An Unorthodox Board-Game--June 1, 2020

An Unorthodox Board-Game--June 1, 2020

"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my advice; it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something--now finish doing it, so that you eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means.  For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has--not according to what one does not have. I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, 'The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little'." [2 Corinthians 8:9-15]

I've had this idea for a board game. Picture your typical winding-path game board, like "Candy Land" or "Chutes and Ladders," or even the old classic "The Game of Life."  Or even like the pathway around the perimeter like Monopoly.  But here's the twist: instead of each individual player's pieces moving independently of one another, everybody's pieces are tied to each other's with a certain length of string, so that your setbacks affect mine, and mine affect yours, and conversely, your advances pull me along to some degree and mine help move you forward as well.  What do you think?

I know, I know.  The moment I pictured this kind of a game, I heard the imaginary complaints about such an unorthodox board-game:  "Wait a second--you mean MY successes help someone ELSE?" or "That's not FAIR--that means that we're all CONNECTED!" or for certain, some version of, "But then YOU would share in MY winning, and then how would I really know that I'm better than you?"

Maybe my board game would never be a commercial success.  But as a thought experiment, I think it might be a good way to get at what the New Testament writers take for granted about our life together in Christ:  we are all connected, so that my life is inextricably bound up with yours, and yours with mine. We can pretend that's not how it is, or we can attempt to ignore it, but the truth is that all of our lives are already tethered to one another.  And yes, that ruins whatever nonsense we had been carrying along with us that "winning" must be a zero-sum game.  And yes, it means that we will each benefit from the successes of others as they go around in this life, and that we will all bear the costs of one another's troubles.  We have just been fed the lie that life really is like those stringless board games where I can "win" at your expense, when that is, honestly, a gross distortion of things.

When Paul writes to his friends in Corinth, he just comes out and says it that way.  He is writing to a church of largely Gentile Christians--that is, folks who weren't Jewish, and who lived in a pretty prosperous part of the Empire in one of its major metropolitan centers.  Things were going pretty well for them, on the whole, especially compared to what was going on for their fellow Christians back in the greater Jerusalem area.  The region around Jerusalem was living through a famine, so picture food shortages, price gouging, and families going hungry.  Now, just by the geography of things, just about everybody there in Jerusalem would have been Jewish.  So they would have had a different language, ethnicity, culture, and likely skin complexion than the Greek and Roman folks living in and around Corinth.  And Paul is writing to his friends in Corinth calling on them to help out the folks in Jerusalem because, as he seems to think is obvious, they are all connected to one another.  The tokens around the board really are all tethered to one another.  And so, in Paul's mind, it only makes sense that it would be right for his Gentile Christian friends to make good on their commitment to take care of their sisters and brothers in Jerusalem--even though these groups were separated by nearly a thousand miles and would never have crossed paths with each other in ordinary daily life.

Now, let's just hold that thought for a moment and let it simmer for a second.  This is in an era without the internet, without air travel, without telephones, email, or even a national postal service.  Most people never went further than a hundred miles from the town they were born in during their whole lives, and there were already plenty of tensions between Jewish and Gentile groups.  It would have been really easy for the folks in Corinth to say, "But their problems don't really affect us, so why are we being asked to support these people who live so far away?"  It would have been easy for them to get resentful, and to get bitter when Paul encouraged them to come to the aid of the Jerusalem community. They could have said in reply to the apostle, "Look, Paul, we're all struggling with our own stuff in life--we've got our own problems to worry about."  Or you could imagine them insisting, "Why are you calling for special help for THEM?  Don't ALL of us matter to you, Paul?"

And in response, Paul anticipates those arguments and simply says, "But they're the ones in need right now, and when the tables are turned in some other way or time, you'll be the ones who are supported by their abundance."  Paul knows that it would be theoretically possible for these different groups to go their whole lives without ever having to interact.  But he believes that in Christ, we cannot ignore the connections that hold us together, even if the world believes that they are optional or not there at all.  He calls on the Corinthians to help their neighbors a thousand miles away because no one is fully taken care of until all are truly taken care of.

It seems important to me these days to remember that this underlying awareness of our connection to one another isn't a new idea, or a radical notion, but was an obvious truth for the New Testament writers.  And maybe that is one of the greatest hurdles we have to deal with in reading the Bible in our day, because so much of the conventional wisdom in the times in which we live say the opposite.  They say that the pieces on the game board are untethered, and that, in fact, the only way to meaningfully "win" at life is to be better than someone else.  The conventional wisdom says that you need to look out only for your own interests, and in fact, if someone else does well, it comes at your expense. To see the blue game token advance three spaces must mean something bad for the red, yellow and green players.  

But what if that kind of thinking only works in childish settings like board games?  What if that kind of oversimplification is exactly the way Candy Land is different from real life?  And what if the conventional wisdom is just plain wrong, and there is no zero-sum reality where your success can only come at the cost of my defeat?  What if that whole mindset of "winners" and "losers" misses this point of life itself?

We need to ask these kinds of questions, and we need to pull at the thread we are beginning to unravel here.  We have to, because at times like these it gets really tempting to look at the troubles around in the wider world and to imagine the solution is just to put our heads down, or to withdraw up to a quiet little hill removed from everybody else and sit on a porch somewhere muttering, "It's not my problem."  We were already feeling that temptation with the coronavirus, weren't we?  Lots of folks in the region where I live are feeling really tempted to just say, "Let the people who live in big population centers worry about spreading sickness, but I don't have to care about it--we aren't connected to them."  And I get it--we're not New York City or Chicago, and there's no chance of spreading coronavirus in an empty field with just your tractor and the animals out to pasture on the next hill.  But my goodness, that's just how the folks in Corinth could have seen things, too: "Those people in Jerusalem should have known that they could be susceptible to a famine living in that arid place--it's their problem if they choose to live in a place where they can have food shortages and famines!"  Paul doesn't let it fly there, either.

We are also tempted in these days, and in this place, to imagine that the angst, the anger, and the outrage in the African-American community "doesn't have to do with us" either.  I get it, in the place where I live, it is really easy to say, "We just don't have many people whose skin is black or brown, and so we really can't have a problem here--and we certainly don't have to spend time thinking about the troubles everybody else is having over the death of George Floyd... or Ahmaud Arbery... or Breonna Taylor."  It is even more tempting to say, "Getting involved in all of that stuff just leads to riots and destruction like so many cities are having, and so the best thing to do is just to ignore it, to bury our heads in the sand, and to insist that 'those people' don't have anything to do with us as we dust off our hands."  But again, back in the first century, Paul didn't let the differences between Gentiles and Jewish peoples become an excuse not to care for one another.  There is no "It's not my problem" for followers of Jesus--there just isn't.

Maybe most difficult of all to face up to is how threatened we can feel sometimes when someone like Saint Paul specially lifts some one group for needing help.  It can feel like the message is, "These people matter... and you don't."  And of course, you can imagine some in Corinth becoming indignant over Paul's position, because they assumed that lifting up the Jerusalem church meant bringing down the Corinthian church.  We do the same these days, too.  It is the same temptation to answer every cry of "Black lives matter" with an immediate "All lives matter!" in response, when of course the point of saying that black lives matter is that they have been made to feel for a very long time that they don't belong in that "all lives" category.  It's not pie, folks--giving someone else a share of dignity doesn't take any away from mine.  It's not a zero-sum game.  But it is so easy to become defensive.  It is so easy to feel like calling attention to the famine in Jerusalem must be saying that my troubles here in Corinth aren't important.  But that's not it at all--Paul is simply saying that in real life, all of our game pieces are tethered together as we move around the board.  My struggles do affect you, and yours mine.  Your joys lift me up, and mine will buoy yours as well.  And God is at work in bringing us all more fully to life.

Today's work, then, is first of all to let go of the childish nonsense that pictures life as a zero-sum game with one winner and a bunch of losers.  Rather, we will see that our well-being is intertwined with the well-being of people near and far, people whose language or culture or ethnicity are different, even including people you might never have crossed paths with in your lifetime.  And that will mean looking at all the places in our lives where we have gotten comfortable with the idea of withdrawing to our own little hills and hollers where we don't have to deal with "those people's problems," and instead looking for how we can support one another, whether it's you wearing a mask to protect me from sickness, or me speaking up for the folks around who have been treated like they are less-than.  It will mean, once and for all, abandoning the notion that the Kingdom life is a pie to be cut up into competing pieces, where a bigger piece for you means less for me.

Maybe nobody would buy a board game where everybody's pieces are tied to everybody else's, but it sure seems like the New Testament thinks it would be good practice for our life in Christ, because all of us are caught up together in him... and Christ's victory over death itself has pulled us from defeat into life forever.  What if I lived like that were true right now?

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to see the ways we are connected to one another.  And give us the faith to trust you will provide for us all.