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Home and away
In the beginning, God created the world, and made humans – Adam and Eve – his representatives in it. Representation came with conditions, though, and when Adam and Eve broke them, something about their world broke too. It became damaged and hostile, and humans began to die – to return to the soil as dust.
So begins the story that shapes the way Christians and Jews understand their place on earth. “Place” and “home” are woven deeply into this story of exile and return, of a wandering people wishing for the undoing of all that’s gone wrong.
New Zealanders may feel isolated from many of the world’s troubles, but even here all is not well. The health system cannot find care for everyone who needs it; our young people kill themselves at rates among the highest in the “developed” world; [1] the far north is rife with bad housing, ill health, drugs and unemployment; street dwellers exhibit the semi-conscious haze of substance abuse in central Wellington; alcohol and chemical binges are part of youth culture generally; and some 18,000 babies annually are permanently exiled. [2]
Maori also know exile. Robbed of the heritage and rights guaranteed with solemn Treaty by an apparently Christian Crown, today they are removed as guardians of the land. Their displacement is a story told repeatedly in our statistics – social, economic, educational, health and legal. The responses around every backyard BBQ are opinions ranging from ignorant Pakeha chauvinism to radical advocacy of Maori sovereignty.
No, all is not well in Aotearoa. And that’s leaving aside the tragedies of road deaths, cancer, violent abuse, sour relationships, job loss, natural disaster, economic hardship and environmental degradation.
Some say these issues are “the problem of evil” for Christian theology. Indeed! But Christian theology does not somehow rationalise evil away. Rather, it invites us to personally participate in the story of evil’s defeat, as a historical and ongoing fact. And so this Christian story matches and answers the problem of evil in a truly engaging way. By inhabiting the story, everyone – tradesman, student, street dweller, civil servant, labourer or IT worker – may find directions for finding and rebuilding our home.
But we have much to learn from the story. Most of all, in our time we need to re-learn the value of place, of some particular place. Despite our access to easy, cheap travel, and the way that the internal combustion engine has so altered our experience of the world, a rich life is not found in the constant moving about of the middle class. Sometimes we merely trail our fingers over a skin of locations that differ only by their promise of pleasure or short-term prospects. We need anchors. We need to commit to and guard particular localities, to forge ties to the folk in them – that is the stuff of roots and belonging, of contentment and home-building. It is the stuff of gardening. It is also the stuff of redemption. By occasionally saying “no” to the pull of forever moving, the desert spaces of modern life become cultivated oases.
In the Christian story, the image for separation is exile – a sending-away from the Garden of Eden, the place of meeting between God and man. From the beautiful Garden humans were meant to grow outwards and care for all of creation. But their unfaithfulness made them strangers to the life and promise the land once held.
The image for life is return to the land. And this image is beautifully set up in the tale of Israel, released by God’s power from slavery in Egypt, wandering toward the rich and abundant land promised to their ancestor Abraham over 350 years earlier.
Wandering
Whether displaced Maori, culture-shocked Asian immigrant, or cynical Pakeha youth, Israel’s tale – otherwise so foreign to urban lives – invites us to reconsider our sense of dislocation and start heading home. Over two million of Abraham’s descendents left Egyptian slavery, through the agency of God, for the explicit purpose of worship. He revealed Himself not only as their champion, but as the one who then accompanied them toward their new and better life. We can span the globe in a second with our email, but meeting a globe-trotting god when we’re alienated offers us the same prospects as Israel: some specific part of earth might become home once again.
Christians therefore have a robust outlook on the world. As believers we walk with Israel’s wandering God. When exile shadows our path, we see ourselves living the reality of much of human history. Particular places don’t represent our only identity and happiness. But neither do we practice deliberate rootlessness. We feel constantly directed toward homemaking.
By the power of the story, we feel called to undo the destruction exile has wrought in all our relationships. And therefore we build homes and communities, exercising what is rightly called faith. At the best of times we build homely practices into the full range of our relationships: with ourselves, our relatives, neighbours, friends, lovers, employers, workmates, native-born and immigrants, our pets and herds, homes, gardens and districts, our environmental and legal structures, our food and purchasing decisions, our travel and career choices, art, business, philosophy, politics, commerce. All these are homecomings of some particular place and circumstance, and they weave the tapestry of a full humanity, rich, textured, cultivated, satisfying.
Some might detect a flaw, or rather a massive and arrogant assumption, in this story. Christians say that we have come to know Israel’s God, but we are clearly not the Jews of Old Testament Israel. Nor have we escaped Egypt as Abraham’s children, heading toward a land promised to his descendants. By what right, then, do Christians say we inhabit Israel’s story? How can we take universal lessons for modern life from Israel’s ancient tradition – a people from whom we are not even descended? Aren’t our claims a kind of theft of someone else’s story?
Israel’s history is the history of all mankind because an Israelite finally returned home. Jesus Christ went into the worst of exile – death – and rose again to life, re-entering the land as one never again to be exiled from it. And so he became the great new Gardener for the whole human race. In going before Israel and doing her task, he has given us the whole earth.
Therefore, those who inhabit Israel’s story do so through Christ, who invites us to live within the story’s terms. We do better than old Israel, wandering in the Middle East – we can simply stop where we are and start gardening. For we know that behind any place we stop stands the God who has redeemed it all.
This is the reason Christians live with a kind of double vision. On the one hand we know that the garden of earth is not yet cultivated as it one day will be. We can accept things going against us – we can accept the remnants of exile. But this acceptance is because we have a deep sense that this place is already our home, and that exile isn’t ultimate, but merely for a time. We wander with Israel’s God, toward a land both promised and already secured.
Coming home
Endless travel is possible. We can get temporary and superficial pleasure by consuming fleeting impressions. But we’ll have to keep moving, lest we get bored.
Overcoming boredom means staying still for long enough to get below the surface, to discover the roots and nature of a place, to begin to drink in its character and moods. And when we start taking responsibility – when we stop being consumers and start being gardeners – then we will discover the deep satisfaction that we’d never find in the fleeting impressions of constant movement.
The Christian story tells us that we are God’s representatives in the particulars of life: gender, blood, culture, history, people, land. As we hear this story and make it our own, we will infuse these particulars with life, and will use that life to nurture others. Our identity and our historical roots will be both strong and loving. We will steward the land for others, because God called it very good, and because it is our life.
The Christian story challenges easy rootlessness, treating everyone identically, and a culture that markets everything for consumption. None of these respect particulars. We have lost neighbourliness, in all its senses, and our lives are only emptier as a consequence. Busier, perhaps, more stressed, but less significant. We must reclaim the localities, the belonging, the welcome and responsibility of being in one place and not another, of belonging to someone and not another. We must construct homes.
But coming home means rejecting the destructive, power-hungry, and inhospitable ways of life that we have inherited. We must give up all the ways in which we contribute to this, and instead embrace a full humanity, living Israel’s story through Christ, in the dignity of representing God, here and now.
We must come home, and begin homemaking.
Footnotes
[1] In the 15–24 and 25–34 age brackets both males and females were among the top five rates for OECD countries with comparable data in 2002 – see Suicide Facts 2002, International Comparisons from Suicide Prevention Information New Zealand.
[2] Abortion Statistics 2004, Statistics New Zealand Press Release, 15 June 2005