End of the Year Reflection
I've been crossing borders for most of my life. I first entered the United States on a passenger ferry from Vancouver to Seattle while the sun gently set over the ocean. And I returned to Canada via a sleepy checkpoint on a dusty country backroad.
Other border crossings have been more dramatic. After a military coup, I left one African country by dashing across a runway and jumping into the back of a turboprop plane while soldiers gave chase. And I nearly collapsed when I left China suffering from bird flu, desperate not be detected by officials waving sensors and hauling travelers out of the line to put them in isolation for three weeks. Phew.
Borders feature strongly in my apprenticeship to Jesus Christ. My horizons have been transformed by visiting prisons, transit camps, leprosy centers and HIV clinics around the world. Time and time again my assumptions about who is "in" and "out," and who is blessed in our world, have been challenged.
Now I see that wherever we draw the lines in society — about who is acceptable and who is unacceptable — Jesus is to be found on the other side of the lines. He seems to show up in all the wrong places and with all the wrong people.
We should not be surprised. The schmaltzy meek and mild Christmas story overlooks that Jesus himself was a migrant; the boy from the other side of the tracks. "Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,” (Philippians 2:6-7).
That's one heck of a border crossing.
Whether we crossed into the kingdom of God in peace, quiet and serenity, or it felt like being flung from the back of a fast moving car, the danger is that we hang around on the border. In fact many people think that all the Christian life is about is to sit on the boundary, just inside the precincts of God, but always ready to slip back over the border if necessary.
What a shame. Whatever happened to striking out from our crossing point and pressing hard into the hinterland of the kingdom of God? Who will show me how it's done in our generation? And where is the community of likeminded people that will embrace the words of the ancient adventurer Sir Francis Drake, who wrote:
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
As we reach through Christmas and step across the border from one year into the next, LORD may it be so.
And may the Center for Christianity and Public Life rise to show us the way.