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.
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