The Cause. The Faces. The Christ.

The Cause


We have all seen the commercials. They usually begin with the image of some sad, dark, child's face from a faraway place, as the anouncer tells us about how hungry, or scared, or thirsty that face is. The announcer, once having gripped our emotions, tells us that we can can bring hope that face with just less then two dollars a day, and then the screen is flooded with smiles and school uniforms all brought together by a pleasant melody and finally ended by the 1-800 number. Before you know it, 90 seconds have gone by and our show is back on, as we anxiously await to find out who stabbed the truck driver and who at CSI will figure it out right in the nick of time with that one hair. Maybe we are just waiting to see if maybe this episode Tom Welling will finally put on the red and blue tights, as we try to imagine how on earth he is going to pull off that cape? In any case, that one sad, dark face, will soon be forgotten, and thank heavens, I was almost feeling guilty enough to call that 1-800 number. Thank god for "The Office", and for Dwight.

The above has been my experience in my adult years. My awarness of the pain and destitution of mankind has been limited to pictures, and college student lead fundraisers. Faces have been made into causes, and causes into politics, and politics into points of tension, and points of tension into argument, argument into resentment, resentment to bitteness, and bitterness into anger, apathy, and segregation. Meanwhile, I assume that the face is still somewhere out there, and perhapse that face will grow up to be another human being trapped in the global cycle of corruption and greed, ending in another grave that will soon be forgotten. But, as I said, all this has only been my experience in my adult years. My childhood yeilds different music.


The Faces


I grew up in one of those far off destituted places. I grew up as a missionary kid in Honduras starting when I was six. In my childhood things were very different, because I grew up with those faces, not just that I grew up looking at those faces in person. I mean I actually grew up with those faces. I played in the backyard with those faces, I ate lunch with those faces while bargaining for the last tortilla, I got into fights with those faces, I picked mangos with those faces and I watched those faces grow up as I did with every birthday. I could tell you stories about those faces when they were in 3rd and 4th grade, and I could tell you what kind of homework they did, and what their teachers were like. I could tell you what their parents were like and the fights that they had with their little brothers and what girls they liked. I could show you the card board shack that they used to live in, and I could tell you who's uncle was stabbed to death in his bed just three shacks down. And I could tell you that I never saw a 1-800 number. And you know what else I could tell you?

I could tell you their names. Not just some name that came in a brochure that you put on your fridge, but the names that I learned to pronounce and spell. The names I used to call out while playing soccer, the names I used to pick for my team or the names that used to pick me for their team. Oh yes, I could tell you their names. The names that grew up to be gunned down in the street, the names that went on to be pilots, the names that when on to be civil engineers, or the names that went on to be masons. I could also tell you the names of good friends that I havent seen in years, and that I have learned not to miss and learned to forget.

You see, I could not tell you of a cause or mission. But I could tell you of faces, of people and of names. In my childhood, it was not about world hunger, or world peace, or social justice. It was about Joni, and Luis, and Alfredo, and Javier, and Sandra, and Carlitos, and Dona Rosaria. They were not in need of another ideology, another group of aid workers to come and build a well, deep down they needed more. They needed to believe that they were valuable, that they were truly human just like the Americans, that the ladder of economic segregation that weighed upon them all their lives, meant nothing. They needed food and water and medicine, but they also needed to be real, to be more than an example of poverty and objects of self rightious charity. They desperatly hungered after dignity and identity, individuality and security.

They were not causes. They were and are, mothers and fathers, brothers and friends, faces and names. They had and have ambitions and dreams, goals and plans, hopes and fears. They were not and are not objects to be used so that we may prove our goodness or godliness, or sources of reliefe for our guilt on acount of our selfish lives, and they are not stones tablets for ambitious men and women to write a legacy upon. They are people.

Dont you see that what they hunger for the most we cannot give in the form of a cause. Because we will ever be the almighty giver and they will be the poor helpless receiver of charity. No one wants to be constantly looking upwards for a morsel that will swell the head of the hand that gives it, and degrade the heart of the one who recieves. I do not belittle the aid and need of aid that is spread across this world, but no one like to feel like a charity case. Not for a moment do I think or say, or insinuate that charity is needed any less. I simply make the statment that no one wants to feel small, helpless and dependant on  the generosity of another. No one wants to be the object of a cause. Where is the dignity in the begging animal? Where is the dignity in the begging mother? Where is the dignity in reducing faces to statistics and causes?


The Christ


This is where the cause and the Christ come face to face. The Christ did not come to die for the salvation of mankind, He came to die for me. Christ came that I might know Him, that I might know God and that all mankind might be the Bride of the Son. We find that in the Bible the core of our faith is displayed in personal terms. We are adopted as sons and daughters of the Father, we are co-heirs and with Christ and loved by Him beyond all measure and we believe in Him not just His way ("I know whom I have believed"). Even humanity as a collective, or the church as a community is not put in organizational terms but in personal terms. The Church is the Bride of Christ, the beloved. We are not the kingdom of God, but the Kingdom of God is in us. Even truth is elevated to personhood. Christ is the truth and gives himself to us, for even the mysterious power and life of is raised to a relational frame, in that the spirit is also a person and He ministers and lives in us as the life of Christ in us. But it does not end there.

Even the ultimate act of God in Christ for the salvation of the world and the full revelation of all wisdom and insight, is not in some hidden principle or path, but in the cross. Where the person of Christ, the very infinate God, was violated and put to death by human hands. The cross is what it is not becuase it is a symbolic image of what love is, but because if the cross is essentially a relational thing. The cross is what is because of Christ's relationship to the father, Christs relationship to us, and the relatioship that we might have through the father through Christ.

Because we were in a relationship of emnity to the Father because of our sins, Jessus took on human form so that He might fully enter into a relationship not just with our humanity, but with each and every human, and because Christ entered into that position, we were able to lay our hands on the intangible God and crucify Him. Christ did this because He loves us and wanted us to know Him and have a relationship with the father like He Himself did. Because the Son had such a relatioship with the Father, even in Christ humanity, Christ could bear the wrath of the Father for us, and did so because even in the Father's wrath against our sin He still loved us, and thus the Father accepted the Son as the subsitute for humanity. Because of all this, the Father now draws us near in His eternal longing for us, as for the Son, and now we can have a relationship with the Father through our relationship to Christ.

It is all on personal terms, and not in a macrocosm of a cause. You see this is the Gospel that God did not reach down to satiate Himself and His need to be charitable, and He did not reduce humanity to a cause and degrade our dignity by reducing us to objects of charity that would be forever lower and helpless and seprerate. No, God stepped into our place and took on our lowliness that we might take on the inheritence of His Son. He exchanged places with us, not that we might become God, but that we would be given the dignity of God becoming man.

This is where the Gospel truly speaks to social justice, by completely obliterating the concpet. We are all the poor and destituted in God's eyes. All people are made equal and brought down to a common community in that all people are sinners and all people and lost and poor, and yet all peoples are elevated to dignity because Christ died for them all and took on their common humanity. Then even a greater wonder is made clear. Not only did God restore dignity by taking on their common humanity, but then went on to do more than just make humanity an object of His charity and reduce us to wants and needs alone. He actually looked upon us and offered to change places with us, that He would take on our poverty so that we could take on His inheritence.

Let me illustrate this so that we may see it clearly. My parents as they did their mission work did one thing that changed the dynamic of the mission. They did one thing that restored dignity and filled others with value. They lived in the slum among the poor. We did not live in the wort community, but we lived as a american missionaries in a place and in a home that was vastly inferior to many other missionaries we knew. We lived with the people and ate the food they ate. We had them in our living room watching movies and playing sega. We spent time in their homes and talked about the soccer games and the recent election. My parents stepped down into their world not just for working, but for living. We didnt live in everyway like they did, but we did in many ways, and where their were differences, the poor were always welcome to join us. Not only did my parents build wells and sponsor children and make meals, they also embraced and related to those faces as friends and neighbors. In some way, my parents took their place so that those faces might be lifted up and encouraged, loved and sustained. My family stepped into their world so that world could know something different, and for five years we stayed in that world.

My parents did not do this because of some cause, and the people we helped we never a cause to my father or mother. There was no mission to change the world. No social action to improve standards of life. There was my family dusty, sweating, and hot, and they did this becuase they had known the Christ who stepped into their world and did the same for them. This is what impelled my parents to sacrifice their lives, because Christ sacrificed His life for them.

This stepping down, this exchange of places, is how the gospel restores dignity to the poor and the destitute. Christ does not become the almighty non-profit foundation rallying social justice. Christ offers the destitute Himself and offers His life in exchange for thiers. He offers to lift them up, even as Christ is brought down.

This exchange is made known in the cross, and if the cross is not or focus even in social just or social action, then we are failing. For the hungry, Jesus offers His flesh, for the thirsty He offers springs of living water that flow from himself. If we offer bread yet do not offer Christ, if we offer medicine and yet we do not offer the great physician, if we offer a better life and yet we do not offer the way the truth and the life, we have merely postponed the grave, and not truly offered life. If we are impelled by the cause and not the Christ, if we long for change and solutions, and not long for Jesus for His own sake and offer Jesus for His ownsake, then we reduce those faces to objects or to needs and wants. We strip them of their ultimate dignity and humanity, because they are not just needs and wants and objects of charity, they are persons who were made by and made for Jesus and are loved by Him. Ignore this part of the mission and you ignore their very personhood, their very value and their very life.