EPILOGUE
HOW TO LIVE IN EMPIRE

I REMEMBER RECENTLY LEARNING about the Beguines, thirteenth-century female Christian mystics who started their own religious order after being denied access to worship God anywhere else. They were holy fools who were committed to paying attention in a society obsessed with hierarchy and economy. Writer Jesse van Eerdman says that these women were like newborn puppies with their eyes licked open by God.1 What a glorious thought: God is the one who opens us up to the blurry world with maternal devotion and a desire to see us truly, fully alive. These women looked very hard at the hand God had given them—a world full of suffering and crusades and wars, a world where, as single or widowed women, they were not valued in their society—and they found a good king and a good kingdom, one defined by love and service; God was present everywhere they looked.

I am less a holy fool and more of an angst-ridden harbinger of doom, but I see the roots of love beginning to bloom in some rather strange places in my life. Waking up to the world has not felt like my eyes have been licked open so much as I have been forced to face realities I would rather pretend don’t exist: injustice and inequality and unrighteousness at every turn. But as I cultivate my eyes to see the bad, I also work toward that discipline of delight, of paying attention to the scent of shalom when I experience it. Recently I realized one of my happiest moments is when I am in our local elementary school cafeteria, the smell of broccoli lingering in my nose. When there are women everywhere scattered like seeds along the long tables for another Friday English class. It’s as orderly as a garden overgrown in late summer—people huddled in clusters of threes and fours, some people tutoring while other people practice.

I’m the happiest seeing the connections being made all around me. People getting what they need, people helping each other in mutual ways: “Here’s the best halal meat market.” “Here is how to find a good interpreter.” “Here is how I talked to my landlord about my problem.” I stand in the corner of the cafeteria, usually double-checking to make sure I’ve marked everyone present, eyeballing to make sure the tutors don’t need more worksheets, figuring out whether now is a good time to make coffee and then serving it to everyone. Everything is slightly chaotic, but there are so many smiles that I stand in the corner, grinning like an idiot, a lightness on my shoulders as we slip into a place of blessing that transcends any ethic of hierarchy—where all, instead of a few, are seen as teachers.

My joy comes from a desire that is not born in me but comes from the Creator God—the desire to see children, women, and men be known as beloved. The community English class every Friday in our elementary school cafeteria smells of belovedness as much as of vegetables and pizza sauce, because it’s a space designed for everyone to flourish, not just a few. Spaces like these are increasingly rare in a capitalized, privatized society, which is why it sticks out when I see it. It feels like a shelter from the outside storm; it feels like a place where together we can start to build our own sort of society, to piece together a nest built out of mutuality, stories, laughter, and sorrow. A place to learn to blink our eyes, to see the image of God sitting right next to us in disguises that might continue to surprise us.

I started this book by looking at the way Jesus announced his ministry: he was bringing good news to the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. I wanted to examine the opposite values—affluence, autonomy, safety, and power—and to pay attention to how strong they are in my life and in the larger narrative of the American experiment.

I purposefully left off a portion of that announcement in Luke 4, just as Jesus did in that synagogue so many years ago. His original audience must have been familiar with Isaiah, and they would have eagerly been waiting for the conclusion to that grand list of proclamations toward the poor and disposed—In Isaiah 61 it says, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” God was on the side of Israel, after all, in the face of large and terrible empires like Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and then Rome, and vengeance was a divinely ordained right of the oppressed. But Jesus leaves them hanging; he leaves them without that last line. Jesus leaves out the part about vengeance, and for a moment the crowd is still with him even as he sits down with a flourish and says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In fact, they “all spoke well of him, and marveled.”

But in the space of a few verses, everything changes. Jesus goes on to give two examples of people in the Hebrew Scriptures who God blessed and worked through—the widow of Zarephath, and Naaman the Syrian. Jesus points out that there must have been other widows in need of sustenance, but God chose to provide for a faithful Gentile. There were many people with leprosy who longed to be healed, he says, but God chose a Gentile again—and a powerful one who seems to subvert the very values that Jesus has just said are high on his priority list. In a second the mood changes and the crowd rushes to murder Jesus by driving him out of the temple and attempting to throw him off a cliff. It’s the first attempt on Jesus’ life, one that we don’t talk about as much. It is a foreshadowing of the crucifixion.

What made the crowd so angry? It’s the most challenging, radical message of all: God is indeed rescuing, loving, and moving in the very communities that we would most like to exclude from the good news. Jesus wasn’t attacked for speaking the truth about a God who demands sacrifice and obedience, who is only working out God’s plan through a specific, chosen people. The crowd rushed and tried to kill Jesus for saying the opposite, for leaving out the bits about judgment against perceived enemies and for saying the kingdom would come from those we were taught to hate and despise. That God was not just on the side of the chosen few but had swung wide the gates of love.

Jesus and his announcement of what he came to do in the world enraged those who had been taught they were the chosen people. If we are not careful, our own hearts can be twisted to feel the same anger and fear as we lose our spot as the pinnacle of God’s creation in our own minds or our societies. I see parallels of this in my own story: as a missionary in training, as a White evangelical Christian, as a teacher, I am forever grappling with the legacy of rightness, of supremacy, of placing myself at the center of Jesus’ work in the world when I was always supposed to be somewhere on the edges. I am constantly challenged by where I have seen Jesus and where I have experienced shalom. And I know I am not alone. Jesus attracted all kinds of people. He was, and remains, good news even for those who have benefited from the systems of the world—if only we have the eyes to see it.

The first person who astonished Jesus in the book of Luke was in fact a higher-up in the Roman government, part of the empire that was oppressing the people of God. A few chapters after his pronouncement Jesus was asked by a centurion—a man in charge of hundreds of soldiers—to heal his very sick servant via messengers. When Jesus is on his way the centurion sends a curious message:

Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, “Go,” and he goes, and to another, “Come,” and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this,” and the slave does it.

Luke then tells us that Jesus was amazed at the centurion, and turning to the crowd that followed him he said, “‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.’ And when those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health” (Luke 7:1-10).

The centurion didn’t fit any of the categories in Luke 4. He wasn’t the target audience for Jesus’ ministry. So how did he recognize and believe who Jesus was and what Jesus came to do more than anyone else at this point in the Gospels? I think the key is his relationship with his servant, the one he asks Jesus to heal. I think the centurion was transformed not just by his proximity to his slave but by the experience of entering into his suffering. He was able to see Jesus for who he was because he was in relationship with someone who desperately needed good news, who needed shalom. This ultimately is what allowed him to experience the liberating presence of Jesus.

People love to say that proximity will fix everything. All we have to do is live next door to each other, they say, and our problems will melt away as we gather together for block parties or dinners over long tables. But this isn’t true. My own neighborhood is a perfect example of this, as are so many of our cities. Living side by side with one another can even make a situation worse: when the oppressed and oppressor are locked in a dance to keep one subservient and the other in power, anger and violence (both physical and ideological) are inevitable. Proximity plus toxic narratives and unequal power lead to more oppression.

This is where the Christian story transcends the easy platitudes of neoliberalism or cultural relativism. It reminds us that something else is needed beyond thoughts and prayers or good intentions. Moving into underresourced neighborhoods or sending our kids to the same schools or eating at the same table with people who have experienced marginalization isn’t enough (although those can be good first steps). Proximity only changes us if we enter into other peoples’ suffering. Only when we allow ourselves to experience the bad news of their world, without rushing to explain it away. Only when we take on the suffering of other people to the point that we will do whatever we can to make it right, even if it includes losing some of our own money, rights, safety, and power.

Sometimes this upside-down world of the kingdom of God looks like dismantling systems, creatively subverting them, or simply protesting them with whatever resources available to us. Sometimes it looks like moving somewhere else, voluntarily giving up positions of power, or learning to check the impulse to hoard resources for ourselves or our families. And sometimes it looks like leaning into the simple pleasures of a life lived in interconnectedness, imitating the resilient joy of our neighbors who have experienced exile.

I’m a little bit obsessed with an idea coined by theologian Kelley Nikondeha—what she calls “relational reparations.” The kingdom of God, Nikondeha says, comes when the people of God give back to those the empire has stolen from. The hallmark of stories of relational reparations is its wonderful creativity—seen throughout Scriptures (the story of Bithiah and Miriam, of the centurion soldier, of Zacchaeus) and in our own world as well. This is where the Christian witness will continue on, long after empires or political and economic power shifts. It will be in the stories of people coming together to follow Jesus, the privileged giving up what they have to enter into real relationship with their new family, their brothers and sisters in Christ.

A friend told me a story about a man in her mission organization. This man—let’s call him Carl—lived and worked in a low-income community that was mostly Spanish speaking. People were often sent to court for minor infractions like running a red light, and many of them faced steep fines and even jail time. Carl decided that he was going to start showing up with his friends when they were called to court. A tall White man, he would dress in a suit and bring a briefcase with him. He would say nothing at all; just his presence was enough for his friends’ cases to be dropped, dismissed, or the fines lowered. Carl knew he couldn’t overturn the entire criminal justice system—he couldn’t change how the system heavily policed the poor and discriminated against Black and Brown youth—all on his own. So he decided to work the system in his own way. Whenever he and his friends would leave court, Carl would open his briefcase and reveal what was inside: a bag of Doritos, which they would eat with relish.

I know people who buy duplexes in poor neighborhoods. They live in one half of the duplex with their family and rent the other at rates well below the market. I know other people who routinely give up speaking gigs to people who aren’t usually given a platform in such places—primarily women and people of color. I know other people who spend a year reading only books by people of color and who find in the process that it’s a delight to be immersed in new worlds of thought and scholarship. I know people who commit to listening and learning from theologies and voices they don’t always agree with, committing themselves to the discipline of being quiet and listening to another perspective. All of these people find they are changing, shifting, as their worlds expand outward. It looks a lot like the joy of welcoming a new baby into the family—the gift of the unexpected, the birth of new possibilities.

There’s the librarian who sings the name of each child at the weekly story time, a silly little song that repeats the name of the child over and over again and makes the children all beam with happiness. He tells me he sings this song not just as a way to learn their names but as a way to combat the negativity they might hear in their own life. He tells me studies show that saying a child’s name in a positive tone eight times a day can help undo the damage of only hearing their name when they’re in trouble for something. I think about this, about a man in a small library’s multipurpose room, singing and clapping and saying each child’s name with love and joy, his own little ministry of naming.

I know people who are creative in the ways they love the planet, finding great joy in reusing, repurposing, and doing without. They do this with love, not from a sense of deprivation or duty—like my friend Leah, who came to me breathless with excitement one day because she had discovered how to cook a pot of beans while using the lowest amount of energy. “You just take a pot full of beans and water, put a lid on it, boil on the stove for ten minutes, then wrap the pot with a bunch of blankets and stick it in a suitcase for twelve hours—then viola! You have a perfect pot of beans!” Would I ever be so pleased about something as simple (or not so simple) as figuring out how to conserve energy for fun?

I have friends who honor a creative God by using their own imaginative energies to make paintings, quilts, books, podcasts, songs, stamps—anything that brings beauty to the world, anything that is worth creating in a world obsessed with consumption. Friends who cook the meals their mothers made and friends who try new and exotic (to them) spices and tastes—all of them modeling what it means to feast in the house of the Lord. People who make casseroles for single mothers struggling to keep up. Businesswomen (like my sister Lindsay) who routinely donate their time and energies to help underresourced communities access information that will help their livelihoods. People like my other sister, Candyce, who throw themselves into learning little-known languages, all the better to make certain people feel slightly more at home in the world.

I have friends who always have somebody living with them like it’s no big deal. Friends who feel responsibility for their neighbors, even if they just met them on the side of the road. Friends who turn a chance encounter into a lifelong friendship. Friends who reject the isolation and autonomy of the surrounding culture and find creative ways to cram more people, more life, and more love into their spaces. Friends who coax gardens out of places that used to be deserts and who let their plants go to seed to feed the birds and the bees, looking for the kingdom to come even in the smallest of ways.

Walter Brueggemann writes that “poets have no advice to give people. They only want people to see differently, to re-vision life. They are not coercive. They only try to stimulate, hint, give nuance, not more. They cannot do more, because they are making available a world that does not yet exist beyond their imagination.”2 My heart leaps within me when I read this. In the end I want to be a poet more than I want to be a prophet: someone who pays attention and sees the world and yet has the imagination and audacity to envision a different future.

A few years ago I got a tattoo on my arm. It’s of a tree, its branches spread out, a few birds in its branches. At the base of the trunk is a tiny seed. It’s a mustard seed, the symbol of faith in Jesus’ parable of a mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32). The mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, but it grows up to be a tall tree, where the birds of the air can make their home.

Once we get a taste of the goodness of Jesus, we won’t ever want to go back to the old dreams, the ones that didn’t have space for all the birds of the air to make their home. This new dream starts with a seed, but it ends with a tree of life, with room for all the birds of the air to make their nests. I tattooed this parable on my body because I know how easy it is to give in to the values of my culture. It reminds me to keep listening, keep lamenting, keep pointing my eyes toward the edges. When I see peace and joy and flourishing for my neighbors who have suffered so much, then I experience it myself. I hold this dream close to my heart, as tiny as the smallest seed.

When I walk around my neighborhood, I see the moss and the litter, I see the school full of joy and economic neglect, and I see neighbors forging a way forward in the shadow of loss and lack of power and dependence on each other. I see the kingdom of God coming up through the cracks in the neighborhoods many of us were taught to ignore and in the voices of those who have long been pushed to the margins. I see a tree growing strong and safe and big enough for us all to find shelter and an imagination forming that’s not dependent on old ways of thinking about economics, privacy, safety, individualism, or power. I see a large tree growing ever taller; I see myself caught safely in its branches.

In the end we will not go back to a garden, a solitary experience with God. Instead, the kingdom coming will look like a new city, full to bursting with people—just like the apartments here at the edge of our city. For now I am like a bird myself, a magpie for the Lord seeking out the small seeds of shalom being planted here and now, eager for the day when they will burst forth. One day I will find my shelter, my true home with all the other beloved birds of the air.