Incarnate Forum | Geoff Ryan #1

Part 1 of 2

T

he Incarnate Mission Forum was held at the Salvation Army Officer Training College in London, England this past January. The event was organized by the UK-based NEO network of urban expressions (ALOVE UK) and was a partner event to the Urban Forum 2007, held in Atlanta, Georgia. Delegates, attending from Canada, the US and the UK, were mostly practitioners from urban ministry settings. A number of papers were presented at the event, both by Salvation Army speakers and others. theRubicon will post selected presentations over the next few weeks.

Implications of a(n Intentional)
Theology of Christian Re-Incarnation
What are the economic and political factors and implications of incarnational mission?

by Major Geoff Ryan
Incarnation Mission Forum:
William Booth College, London January 29-31, 2008

Definitions:

• Christians: Western, Protestant, Evangelical.
• The Poor: Not an exclusively economic term; the last, lost and least; those marginalized; the oppressed; those excluded.
• Urban: Not an exclusively geographic term as in “inner city”; a community characterized by a mixture of socio-economic factors; poverty, crime, lack of opportunities etc.

All Scripture references are from the New International Version unless otherwise indicated

Defining Incarnational Mission

“The task of the Gospel is to bring humanity back into community.”

The terms “incarnation” and “incarnational ministry” or “mission” came into vogue in evangelical, urban ministry circles some years ago and have been bandied about so much, that like many words or concepts they have suffered from overexposure. The sharp edges of definition have been dulled and emptied of much of their meaning. The terms have been reduced to a primarily geographical definition, a matter of location and relocation, with urbanists telling suburbanists to “get their theology and their geography in sync”.

While geography is undoubtedly an aspect of incarnational mission, this is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg and not the true conceptual centre. If we settle for an exclusively geographical understanding, this could mean for example, that any of my peer officers, who have planted churches in upper-middle-class, suburban neighbourhoods, can be considered equally as “incarnational” as my ministry in the inner city. They live where their people live, their kids all attend the same schools, they shop in the same stores, take their relaxation and leisure in the same manner and at the same places. So, “incarnational mission” has to mean more than this, if those of us committed to urban communities really wish to lay claim to it.

The primary text cited for incarnational mission is usually from John 1: “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” or, as Eugene Peterson rendered it in The Message: “The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood”. I would suggest however, that Philippians 2:5-11 gives us a fuller understanding:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death-
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

This passage speaks about the “kenosis”, as Roman Catholic theologians would explain, the emptying of the Christ’s Godhead and the understanding that Jesus divested himself of much of the power and privilege of God, in order to became fully human and walk amongst us.

In their book Political Holiness: A Spirituality of Liberation, Pedro Casaldaliga and Jose-Maria Vigil, make the following case for an alternative view of the mission of the church:

“In Jesus, God emptied himself in kenosis. God did not become generically human, but specifically poor, ‘taking the form of a slave.’ (Philippians 2:7). He ‘lived among us’ (John 1:14), among the poor. He did not come into the world in general - which would itself have been an ‘emptying’ - but into the world of outcasts. He chose that social level: on the margins, among the oppressed, with the poor. The kenosis of the ‘in-carnation’ did not consist simply in taking on ‘flesh’…but also in taking on ‘poverty’, the poverty of humankind.

The church, as a whole, if it wished to be increasingly evangelical and more effectively evangelizing, will have to go through this exodus and into this emptying process. It will have to insert itself - with its human and material resources and all its institutional weight - into the social situation of the poor majorities, among the greatest needs of the poor, on the periphery of this human world divided into rich and poor. The mystical body of Christ has to be where the historical body of Christ was.”

To me, this speaks profoundly about the freedom that God has given to humanity because it is mainly a passage about choices. To make a choice, to choose to do one thing over something else, a degree of freedom is required and often the greater the freedom, then the greater number of choices available. As a theological minimalist (an open theist if you like), I am quite comfortable with this, however if you are weighted more toward the sovereignty-of-God side, then you might have some challenges with my thinking.

I understand it in this way. Limiting his power and privileges and emptying himself of vital aspects of these, Jesus entered our world on the margins, as a slave (doulos), restricting himself to a historical, linear, time-space construct and to the limits of a human body and human existence. He made these choices in order to create choices for us who had none, most particularly the choice ultimate choice between life and death. Indeed, Christ’s humanity is an important to us as his deity.

To me this is the essence of incarnation. Namely, the manner in which those of us with certain choices, choose to use these choices, primarily either for ourselves or for others. Further, if “our attitude should be the same as Christ Jesus” , then it stands to reason that as Jesus worked the margins, so should we, and that our choices are to be primary exercised among those with the least choices of all. “The least of these my brothers and sisters”, is how he referred to them.

Jesus’ incarnational intent was quite clear from the beginning of his public ministry. His first recorded sermon was essentially his mission statement, if we can think of it in those terms. Quoting the prophet Isaiah he proclaimed:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Later on, when John the Baptist sent his disciples to check out Jesus’ credentials as Messiah, he replied by referring them to the signs of his coming Kingdom:

“Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.”

Possibly the most radical statement of identity with the poor that Jesus made, is found in Matthew 25: 31-46. This can be read as a profoundly disturbing passage in which Jesus makes the victims of society - those with the least choices - the judges of those of us with all of the choices. They judge the Church, in fact. He appears to say that our relationship with the poor (what sort of relationship we have, if we even have a relationship) is a determining factor in our relationship with God. Even going so far as to suggest that it will be a primary consideration in how we are judged and therefore where we will spend eternity. As John Wesley wrote in his journal:

“I preached at Haddington, in Provost D’Yard, to a very eloquent congregation, but I expect little good will be done here, for we begin at the wrong end: religion must not go from the greatest to the least, or the power would appear to be of men.”

While living in Russia I necessarily came into close contact with the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity. I came to understand that one of the fundamental differences between Western Christianity (Protestant, evangelical) and Eastern Christianity is in the approach to Easter, the defining moment of the incarnation. The Ortho-Catholics are all about Good Friday - the passion of Christ (as we saw in Mel Gibson’s film). Therefore, for example, their crosses and crucifixes still all have Jesus hanging on them. Western evangelicals are conversely all about Easter Sunday morning. We are a resurrection people, with empty crosses, chocolate bunnies and egg hunts. These seemingly superficial differences are not so much cultural as they are theological and reflect differing approaches to questions of suffering, injustice and, to my understanding, incarnational mission.

Now, if the man who fears God is to avoid all extremes, then an undue emphasis on either one of these two “extremes”, is to miss the point. The balance is neatly summed up by Paul again in his letter to the Philippians:

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

I would like to suggest that it is in reading between the lines of the Easter event, that an important truth about incarnational mission can be understood. What happened between Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning? Where did Jesus go? What did he do? Scripture and church tradition tell us that he descended to hell.

We know that Christ was not killed through the physical punishment of the crucifixion. When the Roman solders came to break his legs in order to hasten his death, they were surprised that he had already expired. He died because every sin ever committed, both sin as a state of humankind and the sins we commit, from the beginning of time and the murder of Abel, through every lie, act of abuse, theft, every single possible transgression of God’s will both small and monumental, until the close of history… all of it was (metaphorically speaking) compressed together and slammed into his heart and his soul. This was, of course, more than any man could bear and so the man - Jesus - died.

Jesus was the Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world. He was the one who, though himself without sin, became sin for us and was consequently “crushed for our iniquities”. He chose to permit our sin, and consequently our sins, to wound, injure, cripple, crush and kill him. Then he took them away to hell, which is where sin belongs, and he left them there. And that is the kicker in the resurrection of Jesus, as far as I am concerned. If it was simply a dead man being raised to live again, well, it had been done before (the widow of Zarephath’s son , the Shunammite’s son , the widow of Nain’s son , Lazarus ). What was unique about this resurrection was that Jesus died full of our sin (and sins) and he rose empty of them. Only then, are we ready for Easter Sunday.

If we are to truly be followers of Jesus, to “have the same attitude” , then how closely and how far, do we follow him? Right up to Good Friday and then skip over to Sunday morning or do we stick close to him through those vital, intervening days, to hell and back?

Jesus promised Philip that anyone who has faith in him will do even greater things than the things he did . If this is true and if we are called to follow Jesus, to be Christians (literally, “little Christ’s”) and to emulate and imitate him, then we are actually being called to re-incarnate his life in our own time and place. As a man, Jesus could only be in one place at one time, but through his followers - through us - he can be in hundreds, thousands, and millions of places and touch that many more lives. True biblical Christianity therefore involves an active belief in re-incarnation, in that we are to be re-incarnations of Jesus and of the life he lived…and the death he died.

I was in a major American city a few years ago and spent some time with the white Salvation Army officers who lead a corps in a tough, primarily African-American inner-city neighbourhood. As we were discussing how to connect their church more intentionally and effectively with the community, I inquired as to why they lived where they did, in a leafy, middle-class suburb about 45-minutes drive away from the inner city church neighbourhood. They told me that The Salvation Army had made a policy decision several years earlier to move all of its officers out of the actual city and now they all lived in this same area, regardless of their appointment. I asked the reason for this and he replied that the school system in their city was apparently so bad, that it cost the Army too much to send all the officer’s children to private schools. The solution was to move them all out to the suburbs where they could attend publicly funded schools of an acceptable standard. It sounded quite reasonable, I guess, unless you apply the understanding of incarnational mission that I have just outlined.

What would Jesus do (finally a context in which this question can be applied with some intelligence)? While I didn’t take the conversation to this point with that officer, here is the logical end place of a choice-driven, re-incarnational theology. The parishioners of his corps have few actual choices in their lives. They have to send their children to dangerous, sub-standard schools where their potential remains unrealized, their hopes dashed and dreams die. The future of their children is sacrificed, generation after generation, by the systemic sins of a system that simply does not care about them, for a variety of reasons. The officer himself had three young children. But he also had choices. He could choose to protect his children’s future or choose to stand in solidarity with his people, accepting upon himself and his family the “iniquities” of his parishioners. He could stand up in his pulpit each Sunday and tell his people that God cared for them, would look after them, and that he indeed came to “dwell among them” . However, in all honesty, he would then have to go on and say that because he worked for a religious institution that cared specifically for him, and maybe because he was white, and definitely because he had the choice, God was going to take care of him and his, in a different way. In fact, in a better way.

He is a good man and deeply sincere, honest, faithful, full of faith and in all likelihood a far better man than myself. However, simply nothing in his training as a Salvation Army officer or his culturally-conditioned reading of the bible had prepared him to grasp the underlying implications of his situation. To extend the metaphor, he lived and ministered as if each day were Easter Sunday morning, all the while longingly and desperately trying to reach out to his people as they floundered in hell, their own sins and the sins of the system wearing them out, keeping them down and keeping them there. The conversation ended rather inconclusively and reminded me of the closing lines of T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi:

I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation…

My theology, as one who gives great latitude to human freewill and less to an interventionist God (than some might prefer), holds that God cannot - or will not - present himself in a neighbourhood or a community or amongst a people, unless his people, the Church, are themselves physically present and fully sharing life with the community.

In my city of Toronto, it is estimated that between the end of World War II and the year 2000, approximately 400 church congregations moved out of the broadly defined downtown core and repositioned themselves in outer suburbs. When people subsequently lamented the decay of our inner city, and shook their collective heads at the crime and poverty in numerous downtown communities, in point of fact they were really asking where the goodness had gone and therefore where God had gone… the only conclusion was to ask another question about where God’s people had gone?

So, how far do we go down this road of incarnational mission? What are the practicalities versus the impracticalities of such a course of action? Is it advisable? Is it desirable? Is this really what we signed up for when we accepted Jesus into our hearts and decided to follow him? What are the full implications? John Stott wrote: “All authentic mission is incarnational. It demands identification without loss of identity. It means entering other people’s worlds, as he entered ours, though without compromising our Christian convictions, values or standards.” So the battle, as it were, centers around definitions of identity, of authentic Christian values versus simply cultural values, convictions and standards. These are the issues and questions that we are all probably wrestling with in some form or other. And, course, we all draw our own lines in the sand.

The given topic of my paper is: “What are the economic and political factors and implications of incarnational mission?” So, with the above definition of incarnational mission, I would now like to briefly apply this understanding specifically to the political arena and area of economics.

The second half of this paper will appear on theRubicon on Thursday April 17.

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder and publisher of theRubicon and co-ordinator of the 614 Network. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.

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