Sharing the Witness as the Stranger-Church

[This is the second of two presentations, please see the one after for details.) 

Presentation #2 - The Stranger-Church

V. Repentance of Binding Ourselves to the Subjugating Powers and being Lord of All

This afternoon's presentation is called "Sharing the Witness of the Stranger-Church" and I want to spend time getting more into two frameworks for understanding what it means for the church to take on this position of being a stranger in the world. The first is about naming ways in which we have actually rejected what it means to be a stranger and taken on the power and position of a people who have become the in-group and decided who will be categorized as strangers and who should assimilate to us. This is actually part of what it means to be a colonizing power - and so that's how I'll describe it. My goal here will be for us to see the ways in which the church has behaved as lord over all, and with that awareness, to reject that. Then the second piece will be about who it is we are meant to be in solidarity with - what a relationship of strangers might look like and what other strangers we are called to join and to reconcile with and to serve.

So we go back again to Constantine who gave Christianity a legitimate place in the Roman Empire and who is reputed to have claimed Christ as the reason for his military triumphs. He had Roman currency imprinted with him holding the Chi and Ro symbols, an explicit conflation of Christ's power with his, and he paved the way for future emperors to take on more direct roles in the formation of the Christian religion, setting the stage for Luther's frequently misunderstood critique of the enmeshment of state and church. He offered a place where Christians could feel at home and become established, where we could leave behind the identity of stranger that previous emperors had imposed on us.

The seduction of leaving strangerhood behind was not something Christians resisted. It is important to be clear on this point: we did not object to Constantine. We had been persecuted to various degrees since their beginnings as Jewish followers of Christ, and then through the next few hundred years as they became more Gentile. Constantine's predecessor, Diocletian, aggressively persecuted Christians, prohibiting them from worship, and executing some of their clergy. When Constantine gave Christians legal status, when he gave us insider status, and funded the building of our churches––the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one such example, and took on Christians symbols as part of imperial power, Christians discovered the appeal of being aligned with and protected by power, and the appeal of being "one of the gang."

We also didn't object when Constantine became tired of the social unrests caused by Christian religious arguments and convened the bishops in order to establish a Christian orthodoxy, as he did when he convened the first Council at Nicaea. Orthodoxy meant stability, and stability made the Emperor happy. (Lutherans in particular can always appreciate the desire for "good order.") When the Emperor took over Christian symbols, performing a kind of religious colonization and using Christianity to displace the pagan gods, Christians did not resist this assimilaton or protest that others were being excluded. Rejecting Rome was rejecting the life that Rome bestowed. Constantine offered Christianity a place within the religious and physical boundaries of the Empire, he offered us a path for leaving our strangeness behind. That Christianity readily accepted is something from which we have not yet recovered.

Now I can name ways in which Lutheranism has been happy to become a dominant power in the countries where it took root. We have an unfortunate history in the early years of the Reformation when we attacked and drowned Anabaptists for what we called heretical views on baptism. (And yes, the drowning was directly connected to how they practiced adult baptism.) I also name that in Scandinavian countries, Lutherans perpetrated our own forms of colonization, doing to the Indigenous Sami people what Canadians have done to Indigenous peoples here in Canada. Lutherans have also engaged in colonizing mission work - for example, in Guyana, Lutheran missionaries eventually established the public school system, with the stipulation that to teach in the schools, you had to become Lutheran. Lutherans have also engaged in colonizing and missionizing work in African countries and we are not without blame for the work we have done suppressing Indigenous African religions in those places. Lutherans also place a very high emphasis on the principle of "good order," which I've spoke of elsewhere as being a mechanism that can lead to excluding those who don't know the rules of good order, revealing that they are strangers in our midst.(1) Even today, the Lutheran World Federation struggles to move the definers of what it is to be Lutheran away from Europe and to other regions of the world. It's not quite so evident here in Canada, where Lutherans, especially German Lutherans, have been considered strangers, but particularly in Europe and Scandinavia, those who are not Lutheran are considered strangers, as are those who are Lutheran but not German or Scandinavian.

But I know that the Anglican Church and the United Church of Canada have different positions than Lutherans here in Canada, particularly in respect to aligning themselves with the powers-that-be of this country. But rather than me calling that out, which would be rude behaviour for a stranger, I'd like to give a few minutes to all of you to identify for yourselves and one another ways in which these denominations have happily taken on "insider status" and moved away from being "strangers" in this country. So I invite you to gather again in groups of three or four for a few minutes to talk about how you see this, and then I'll invite some sharing with all of us together. What are way, historical or contemporary, in which your churches have embraced "insider status" and moved away from or outright rejected being thought of as strangers?

VI. Reconciliation with (Serving) the Strangers of the World

Among one of the many consequences of losing the identity of being strangers is that the church has become increasingly uncomfortable with being displaced, and we fear losing our power. I suspect this is behind much of the alarm around the shrinking churches, a phenomenon occurring across all the major denominations. Our rapidly decreasing percentage of the religious pie graph means we are becoming less known, less recognizable as denominations, and at increased risk of being excluded from the halls of power. Which is why the call to return to being strangers, to return to the risk of displacement, is so uncomfortable. It brings risk. Decolonizing means deciding to live as strangers do, which is to take on the life of a nomadic people, intentionally moving from place to place, learning as we go, deepening as we go, never striving to be fully accepted. It forces us to rely on God in Christ, and God alone, to give us life in our nomadic journeying.

But this journeying has been our work since we started following Jesus. I have been saying that Jesus is a stranger to us, but actually, it is more true to say that we are strangers to Jesus. This flip is important. This is what it means to decenter and displaces ourselves––it means refusing to make ourselves the reference point. Jesus is not different from us, we are different from Jesus. As Daniel Boyarin, a religious historian and Talmudic scholar, cautions, when we look at the history of Christian-Jewish relations, and the ways in which Christians took ownership of Jesus and then separated him from his people, and then engaged in centuries of persecution of those very people in Jesus' own name, we need to be very careful about how we frame this relationship between Jesus and us. Jesus is not different from us, Jesus is not the one who is strange––we are different from Jesus, we are the ones who are strange. We are not the original branch of God's people, as Paul points out, we are grafts. We are add-ons, not replacements. To the first church of Jews who followed Jesus, the Gentiles (which includes us) are the strangers. We are called to return to that identity.

This means several things, among them that we might think of our theologies and our ministries and what we do and what we believe as the tentative offerings of strangers humbly sharing with those who were here before us, the way the Europeans ought to have presented themselves to the Indigenous peoples of this place. Not as the lord "shares" with the servant, but the reverse. We are called to share the witness of the church as a servant shares, as a stranger shares. Though Christ brings us life, and though we strongly suspect that Christ will bring life to others, we can only offer that story to others, never impose, and even more difficult, we can offer it only when invited. Which means, given how many people view the church today, we may go for a very long time before we can share our story. This is challenging.

To do this work, we need to lean into our identity as strangers and into the work of displacing ourselves. Following Kwok Pui-lan's description that feminist theology must centre the voices of oppressed women, the Stranger-Church lifts up the God-experiences of those who have themselves been categorized as strangers because it is these voices that deepen our understanding of the Stranger-Christ. Insofar as we can know the Stranger-Christ, it will be through the experiences of strangers. In doing so, we give up attempts to be the lords of church and we engage in servant church, thereby refusing to participate in the colonial project. 

One thing this means is that we practice being church communally. This is very different from our current practices, particularly in seminaries, of encouraging students to think of ministry as individuals, which risks one person's ideas becoming normative and exclusionary. Communal church is a church that decolonizes when the community is made of a multitude of others, and when the community is engaged in cultivating and nurturing relationships of difference. Doing church communally, and I believe the echoes with the word 'commune' are helpful, is engaging in the work of mutuality, of reciprocity, of sharing experiences, and refusing to establish ownership. It relies on the voices of outsiders, of strangers, of others who have been wounded by exclusion.

I would offer a word of caution however: this community of diverse strangers is risky. Community does not automatically mean life. There is a reason that "mob mentality" is a negative phrase. Willie James Jennings, an African-American theologian, says that, "we already live in the midst of a process of gathering, a global gathering that does not cultivate life but pulls us toward a bondage and death found in a managed diversity and a stupefying docility. [...] There is nothing inherently good about gathering people together, but there is something inherently powerful."(2) The danger comes when the difference of the community is either "manufactured," or manipulated, or managed, or, in typical colonial fashion, controlled. When we attempt to control difference, to be lords over it, to assimilate those who come to us, something Lutherans do all too often in the name of "good order," we lose who we are as the Stranger-Church. We lose the life that Christ gives us.

There is, of course, a different loss of life for those who engage in this way of being church, and it is the same cost Jesus paid. Jesus died because he refused to allow himself to be used as a tool for lording it over others––he refused to submit to the imperial power's attempt to subdue the people it was colonizing, he refused the notion that "good order" was more important than opening up the conversation around God to strangers. The cost for those who engage in ministry/church that refuses to assimilate God, that decenters itself in the conversation, that humbly accepts the position of stranger in others' conversations about God, is heavy, especially for churches that are dying, the way our main-stream Protestant denominations are. It is the loss of an identity that sees Christianity as the central, defining, even authoritative place for understanding God. And by extension, it is the voluntary displacement of Christianity as the normative religion, or even majority religion ,in public conversations. It is offering our thoughts with hesitancy, with humility, with acceptance that we may be rejected. And it means embracing that position and the loss of status and power that comes with it.

But what was death for Jesus, what is death for us, is resurrection for others. A Stranger-Church that decolonizes is a church that heals, not because the ideas we have are so wonderful and life-giving, but because in refusing to assimilate and master others, we finally find our true identity not in a group or belonging, but in God. The first step in healing a wound is to withdraw the foreign object that has inflicted the injury and allow the body to recover. A church that embraces the position of Stranger is one that withdraws its injurious claims to what is or should be normative for others and allows the community to recover.

 

And when we do so in the name of Jesus, we do so in the name of the Jesus who welcomes Others, who, through resurrection, shares life––God's own resource––with us. When we decolonize and make ourselves strangers and give up our lives in the name of Jesus, we experience what it is to be the recipients of sharing, and when we share the Gospel that has been shared with us, as strangers share what they have with those who may or may not welcome them, then we are sharing a Gospel that resists and liberates from colonization, and even, God willing, moves towards reconciliation.

As postcolonial and anticolonial theologians have noted, we do not dismantle the systems of oppressive powers by reversing the positions of those within the system. While Luther says we should be servants of all, we need to go even further. We cannot allow others to be lord over us, because that is falling into idolatry. The challenge here is the balance of being servants to all, taking on the position of strangers, and yet seeing everyone as strangers to one another and, most importantly, reliant on one other. The call is to cultivate a church of complete and total interdependent reliance, based not on how we are the same but on  how we are strange to one another. So what might this mean practically?

One way forward may lie in the work of mutual aid networks. Mutual aid is an idea proposed by Peter Kropotkin, in a series of essays published for a journal in the late 19th century. Mutual aid is not new, but it is still relatively unknown. In the book, Kropotkin sought to counter the rise of what is now known as social Darwinism and offer an alternate strategy for survival. Social Darwinism was prevalent in the 19th century and still continues today and arises from a misreading of Darwin’s work on species evolution. It argues that “survival of the fittest” means that survival is possible only through competition with one another for resources, and that such competition is a natural part of evolution and “built-in” to the human species. Social Darwinism has been the foundation of eugenics policies and actions over the last 100 years, and relies on a belief that, in times of resource scarcity, in-groups will compete against and turn on strangers.

While Kropotkin makes the case that Darwin himself rejected social Darwinism as a misreading of his work, the bulk of his essays relate evidence that collaboration or cooperation is how species survive. He calls this “mutual aid” and argues that rather than species naturally inclining to competing with one another over scarce resources, they work together both inter- and intra-species to adjust their lives so that all can survive. He observes that, “Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. In the great struggle for life – for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy – natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible.”(3) Tracking examples of animal behaviour from insects to birds to mammals, he makes the case that "survival of the fittest" means those who are fit to collaborate, rather than compete. He then goes on to give examples from “savages” (First Nations, Indigenous peoples), and “barbarians” (non-European non-Christians), as well as examples from the Middle Ages, to argue that humans have a built-in tendency to organize in small groups for the welfare of the community, which leads to their ongoing survival. The natural inclination of created being when faced with resource scarcity is not to compete, it's to come together to help one another.

So what should the church be taking from Kropotkin and his theory of mutual aid? The first thing is community and cooperation is our natural tendency, and that differences are what help our survival as we each use the strengths that come with our differences to serve and strengthen others where they are lacking, just as they do for us. This mutuality is a very different foundation for thriving than the idea of an in-group helping strangers. In fact, the Church’s emphasis on charity and love towards neighbour, which is based on an unfair accumulation and distribution of resrouces, has harmed the thriving of all. Why do we have two coats? How did we end up with someone else's coat to start with? Kropotkin states bluntly, “while early Christianity, like all other religions, was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of other mutual aid and sympathy, the Christian Church has aided the State in wrecking all standing institutions of mutual aid and support which were anterior to it, or developed outside of it; and, instead of the mutual aid which every savage considers as due to his kinsman, it has preached charity which bears a character of inspiration from above, and accordingly, implies a certain superiority of the giver upon the receiver.”(4)

His argument here is two-fold. The first is that an attitude of charity fosters a hierarchical approach to giving, wherein the recipient is not deserving of the resources, but is given it by reason of the gracious attitude of the giver. This implies that some are deserving of extra esources (the givers or Church) and others are not, which reduces people to competition rather than collaboration. Even charity towards the stranger reinforces this notion as it sets up a relationship where the charitable have no need of the stranger and can then safely exclude them from the community and from aid. Kropotkin argues that charity, built on hierarchy and communities of us and them, is antithetical to mutual aid, built on reliance and difference.

The second point of Kropotkin’s argument is that Christian ideals of love, on which charity is based, is not a sufficient motivator for mutual care and the development of community. It is a challenging point, so I want to read his words directly: “It is not love of my neighbour – whom I often do not know at all – which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague, feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. […] It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in [hu]mankind. It is the conscience – be it only at the stage of an instinct – of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each [person] from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to [their] own.”(5) In other words, it is mutual survival and thriving in networks of reciprocity that are the true motivators for care, not the feeling of love for your neighbour.

This is a particularly important message for the church to understand. Love does not effect the kind of change needed today. Community organization and solidarity work does. I do not need to love my neighbour in order to fight for their rights. I need to see them as strangers whose well-being is vital to the well-being of the entire community because we need them as much as they need us. But to do that we need to surrender our position as the source and givers of charity, we need to give up the power that comes with being the ones who decide what care should look like, and allow others, those who may be strange to us, to tell us the best way to serve.

Now, I could do a whole sidebar on how Augustinian theology's emphasis on humans as naturally sinful has led the church to ignore mutual aid, but that's a whole other thing. I will say that's probably the reason that theological books published in the last ten years on social justice and advocacy don't use the phrase “mutual aid” or reference Kropotkin. But mutual aid is familiar to many who do work in social justice, particularly disability justice, professionally or voluntarily, apart from religious organizations. The non-religious and religious share an impetus towards caring for the community, regardless of where we believe that feeling of moral duty emerges. As global food, housing, and civil security continue to decline, the approaches of mutual aid in theory and in practice will become important for human thriving in the decades to come. But for the church to engage in means that we must surrender our position as the decision-makers or even the decision-shapers and step back to take our position as strangers being led by others. We need to take on a position of actually relying on those who are different from us, and allowing ourselves to be helped by them. 

So I want to just stop here for a few minutes, because this is a big shift. To think about how the church needs to think of itself not as the helpful servant, but as the servant who is reliant on others. So I'll invite you again to get into small groups - this is the professor in me - and just think of ways in which your congregation or your ministry is actually reliant on others. Rather than thinking about how you help others, what are the ways you are being helped by - or in need of help from - those around you?

I want to move to my final piece for today. If the church is serious about sharing, and doing so from the position of stranger which means more being shared-with than sharing what we have, then we need to talk about what this means in terms of our relationship with the land. And not just the ground. As Glen Sean Coulthard writes, in Red Skin, White Masks, “In the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib [his community's language ...] “land” (or dé) is translated in relations terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material), but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on. Seen in this light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element.”(6) What does it mean to be in a mutual relationship with the land and all our relations?

One thing it means is to take on this position of stranger-servanthood to the land. Rarihokwats, a member of Bear Clan from Akwesasne, says, “The land provides for the life of your children and you must provide for the redemption of the land.”(7) Again, though, this comes from a position of realizing that we and the land are strangers. In an exercise that I have done several times with my theology students, I require students to spend two hours on the land around them, and then to come back and share stories and experiences about the land with the class, and draw a map. What has happened every time is that students mostly focus on the built environment and not on the trees or plants or animals around them. If I ask them what the names of the plants are that they see, most of them can't tell me. I point out to them that these are our relations and we don’t even know the names of our relations. The trees and animals and birds and insects are strangers to us. Many of us don't know what watershed nourishes us. Yet we rely on all these for nourishment. We rely on strangers. And we are, most of us, strangers to the land.

Except that we're not. That is to say, the land does not receive us as strangers to be assimilated or excluded. Instead, it welcomes us as we are. Martin Luther in his explanation to the petition in the Lord's Prayer “Give Us this Day our Daily Bread” says that God sends rain and sun to those deserving and undeserving. God doesn't identify whether those receiving the rain and sun know Christ, God sends it to Christians and strangers alike. We can extend that to say the land does the same. The land shows no preference to those who have been here for one generation or for seven, to those who are Indigenous or those who are newcomers, to those who are known or to those who are strangers. This is not to say that the land and our non-human relations are indifferent to those who live here, but that it is non-preferential, welcoming all.

This relationship is not one of charity, however. We can't say that the land is charitable to us humans, which would be a hierarchical framework. It is, instead, in a relationship of mutual aid. Robin Wall Kimmerer, an Anishinaabe biologist, makes this point in Braiding Sweetgrass and in her more recent book, The Serviceberry.(8) In both books she makes the point that our relationship with the land and all our relationships is one of mutuality and reciprocal need that is based on the ways in which we are different from one another - strangers to each other. As she says, "In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual. Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude–-of which you will be reminded."(9) Mutuality, not charity, is the key to the interrelated web of relationships the land and our non-human relations have with us.

And strangeness is key to these relationships because allowing strangeness is how we resist assimilating the land to our needs, or dominating it, or exploiting it but instead living in true community with it. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a scholar and activist from the Mississauga Anishnaabe people, talks about how bonding to one another in our differences makes us stronger. In her book, Theory of Water, she introduces us to the idea of sintering, which is what happen when one snowflake falls and then bonds immediately to another snowflake in such a way that the billions of snowflakes - each one unique and unlike the next - become a snow pack.(10) Simpson talks about sintering on the land and with others as a way of forming community and solidarity. She says, “My ancestors were very good at sintering, in other words––at living in a way that bonded them to the different forms of life with whom they were sharing time and space.”(11) We must bond to one another while cherishing our individuality and differences - our strangeness to one another.

In bonding and sintering through strangeness, not despite it and not without it, we can discern the shape of this church that follows who Christ is and who Christ is calling us to be in these times. And it is in our relationship with the land and all our relations that we will have a model for how to do this with those around us. As Simpson points out, “It is these relationships [of reciprocity and giving] that continually renew the self-determination, sovereignty and freedom of the plant and animal relations with whom we humans share space in the past, present and future. And our spirits, and those of all other living things, continually reshape the boundaries of our home space, our physical bodies and our material reality, in order to form a profound and intimate connection.”(12) If we attempt, as a church, to engage in the kinds of relationships that the Stranger-Christ calls us to, we will not get very far if we are disconnected from the very foundational relationship we have with the land.

Now I realize this starting with our relationship with the land be somewhat of an unusual way of thinking about the church, but I'll invite you to our final time of small group sharing and invite you to turn to your neighbours and discuss this last piece I'm proposing: does your congregation or ministry have a relationship with the land - how do you rely on the land, and how do you feel like a stranger to it? What might a relationship between your church and the land look like?

VII. Conclusion

We walk in the Way of the Stranger-Christ, and so when the church thinks of itself as servant to all, as an institution or an organization or a denomination or even a congregation, it means we allow our existence to be shaped by others. This is a vulnerable thing to do. It is risky. As groups defined as strangers have known for centuries, having one's identity constructed from outside ones self can lead to segregation, ghettoization, and even genocide. And as I have mentioned, this is dangerous. We are afraid of strangers, and thus of becoming strangers because, as Bauman observes, “Strangers tend to cause anxiety precisely because of being ‘strange’ – and so, fearsomely unpredictable, unlike the people with whom we interact daily and from whom we believe we know what to expect.”(13) In addition, “the massive and sudden appearance of strangers on our streets” … “[who] are the embodiments of the collapse of order,” leave us unable to “know how to proceed.”(14) Thus, strangers represent unknowability of life and a reminder that we, personally, lack control. As we move farther into a time of precarity and vulnerability on a global scale, where the future is unknown, taking on the positions of strangers who are unknowable can be provocative in unsafe ways.

But if fear of the stranger is really fear of the unknown and unknowable, then the answer is not to make the world and one another knowable, as modernity has tried, because this is impossible. The world is not completely knowable, and neither are we. Instead, the goal is to make ourselves comfortable with the unknown and the unknowable, within ourselves and outside. One way is to be in constant and intimate encounter with the Stranger, to become comfortable with them as unknowable, but along with that, we must become comfortable with our own unknowability, even to ourselves. 

And to do this, we must become comfortable with the idea that the One in whose image we are made is also ultimately unknowable. But this is a source of hope for us. To return to Ladin, who I introduced this morning, “God never stops believing that human communities can make a place for a God who is incomprehensibly strange and utterly different, a God who cannot fit into human roles and categories, but whose presence, like the cloud and fire that surrounded the Tabernacle, is recognized and embraced at the very heart of our lives––not only our lives as isolated individuals, but the lives we live together.”(15)

Embracing the understanding that Christ, God-with-us, is a Stranger means that we, as the body of Christ, are likewise called to take on the position of strangers as we serve those whom Christ serves. We are called to take ourselves outside of the circle and called to serve from that position of strangeness. We are called to serve with attention to mutual aid and our relationship with the land. Being a servant as Christ serves means being a "strange" member of the community, recognizing that we nevertheless belong to one another because we all serve one another in our differences, not despite them.

This, of course, leaves us with questions as to the concrete application of what I'm proposing. And here's where, like a good professor, I'm going to leave you with these questions as a kind of homework, for you to bring back to your communities to talk through. The first is, how do we share the historical power and status of the church with those who have been excluded from that power? In practice, this is about who gets to make decisions that affect the church. In your church contexts, who makes the decisions about the church? Are they only people who "know" the church or are people who are strangers allowed also to make those decisions? Most congregations have rules about only members serving on councils or boards, and those members need to be known to the community and have been there for a period of time. What would it look like if strangers or non-members or brand-new members were invited to make the decisions? Not just in a token way, but in a real, future-shaping way? What would need to change in your church processes for that to be allowed to happen?

A related set of questions centre around the concept of mutual aid, some of which you already discussed in your small groups. Who does your church rely on that isn't part of your church already? What strangers do you need help from? Whose help do you need that would consider you to be strange? If you don't have those kinds of relationships, why not? Who is your church afraid to be vulnerable to? Who is it afraid to rely on? Why? 

And finally, the last set of questions is, how does your church community engage with the land and our non-human relations in such a way that you serve the land? Obviously this goes beyond dominion over the land, but it also goes beyond stewardship, which is still a relationship of hierarchy, if we can even call it a relationship. Stewardship still thinks of the land as an object, a collection of resources; stewardship is a kind of charity. Servanthood to the land recognizes that the land is living, is a community with spirits, with whom we are in a mutual relationship of service, even though we really don't understand one another. As we think through how we might share our witness what would it mean to think about it as, how might our witness serve the land and all our relations? How do relationships with the land affect the decisions we make around programs, worship, church structures? What stories of Christ is the land inviting us to share? Do the physical locations of our ministries or head offices shape how we understand the service our denominations are carrying out? How? If we built our church organizations on the relationships of the land with us, what would they look like? Do we know the land we live on well enough to even answer that question? How can we develop those relationships?

Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts, and to serve you in this way. I am a stranger to most of you, although less so than when I started talking this morning. Niawen, Merci, Siyisgaas, Thank you.

Endnotes:

 1. Driedger Hesslein, Kayko (2024) "Good Order and Decolonizing: Blessings and Challenges," Consensus: Vol. 45: Iss. 2, Article 7. DOI: 10.51644/GAHH3021 Available at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol45/iss2/7

 2. Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Eerdmans, 2020, 134.

 3. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, Penguin, 70.

 4. Kropotkin, 236.

 5. Kropotkin, 7-8.

6. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 6.

7. Raymond Aldred and Matthew Anderson, Our Home and Treaty Land: Walking Our Creation Story, Wood Lake Publishing, 2022, citing Rarihokwats, “In the Seventh Round of the 13 Moons,” Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization, edited by Steve Heinrichs, Orbis, 2018, 32.

8. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of the Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013. Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Scribner, 2024.

9. Kimmerer 2024, 8-9.

10. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, Alchemy, 2025. 17-18.

11. Simpson, 24.

12. Simpson, 160.

13. Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door, Polity, 2016, 8.

14. Bauman 2016, 15.

15. Ladin, 131.

Sharing the Way with the Stranger-Christ, May 20 2026

 Shared Way, Shared Witness - https://www.sharedway.ca/

May 19-22, 2026 - Villa St. Martin, Montreal

Wednesday, May 20

Presentation #1 - Sharing the Way with The Stranger-Christ

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me here to share some reflections on this rather large topic of the church and how it might engage in this important of work of sharing. I acknowledge that we are gathered today on unceded lands, belonging to the Kanien'ka:há'ka Nation. Skennen'kó:wa ken?The land where I live is governed by Treaty 7, signed by the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes the Piikani, the Siksika, the Kainai and Stoney-Nakoda Nations, and by the Tsuut'ina Nation, so it is unusual for me to be on unceded land. I will be talking a lot about what it means to be a stranger, and that feels particularly acute for me at the moment. Nevertheless, I am deeply appreciative for the opportunity to be on this land.

In the notes I have from conversations with Jesse, I have questions jotted down that were offered as some ways to frame my presentation - "Who is the church?" "Who defines who the church is?" "Who decides how the church participates in the world?" Totally easy to cover in three hours!

And then there is the connected conversation of sharing - what does it mean to share? What are we sharing? Are we sharing with others or are others sharing with us? How does sharing fit within the framework of the kind of decolonizing work we are all engaged in as part of our commitment to Christ? Again, totally easy to cover both the topic of the church and the topic of sharing in three hours!

Given the depth of both of these topics, and the importance of them for clarifying both the identity and the work of the church in the next decade (because trying to do anything beyond that is perhaps a bit foolish at this point in history), my goal for today is to offer some thoughts that will provoke further questions and further conversation, rather than provide any answers. Like I say to my students in theology classes, if you leave here with more questions about God than answers, then I've done my job. Partly because the life of faith is one of humbleness and respect for the limits of our knowledge, but also because the church as an organized institution still has a lot of work to do in disentangling ourselves from our histories of harm, and until we do that work, we will find ourselves just replicating attitudes and behaviour from the past, particularly ones that no longer work in the next contexts we're in.

So this morning I'm going to talk about what it means to be a church whose identity rests in Christ. Particularly, I'm going to propose something a bit different, which is that when we talk about Christ as our centre, we're actually talking about someone who is a stranger to us. I'm going to unpack that, and then reflect on how the church serves Christ in our work, and introduce us to thinking about what it means that we are carrying out this service as our imitation of Christ, who is a stranger. So, Christ as stranger, the church as engaging in Christ-like servanthood, and what it means for the church to do this as strangers like Christ.

I. Christ as Stranger

The Christian church is centred on Christ. Before we were even "the church," before the institution of Christianity, we were a collection of groups who put Jesus at the centre - what Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig, early church historians, call "Jesus peoples."(1) The research from these scholars tells us that while the word christianos occurs in the book of Acts and 1 Peter (Acts 11:25-26, 26:27-29, 1Peter 4:14-16), it is a word connected with the original root of Christ, which means the Anointed One, and so christianos in the Greek Scriptures references people who were dedicated to the Anointed One. It was more of an adjective describing what the people held in common, rather than a proper noun and name like we use it today. Nevertheless, of the dozens of different groups identified in historical research who we might consider our ancestors in faith, what they all held in common was that they all centered their lives around the sayings and teachings of Jesus Christ. They ate together, they created new family structures together, and most importantly, they developed new identities together, ones formed by their togetherness in Christ.(2)

Now in order to understand who this one is at our centre and on whom we base our identity, and to better understand what it means for us to be a community that follows Christ, it makes sense to try to know as much as possible about him. We have the New Testament, of course, but that's only the beginning of our investigations, rather than the end, because there's so much that these writings don't tell us. There are two reasons for that - one is that maybe it wasn't important, and the other is that the writers assumed that their readers knew all the background and all the context already. It would have been easy to know who Christ was and what it meant to follow him when you had people in your community with living memory of him, and when the world you lived in was pretty much the same as the world he lived in. Sadly, that's not knowledge that we have access to anymore.

In any case, what we do know is that Jesus was a Jew, one of many with ideas about God and how God wants us to live in the world. We know that he lived in a place where everybody worshipped the God of Israel, and centred their lives on Torah and the Temple, and we know that, just like today, the faithful people of his time had lots of different opinions - strong opinions - about what those lives should look like. We all know the names of the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Essenes, but around 90% of Jews were unaffiliated with those groups and would hold a mishmash of opinions from each of the groups. Jesus, himself, had a little in common with the Sadducees, quite a bit in common with the Pharisees, especially around his belief in the resurrection, and something in common with the Essenes in his opinions of the Temple. His beliefs about God were not in and of themselves unique, although the way he combined them may have been.

We also know that he lived in a time when the Roman Empire was dominant in that part of the world, and we know that he had opinions on the Empire and its relationship to God, opinions that were rooted in his knowledge of the prophets and the lullaby his mother must have sung him, the one we call the Magnificat: "The Lord has cast down the might from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly, and has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty."  We know that he was not a citizen in the Roman Empire, and was thus subject to any punishment they might inflict, and we know that he stood in solidarity with the poor, the sick, and the outcast. He was not interested in siding with the powerful.

But the more we know, the more we realize there is so much we don't know. Partly because, as the Enlightenment philosopher, Gotthold Lessing said, history is an "ugly ditch" between us and the life of Jesus - a ditch that we can never cross because we simply can't go back in time. Although every year brings new archeological discoveries that tells us more and more about life in Second-Temple Israel, we'll never truly get the vibe of that time and place.

But we also can never truly understand who this One is that we follow because Jesus Christ was, as defined at the Council of Chalcedon and as confessed in our creeds, fully human. To be human is to be particular and unique, irreplaceable and irreducible, just like each one of us here. We are all miracles of uniqueness, shaped by our relationships, by our contexts, by our biology, and by some mystery that can't be understood through a formula. This combination of things that makes us who we are, that makes us human, means that we are never completely knowable. No matter how close our relationships, we can never truly know another. No matter how much therapy we've done (and I hope we're all doing it), no matter how self-aware we are, we can't even truly know ourselves. That is one of the conditions of being human. And the same is true of Christ, because he, too, is fully human. Beyond complete comprehension, as all humans are. Christ knows us, God knows us when we were knit in our mother's womb (to mash together Jeremiah 1 and Psalm 139), of that there is no doubt. But we can never truly know Christ either in his humanity or especially in his divinity. In essence, Christ is a stranger to us.

Christ is a stranger to us. This is quite a claim, I recognize. While on the one hand, we may be comfortable accepting that yes, we can never truly know the divine, we have two thousand years of claiming that the church knows Christ. At times, the church has claimed to be the only one who can know Christ - extra ecclesiam nulla salva - outside the church there is no salvation. Fortunately, we have theologians like the Jesuit Karl Rahner and doctrinal statements from Vatican II from the middle-ish part of the twentieth century that allow that Christ can be found outside of the church, although in an "anonymous" form, which has allowed us to come to know Christ better through the practices of those of other religions but "the church" still insists that Christ is ours, that if you want to know who Christ is, look to the Christians. So to then turn around and say that Christ is a stranger to us is, I agree, somewhat radical and requires some unpacking.

 So, the concept of "stranger" is one that was developed in the field of sociology as a way to understand people who come to live in communities but then are never really considered part of them. The sociologist Zymunt Bauman has spent most of his career focusing on who strangers are and how they have been (and continue to be) treated over the last hundred years, a time when we've seen increased movement of peoples around the world, resulting in an increase of strangers. Bauman describes strangers as people who stand in-between in-groups and out-groups, not completely separate because they're among us, but not one of us, because they come from elsewhere.(3) We might think of the three strangers who came to visit Abraham to tell him Sarah would have a child. Sometimes they're called men, sometimes angels - the ambivalence demonstrates that they can't quite be categorized as one thing or another - they are strange, and therefore strangers. Strangers are those who don't quite fit but we can't actually ignore, because here they are among us.

So to say that Christ is a stranger to us is quite the position to take. And yet we can't really say that Christ is one of us. Jesus was never a Christian. As both a human Jew and as the divine Other, he has never been one of us. This is not to say that Jesus is estranged from us, or we from him, as Barbara Meyer, a Christian theologian, points out.(4) We are not strangers to Jesus - he knows us because he is also God, but he is a stranger to us, and it is vital that we recognize this because how we embrace and follow this One who is a stranger to us deeply impacts how we understand and serve those around us. I'll unpack this later, but there is a lot at stake in how we understand Christ if we are called to serve others as if they are Christ in our midst. There is also a lot at stake when we consider how we have treated those whom we consider to be strangers in our midst, who are also those whom we are called to serve.

So let's unpack this stranger thing a bit more, now with a theological lens. To begin, I actually want to introduce the work of Joy Ladin, who is an Orthodox Jewish theologian, and more importantly, a trans woman. Ladin being trans is significant because she brings to her work a lifetime of the experiences of being a stranger and being unknown by those around her. As a child labelled as a boy, she not only was considered strange because she didn't quite fulfill the boyness expected of her, but she was also strange to herself because she didn't know why she couldn't fulfill those expectations, she just knew she didn't. She felt that her parents and friends, even though they loved her, didn't really know her, which multiplied her feeling of being a stranger. 

At the same time, Ladin was (and is) a devout Jew who had a strong and intimate relationship with God - never feeling estranged from God, but feeling that actually, they had something in common because God was as strange as she was and yet remained in community. Now why would she call God a stranger? First, she recognizes that God behaves in ways that are unpredictable and ultimately incomprehensible. God creates God's people but threatens to wipe them out in a flood. God commits to the people in the covenant with Moses but allows them to be exiled twice. God gives Abraham a son but then asks for that son to be sacrificed. God is both mighty and merciful, angry and abounding in steadfast love. While Christians have attempted to create a kind of logic for these contradictions, sometimes even falling into the heresy of Manichaeism, Jews allow God to be who God is without attempting to resolve or explain what is strange to them. Indeed, Ladin, in her book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, says, “If we don’t recognize God’s incomprehensible strangeness, we aren’t recognizing God.”(5)

I turn to Ladin to help us think through what it means that Christ is a stranger because I wonder if, because we believe that God became incarnate as one of us, we have made Christ so much one of us that we have lost an important claim about God and thus about how radical God's love is for us, particularly as that love comes to us in Christ. Particularly I wonder if in claiming to be Christ's people, we have come to claim Christ as one of ours in ways that deny the radical inclusivity of God for all people, whose who are like us and particulary those who are unlike us. For Ladin, it is vitally important to understand that God is strange to us so that we can embrace the true call of God to love those around us. Her words are so important that I'm going to read this paragraph from her:  “Regardless of our religious tradition or affiliation, to welcome God into our communities is to welcome a stranger who will never assimilate, who will not go along just to get along, who will not follow our rules, accept our judgments, embrace our values, affirm our doctrines, confirm our biases, or look or behave the way we expect––a stranger who may bless us or curse us, who is responsible for all the good and all the evil that befalls us, who takes without asking and gives without explanation. To love God, we must learn to love someone who will always be a stranger. To serve God, we must serve the needs of a stranger. To grow close to God, we must become intimate with a stranger. To open ourselves to God, we must open ourselves to a stranger. To make a place for the God who dwells invisibly and incomprehensibly among us––to show that God belongs with us, and that we belong to God––we must know, and build our lives and communities around knowing, the soul of the stranger.”(6)

For Christians, God has come to dwell incomprehensibly among us as Jesus Christ, who is in many ways unknown to us. First historically, second religiously, third in the way that all humans are unknowable to one another, and fourth in the way that God is unknowable to us. We thus rely on this stranger, following him even though we don’t know him. The challenge for us is that following strangers is not actually how we historically interact with them.

You see in Bauman's survey of modern history, concludes that groups treat strangers in one of two ways, which he gets from the anrthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. One way is to assimilate the stranger, forcing them to give up what makes them different and become one of us. In assimilation, we expect strangers to learn our language, our customs, our histories, and our written and unwritten rules, (including our liturgies and church decision-making structures). We expect them to live the way we do. The other way we treat strangers is by excluding them, by putting up walls, either physical or bureaucratic. We deny them the ability to identify as one of us, while reducing or eliminating the identities they come with. (What are the rules of our church memberships, after all?) Sometimes we even do both when we expect the stranger to assimilate while we simultaneously exclude the parts of them that make them different. We expect strangers to give up their own languages, customs, histories, and rules. Immigrants and children of immigrants know this very well, as do our Indigenous siblings, whom we have turned into strangers. We both assimilate and exclude them simultaneously.

These dual processes are used by colonialism and imperialism and by those who aspire to the kinds of power those things wield. Relevant for us today is that these are the processes that Constantine used to draw us into the Empire and that Christians repeated as we claimed Christ as our own. Even as Constantine gave Christianity legitimate status, he instituted policies to make Jews and Christian strangers to one another. In our effort to distance ourselves from the increasingly "strange" Jew, Christians began to exclude the Jewishness of Jesus, separating Easter from Passover by affixing Christian holidays to the Julian calendar while Jewish holidays stayed attached to the Hebrew calendar. Rejecting any solidarity with the Jewish people allowed Christians to stay protected by the Empire, which in turn claimed Christian support as proof of divine support. As Rome continued, demonstrating solidarity with this form of power became embedded in Christian theology and we were happy to relinquish our status as strangers to the Empire.

Assimilation and exclusion manifests in multiple ways, and the church is only now beginning to realize the frequency with which we have used both of these mechanisms to control strangers. We have done unto others what we allowed to be done to us by Constantine. The first step, which perhaps paved the way for all the others, was the assimilation of Jesus, a stranger to Gentiles. After Jesus was no longer physically present among the people, and after the Jewish people were displaced by the destruction of the Second Temple, Gentile Christians lost any physical reminder, any physical place, to associate with Jesus and thus any reminder that he was a stranger to Gentiles. As Jesus' own people were themselves displaced, Christians took him as our own and estranged him from his own history. For centuries we denied that he was a Jew and erased any evidence to the contrary. And yet, as refugees and immigrants throughout time experience, nobody likes someone who's from nowhere, and so the church then almost immediately assimilated Jesus as a citizen of the Christian community, a community that belonged to the Roman Empire and later more specifically to Europe. There, in that community, within the borders of that Empire, Jesus was made a Christian. Assimilated, with everything specifically Jewish about him excluded.

Yet Christ remains ultimately unassimilated, not the least because of his divine nature. Despite what Christian doctrine has attempted, we nevertheless have to reckon with Emmanuel as God-with-us, and so, as Barbara Meyer, writes, "God sides with the otherness of Christ and continues to protect him from our efforts to domesticate him."(7) And as Ladin reminds us, “God is not just a stranger in this or that community: God is the ultimate ger [the Hebrew word for stranger]: a singular Presence who, as Judaism and other traditions that grew out of the Torah teach, dwells among human beings, sharing our lives, caring about our actions, knowing our sorrows and our struggles, but who can never fit in or be seen as one of us."(8) Christ is a stranger to us not only because of his historical humanity, and his humanity in general, but also because of his divinity, no matter how we have tried to make it otherwise.

But the process of trying to make Christ one of us has been damaging to those outside of the church. And so, my hope in defining Christ as a stranger among us are multiple. One hope is that we might begin to repair some of the damage that was inflicted when we assimilated Jesus and appropriated him into Western Christianity's image. Another hope is that as we become more comfortable with the idea of this particular stranger shaping our lives that we might thus better treat those who are strangers to us.

But before I turn to that, I want to give you time to reflect on what it means to think of Christ as a stranger to us. So at this point, I'm going to actually invite you to gather into small groups of 3 or 4 and talk about what I've just proposed. What do you think about my proposal that Christ is a stranger to us? How does it feel to think of Christ as a stranger?

III. The Church as Sharing Christ's Strangeness

One of my other hopes for introducing the idea of Christ as stranger is that if we, as the church, base our identity on the identity of Christ, this means that we are called to see ourselves as strangers and to enter into that experience in order to develop better relationships with those who are considered strangers to us. This relational piece is one I will reflect more on this afternoon, but right now I want to reflect on generally what it might mean for the church to take on the position of stranger in the world today.

So what is this world we live in? Although we may be familiar with the phrase post-modernity and hear suggestions that we no longer live in modernity, Bauman and other sociologist and philosophers would argue that we are still very much enmeshed in the modern period. We continue to be shaped by an emphasis on rational and logical thinking as priorities in decision-making, the success of "the economy" is a benchmark for how well a nation-state is doing, and we still live with institutional structures that seek to govern our collective lives by treating us all the same. However, we are also now experiencing some of the negative effects of modernity, where we are beginning to see the consequences of the push to a universal sameness when that kind of sameness is actually a form of assimilation. We are also all beginning to experience the effects of the modern emphasis on capitalism and production as the sole defining features of a group where everything must be connected to growth or efficiency or production, with no room for rest or deepening or creativity. And, relevant to this gathering, we are all experiencing the collapse of institutions, as their structures no longer address the needs of the communities we are in.

Bauman describes this time as the "liquid modern" time, which is a time when, as he says, "the conditions under which members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines,” “In short: liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty.” “Life in the liquid modern society is a sinister version of the musical chairs game, played for real.”(9) Bauman identifies the fluid nature of modern existence, especially for those without privilege, as competition for a seat. This is the age we are experiencing, where resources become fewer and fewer - water, fuel, food, medical care - and sooner rather than later we will all be the ones competing for a seat. I remember moments as a child playing musical chairs where, out of desperation, somebody would sit on the lap of someone else (usually to much giggling), but this frivolity may soon become necessity, and there won’t be much laughter. We are entering (have already entered) a time when resource scarcity will demand acting for survival, which too often is interpreted as meaning competition. I'll speak more on that this afternoon, but what I want to highlight now is that this kind of precarious existence is particularly hostile to strangers. In times of scarcity, communities tend to close ranks and look skeptically, if not aggressively, at those who use up resources but don't "truly belong." We can actually see this happening currently with the increased calls to protect "Canadians" from "immigrants," and in certain politicians' calls for "remigration" (which I'll note is actually a dog whistle for white supremacy.")

For the church, then, to take on the identity of being strangers as Christ is means intentionally entering into a position of in-between-ness and not-quite-belonging. While we have a long history of thinking of Christians as in the world but not of it, we have less of a history of thinking of ourselves as taking up a position of vulnerability. Since Constantine established Christianity as central to the empire sixteen centuries ago, the church has occupied a position of authority where we become the ones who determine who the stranger is and whether or not they should be assimilated into our midst. So for the church to take on the position of stranger is to surrender over 1500 years of security and power.

Taking on the position of stranger also means allowing others to shape us. As Christians we are first defined by Jesus and his call to us, of course, but secondary to that is then the call to allow the world around us tell us where we might go, how we might live, and who we should serve - the way of strangers. Jesus is certainly our model for this - his ministry took him far from his hometown, in Samaria he was most definitely a stranger, not just because he was from Judea but because he was a Jew who worshipped at the Temple in Israel, which Samaritan Jews did not recognize. He accepted the vulnerability that came with being unknown and he also accepted the reality that he would have to rely on others to care for him. And, in that final week, he accepted the powerlessness that comes when one is considered a stranger by the Roman Empire and surrendered his life. We, too, are called to voluntarily enter into this position of vulnerability, reliance, and powerlessness, following Jesus.

This is a position of humbleness. One where we we will be tempted to reclaim our status as part of the in-group, to take centre place, to ground ourselves and take ownership of a space that was never meant to be owned. Being a stranger will mean building our faith and our theology on the foundational understanding that God loved our Jewish siblings before God loved us, and cherishing that. Which is the hardest thing, right? To cherish being outsiders, to cherish being displaced, to cherish being loved second? It is much easier to live with the logic that tells us that if we are outsiders, we make ourselves insiders, that if we are displaced we find a home to take, that if we are loved second we take over until we are first. It is much easier to assimilate others than to consider allowing ourselves to be assimilated or excluded. To be the stranger, is to put ourselves at the mercy of others, to be the reliant ones, rather than the reliable ones.

There is a fine but necessary distinction here. As the church occupying the dominant position, we think of ourselves as gracious owners who share with strangers. We take what we have and give it to them. We lift up Jesus' words that we should give away our cloak, our food, our shelter to the Other, forgetting that giving these things away means that we have the power and stability to have them in the first place. But being the stranger means giving more weight to Jesus' words when he sent the disciples out instructing them to take no bread, no bag, and to rely entirely on the hospitality of others. When we are strangers, we are reliant on others. Not entitled to care, but still obligated to work.

IV. Freedom of a Christian as serving the Strangers as Strangers Ourselves

What is the work, then, that the church takes up as strangers in the world? This is a complex question because we have to be cautious about conflating being a stranger with any attitude of entitlement to being hosted. Strangers have never been entitled to anything - this is why taking on the position of stranger means also taking on a position of humility and powerlessness. This is part of the work of uniting ourselves with the kenotic Christ of Philippians - voluntarily taking on a position of stranger in order to embody Christ and so that Christ might work through us. Becoming strangers includes making space for the needs of others so that their concerns are equal to our own. As Christ says, "Love the lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself."

"Love your neighbour as yourself." One of the treasure of Martin Luther's writings that is central to much of what Lutherans might call ethics and what it means to love your neighbour, is a tract he wrote in 1520 called "The Freedom of a Christian." As a Lutheran, I want to take a few minutes to review it for you before I bring it back into conversation with this whole piece around becoming strangers and the work we're called to do. 

The central claim of "The Freedom of a Christian" is this: "The Christian individual is a completely free lord of all, subject to none. AND The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all."(10) The first statement about free lord of all, subject to none is a spiritual one, building from Luther's belief that Christians are all justified by the faith freely given to us through Christ. This justification means that there are no worldly works or spiritual disciplines or alliances with power that we must undertake in order to improve ourselves in the eyes of God. Rather, through baptism, Christ's righteousness and our sinfulness are exchanged, and God sees us through the lens of the righteousness of Christ. Luther calls this the "joyous exchange" and just as Christ is lord of his own salvation and subject to none, Christians take on this position of being subject to no one.

From this position of spiritual freedom then, the second half of Luther's statement emerges. That Christians are subject to all when it comes to our lives here on earth. Now some of this is rooted in Christ's command to love our neighbour as ourselves, and to obey God's words to the prophets to care for the widow and the orphan, and all the poor in the community - to redistribute resources so that instead of one person having two cloaks, two people each have one. For Luther, however, this kind of servanthood is even deeper, and it is because of where we see Christ.

For Luther, the location of Christ is multiple. To start, Christ is in the one whom we serve, and therefore we serve others because we serve Christ. But another location of Christ is in ourselves, as we saw in the joyous exchange. And therefore, as Luther says, "although individual Christians are thereby free from all works, they should nevertheless once again 'humble themselves' in this freedom, take on 'the form of a servant,' 'be made in human form and found in human vesture,' and serve, help, and do everything for their neighbour, just as they see God has done and does with them through Christ."(11) Luther offers his inner monologue thus, "I will give myself as a kind of Christ to my neighbour, just as Christ offered himself to me."

And now here's where I want to bring things together and, of course, make them a bit more complicated. Particularly, I want to bring this all together around our idea of Christ as the Stranger and what it might mean for the church to both serve others as though Christ the Stranger is in them, and also as though we are engaging in servanthood from the position of strangers ourselves, as Christ serves us. We serve the stranger (Christ) as the stranger (Christ).

Now I have a particular reason for wanting us to think through this idea of serving the Stranger as strangers ourselves. And it's because I wonder whether the Christian "motto" as it were, love your neighbour, isn't actually radical enough anymore. Or rather, the category of "neighbour" has been too easily domesticated and controlled. This isn't new - the legal expert in Luke 10 challenges Jesus to define who Jesus means by neighbour, presumably as an attempt to wiggle out from loving them. Even Jesus' answer doesn't quite tell us who the neighbour is, other than to point out that it's someone in our proximity when we are in need. Or when they are in need. Again, it's not completely clear. But my point is that when we are told to love our neighbour, we then seek to find ways in which everybody can either be included (or excluded) in that category. Neighbours are those like us, and we seek to discover how the neighbour is like us. "They are human, like us." "They are in need, like us." 

But as we find ways to create our neighbour like us, we ultimately run into that moment when we discover that our neighbour is, in fact, not like us. We discover that they perhaps hold different beliefs than us, they value life differently than us, they are maybe even not human like us. And we find an escape from loving our neighbour by pointing out ways in which, actually, they are not our neighbours. We put them into the categories of strangers.

So my proposal to foreclose on that move is to suggest that rather than focusing on loving our neigbour, we focus on serving the stranger. We focus on those whom Bauman puts in the liminal category - like us but not like us, in a way that is disruptive to our self-identity, in a way that challenges the categories in which we locate our stable identities. This is why it becomes important to envision Christ as a Stranger - in part because strangers are unknowable and therefore uncontrollable. In serving the other, or the stranger, true servanthood means that we are no longer the ones in control of what that service looks like, and we no longer decide who is worthy of our service. We displace ourselves from the calculation, and privilege the one whom we don't really, and can't really, know.

This decentering increases when we serve the other as strangers ourselves. Which means, as I mentioned earlier, putting ourselves in a position of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the defining experience of strangers, always reliant on the in-group for acceptance and even existence. Serving as a stranger is a double vulnerability - what if we serve in the wrong way? What if we are asked to serve in ways that change who we are? What if our service requires us to give up who we are? Serving as a stranger means voluntarily surrendering autonomy, self-direction, even identity in order to serve the other. And further, it means we can't even predict what might be asked of us because we don't know the one whom we are serving. And for the church, this is a particularly precarious position. What if we, which is to say the church, are asked to surrender something important? What if we are asked to surrender our autonomy? Our self-direction? Our governance? Our structure? (You see where I might be going with this.) Yet, as Luther points out, we are freed from adherence to things like institutions and controlling systems and stereotypes and norms that would exclude the vulnerable, so that we might joyfully focus on the work Jesus actually calls us to share with him. Taking on the position of stranger is a kind of freedom, because we are free in Christ, the Stranger.

Endnotes:

 1. Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scot, and Hal Taussig, After Jesus, Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements, Harper One, 2021. "Chapter 2: If Not Christian, What?".

 2. Ibid. "Part II: Belonging and Community."

3. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence,  cited in Niclas Mänsson, "Bauman on Strangers, Unwanted Pecularities."

 4. “To Christians of Gentile descent, Jesus is and remains different. This interruption of identification does not need to estrange Christians from the Jesus they feel committed to.” Barbara U. Meyer, Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory: Theological and Philosophical Explorations (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 7.

 5. Joy Ladin, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Brandeis University Press, 2019, 130.

6. Ibid. 147.

 7. Meyer, 156.

 8. Ladin, 146-147.

 9. Liquid Life, Zygmunt Bauman, Polity Press, 2005.

 10. Martin Luther, "Freedom of a Christian," The Annotated Luther, Vol 1, 488.

11. "Freedom," 520.

 12. "Freedom," 523.