City of…

But the question of how we define mission, what we mean by mission, is a very important one for us. I don’t think there’s one right answer, but I think the question needs to be asked. So I thought maybe I’d share a few thoughts, a few minor insights that have been gifted to me in my time as a mission intern, and then we’ll pray together.

When I was in college, I was an international studies major. My understanding of mission and missionaries was basically as a remnant of the colonial project. Mission meant we were right and they were wrong, we were enlightened and they were savages, and we needed to convert them, in cooperation with exploitative, abusive, and imperialistic colonial regimes, if necessary—which it usually was. So I wasn’t so big on this concept of mission until I started having conversations with people, including people in this church, who were asking the question, “What is mission?” in a whole new way.

We’ve been reading Job in the lectionary, so I think I’ll talk about mission in light of the book of Job, or at least in light of a brief, snarky synopsis of the book of Job. You should know that I consider the author of the book of Job to be the greatest satirical writer in Biblical literature, so please forgive me if a bit of dark humor slips into this prayer service a bit.

Oh, Job. “Have you considered my servant Job,” God says to Satan, just before God takes the very un-Methodist step of apparently gambling away Job’s livelihood and family to score a pride point with Satan. As I said, it’s satire, I think. What sort of silly explanation for suffering would that be? Now, the early listeners to this text were people who had suffered, who were suffering. Exile. Abandonment. Destruction of homes. So, they considered God’s servant Job, and they learned that sometimes, suffering is through no fault of the ones who suffer. That sometimes, what God gives us is not an explanation of suffering but rather the sort of Divine encounter that gives us the strength to rise from the ashes of suffering.

Here in the American church, one thing I’ve noticed is that we have a really hard time accepting that we’re not always the main character in the story. When we read Job, we take God’s word at face value and we consider God’s servant Job. So, we read Job, and we ask questions like, “Why is there suffering? What does suffering mean? Is suffering my fault?”

These are powerful questions, and I don’t want to scoff at them. But if the author of the Book of Job were to get a crack at rewriting the book for a U.S. church audience, I think he’d edit the text to say, “Consider Job’s friends.” Here’s Job, right? He’s lost everything in a bizarre Divine gambling accident (seriously folks. Don’t gamble. It ruins everything). And Job’s friends come along, and in Chapter 2 we read the following: “Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home—Eli from Towson, Bill from Silver Spring, and Zack from Glen Burnie. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw his suffering was great.”

So far so good! Job’s friends show up. They weep for their friends’ suffering. They make the basic step of solidarity with Job in the way they know how. And they sit with Job, for 7 days, and they don’t say a thing.

And then they have to go and ruin it.

For the next 30 CHAPTERS, Job’s friends try to convince him that it’s all his fault. I know some people who really appreciate the poetry of the book of Job. Personally, I find those 30 chapters to be a bit excruciating.

And then, God shows up, and reminds everyone, in a very God-like way, of who exactly God is. God speaks out of a whirlwind—a WHIRLWIND, folks!—and really lays it down: “Where were you when I laid the Earth’s foundations? Where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”

Now, since we usually read this book with the idea in mind that we’re Job, we usually read God’s response as a rebuke of Job. But I think it’s mainly a rebuke of Job’s friends. Who are you, says God, to tell my servants that their suffering is their fault? Who are you to talk to them as if you have all the answers, instead of just being with them in the midst of their suffering?

What is mission? If you ask Job’s friends, mission is about explaining to someone why they are suffering. It’s about having the answers, and making sure that people without The Answers get them.

But what if Job’s friends had just sat with Job and listened? What if they had seen their role, not as having the answers, but as encountering God as God is present, even in the midst of suffering?

In the end, it’s not the answers of Job’s friends, but their encounter with God that transforms the situation. It’s not their speaking that matters. It’s their listening.

There is a lesson here for us, as a church, about what mission means. In his small book Listening to the Groans (Upper Room Books, 2007)—named after the passage in the letter to the Romans in which Paul describes the church, Creation, and the Spirit all groaning in prayer, South African Methodist pastor Trevor Hudson says the following:

Sadly, we who call ourselves by the name of Christ are not good at listening. During World War II theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few German Christians who resisted the tyranny of Hitler. In the midst of that national trauma, he helped build a confessing church….In [a] book called Life Together, written over sixty years ago, Bonhoeffer wrote these words: “Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening.” He goes on to say that Christians who have stopped listening to their neighbor will soon stop listening to God as well.

Hudson goes on to tell the following story, about a conversation with the founder of the Church of the Savior, an ecumenical congregation whose ministries are based right down the street from where I work in Adams Morgan in Washington DC. I quote:

One day just before I came back to South Africa I was having a cup of coffee with the pastor of this remarkable congregation, a man named Gordon Cosby. I asked him a question I sometimes ask people I respect: “If you could say one thing to me, what would it be?” He was quiet for a few moments and then he answered, “When you go back to South Africa and stand up to preach and teach, remember always that each person sits next to their own pool of tears.” I have never forgotten this image….Each one of us carries in our hearts personal wounds as well as the wounds of the nation. Each one of us groans, not only with our own painful longings, but also with the painful longings of that part of the world where we live.

What if, as a church, we started thinking of mission as listening to the groans of our community and the world around us, as Hudson suggests? What if our mission is one of listening more than one of talking? What if we’re called to sit and to listen and to mourn with those who are suffering the most in our world? What if that’s where we encounter God? What if mission consists of acts of basic solidarity with and accompaniment of the oppressed and the disenfranchised, rather than with providing “The Solution”? What if we learn hope from those we are sent to serve, and not the other way around?

Let me end with this. Listening doesn’t mean being passive. If anything, listening—listening carefully—to the groans of our world ends up making us active—and sometimes, getting us in a lot of trouble.

[At this point in the service I told a story about the village of At-Tuwani, in the South Hebron Hills of Palestine. I talked about the rather bizarre experience that At-Tuwani had when Tony Blair visited the village–armed convoy and all–and gave a speech promising electricity and a clinic before being whisked away, leaving the village, just as it was before he came, with Israeli military demolition orders on its clinic, cistern, and many of its houses. Then I contrasted that with this amazing recent action, which was able to come about because the friends of At-Tuwani–those Israelis and internationals who have bothered to come and meet and get to know the Palestinians of the South Hebron hills–listened and listened well. You can read about it from an Israeli perspective here. I’d link to the story on the Christian Peacemaker Teams website but the site is down for maintenance right now, darn!

What is mission?

It’s a lot of things. But as someone who likes to talk, let me suggest that our mission—as Christians who are used to the United States, are used to power, are used to getting our way, and are used to talking—might just be to listen, and to listen well.

Amen