Cynicism and Hope

“Voluntary poverty is not meant to be painless.”

This observation was recounted on Facebook recently by a friend of mine who lives very simply as a member of an intentional community. He reflected:

Disempowerment is part of the Christian call. Do we feel it? If we don’t at least sometimes, I wonder how authentically we’re living what we preach?

Here was a surprising response:

It is as if you are speaking an alternative English. I thought that God did not add pain (sorrow) to his blessings. If one deliberately chooses a painful life is he following God’s will?

This response caught my eye because in evangelical churches I often felt like I was speaking an alternative English with regard to our life as Christ-followers. I would speak in terms that made scriptural sense to me, and it seemed that there was no resonance, as though I were speaking into a void. But how could this be if we are all reading the same scriptures?

I recently encountered a phrase that I think explains much of this problem: “rhetorical realm.” It is possible to live next door to someone yet reside in an entirely different rhetorical realm: all of the verbal input that comes to me via preachers, radio, television, the Internet, books, and friends may have no commonality whatsoever with what comes to my Christian neighbor.

But we share scripture in common. Shouldn’t that be one place where our rhetorical realms overlap?

In certain particulars, yes. But by and large our rhetorical realms are a strong magnet that draws in the words of scripture and envelops them, making their meaning to us unintelligible to our neighbors who reside in another rhetorical realm.

Take this Beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

As a child of a prosperous family in the prosperous United States, I had always understood that to mean that our mourning would be relieved by God’s comfort. God’s comfort would come and we would no longer mourn.

One evening shortly after the start of the Iraq war, I was sitting in the car waiting for my tears to stop so I could go into a cafe and get some work done. I wondered how I would bear my grief that my country was visiting such destruction on children, women, and men across the ocean. Would the grief ever leave me?

Then the words came to me: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” and I realized that I’d always misunderstood this Beatitude.

It’s not that God’s comfort will dismiss our mourning. No, as the circumstances that we mourn continue, so does our mourning, and into this mourning, God’s comfort comes. The mourning continues, and it is blessed.

I could not have perceived this meaning if I had continued to reside in the Christian triumphalist, American exceptionalist rhetorical realm that tempts so many of us, then traps us with its insistence that it is the only realm where historical and Christian truth prevails.

Today a man named James who has been worshiping with our Mennonite congregation for a few months said that he has noticed that almost every week there is talk about loving our enemies. He said that embrace of this truth makes ours a very unusual congregation and one he is very glad to have found.

Loving enemies. Esteeming others more highly than ourselves. Giving our surplus to those who have need. Forgiving many times. Practicing hospitality. Rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn. These are the words, the ideas, the rhetoric that define our congregational realm. Sometimes it’s painful here. We don’t always triumph. But our mourning is blessed, and God’s comfort is near.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.