Revisions from the Margins

Revisions from the Margins--August 29, 2017

"Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.  Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured." [Hebrews 13:1-3]

You have to decide at some point whether you think the teacher's red pen is something to be afraid of... or something meant to make you better.

Flash back with me, will you, to the days of your high school English teachers.  Can you remember having to hand in draft versions of essays, only to have them returned to you with a code-like amalgamation of proofreading marks and cursive letters in bold red pen? 

All of my high school English teachers were women, and I can remember the similar look of all of their handwriting as they made comments for corrections in the margins of my papers--a forgotten bit of punctuation here, or a misspelled word there.  Sometimes it was to help me see where I had flubbed a citation or left a dangling modifier.  (I remember once in a short story assignment I had to write, I intended to be describing an old photograph found in an attic being unearthed from among its wrappings, but I had put the modifying phrase in the wrong place.  My sentence read, "...found an old photograph in a frame of a woman wrapped in tissue paper..." and my teacher blushed when she asked why the woman was wrapped in tissue paper!) 

You have been there, I trust.  You wrote something, and turned it in, and then the eagle eye vision of an English teacher called your attention to something you had not seen before--some mistake that was either confusing, or embarrassing, or otherwise incorrect.  Now, if your understanding of the whole school process is that you are there as a student to be judged and to squeak through with as few red marks on your record as possible, it is indeed a fearful thing to have your essay returned to you with all of that red pen, highlighting your mistakes and mess-ups.  But if, on the other hand, you see the years of public education as something intended to make you a better writer, communicator, thinker, and human being, well then, the red marks are exactly what you need.  They are gifts of grace to help you to catch things in the future that you otherwise would have missed.  And in that case, the red pen of a good teacher is exactly what you need to learn how to see what you could not see on your own. That is to say, you and I need to be able to "see again"--to re-vise, so that we will catch what we have overlooked. You and I, we need that gift of revision from the margins of the page.

This, it turns out, it not a bad way of thinking about what the writers of the New Testament want to do with us.  Sometimes we religious folks have a way of thinking that the writers of the Bible, the prophets, apostles, and evangelists of an earlier era, were only interested in getting souls to get to heaven, like Christianity is just a matter of getting afterlife-insurance.  But that's not the case, really.  The biblical writers want to do something to us--they want to change us.  And among other things, they intend to change our vision--to help us to see from the margins what--and whom!--we have been missing and overlooking.  The voices of the New Testament are gifts like high school English teachers, whose red pen marks on the paper help us to recognize what we would have failed to see otherwise.  And in doing that, they are not just meant to be judgmental or condemning voices, but rather they are there to make our vision clearer. They are here to help us with re-vision... not just of paragraphs and punctuation, but with our very lives and love.

That's what I love about these verses from Hebrews.  They are all about changing our vision--changing the way we see the world, and the people in it.  All of it falls under the category of "mutual love," but that idea by itself needs to be fleshed out.  So that we don't mishear "love" and think only of affectionate feelings, pink hearts, or an exclusive care reserved only for in-group members, the writer of Hebrews spells out what love looks like.  And it includes... dare we say it, strangers. 

"Strangers," of course is a loaded term in the Bible.  Since the people of Israel were taught to see all of their fellow Israelites as part of one big "family," that meant a "stranger" was someone even outside of that category.  "Stranger," in the Bible, means foreigner.  And the word for "hospitality" here in Hebrews comes from the Greek roots that mean "love for strangers" or "love for what and whom is foreign."  All of that is to say, the New Testament says that love isn't love if it is limited just to people who look like me, talk like me, vote like me, and come from the same DNA as I do.  Love, if it is the real thing, includes folks I would see as "outsiders."  That is to say, love is only love if it includes people on the margins.  And in the ancient world, where it was already a given that you looked out for your own kin, the command to love strangers--to show love to "outsiders" without other conditions or caveats or fine print--was a way of saying, "We take care of everybody."

And then, to flesh out the picture even further, the writer of Hebrews helps us to see others on the margins that we are likely to have forgotten or overlooked.  "Remember those who are in prison," he says, "as though you yourself were imprisoned with them."  And not just that--put yourself in the position of those who are being tortured.   Notice here that the passage doesn't give any qualifiers as though this is only talking about "Christians who are imprisoned" or "Christians who are being persecuted."  Obviously, those folks would be in mind, but beyond that, the writer of Hebrews seems to be including anybody who is imprisoned... and anybody who is being tortured.  After all, for as early as the book of Hebrews is being written (late 1st century), it's unlikely that there is official, empire-wide policy of persecuting Christians that would have included torture or imprisonment.  That happened, to be sure, in pockets and periods of time, but wasn't a full-blown imperial policy until into the following century.  The writer of Hebrews wants us to see again--to revise--the way we see all people, especially those at the margins.

You'll note, then, that the passage doesn't make any distinction between those who are "guilty" and those who are "wrongfully" imprisoned.  And you'll notice that he doesn't give an exception with this torture business to say "well, some people really deserve it, so then it's ok," or that "it's ok to torture people if you think you can get them to give up some secret information."  That's what the Romans did.  The Romans wanted to make examples of people. The Romans did things to intimidate, whether or not it actually ever got any results.  The Romans imprisoned or tortured, not because they were so vigilant about justice, but because they were efficient and wanted to maintain control.  So no, the writer of Hebrews doesn't say that we only should care about those who are "wrongly accused" or those who "are innocent but are being tortured."  He just says, "put yourself where they are--how would you like it?"

In this age of private-prisons where incarceration becomes an industry, in this age in which we occasionally flirt with violating the Geneva Conventions or advocating torture because we want to "send a tough message to bad guys," it is worth remembering these words from Hebrews.  The New Testament wants us to see what we otherwise miss--that these people who are imprisoned, these people who are tortured, are faces, still made in the image of God.  Indeed, says the writer, some have even entertained angels without knowing it because they were willing to welcome foreigners rather than turning them away.

We need the red pen of the book of Hebrews to help us with revision--to see from the margins the people who are beloved of God who are too easily looked over: the foreigner, the outsider, the imprisoned, the forgotten.  We do just fine at seeing the celebrities, the powerful, the influential, and the familiar.  We are not in danger of forgetting to take care of ourselves or our own.  That's just our own self-interested hard-wiring.  What we do need is the wise and insightful red pen of Scripture, like these words from Hebrews, to train our eyes to see the people, the faces, the lives, we would have otherwise ignored or missed.  And like a high school English teacher's red marks on your essay, the whole point is to retrain our eyes so that we will catch the things we had previous overlooked, so that we will not overlook them anymore.

Rather than running from these words from Scripture because we don't like being shown our own failings, what if we were free from the fear of seeing our mistakes and our guilt, and instead saw that the design of Mercy always has been to transform our vision... to give us new eyes... to re-vise the way we look at the world in front of us?  What if we considered that there are faces on the margins who are beloved of God--and that we might even be able to recognize the very face of Christ or the flutter of angelic wings when we dare to care for the stranger, the prisoner, and the victims of torture? 

Where else might we find God on the margins today?

Go look.  God is already waiting there.

Lord Jesus, help us to revise our view of what is in front of us, and to see the faces and lives of those we had overlooked.  Help us to see you in the margins.