You do not belong to the world: Part I

A benefit of living so far from "home" is that it reminds me not to treat this world as my true home.  The earliest Christians were adamant that those who follow Christ are "not of this world" (John 18:36). Having grown up in a nation where most people count themselves within the Christian faith and where much of the culture, economy, and politics are tied around superficially Christian expressions, it can be difficult to remember that we should not try to make ourselves comfortable with what this world has to offer. In Compassion, Henri Nouwen and his coauthors discuss the strong pull we feel to go along with the world and fall in line with its standards. They share:

We want to be ordinary and proper people who live ordinary and proper lives. There is an enormous pressure on us to do what is ordinary and proper - even the attempt to excel is ordinary and proper - and thus find the satisfaction of general acceptance. This is quite understandable since the ordinary and proper behavior that gives shape to an ordinary and proper life offers us the comforting illusion that things are under control and that everything extraordinary and improper can be kept outside the walls of our self-created fortress.

Unfortunately, this "conforming to the pattern of the world" (Romans 12:2) only leads us away from God. Christ calls us to so much more, but we have to give up our love of the "ordinary" world in order to love our extraordinary God (1 John 2:15-17). The Shepherd of Hermas, one of the earliest Christian writers, began his Similitudes by stating that when Christians realize that they are not in their true home but living in a "strange country", they will be free to stop trying to hoard things and be comfortable in this life but instead will open up their possessions to those afflicted by need (Similitudes 1:1-11). More than 200 years later, St. John Chrysostom emphasized the same message over and over again, exclaiming to his flock that they are not to trust in material things for, "You are a stranger and a pilgrim with respect to the things here! You have a country which is your own in the heavens!" (Homily 2 on the Statutes).  And it was this rejection of the standards of the world that drove the passions of the Desert Fathers, for "These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster" (Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert).


One unfortunate side affect of the surface-level "Christianizing" of many of our societies is that it has made it easier for us to feel comfortable here.  We are not the early Christians living under fear of persecution or the Desert Fathers purposely choosing to remove themselves from the excesses of society.  We don't have the constant reminders that the values of the world oppose the values of God.  And so we need to work that much harder to remind ourselves that our souls are being prepared for eternity with God rather than comfort in this life, that society's standards for success and achievement are not God's standards, that affirmation in the eyes of the world is not equivilent to affirmation from God, and that our worldly possessions are not our own to keep but are given to us temporarily by God in order to bless others.

It has been a blessing of my experience in Thailand that these things are easier to remember here.  This is partially because I now live in a expressedly non-Christian culture, and partially because I am pledged full-time to Christian service, but I think the biggest factor has just been my displacement from the world I was "expected" to be within to a world where I know I am different, and thus am reminded that all of this world stands apart from the expectations of the Kingdom of Heaven.


There's more I have to say, but it will have to wait for another post.  I'll end here with the conclusion to John Chrysostom's Homily 12 on Matthew, where he considers the effects that our failure to let go of this world has on our witness as Christians:

For this cause the very heathens disbelieve the things that we say, since our doings, not our sayings, are the demonstration which they are willing to receive from us; and when they see us building ourselves fine houses and laying out gardens and baths and buying fields, they are not willing to believe that we are preparing for another sort of residence away from our city.

For if this were so, say they, they would turn to money all they have here and lay them up beforehand there; and this they divine from the things that are done in this world. For so we see those who are very rich getting themselves houses and fields and all the rest, chiefly in those cities in which they are to stay. But we do the contrary; and with all earnest zeal we get possession of the earth which we are soon after to leave; giving up not money only but even our very blood for a few acres and tenements: while for the purchase of Heaven we do not endure to give even what is beyond our wants, and this though we are to purchase it at a small price and to possess it forever, provided we had once purchased it.

Therefore I say we shall suffer the utmost punishment, departing there naked and poor; or rather it will not be for our own poverty that we shall undergo these irremediable calamities but also for our making others to be such as ourselves. For when heathens see them that have partaken of so great mysteries earnest about these matters, much more will they cling themselves to the things heaping much fire upon our head. For when we who ought to teach them to despise all things that appear do ourselves most of all urge them to the lust of these things; when shall it be possible for us to be saved, having to give account for the perdition of others? Do you not hear Christ say that He left us to be for salt and for lights in this world, in order that we may both brace up those that are melting in luxury and enlighten them that are darkened by the care of wealth? When therefore we even cast them into more thorough darkness and make them more dissolute, what hope shall we have of salvation? There is none at all; but wailing and gnashing our teeth, and bound hand and foot, we shall depart into the fire of hell, after being full well worn down by the cares of riches.

Considering then all these things, let us loose the bands of such deceit, that we may not at all fall into those things which deliver us over to the unquenchable fire. For he that is a slave to money, the chains both here and there will have him continually liable to them; but he that is rid of this desire will attain to freedom from both. Unto which that we also may attain, let us break in pieces the grievous yoke of avarice, and make ourselves wings toward Heaven; by the grace and love towards man of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and might forever and ever. Amen.