The Regions Beyond: Traveling to Solidarity

I know many of you have travel plans now, graduates. Let me however think with you about a different kind of journey. The Berkeley Divinity School motto is usually translated as "into the regions beyond," but the classicists among you will know that there's nothing about "regions" in those five Latin words in illa quae ultra sunt; The original Greek of 2 Corinthians 10:16 from which it derives likewise refers just to something, or things, "beyond."

In context, Paul is here grumbling, in a sort of passive aggressive apostolic way, about a group of competing leaders who had gained sway over the Corinthian Church. It is part of a passage that uses images of space and place metaphorically as well as literally "we will not boast beyond limits but will keep within the field that God has assigned to us, to reach out even as far as you. For we were not overstepping our limits when we reached you; we were the first to come all the way to you with the good news of Christ." Those whom he criticizes were "taking up space" beyond their proper due as it were - and bad-mouthing him, he would not have had to waste time writing this letter, but could already have been off and away to that unspecified "beyond" - the next thing or place, but a literal place as most interpret it; for "the things beyond" is generally understood to mean an intended missionary journey to Spain, a plan to which Paul refers explicitly in Romans 15.

The question you graduates are asking in one form or another is what are now the regions beyond, the new spaces and places for ministry to which you are bring called and commissioned by completing your studies here and at YDS, and in many cases by ordination as well? Let us then consider some other maps.

In the mission field to which you are called, religion in general and Christianity in particular have been allocated an "area of influence," a space or region for free action, by the social and economic forces of the modern West, beyond which we are not supposed to travel. This narrow strip of land is often called spirituality. So long as we remain in that region of interiority, behind the walls built by secular liberal capitalism and stick to the task of offering "spiritual care," religious institutions can walk peaceably. This at least is a long standing territorial compact.

It may seem however as though this is changing; white Christian nationalism may seem to be breaking this mold somewhat, with its unapologetic attempts to claim a sort of nominally Christian hegemony within the USA at least, the whole map in one sense. Without being able to do justice to that phenomenon here, let me suggest that this is not really as religiously ambitious as it claims, posturing aside: that in this project any genuinely transcendent let alone Christian vision has been erased and what we see proclaimed is a religious branding for an agenda quite alien to the Gospel. Being nationalist and racist but not Christian, white Christian nationalism is in fact a different way of keeping faith itself off the map. 

So in both cases I suggest we find what the Gospel claims - the truth of human existence as social beings enlivened by divine love - constrained by the contemporary insistence that we are just individuals, who should stick to interiority, eternity, and consumption. 

What would a truer map look like? A genuinely Christian vision of human existence, individually and socially cannot accept the territorial constraints either of "the spiritual," or of Christian nationalism, because the Gospel makes claims and promises which have to do with the whole of human existence. 

Just as confrontingly for a culture that wants to refuse the Gospel but also to refuse its own social existence and mutual responsibility, the Gospel involves a claim shared with people and traditions of many places and times, that our truest selves, our real being, does not bubble up from within us as individuals but is something we can only be together. It involves solidarity.

Rowan Williams, giving the Taylor Lectures from this very pulpit two years ago, called this work of solidarity "the shared labor of constructing a sustainable, equitable communal order in which each agent has a uniquely formative contribution to the agency and liberty of every other."

In the letter to the Ephesians, from which we heard this evening, we get another Pauline map, that conjures an image of solidarity, specifically between Jew and gentile - "For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." We take this to be more than a reflection on the particular first-century Christian challenge of relations between Jewish and gentile believers, but a kind of universal possibility. And the image is one not just of overcoming barriers but of overcoming distance, of Jesus' own travel into our midst in solidarity: "So," Ephesians reads, "he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father."

This is not merely an elaborate metaphor to exhort the reader to inclusion and justice because they are good; it is a sort of map of the reign of God as it has been made in Christ. He is our peace, not just "peaceable" or even "peacemaking" but peace. The enterprise of reconciliation is possible not because it would be a good idea but because it has been done. 

The Christian nationalist version of the Ephesian image of course has the new denizens of this Christian empire swiftly gathering the rubble from the dividing wall to rebuild a rampart around themselves over against some new excluded entity, religious, ethnic or ideological. And their version of the 2 Corinthians motto is the crusader, a vision of conquest and domination surging out from the bastion to conquer.

The liberal or progressive equivalent, however, may not be so much better than we are tempted to think. For we also see versions of Christian faith in which the banner of inclusion flies over walls which have again been rebuilt from the debris of mutual alienation, and whose inhabitants consider the existence of a sufficiently diverse community within the wall a satisfactory result - with a few spare stones to cast at the less enlightened.

Even as we attend carefully to the particularity of how history has shaped relations of power and exclusion, and seek to act with that in mind, the Ephesians map suggests the characteristic territoriality of the Christian gospel, its practice of space and place, must be universal. What we are called to even via redress and reparation, even via the acknowledgement of the particularity of oppression, must ultimately be solidarity. As Williams reminded us, solidarity "is a 'condition' as well as an imperative." 

Communities of faith must reflect the universal call of Jesus not just by internal diversity but by external porousness and as places where the false forms of alienation foisted on us by a divided and dividing regime are rejected; where the presence of those far off and near is manifest.

So what is the beyond? What map will you follow, how to get to the place we are called?

Here's the thing: Paul doesn't seem to have made it to Spain. At least there is no evidence to suggest that getting "to the regions beyond," in the sense he seems to have meant it, was more than an unfulfilled ambition. Also somewhat murky is what did actually happen to Paul, although I think more scholars would credit the tradition of his death in Rome than the idea he ever made it to the West.

Paul the Martyr then is more likely a better guide to the geography of Christian mission than Paul the thwarted missionary - and perhaps in the end this made sense to him, who wanted to know nothing among the Corinthians except Christ crucified. 

The map of the reign of God cannot be defined by territory, because the moment we claim territory, it is no longer the reign of God. Yet the map of the reign of God encompasses all territory, since it is not merely one thing, a sphere of influence, neither just spirituality nor a national ideology, but the truth of our existence. 

So as to travel plans and "the regions beyond," you need not fear that the fulfillment of your calling depends on getting to the precise place you thought you should have. Your journey is simply beyond the narrow confines of whatever ways faith is misshapen to suit idols of narcissism, wealth and power, remembering Jesus' travel into our midst to proclaim of peace both to those far off and those who are near.