Divine Plagiarism

‘It’s not my fight.’ They generally say it when the protagonists need them the most. Han Solo says it to Luke Skywalker, leaving him to face the suicidal trench run alone. Francis Marion, on the eve of the great battle in ‘The Patriot,’ decides his course is run. Theoden of Rohan asks why Rohan should ride out for those who did not ride for them. The story rarely ends there, though; something always happens to pull the characters back into the story. So Theoden, upon seeing the beacon of Gondor, decides to ride to wrath, to ruin, and the world’s ending. Marion, finding the flag that his son was mending, returns in time to turn the tide of the battle. And Solo, remembering a loyalty he had long forgot, buys Luke enough time to destroy the Death Star.

Our myths reflect the One True Myth. God calls the most unlikely of heroes to leave behind the lives they knew and enter into His story. Some go easily. With just a word, Simon Peter leaves his nets behind to become a fisher of men. On command, Hosea takes a leap of faith and enters into a relationship he knew would break his heart. But more often than not, God seems to draw his characters from the ranks of the unwilling. Saul, the great persecutor of Christians, is dragged into his role kicking and screaming. Jonah runs as far and as fast as he can, and God is forced to beat obedience into him with the waves of the sea. Ultimately, both Jonah and Hosea find their places in His story. And even though Hosea’s scars of righteousness stand in sharp contrast to Jonah’s scars of stubbornness, God still uses scars to shape them, breaking and remaking them until they can be used by Him. So it is Peter and Paul, Hosea and Jonah. I think most of us fall somewhere in between.

Allow me to provide some narrative. Five years ago, I arrived in Cambridge. Providing a bit of context, I am a suburban-raised middle-class conservative Evangelical white male who serves in the military. Take every category that is popular in Cambridge, and imagine someone who is the diametric opposite of all of them. That’s pretty much me. So within weeks a nascent sense grows into a full-fledged realization: something along the lines of ‘everyone [else] is welcome here.’ I had hoped against hope to find a place where it was safe to be smart, where it was safe to be myself without having to give a whit about what was popular. For someone who had dreamt of finding kindred spirits in the self-proclaimed intellectual Mecca of the country, this was a dagger. Soon enough, though, I realized there was a reality much deeper than my thwarted desires for belonging: there was a war, and I was very far behind enemy lines. And every ethics class, every bumper sticker, every curbside protestor was bound and determined to make me feel it.

I’ve heard a friend tell me that I couldn’t understand what it was like to be hated for the way you looked. I’m not so sure that’s true. I’ve worn a uniform through Harvard Square a few times. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many faces disfigured by scorn in a row. Of course, I can take off my uniform much more easily than that friend could leave behind their melanin, but I can no more put aside my identity as a soldier than they could put aside their race. For a warrior, service is identity; in a very real way those who I serve with are my people, and I am theirs. The phrase ‘brothers and sisters in arms’ is not said in vain. We have our own language, our own culture, our own language, our own rituals, and our own values. First amongst these is honor. We‘ll return to this in a bit. I remember a friend stating in Leadership class, ’I like Dave, he’s not like most military guys.’ Imagine this phrase in any other context: ’I like you because you’re not like the rest of your people.’ Even in something intended as a compliment, the message came through loud and clear: ’your kind isn’t welcome here.’

I have always turned to the Body of Christ for community and belonging. After all, we are supposed to be family. So I found myself involved in the various Cambridge ministries, in the same way I had been involved in the various Colorado Springs ministries before. To one whose identity is under attack, a safe place to be yourself is prized above all. And this is what I sought in Bible Studies, in Church, and Christian conferences. Yet, even there, the same message was whispered. At Bible Study, I still sensed some degree of discomfort with who I was and what I represented. In context, though, those are my friends and sometimes friends disagree. And I truly appreciate the grace they showed in their disagreements. I suspect that I challenged them as much as they challenged me. At Church, though, the message was not so much whispered as spoken. In their depiction of Stations of the Cross, the station where the soldiers stripped Christ was presented interspersed with images of soldiers in Iraq. ‘This is who you are. You are not the Centurion. You are hurting Jesus when you go into Iraq.’ At an InterVarsity graduate student conference, the message was not just spoken, but screamed. Marva Dawn, addressing systemic evil, told the gathered crowd to ‘remember the American government and military interests who pay for your education, for they are the principalities and the powers.’ It may not have occurred to her that some in that crowd may have been of the house of the Centurion and the house of Caesar. The principalities and the powers, in a scriptural context, means the forces of Satan. So the message, to any soldier who happened to be there, is ’you serve Satan.’ Uncharitable, at the very least. Devastating to someone looking for somewhere where it was safe to be real. I understood the entirety of the experience as something akin to being behind enemy lines. And just as a POW has little interest to returning to the land of his tormentors, I had little interest in returning to Cambridge. It became my Nineveh, a land that hated my people. So as soon as I got my degree, I ran as far and as fast as I could.

In a way I could have never understood at the time, it was the last Cambridge wound that would bring me back. The deepest wounds always strike at our identity. Some wounds attack our people as a whole, but the crueler wounds tell us that we are not of our people. Those who have been deeply wounded draw from their wounds when they want to hurt another. And she did that day. So the warrior, whose honor is his identity, is told that he has no honor. ‘A white girl with a tan,’ with a decade of compounded interest. The message is the same: ‘you are not of your people.’ There were reasons, of course. There are always reasons. The teenager who wounded her a decade ago had reasons, too. ‘Why does this weird girl keep bothering us? I wish she would leave us alone.’ All the way back to the garden there were reasons. ‘If you hadn’t given me this woman…if the man was doing what he was supposed to do…’ So we are trapped in the physics of a fallen world, we are the slaves and the slave-owners, all at once; the wounded wounding others in a never-ending cascade of brokenness reaching all the way back to the fall. We spend our days trying to equalize brokenness, hoping to find some sort of balance in an equitable distribution of pain. But there can be no balance in brokenness… it must itself be broken. And I was broken that day.

You can only teach someone when they are ready to learn. I don’t know how long God had been waiting to teach me. But at long last, that day I was ready to learn. No more running, no more hiding, no more wrestling Him for control, I came to Him as my only hope. I came to Him with simple prayers, and I came intending to pray until He answered. And in that brokenness, He began to teach. Thus began the most fruitful year of my life.

Sometimes you don’t realize what He has been teaching until He has already taught it. I had been praying for reconciliation for a year. It wasn’t until I returned to Cambridge that I realized how much reconciliation He had taught me. So I am sitting across from my friend, talking about the things that divide us, dreaming and praying for unity. Colorado Springs and Cambridge united for the Great Commission. I felt passion and purpose flowing through us, and it was the most natural thing in the world. And it strikes me, on the walk back to the car, that two years ago it would not have been the most natural thing in the world. I’ve heard it said that God never wastes a hurt. I believe it. In praying for two people to be reconciled to each other, He helped me to understand how many people could be reconciled to each other. Healing me and humbling me, He had been preparing me for a story that I had previously not wanted any part of.

As individuals, we reflect our communities, even as our communities reflect who we are as individuals. It is then appropriate that she and I, both of us in many ways the archetypes of our factions, fractured along the same fault lines that divide our communities: race, class and politics. It seems that God often leads us into the brokenness of communities through brokenness between individuals. Hosea comes back to mind.

Upon first reading Hosea, many years ago, I remember feeling that God treated him cruelly. Destroying a good man’s life, breaking his heart over and over just to write a case study, these didn’t seem to me the actions of a compassionate God. I consigned his story to the closet of ‘things I don’t understand about God,’ assuming that He would explain things in time. A few years ago, when I began to understand vulnerability, Hosea’s story started to come into focus. As Theologically problematic as it may be, I wonder if there is some flavor of ‘God’s loneliness’ in this story. I know all the Aquinas: simple being, necessary, complete and all of that. But I also know Lewis’ brilliant passage in the Four Loves, telling us that to love at all is to be hurt. I imagine an image of God in pain, inviting His friend Hosea to come and dwell with Him in that place. That feeling, relational God is infinitely different from the Aristotelian watchmaker god writing Aesop’s Fables in our blood and tears that I had so feared in the first reading. At the very least, God invites Hosea into a place where he can understand the ways we hurt Him. In this is a paradoxical vulnerability; an infinitely powerful God gives us the latitude to cause Him pain. I cannot see Zeus or Thor enduring the insults of mortal men, yet the God of Everything chooses to do so out of love.

Walking with my friend, though, the picture of Hosea was completed. When He invites us into Him, He always sends us back out. God invites Hosea into vulnerability in order to prepare him for his ministry. There is no way that Hosea could have ministered as the prophet of God to Israel unless he intimately understood the feelings of God for Israel. So God gave him Gomer. And the man who brought his wife Gomer back home each time became the man who brought his people Israel back home time and again. Hosea was forged by his scars, as a sword on an anvil. Yet in his obedience he experiences grace, just as the sword being forged is immersed in cool water from time to time. And this is the difference between Hosea and Jonah.

Like Hosea, Jonah’s life is turned upside down by his calling. Like Hosea, Jonah finds vulnerability and brokenness, though he almost breaks a ship in the process. Like Hosea, Jonah is prepared for his ministries by his scars, though his are almost entirely self-inflicted. There is a certain comic irony to the whole story: Jonah’s platform for reaching Nineveh resulted almost entirely from the unpleasant consequences of his disobedience; he stumbles right into the middle of their mythology. How better to reach a people who believed in a fish-god than to make your entry from the gullet of a fish? I’m sure that a man bleached to the color of porcelain by a whale’s digestive enzymes made a pretty fearsome spectacle to the astonished city, especially when he pronounces impending doom. It would be easy to say things worked out, but really, things were redeemed. Where God would have forged Jonah with scars of righteousness, He instead allows Jonah to be forged from the scars of rebellion. While Jonah misses out on the grace that would have come with obedience, God nonetheless grants him grace as He redeems Jonah’s foolish choices. In the same way that He redeems mine.

Hosea is a hero. Jonah is a fool. God redeems the stories of both. I‘ve heard it said, ‘de loco, poeta, y tonto, todo sabemos un poco.’ I had the last one covered. I don’t know about the first two. So I was a Jonah, running and running. I thank God that He brought me to a place of brokenness where I could learn obedience. Where He could make me into a Hosea. I am still somewhere in between.

God never wastes a hurt…even when we cause them. I will rejoice in His grace, and I will treasure these lessons and passions that He had been trying to give me for so long. Even if He had to pry my hands open in order to give them to me.