A Long Overdue Update (Or At Least A Start At One)

Well, I’m actually embarrassed by how long it has been since I’ve written anything. So this week I’m going to play catch-up. Check out what has been happening in our lives at church and what we’ve been learning there in this post, and then check back in mid-week for an update on work. And, if all goes according to plan, we’ll sum up how our ever-growing love for and understanding of the Scriptures dovetails with all of the dust of daily living before you go home for the weekend on Friday.


Jesus knows what he’s doing; the past 8 months at NCF have turned into an unexpected pastoral internship of sorts that has been an incredibly powerful, challenging, and growing experience for me. Since Januaryish, I have met every Tuesday with our two pastors to help plan and evaluate worship services and to discuss and pray through the pain and joy of our congregational life together. I’ve gotten a chance as the interim worship leader to really think deeply about worship that glorifies God in the context of an extremely diverse group of folks, and then to try to actually live a theology of diverse worship in a world of broken mics, busted speakers, cross-cultural conflicts, and busy schedules. And because our pastor has had to go down to S Africa for a couple months to finish some studies, I’ve gotten the incredible experience of preaching to an audience that has seminary professors and Hindus who have never heard the gospel sitting side-by-side.

Both Rebecca and I have also gotten the chance to learn a bit more about what it means to be present to suffering, particularly among the poor. Just this past weekend we spent the night at the hospital with a friend with very painful pneumonia and pelvic inflammatory disease, we encountered a situation of grave injustice committed in a “Christian” workplace against a dear friend of ours, and one of our closest friends from the slums lost her mother.

On the surface, each of these stories could be very similar to the experiences of families in our own home churches. But the reality of life lived on the margins economically creates a deeper, darker reality that our affluent American lifestyle has kept us from seeing. In each of these experiences poverty created a void, a gap, a situation of powerlessness filled by injustice. A friend endures sexual harassment because she’s afraid to lose her job in a culture where masochistic tendencies protect powerful men and leave vulnerable women defenseless. A sick woman enters a hospital environment where staff are stumbling drunk and where apathetic doctors give second-rate service at first-rate prices because those who (like me) don’t understand medicine can’t understand the issues. And a mother of seven, who cannot find regular work and lives in a one room mud hut in the largest slum on the continent, faces a culture which requires her to provide hundreds of dollars worth of meat to greedy relatives who will come to her mother’s funeral in order to feed themselves. The consequence if she does not? As one of our friends told us, “If she does not follow the culture and feed them well, they will call her names for the rest of her life, say she is the one who shamed her mother, and even curse her using witchcraft.” And in this case, which is really the worst of the three, these greedy relatives probably won’t stop eating off our friend’s tab the day they lay her mother in the ground; our friend fears that they will probably steal her farm there as well because she, as a poor woman, cannot defend herself against the land-grabbing of her cousins and uncles.

If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. (Leviticus 25:35-36)

The law of Leviticus, as well as other parts of the Old Testament, reflect the belief that poverty at its worst has the ability to exclude individuals and families from the community. And in a month where we have seen injustice of Old Testament proportions, with the wealthy oppressing the poor, with men taking advantage of the women in their midst, with witchcraft being used to backup greed, we hear these words and realize once again that the Biblical story provides the most powerful exposition of injustice the world has ever known, and at the same time the only hope for a world wracked by injustice: the rule and reign of Yahweh God, who hears the orphan and the widow, who protects the stranger, who brings His wrath in power against all of those who use their position, influence, culture, and even demonic involvement to abuse and oppress any of God’s treasured children.

Because the system is against the poor and the powerless, whether it’s the hospital system which provides decent care for the rich and negligent extortionate care for the poor, or the cultural system which leaves widows vulnerable to land theft and abusive cultural practices even in the midst of their deepest grief, or masochistic systems of authority that protect men who abuse women. The threat of demonic curses, and our friend’s stories of seeing and experiencing the power of witchcraft in the past, has forced us spiritually confused Prebyterians to re-evaluate our laissez-faire stance towards the demonic world and to ask ourselves hard questions. But one thing we do know: Satan works some of his most deadly deeds in the nebulous and difficult-to-define systems of our world; that the truth of sin is that the systems we create are worse than the sum of our sinful parts, that the structures that oppress and push down the poor are exponentially more evil than the evilest individuals, and that their deadly effects are more easily hidden because we cannot point to simple individualistic violations. Who do you blame for cultural evils? Whose fault is it that the courts don’t do justice? Whose fault is it that only the rich hospitals can afford decent doctors? The answer must be all of ours, but in our individualistic American mindset that is an answer we all too often ignore.

But the God of the Bible does not. The God of the Bible provides an answer to the demonic forces that affect our structures. The answer is the rule and reign of God, the Kingdom of Christ. And we are called to prayerfully work for the poor and against injustice wherever the curse is found! So pray for our friends, and pray for us, that justice would roll down like rivers, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Peace,

Michael