Nothing But Ransomed Refugees--April 21, 2020

Nothing But Ransomed Refugees--April 21, 2020

"They sing a new song [to the Lamb]:

  'You are worthy to take the scroll and top open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth'." [Revelation 5:9-10]

One of the defining marks of the resurrection community is that it includes all kinds of folks from all kinds of places.  Seriously.

It's a pretty radical thing, if you think about it, that what began as a teaching group of basically twelve Jewish peasants so quickly became a new kind of community altogether, made up of people from every nationality, gender, class, language, skin color, and culture.  The New Testament writers saw this as something made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus, and it wasn't just incidental.  It wasn't just a quirky coincidence or accident of history that the people of Christ were from everywhere--it was, to borrow the words of a song, "a new way to be human"! Just like the risen Jesus is human but with a new kind of body (one which, for example, could materialize behind locked doors and vanish in an instant), so the community of Jesus is a new kind of humanity.  The resurrection is the inflection point, and it starts the creation of a family called church that isn't bounded by DNA, by a common language, or by shared heritage.  The "kingdom" to which Christians belong is only and always a kingdom of immigrants from every other corner of creation--and that is by God's design.

Read the story of the early church in Acts, and you see how the new community called church took that new identity seriously.  In addition to welcoming people from Gentile and Samaritan nationalities, they shared their common life.  They learned the importance of small things like eating together across the old dividing lines.  They supported each other financially when one group was struggling.  They knew that belonging the Christ was more than just about "letting those people in" but about genuinely including them in everything from leadership to resources to everyday life.  It was, quite honestly, an experiment.  Prior to this moment in history, you pretty much either had nations made up of a single common ethnicity, language, and culture, or you had an authoritarian empire forcing people together from above with at the point of a sword.  But the Jesus-community came to understand that they were meant to be a motley crew of refugees from everywhere, people who were welcomed as they were, and who were called to look out for the well-being of others who were different.  That much was baked in from the beginning.

And here in the last book of the Bible, you get the picture, too, that this was seen as something to celebrate.  Here as the narrator John gives us another song in the musical production that is Revelation, the whole heavenly chorus is praising Christ (the Lamb) because his death and resurrection redeemed people from all nations and tribes and languages into this new community.  And that's just it: the church is--and has always been--nothing but a bunch of ransomed refugees, immigrants and exiles, sojourners and asylum seekers gathered up in Christ from everywhere else.  Unlike every other people-group on earth, we don't have to worry about keeping up a birth-rate to avoid from dying out, because we have always been made by the risen Christ who grabs hold of us from wherever we had come from before. And unlike the fearful ethnic nationalist movements bellowing loudly still today, we don't traffic in any fears of being "replaced" by other people-groups, because that's just not how things work for the Christ-community.  We have always been nothing but welcomed-in former outsiders, by God's intention.

It's worth remembering that the news of the resurrection is always about more than just the afterlife--it's about a new kind of belonging that has been given to us, and to folks from everywhere on earth.  And because of that, the resurrection means we don't have to fear demographic changes, or be resentful when others live in our neighborhood who speak different languages, or live in fear because the complexion of our community is different than it was decades ago.  That's not something to be afraid of, or a reason to long for a vanished past--it is, rather, a vision of the promised future.

Lord Jesus, thank you for gathering us from every corner of creation.  Let us welcome others as you have welcomed us.