When have you felt left out? When have you entered a space only to discover no room for your voice or your identity? Reflect on that experience.
1. I appreciate Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook’s definition of power in her work on multiracial communities; she describes it as “the capacity to have control, authority or influence over others. [In particular] social power refers to the capacity of the dominant culture to have control, authority and influence over” oppressed peoples. She concludes, “social power plus prejudice equals oppression.” See A House of Prayer for All Peoples: Building Multiracial Community (Bethesda, MD: Alban Institute, 2004), 15.
2. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 140–45.
3. Volf’s use of the phrase the other here indicates the individual one who is not the self. It is not necessarily the outcast or oppressed other, as when I use the term. I have marked the difference by capitalizing the term (“The Other”) when it refers to those who are part of oppressed or marginalized groups.
4. Ibid., 142.
5. Ibid., 143.
6. Ibid., 145.
7. Homan and Pratt, Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2004), 36.
8. Valerie Batts, Modern Racism: New Melody for the Same Old Tunes (Cambridge, MA: Episcopal Divinity School Occasional Papers, 1998).
9. A term made popular by priest and consultant Eric Law, whose works are featured in the bibliography.
God is changing things so that they finally reflect
the dream of God. It will be new to us, but it is merely
the fulfillment of what God intended all along.
THE RIGHT REVEREND MICHAEL CURRY,
EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF NORTH CAROLINA
Life would be so much easier—and church more comfortable—if we didn’t answer the call to become radically welcoming. Why would a community go in search of transformation and dissonance, when most of us instinctively seek institutions to find stability and shelter from the storm? Couldn’t we trust that Sunday morning is destined to remain the most segregated hour in American life, that certain groups have mutually agreed not to share spiritual relationship, and leave it at that? Why rock the boat? Why cross boundaries? Why risk welcoming?
Earl Kooperkamp answers that question as well as anyone I’ve met. “Radical hospitality is one of the most important spiritual gifts,” said Kooperkamp, who serves as rector of St. Maiy’s Episcopal Church in West Harlem, New York. “Look at Abraham and his three angelic visitors in Genesis. Look at Hebrews, where they speak of entertaining angels unawares. Look at Jesus’ open table fellowship. That’s my vision for what the church should be.” Having warmed to his topic, the community organizer-turned-priest continued, “Jesus reaches out and bids us to do the same: to open our hearts and hands to those around us, to embrace the abundant life that God graciously offers to all.”
Why are congregations like St. Mary’s becoming radically welcoming? Why should any of us risk transformation? Quite simply because God did it first.
The God of Transformation
From the beginning, God has been about the business of creating, reshaping, and making things new. The record of Scripture is filled with images of a God who turns things upside-down in order to get them right-side up, and creates something from what would seem to be nothing. Open the Bible to almost any page and you will see the evidence. In the beginning the Creator God takes the formless, watery void and brings forth life with a word and a touch. Later, we meet Abraham and Sarah, the unlikely patriarch and matriarch of Israel, both too old to expect to be the new parents of a great, holy people. Then we greet Moses, the stumbling, mumbling, ever-reluctant prophet and leader of Israel.
Online Extra: Exercises for
Discerning the Dream of God
Though the truth and its implications are life-altering, can there be any doubt that God is a God of transformation who wants to embrace and transform all of creation? The promise is present in the prophet Isaiah, who cried out to the complacent children of Israel, giving voice to the word of God:
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise. (Isaiah 43:18–21)
And in the closing chapters of the New Testament, we hear echoes of the same promise:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell among them; they will be God’s people, and God will be with them, wiping every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” And the one who is seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:1, 3–5)
We humans might have a vested interest in depicting a changeless God who made a stable and unchanging world. Scripture, history and our own life experiences put the lie to that hope. “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” You have never seen rivers in the desert—this God will make it so. You have never seen wild animals obey—this God will make it so. You cannot imagine life beyond the old patterns and accepted ways that seem ingrained in the groove of creation—this God is not bound by those limits. This God is making a new heaven and a new earth, one where pain will cease, justice will rule, and death itself will die. God invites us to look around with the eyes of faith; then we, too, will see how God is “making all things new.”
A warning: the new thing God is bringing to life is not “new” in the way we so often understand and fear it to be. Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, the first black diocesan bishop elected in the South, and thus a man with long experience following the God of transformation, explained it to me with these simple words: “God is changing things so that they finally reflect the dream of God. It will be new to us, but it is merely the fulfillment of what God intended all along.”
Many theologians have painted their picture of this new thing God is doing in the world, what Episcopal laywoman Verna Dozier calls “the dream of God” and what Howard Thurman, another black theologian and mystic, describes as “a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sly.”1 If it sounds pleasant and non-threatening, it is not. In his book God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, Archbishop Desmond Tutu
