keeping the questions alive

over the past several weeks i have been questioning my previous assumptions about my relationships with people who are not following Christ. last week i had a conversation with my co-worker Krista, who is more interested in reading tea leaves (literally) than the gospels, about my internal resistance to particularistic (i.e., through Jesus only) salvation.

i told krista that on the one hand, when Christ says that "no one comes to the father except by him," i want to simply take him at his word. the road is indeed narrow, i reason, so i should set my dissonance with particularism aside. yet, on the other hand, when i hear these same words i cannot help but make qualifications. surely, when Jesus wrote these words, he wasn't speaking of melvin, my mentally handicapped friend whose primary source of identification in a nominally christian community is that he is jewish not christian. so, though scripture is silent on the salvation of the handicapped who have not made an objective decision to follow Christ, we can assume that God's grace is sufficient. moreover, although he didn't explicitly confess Christ, surely Christ's reconciliation was incarnate through and eventually extended to ghandi...and on and on i went.

in the midst of the conversation, i began to wonder whether krista and i should be having this conversation at all. after all, as my missions and evangelism teachers at lcc would have reminded me, my job is not to raise further doubts for unbelievers but through intellectual argument, personal testimony and reliable companionship to woo them to Christ. thus, part of me believes that i should be ashamed of myself for creating roadblocks instead of straight roads for the gospel. yet there is another voice within me, which is much quieter than the voices of either tradition or professors past, that reminds me that such vulnerability and personal revelation is essential to proclamation. perhaps, as someone i read this week surmised, my job as a pastor and sojourner is not to provide answers, but to keep the great questions alive.

anyway, that is a ridiculously long introduction to a quotation from henri that i would like to share. in this passage henri speaks of 'reverse mission.' as i read this passage i could not help but think of friends like krista, melvin or mark who do not follow Christ, yet may have a mission that i need to receive and a message that i need to hear.

"...i have become aware that wherever God's Spirit is present there is a reverse mission.
when i marched with thousands of black and white americans from selma to montgomery in the summer of 1965 to support the blacks in their struggle for equal rights, martin luther king already said that the deeper spiritual meaning of the civil rights movement was that the blacks were calling the whites to conversion.
when, years later, i joined l'arche to live and work with mentally handicapped people, i soon learned that my real task would be to let those whom i wanted to help offer me--and through me many others--their unique spiritual gifts.
this 'reversal' is a sign of God's Spirit. the poor have a mission to the rich, the blacks have a mission to the whites, the handicapped have a mission to the 'normal,' the gay people have a mission to the straight,' the dying have a mission to the living. those whom the world has made into victims God has chosen to be bearers of good news.
when Jesus heard that eighteen people had been killed when the tower at siloam had fallen down, he was asked whether these men and women were worse sinners than others. 'they were not. i tell you,' he said. 'no, but unless you repent you will perish as they did.' Jesus shows that the victims become our evangelists, calling us to conversion. that's the reverse mission that keeps surprising us." ~Here and Now: Living in the Spirit, pgs. 58-59.