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Anywhere People/Somewhere People
(with reference to David Goodhart’s ‘The Road to Somewhere’ (Penguin 2017)
For better and for worse Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel ‘On the Road’ was a major influence on my youth. Its celebration of travel, movement, horizons, rootlessness fitted well with the easy prosperity of the fifties and sixties; just as the subsequent cycles of boom and bust, along with rising unemployment and house prices, have caused people to think more cautiously about their future prospects. Nonetheless there are ways in which the Bible is a ‘road’ book (as implied in James K A Smith’s recent, stimulating ‘On the Road with St Augustine’).
Both Wanderers and At Home.
In Gen 12:1 the beginning of Abraham’s faith is conscious detachment from what had given him identity: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house”. After this he receives God’s blessing, so that, as Miroslav Volf writes: “Departure from his native soil, no less than the trust that God will give him an heir, made Abraham the ancestor of us all” (‘Exclusion and Embrace’, p 39).
So at the annual Feast of First Fruits the people were told to repeat “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous” (Deut 26:5). It is a response to draw them back from a mind-set of settled prosperity to their initial migratory experience that remained part of their worshipping DNA. “I dwell with you as a foreigner, a stranger, as all my ancestors were” wrote King David (Psalm 39:12b, TNIV). Therefore it became part of their ethical code too. “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Ex 23:9). They must never forget their rootless origins. The alien becomes a sort of sacrament to remind them of their easily forgotten identity as a people who know what it is to not belong. A similar passage at Leviticus strengthens the sense of empathetic identification that comes from being rooted in a story of migration: “you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev 19:34). The last phrase establishes that the journey of migration was also the place of Covenant. Indeed God’s love for the stranger, and call to Israel to likewise love them (Deut 10:12-21) is not just an ‘implication’ of Israel’s faith but is centrally placed as a covenantal mark of circumcised hearts.
Yet the purpose of migration was to lead them to a settled place, a land flowing with milk and honey. Moses acknowledged the transition from being an alien to finding the security of even a short-term home when he names the son born to him in Midian as Gershom, signifying “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land” (Ex 2:22). John Durham comments: “There [Egypt] Moses was a stranger, no matter how familiar to him were that land and the ways of its people. Here [Midian] Moses is at home, no matter how unfamiliar to him may be this land and the ways of its people. There, he had been rejected by the Egyptians and even by his kinsmen. Here, he had been received into the innermost circle of a people who he had never seen before. Moses, who all his life had been a stranger there, was here a stranger no longer. Is it any wonder that Moses should want such a homecoming for his people, foreigners there in Egypt” (Exodus – Word Bible Commemtary, p 24).
The experience of being a migrant recurs constantly in the Old Testament, and draws readers into identifying with their “expectations and fears. Time and again, it invites us to see the migrant’s life from the inside; indeed it invites us, no matter where we live or how far we have travelled from our birthplace, to identify with migrants” (Nick Spencer, writing in ‘The Bible in Transmission’, Spring 2015 edition on ‘Migration’). Thus at a high point in Israel’s history - the abundant and joyful offering of gifts for building the temple - David’s prayer comes not from prosperous stability, but from the national memory of rootlessness and provisionality: “For we are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no hope” (1 Chron 29:15). When the Jamaican group, The Melodians rastafarianised Psalm 137 to record ‘Rivers of Babylon (1970) – ‘How can we sing King Alpha’s [sic, not ‘the Lord’s’] song in a strange land” - they were portraying both a historic memory of captivity and enslavement, but also a more universal experience of dislocation.
The experience of being foreigners and migrants, then, for Israel was not forgotten but lay alongside that of settlement and stability, comfort and prosperity. The ideal of a place of material satisfaction, but more profoundly dignity and independence, was expressed under Solomon’s rule in the phrase which appears in1 Kings 4:25, speaking of “Judah and Israel . . all of them under their vines and fig trees.” But this vision of mutuality with sufficiency was undermined by growing injustice, and appropriation of land and wealth by a few, as Jeremiah saw. The result was God’s punishment in the form of exile to Babylon, disgrace, hopelessness. Nonetheless in face of the renewed but now punitive experience of rootlessness that exile brought, Jeremiah once more swam against the current and argued for the compensatory, balancing theme of rootedness. Whilst his contemporary Ezekiel saw only anomie and alienation, Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles urges them to reinstitute domesticity: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. . . Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jm 29:5-7). Casey Strine has suggested that markedly different contexts account for the different responses of Ezekiel and Jeremiah: “Ezekiel depicts a group living in an ancient setting similar to a modern refugee camp, where immigrants are isolated from the host population and limited in their ability to interact with and get to know foreigners. This is sharply different from the cosmopolitan setting of the immigrants living in Babylon that are described in Jeremiah”. (In ‘More than Neighbours? The Old Testament as a resource for thinking about migration”, in ‘The Bible in Transmission’ Spring 2015 on ‘Migration’). Jeremiah’s constructive, confident response to living in a strange, new land has spoken repeatedly to diasporic Christians.
Beyond exile then, the prophets looked for divine implementation of this stable, dignified, ‘self-sufficiency in community’ ideal, that lay at the heart of the Old Testament vision of shalom. With the return from exile came the will to restore a pattern of settled life and worship: “For God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah; and his servants shall live there and possess it” (Psalm 69:35).
The interplay of home and wandering is seen in the life of Jesus. He grew up in a stable home, with parents and siblings. He lived in a settled community, took part in local wedding celebrations, worked for many years in a trade – lived, as it were under his own vine and fig tree. Yet from the start there are pointers to disruption and exclusion, starkly with the flight into Egypt from Herod’s murderous intentions; or later the near-total dislocation from his family as they are replaced by the disciples (Matt 12:46-50). ‘The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Matt 8:20) indicates how completely his life had become that of a wanderer.
The prologue to John’s gospel gives theological grounding to Jesus’ simultaneous ‘insider/outsider’ identity, that resonates with the more usual fully human/fully divine complementarity: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him’’ (John 1:10,11
As with the Old Testament, the experience of being an outsider shaped behavior. Jesus’ life was marked by his delight in eating with those society rejected, in his positive affirmation of women, with his valuing of Gentiles. His example impacted his followers.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews draws together Old Testament experience and New Testament hope. “Off he went, not knowing where he was going” is the description of Abraham in Tom Wright’s translation of Hebrews 11:8. “They (the patriarchs) confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth”; for Christians who also experience dislocation, there is the trust that “here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrew 11:13 and 13:14). For a ‘pilgrim’ his destination is known and secure; for ‘immigrants’ (or perhaps better ‘explorers’) the future is a lot less certain. “Their’s was a journey without maps” said the daughter of one of the original ‘Windrush’ migrants. Not only does this speak for all the successive waves of immigration that have followed, it also speaks in a secondary sense of the whole society which has needed to learn to live with an uncharted future marked by radical ‘super-diversity’.
We are all ‘Diasporic’.
This self-understanding generated by the New Testament links to an important word used to describe the different minority ethnic communities scattered especially around the big cities of the world today – diaspora. It is a New Testament word – both the letters of 1 Peter and James begin with a reference to the recipients as the ‘Dispersion’ (diasporas). Whilst the original meaning was a geographical reference to the Jews who were scattered across the ancient world (so used in John 7:35), in 1 Peter 1:1 it has a double reference – both to his Jewish readers who had literally been ‘dispersed’ from their ancestral homeland, but also to Gentile Christians who even whilst living in the towns of their birth and ancestors had nonetheless, by coming to faith in Christ, become aliens: ‘dispersed’ from their old local identities. “These are people whose commitment to the lordship of Jesus Christ have led to transformed dispositions and behaviours that place them on the margin of respectable society. Their allegiance to Christ had won for them animosity, scorn and vilification. Their lack of acculturation to prevailing social values marked them as misfits worthy of contempt.” (Joel B Green ‘1 Peter: The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary’, Eerdmans 2007, p16).
Significantly diaspora is the word used for the ‘scattering’ or dispersal of all humanity at the Tower of Babel (in the translation of Genesis 11:1-9 into Greek) as God’s response to human hubris. The scattering that in their pride they had intended their building project to avoid (verse 4), becomes the very consequence of the confusion of languages in verse 9. Language forms one of the strongest bonds of ethnic identity, and one of the most intractable divisions of humanity; simultaneously preventing over-arching human power, whilst requiring attentiveness to each other’s culture in order to co-operate. So Stanley Hauerwas, in his theological commentary on Matthew, writes “In response to humanity’s rebellious attempt to replace their dependence on God by creating their own heaven, in response to the attempt of people to overcome their contingency, God benevolently scattered the people of the world so that they might learn to respect the other and to learn humility” (‘Matthew: SCM Theological Commentary on the Bible’, p26).
Thus when God acts to restore the unity of humanity he does so not by abrogating the linguistic divisions of Babel, but by transcending them at Pentecost, so that diverse languages are retained within the deeper outpouring of the uniting Spirit. Language, then, has the potential to unite through acceptance, not denial, of its diversity. The thesis of the late Lamin Sanneh, of Gambian Muslim background who became a professor at Yale, is that as missionaries affirmed the diversity and particularity of African languages through bible translation and literacy, the consequence was not fragmentation but rather the opposite: giving Africans entry into the universal network of written communication.
The experience of being ‘scattered’ and transient is the lot of all people, never to be fully secure and settled in the worlds we create. The gospel turns the universal reality of being ‘scattered’ away from the curse of being alienated and towards the blessing of finding God in the midst of the flux and uncertainty of life – a blessing where we encounter God’s love precisely by having ‘no confidence in the flesh’, but rather ‘regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord’ (Philippians 3:3, 8).
Consequences for Discipleship Today.
1. Migrants set the pace.
Those Christians, then, who belong in the geographical sense to diasporic communities have a head-start in understanding discipleship by comparison with those Christians who have never known the scattering experience of physical migration. So it is that in “God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World”, the Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge observe the rapid growth of diasporic Christianity in the world’s big cities: ‘If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world’ (p 195). For churches that have over time become very ‘settled’ in their contexts (and the Church of England is an obvious example) this raises the very sharp challenge to work at developing the mindset and spirituality of the ‘scattered’. As often, paradox raises its fascinating but challenging head – we rightly feel a loving identity with the context in which we are settled (see Andrew Rumsey: ‘Parish: an Anglican theology of place’), but simultaneously we are called to be emotional migrants and intellectual travellers.
The sociologist Stuart Hall, initially from the Caribbean, identified the strength and enrichment such experience gives when he spoke of "the experience of being inside and outside, 'the familiar stranger'. We used to call that 'alienation' or deracination. But nowadays it's come to be the archetypal late-modern condition. Increasingly it's what everybody's life is like”. A similar point is made by the late Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks when he portrays the experience in a delightfully elegant phrase: ‘a delicate interplay between our second languages of identity and our first language of common citizenship’ (pp 120,119).] Thus 'diasporic' music - blues, rock, soul, reggae, hip-hop - has become the most vivid expression of international popular culture.
However, it is not just music. In terms of their contribution to business, politics, academia, religion and the arts diasporic communities have punched well above their weight. Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in ‘The Triple Package’ write of those dynamic cultural minorities who ‘occupy a strange position, pulled simultaneously by the demands of their home culture and by the allure of American freedom. Poised on the edge of both worlds, they belong fully to neither. This cultural edge has its own price, exacting its own psychological toll, but it may be one of the most liberating and creatively productive places a person can inhabit’ (p 164). Christian faith enables us to internalize the paradoxical nature of our cultural identities by learning to both value them and sit loose to them
2. Creating stability is a blessing.
In the midst of flux churches that create centres of stability that are open and welcoming to the flow around them but not overwhelmed by it contribute greatly to their communities. Ben Quash in ‘Abiding’ writes with reference to Benedictine communities “I think parishes can be seen as generators of stability, whose purpose and value becomes even more visible when their environments are threatened. . . You cannot give hospitality without stability – without a place from which to offer it. Parishes are uniquely poised to be hospitable to their environments, to tend the public spaces they serve, to ‘curate’ them” (p28,29). Quash goes on to describe the impact on him of a post-university year as parish assistant in a mixed-race area of Johannesburg: “That time in South Africa exposed me to an instability I had never experienced before, but with a strange simultaneity showed me a stability that was new as well” (p 30).
3. Hospitality is key virtue.
Taking the reference to hospitality above, it is a common word in the New Testament (Romans 12:13; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8; Hebrews 13:2; 1 Peter 4:9). In Greek it is ‘philoxenos’, literally ‘love of strangers. Sadly in English we only use the reverse, negative form, ‘zenophobia’. It would be nice if churches could cause the positive word to become part of the English language too, and show a pattern of being ‘zenophiliac’. As regards the Old Testament Stephen Rhodes counts 36 references to treating the immigrant with mercy (p 133). He rightly concludes ‘the most important virtue any church can embody is the virtue of hospitality’ (‘Where the Nations Meet’ p 134). Jonathan Sachs has commented that the Hebrew Bible has 36 references to loving the stranger; only one to loving your neighbor.
4. Learn to live in two worlds.
Paul painfully experienced the tension, as he writes in 2 Cor 6:8-10 of living with “ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet true, as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and not yet killed; as sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” It became standard fare for the church of the early centuries. See also the ‘Letter to Diognetus’ – the Quote of the Week in last week’s blog.
David Goodhart’s book ‘The Road to Somewhere’ characterized post-Brexit Britain as deeply divided by ‘Somewhere’ Brexiteers with a strong loyalty to place, tradition and British identity, and ‘Anywhere’ Remainers who have benefitted from mobility and loose local affiliations. ‘The Church’ (‘anywhere’) ‘of England’ (‘somewhere’) should be rooted in a spirituality and theology which enables us to rejoice in carrying both those identities. Sadly it never appeared to David Goodhart that Christians are designed to be that sort of people. Yet central to our vocation is to be simultaneously Anywhere and Somewhere people. It is an essential and invigorating and potentially dynamic aspect of our discipleship today.
Add Ons
It was good to get several suggestions for useful video links, but do send more, especially the musical or the unusual.
Thank you. Interesting on the amount of hospitality to strangers! Looking forward to more wisdom on living in two worlds as we seek to love God and others well... :D
Thanks so much for reminding us of our migrant roots and identity John, and for calling us to get the magic medicine of philoxenos back on the shelf.