The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.” Genesis 12:1
“The call to community as we hear it from our Lord is the call to move away from the ordinary and proper places. Leave your father and mother. Let the dead bury their dead. Keep your hand on the plow and not look back. Sell what you own, give the money to the poor, and come follow me (Luke 14:26; 9:60, 62; 18:22). The Gospels confront us with this persistent voice inviting us to move from where it is comfortable, from where we want to stay, from where we feel at home.
Why is this so central? It is central because in voluntary displacement, we cast off the illusion of “having it together” and thus begin to experience our true condition, which is that we, like everyone else, are pilgrims on the way, sinners in need of grace. Through voluntary displacement, we counteract the tendency to become settled in a false comfort and to forget the fundamentally unsettled position that we share with all people. Voluntary displacement leads us to the existential recognition of our inner brokenness and thus brings us to a deeper solidarity with the brokenness of our fellow human beings.
Community, as the place of compassion, therefore, always requires displacement. The Greek word for church, ekklesia – from ek = out, and kaleo – call – indicates that as a Christian community we are people who together are called out of our familiar places to unknown territories, out of our ordinary and proper places to the places where people hurt and where we can experience with them our common human brokenness and our common need for healing.”
Henri Nouwen in Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Image, 1996) 61-62.
Hope you like the new header photo. I like to take a 3 mile walk with Grace St. Catherine (our German Shorthaired Pointer) and dawn in the summer. I felt God’s presence with me when I saw the sunrise through this tree.
If we think back to God’s call to Abraham it was to leave his comfort zone and go to a place that God would show him. That’s the call to each of us as followers of Jesus. To experience real community we must choose voluntary displacement.
I’m writing a devotional book with a friend, Travis Shelton, entitled Community. As I explored this idea in Nouwen’s thinking this morning, I am struck by the way it leads to generous living. We abandon the cultural trappings and follow Jesus.
He directs us to go, sell, and give when the world tells us to stop, buy, and keep. He shows us that only in selling and giving do we actually get what we are looking for: life a hundred times better than we can make it on our own.
So, on this Lord’s day, ask God what voluntary displacement looks like for you. What ordinary and proper places do you need to leave in order to experience community and grasp generous living with fellow humans?