© 2013 by Jim Wallis

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516–6287

www.brazospress.com

Excerpted from On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned about Serving the Common Good

Ebook edition created 2013

ISBN 978-1-4412-4597-7

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Unless noted otherwise, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked Message are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Why You Should Care about the Person Who Made Your Cell Phone

Epilogue: Ten Personal Decisions for the Common Good

Notes

About the Author

Back Ad

Back Cover

Why You Should Care about the Person Who Made Your Cell Phone

I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. . . . That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure.

And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

—Martin Luther King Jr.[1]

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

—Martin Luther King Jr.[2]

As a nation and as a people, as a home, as a family, we’ve made a lot of progress—we’ve come a distance. But we’re still not there. We have not yet created the beloved community. We have not come to that point where we recognize the dignity and the worth of every human being. It is still a struggle. . . . We still have a distance to go before we create one family, one house—the American house.

—Representative John Lewis, Georgia[3]

Almost everybody knows the story of the Good Samaritan, and how Jesus told it to answer a question somebody had asked him: “Who is my neighbor?” That is always a good question. But we need to ask it in the right context. Helping a man in need by the side of a dangerous road was the example Jesus used to show who our neighbor is and how to help him or her. Who is our neighbor? In our increasingly connected global world, this ancient moral question takes on a whole new context. What does it mean for the Good Samaritan to go global?

The Lawyer’s Question

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25–37)

This, of course, is the very famous parable of the Good Samaritan, widely understood as one of Jesus’s key teachings on ethics. And it concerns a question that was fundamental in ancient times and remains so in the modern world: Who is my neighbor? With our world now becoming so globalized and closely connected, it is a question we will need whole new ethical perspectives and patterns to deal with. This story can help us.

As you see above, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about this parable, about the plight of those robbed and beaten on the roadways of life and the self-protecting avoidance of those who pass by on the other side—even religious leaders. Just as Jesus did, King was calling for a radical extension of the idea of the neighbor, well beyond the boundaries that people use to justify their lack of response to human suffering.

And that is what this parable is all about: expanding and extending the identity of “our neighbor.” There is no doubt that most human beings believe they have obligations and responsibilities to their neighbors. But they also believe in boundaries, and many people fall outside of them to become nonneighbors. It’s much easier when our neighbor is a relative, or friend, or member of our group and very much like us. But when we have to cross boundaries—like race, religion, neighborhood, region, culture, class, tribe, country, and often gender, even within those other boundaries—the justifications begin for our having ignored somebody or some group of people.

That is exactly what the lawyer in the story is doing—trying to justify himself. This isn’t a sincere query by a humble man ready to confess his failure and find the strength to walk a new path. This is about how to get out of responsibilities, which is often how this conversation plays out in the politics of the public square: “Am I my brother’s or sister’s keeper?”[4] or “Who is my brother or sister?” And again, it is often our lawyers, or politicians, who want to put up the boundaries that stand in the way of our being our brother’s keeper. The lawyer, or politician, in the story had to agree to what the law says about loving the Lord your God and loving your neighbor as yourself—which he can’t get around because that is what the law says. So all that is left for him is to try to narrow whom that might apply to, whom he really has to love. He asks with this clear tone and meaning in his voice: “Okay then, just who is my neighbor anyway?”

In reply to the lawyer’s attempt to evade and avoid his responsibilities, Jesus tells this compelling and convicting story in front of a whole audience of people listening to the question and to Jesus’s answer.

One of the first things to notice is what New Testament scholars tell us about the scene and context of this story. Because the man was beaten, stripped, and left for “half dead,” he couldn’t be identified in the usual ways by his dress and his speech or dialect. Nobody could tell who this man was just by looking at him, lying mostly naked on the ground and likely unconscious. His terrible state demonstrated no identity, status, or position. He was devoid of any social background or cultural connection. He was nobody and could be anybody. He might also have been dead or almost dead. So it was hard to tell if this man was a “neighbor” in all the usual categories because he could not be identified.

First a priest passes him by and then a Levite. Why do they not stop? Many suggest it has to do with issues of “ritual purity” and the “holiness code,” especially involving the religious leaders.[5] If the man on the side of the road was not Jewish, contact with him could risk defilement for a priest. The law was even stricter if he was actually dead; a priest was not to come within six feet of a corpse.[6] In Jesus’s culture, contact with a dead body was commonly understood to defile a person. And for the priest and Levite, to ritually purify themselves again would take time, money, and inconvenience. There is debate about whether the law could have been interpreted or used in other ways to justify helping the man; for example, there could be legal exceptions for “neglected corpses” and other technicalities. In this case, the priest and Levite chose purity over compassion, perhaps letting their religious rules become their excuse for not helping.[7] Ever seen or heard of that before? But as New Testament scholar Klyne Snodgrass puts it, “The parable is one more example of Jesus substituting the mercy code for the holiness code.”[8]

Maybe the priest and the Levite were also afraid. It was a very dangerous and treacherous road, where robbers often attacked without warning. Perhaps the thieves were still around and would pounce on anyone else who stopped. Or, as Dr. King wondered, maybe they feared the man was faking and might be part of a plot to trap them. Stopping to help would certainly put them in touch with this man, this other human being, and that could entail some time, risk, and vulnerability—just as stopping to help people today usually does. Hurrying along would be safer than stopping. So to avoid the problem, to keep both pure and safe, the first two passersby—the religious leaders—crossed to the other side of the road, ignored the suffering man, and kept going about their business.

Too Busy to Help?

Some have also proposed another possible reason: that these men were just too busy! The religious leaders might have been in a real hurry, with too many important things and people on their minds, and perhaps on their way to very important meetings. These were leaders with tight schedules; they hardly had the time to see what was going on around them on their way to their next appointment, and certainly had no time to stop and be diverted from their prearranged plan for the day. Perhaps the Samaritan who stopped was in less of a hurry.

A fascinating experiment related to the Good Samaritan story, conducted at Princeton Seminary, may shed some light on this theory.[9] Seminary students were invited to participate in a project on religious education. After filling out a survey of religious questions about themselves, they were asked to travel from one building to another on campus to give prepared talks on different topics and have the talks recorded when they arrived at their final destination. But on their way, they encountered a young actor, lying in an alleyway right in their path, playing the part of somebody who was hurt and in distress, his condition unknown.

The researchers wanted to test three questions: (1) whether people thinking “religious” and “helping” thoughts would be likely to stop; (2) whether people who saw mostly a personal gain from religion would respond differently than those who saw it as having a value of its own for finding meaning in their lives; and (3) whether people in a hurry would be less prone to help. There were three variables: topic, identity, and urgency. One group was told to prepare a talk about seminary jobs, the other about the Good Samaritan. Some were told they were almost late for the next task, others that they would arrive early but might as well get over there anyway. In the alley, they all passed the man sitting slumped in a doorway, and he was to moan and cough—twice—as they walked by. After they arrived at the second site, the seminarians gave their talk and answered a “helping behavior questionnaire.”[10]

The results from the experiment were very clear: “The only one of these variables that made a difference was how much of a hurry the subjects were in. Sixty-three percent of subjects that were in no hurry stopped to help, 45 percent of those in a moderate hurry stopped, and 10 percent of those that were in a great hurry stopped. It made no difference whether the students were assigned to talk on the Good Samaritan parable, nor did it matter what their religious outlook was.”[11]

I was very struck by what the study concluded: that a person in a hurry is less likely to stop and help someone in trouble, even if the passerby is about to teach the parable of the Good Samaritan! Princeton reported that some of the seminarians literally stepped over the actor in order to continue on their way—to preach Jesus’s Gospel story of what it means to be a neighbor. What does that tell us about our ethics and our actions, and about how being hurried and terribly busy all the time affects our ability to do the things we say we believe? Princeton reported that many students who didn’t stop to help the man in the alley didn’t even seem anxious or worried about it after they arrived. Were they just too busy to even notice a person in real trouble? They were facing a conflict between the time demands being imposed on them and the possibility of ethical behavior that presented itself on their way. The study report surmised that “conflict rather than callousness can explain the failure to stop.”[12]

The priest, the Levite, and most of the seminarians in the Princeton study were motivated either by a desire to maintain their holiness to please God or by a commitment to following the rules and timetables of their busy schedules; but the Samaritan decided to act in response to the needs of another human being. And he is the example Jesus uses to say, “Go and do likewise.”[13] So what can we learn from the nature of the Good Samaritan’s response?

The Costs of Compassion

The very fact that Jesus chose a Samaritan as his positive example in the story would have been a shock to his Jewish audience. Samaritans were of mixed race—Jewish and another race of occupied people in their region—and the Jewish-Samaritan relationship was “notoriously bad,” according to Klyne Snodgrass: “Jews believed Samaritans to be people of doubtful descent and inadequate theology.”[14] That sounds like what I hear today from too many religious leaders about the people they don’t like. Clearly, this was a tense relationship. Jesus once completely surprised the Samaritan woman at the well by even talking to her and asking for a drink of water. So who was this Samaritan, and what did he do that Jesus commended in his parable?

First, the Samaritan would not have been from the immediate area, so the injured man would not easily qualify as his “neighbor.” Second, Samaritans were not Gentiles and were bound by the same purity laws as the Jews; yet this one seems to ignore these laws when he stops and approaches an unidentified stranger—risking his own defilement. And when he sees the man is not dead but severely hurt, he begins to treat the wounds with his own oil and wine and to bandage him as best he can. Then he places the man on his own donkey and takes him to a nearby inn where he can get him the help and rest he needs.

Now the robbery victim, of course, has no money; so the Samaritan pulls out of his own pocket two denarii, or about two days’ wages, which will pay for about two weeks at the inn. After he spends the night getting the injured man settled and taken care of, he goes on his way again the next day. But he promises the innkeeper that he will come back to pay whatever else is owed to meet the recovery needs of this man, a total stranger to him. There is no way to ensure that his money will be returned, and it is clear that the Samaritan doesn’t expect anything in return.

In offering to pay more for the injured man, the Samaritan obviously has to identify himself to the innkeeper, and here is why that is important. The motivation for the attack on this man, which the parable does not describe or explain, could well have been the violence of “blood revenge,” with one group or clan taking out its grievances on a member of another. Being quite familiar with gang violence in our urban communities, I can easily understand that reality and pattern. If you assist a victim of such gang violence, you can easily become the gang’s next victim. So the Samaritan was again putting himself at risk for this man.

The Good Samaritan shows the difference between what New Testament theologian Sharon Ringe calls “having” a neighbor and “being” a neighbor: “No one can simply have a neighbor; one must also be a neighbor. Neighboring is a two-way street. The parable changes in a fundamental way how the question about neighbors is usually framed. The Gospel records no one’s response to this story—neither the lawyer’s nor the onlookers’. The story simply stands as yet another challenge to the transformation of daily life and business as usual which lies at the heart of the practice of discipleship.”[15]

We all have neighbors, but the gospel requires us to be a neighbor. The Good Samaritan shows us how, and Jesus says this is the example we are to follow. Snodgrass summarizes: “The parable is most often interpreted as an example story intended to show that love does not allow limits on the definition of the neighbor. . . . It is about a compassionate Samaritan and is intended to teach about the love command.”[16] Jesus is clearly saying he doesn’t want us to place limits on who our neighbor is and who is therefore worthy of the love God asks of us. He answers the question that keeps getting asked in our public life. We are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.

Crossing All the Boundaries

The Good Samaritan is, therefore, crossing all kinds of boundaries and taking all sorts of risks by helping somebody in need. And that is the point Jesus is making, and it’s the answer to the question, who is my neighbor? Humanity wants to put up boundaries, walls, and restrictive definitions around the concept of our neighbor. Those whom we can’t fully identify, who are outside our group, who are different from us, or who might even place us in new, uncomfortable, or even dangerous situations—we want to prevent these people from being defined as our neighbors. But, says Jesus, they are our neighbors in the eyes of God. This Samaritan, on his way down the Jericho road, sees another person in trouble and breaks all the rules and boundaries to help him. Most of all, he shows that compassion and love require action and are not just ideals or feelings.

Every society creates boundaries—barriers between itself and “others”—and Jesus is telling us to cross those cultural, racial, religious, regional, and tribal boundaries to find our “neighbors.” The fact that Martin Luther King Jr. would conclude that this passage was central to the struggle against racism is not surprising. We naturally seek and hide behind our created boundaries to excuse ourselves from loving those who are different or removed from us, but this parable stands right in the way of that. Jesus obliterates all our notions of acceptable boundaries between neighbors. If our boundaries are drawn narrowly enough, we can avoid the costs of loving the “neighbors” who stand outside of them. But again, Jesus says no to that because there are no “nonneighbors” in this world. All of God’s children are our neighbors, and that radical concept is absolutely essential to the idea of the common good. Indeed, it is a spiritual foundation for the common good.

This basic ethic from the Good Samaritan parable—that there are no boundaries for our definitions of “neighbor”—needs to be the moral guide and compass for us now in an increasingly globalized world. And the good news is that it is being adopted and enacted by many of the brightest and most committed members of the next generation. To think of their neighbors across the world as easily as right next door is coming naturally to younger people, who have a far more global perspective of life than their parents do.

That is a very important thing, because the problems and threats that now face us are truly global in nature and don’t know any boundaries. Global pandemic diseases aren’t stopped by the walls that we erect. Natural disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, respect none of our national borders. The threats posed by rapid climate change could affect all of our children and grandchildren, wherever they live. Massive migration caused by poverty, conflict, or environmental pressures creates brand-new tensions and upheavals for new immigrants and for the people who live in places where those immigrants end up. And the impact of war and violence in one part of the world has shown a deadly capacity to spread its costs in both financial and human terms to many other places.

The reality of our global village speaks very directly to the ethic of Jesus’s parable: we are all neighbors now, whether we like it or not. Both that global reality and new international perceptions regarding the true identity of our neighbors are causing a great expansion of global travel, connection, and responsibility. Students I’ve taught have gone on to medical school and ended up working in places with intense health care needs with groups like Doctors Without Borders, whose name itself speaks directly to the ethic of the Good Samaritan. Some exemplary journalists regularly place themselves in great danger, not just to cover situations of terrible conflict but to actually be among the victims of violence in order to tell their story. As I wrote this book, two of those heroic reporters were killed in Syria, the American war correspondent Marie Colvin and young French photographer Rémi Ochlik.[17]

Young couples from our own Sojourners community have ventured into some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden places around the world, such as Palestine, the Philippines, Central America, and Kenya, to serve with groups like the Mennonite Central Committee or World Vision. Even Christian musical groups have contributed, such as when Jars of Clay created the new “Blood:Water Mission” project, which pours time and money into building wells in southern Africa and addressing HIV/AIDS. Groups like Amnesty International have gained credibility by holding all governments, regardless of their ideologies, accountable for protecting the human rights and dignity of their peoples—again affirming their status as our neighbors.

And no cause has attracted more of the younger generation than the “new abolitionist” movement being directed against the sex trafficking of women and children in both poor and affluent countries—with more slaves today than there were when William Wilberforce ended the slave trade two hundred years ago. My friend David Batstone, who leads the Not for Sale campaign against human trafficking and slavery,[18] tells me moving stories about his students and even his own children going to engage those campaigns in Thailand, India, Peru, and around the world. In every case, the moral and spiritual foundation of that involvement comes right out of this Good Samaritan parable, in which Jesus is telling us to bring down all the boundaries and walls that separate us from responding to our neighbor.

An Ethic for Our Global Neighbor

An ethic for our global neighbor is emerging now. And it comes right out of Jesus’s parable. People are learning the lessons of the Good Samaritan and have chosen to live out that ethic on a global scale. In reaching out to those they now define as their neighbors, young people are making new connections and commitments, forging alliances, seeking to resolve conflicts, and giving their time and energy to actually solving problems instead of just talking and complaining about them. It’s a wonderful thing, for example, to sit in on an intense discussion among young social entrepreneurs—from both the private and nonprofit sectors at places like the World Economic Forum—about how to solve the problem of water management and conservation in the world today, which is likely one of the greatest problems we will ever face. Just watching and listening to their conversation is a great encouragement to me because it is clear that the global identity and ethic of the neighbor is now being applied across all boundaries and around the world. I think Jesus might be smiling too.

This ethic that reminds us to love our neighbors as ourselves now even extends to defining those who make the products we use as neighbors. That extension is especially occurring among many young people who don’t want to mindlessly consume products that are made by exploited children who are the same age as they are. Yes, the ethic of the Good Samaritan is even extending to our shopping habits.

I was invited to speak to a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, about the terrible violence in the Congo, fueled by brutal militias who rain down terror on helpless civilian populations. The discussion was focused on how the money that supports these militias and buys their weapons comes from the “dirty minerals” they control and sell—minerals that are essential in making our cell phones.

I was the lunchtime speaker, whose role is always to try to be inspirational as people eat their meal. I started by reciting the Good Samaritan passage to a very diverse (and mostly secular) audience; reading the Bible got their attention. I asked how the discussion Jesus had with his legal questioner in the Gospel story might apply to our globalized world and even to the problem of dirty minerals. Are the individuals involved in making our lives work now (and most of us would say that we can’t function without a cell phone!) really our neighbors, left on the side of the global road—alone, fearful, and vulnerable?

Jesus taught his disciples the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). This is the ethical commandment that is held in common with all the world’s major religious traditions. It is both our common ground and our higher ground. In the same way, Jesus affirmed that the way to eternal life is to obey these commands: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Luke 10:27 NIV; see Mark 12:29–31).

I explained how somebody in Jesus’s audience got the bright idea to ask him the question, “And just who is my neighbor?” and how he responded with this famous story. I suggested that when we hear the story it is easy to condemn the priest and the Levite for leaving somebody by the side of the road. But they were technically just obeying the law. They were fulfilling, as they saw it, their responsibilities to their prescribed roles. They were both supposed to stay “clean” in order to fulfill their duties. Touching the bloody body would make them “unclean” and cause problems for them once they got to Jericho. Responding to the injured man could also take too much of their time or put them in a risky or dangerous situation. My job, they said, is at the end of the road. I can’t get involved in the mess by the side of the road. It would only slow me down on the way to my responsibilities in Jericho.

Then I asked, what if someone in Jesus’s audience today had the same bright idea to ask him the same question—now? “And who is my neighbor?” What might be his parable today? In that room filled with activists and policy makers, CEOs and heads of nonprofit organizations, I asked them to all hold up their cell phones. I said, let’s be honest, cell phones have become the “significant other” for lots of people today. Many spend more time with them each day—thumbing away on the keyboards or having long conversations from anywhere and everywhere—than with any person in their lives. But what was the road that brought our cell phones to us? It is worrying to think that it may be a far more dangerous one than the Jericho road.

Do we know or really understand, for example, that many of the key materials in our cell phones come from minerals that are at the heart of violent conflicts in places like the Congo? Brutal militias are selling those “dirty minerals” to buy the weapons they use to kill and destroy thousands of people in Africa. What are we going to do about that? What about the revelation that some of our favorite gadgets, such as the iPhone and iPad, are made in China by people working under horrendous conditions that cause some to lose the use of their hands?[19] The stories go on and on: on the side of the road that brings us all our technical devices, clothing, delectable chocolates, and more are the many victims who have literally been beaten, robbed, and left to die. Whoever is involved in making your cell phone, I told the conferees, who were all now holding their smart phones in the air, is your neighbor! Does the meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan today, I asked them, suggest that economic supply chains should also become value chains?

People stopped eating their lunch and you could have heard a pin drop. Imagine Jesus holding up our cell phones, I suggested. Your neighbor, he might say, is every man, woman, and child who touched the supply chain used to make your phone, or the clothes you wear, the computers you type on, the food you eat, and the cars you drive. Your global neighbors in these supply chains are all God’s children. The theological reality that people of faith must try to live out is that our neighbor is not defined by geographical proximity. Our neighbor is the person in need. So it’s time to look at what is happening along the bloody road of our consumer supply chains.

Turning Supply Chains into Value Chains

Sometimes, caring for our global neighbor might mean a change of plans or maybe a change in products. Sometimes, caring for our neighbor means we have to slow down a little bit and think about what we are doing and buying. Sometimes, caring for our neighbor might cost us some time and even some money. There are many people who haven’t wanted to get involved in the mess by the side of the road. They walk by it and say that it’s somebody else’s responsibility. My job, they say, is at the end of the road in Jericho. I’m just being faithful to my shareholders by maximizing profit. My job is just getting the products people want into the hands of those that want them. I can’t be worried about those who get left by the side of the road of my supply chain. If I stop to help clean up the mess along the way, it might cost too much time and money.

It’s not my job; I’m just responsible to the consumer. It’s not my job; I am just a consumer. It’s not my job; I’m not breaking any laws or rules. It’s not my job; that’s why they have boards of directors. It’s not my job; it would be too inconvenient or expensive to stop and help. And hey, if a few people do get hurt along the way, are there not some Good Samaritans around who will take care of them? Isn’t that why we have faith-based and charity organizations?

Jesus said that we are all responsible. It doesn’t matter if we think we have a good excuse to just keep on walking by and ignore all the injustice along the road of our supply chains. And since we are already responsible, the fact that we also benefit at the end of these supply chains makes us even more responsible. There might be an excuse to give your supervisor about why you just walked on by; there might be an excuse to give your shareholders to just walk on by; there might be an excuse to give your customers to just walk on by; but there is no moral excuse for how we are now treating our neighbors who are falling along the side of the road of the global supply chains, which are now the world’s main roads. And if we are part of the faith community, there are no excuses at all.

But the very good news is that there are many Good Samaritans walking along the road now—especially from a younger generation—and they are stopping to help those who have been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. Some are religious believers and some are not, but they all tend to believe that their neighbor is not defined by color, creed, religion, or borders and that we are all God’s children and need to be treated fairly. Whether they are high school students in America who text each other or the young people working in dangerous conditions in the mines of eastern Congo, they are getting connected.

The movement is aiming toward new relationships and new rules. Building relationships is usually the beginning of establishing some new rules. Of course, no rules are going to fix every problem. It takes work, vigilance, monitoring, and a continuing effort to transform the conditions and contexts in which people participate in supply chains. But we continue to hear that fairer rules really do help the people caught in dangerous working conditions or in bloody and violent conflicts. Fairer rules and better protective standards are the best step to make sure that we—whether manufacturers, investors, or consumers—don’t just walk on by.

A key to the Congo’s peace and prosperity, for example, will be to ensure that Americans aren’t putting money into the hands of violent militias and that the country’s natural wealth benefits the people who live there. We have a responsibility. We have a job. We can’t just walk on by with our excuses, because the people of the Congo are our neighbors.

The good news is that there are growing campaigns to hold businesses accountable for their supply chains. These campaigns incorporate language about transparency, monitoring, and protection, all aimed at the defense of our global neighbors along the dangerous road of supply chains. They are focused on changing business practices at all points on supply chains. This is a change of major proportions, and it will take many years to implement. But it is now under way and growing each day. At Georgetown University, where I teach, a campus-wide assumption now exists that no Georgetown T-shirt, sweatshirt, or school apparel will be sold that doesn’t pass the muster of rigorous tests about how the workers are treated—because the Georgetown students care about that.

Fortune 500 companies now face growing pressures—from consumers, investors, boards of directors, and the media—and their supply chains are being scrutinized under an ethical microscope. Many people in business I talk to now actually believe that such rigorous pressure will benefit not only factory workers but also the environment. Getting caught under the spotlight of ethical inquiry makes companies very uncomfortable but may ultimately be in their best interest if such scrutiny spurs them to produce stronger, more responsible, and more forward-looking businesses. Even in the nation’s business schools, vibrant conversation is going on about how the practice of turning supply chains into sustainable value chains will help build business credibility while creating loyalty among customers and among ever more discerning stakeholders of all kinds.

Listen to what some of these companies who have been under scrutiny are now saying, obviously in large part because of the supply chain campaigns that have been directed at them.

Nokia, the world’s largest vendor of mobile phones during the first decade of this millennium, assures us: “We take continuous action to ensure that metals from conflict areas do not enter our supply chain. We require our suppliers to confirm that our ban of conflict metals is respected and our requirements fulfilled. . . . We are actively working on industry initiatives to improve traceability of minerals.”[20]

Nike, which was once the focus of every antisweatshop activist’s most passionate energy, now has statements like these. Its “ambition” statement is “to help Nike, Inc., and its consumers thrive in a sustainable economy where people, profit and planet are in balance.”[21] On their website, they continue:

That’s how Nike approaches corporate responsibility. It’s not just about getting better at what we do—addressing impacts throughout our supply chain—it’s about striving for the best, creating value for the business and innovating for a better world. . . . As environmental, social and economic challenges in our world proliferate, they demand our best performance. We’re using the power of our brand, the energy and passion of our people and the scale of our business to create meaningful change. The opportunity is greater than ever for our sustainability strategy to drive business growth, build deeper consumer and community connections, and create positive social and environmental change.[22]

While Nike is far from having improved everything it can, it has realized that to maintain its credibility and its customers, it has to dramatically change how it does business.

Obviously, saying and doing are very different things, but without these global campaigns pressuring companies, such large corporations would not be talking like this. These are just two examples from industries in which supply chains are most often exploited. But they are part of a bigger story that is being told across the world of business. Implementation and monitoring are the keys now. The fair trade movement, especially strong in the United Kingdom, has found its way into every major food and department store there; and I am amazed at the breadth of the products involved that I see on visits to my wife Joy’s family in England. The UK-based Fairtrade Foundation, for example, regularly tracks cocoa to source farms and has taken strong actions against farms that fail to live up to the standards and requirements of a “fairtrade farm.”[23] And that information is made available to consumers, so that they can make choices based on their values and not just on the price of products. In 2009, the Deloitte company, along with the World Economic Forum, produced a report called Sustainability for Tomorrow’s Consumer: The Business Case for Sustainability. It reported that the business world is responding to “more public and investor scrutiny of the traditional supply chain.”[24]

The ethics of who my neighbor is are changing—for the better. The moral compass for that change is derived from our most ancient religious traditions but is now being picked up by the youngest members of our globalized world. We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, wherever we directly encounter people in need; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that in order to protect men, women, and children from being constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway, the Jericho road must be transformed! And that commitment is all about the common good.

* * * * *

The beloved community welcomes all tribes—all the families, groups, races, clans, and nations that make up our very diverse human mosaic. This vision of community is embedded in the experience of the early church, which crossed all human boundaries; it was the underlying foundation for the civil rights movement, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis testify above; and it has its more limited secular manifestation in the vision of a pluralistic democracy that is intended to serve the common good.

So let’s look at some relevant Scriptures and see how they might guide us in the context of a nation and world whose demographics are changing fundamentally. Our rapidly changing world depends on leadership that can help us navigate the turbulent waters of our tribal and common identities.

All Are Welcome

There can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ. (Gal. 3:28 Message)

Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. (Rom. 12:2 Message)

God welcomes all our human tribes and asks us to welcome the outsiders. Throughout the Scriptures, we see God actively affirming diverse cultures rather than trying to make them into one. There are biblical imperatives for breaking down the cultural barriers that divide humanity, especially in the new community that forms around Jesus. And a very dramatic description of the end of history in the book of Revelation shows the preservation of multiple cultures who together offer praise and worship of God, with their diverse cultural expressions as a means of their worship in the kingdom of God (Rev. 7:9–10).

Near the beginning of biblical history, from the tower of Babel onward, we see geographical dispersal and linguistic diversity as a means to execute God’s cultural mandate given in Genesis 1:28 to go and fill all the earth. Even as God calls out Abraham as a “blessing” to all nations and forms his covenant with Israel (Gen. 12:2), God demands inclusivity among the people of God and encourages foreigners and faithful Gentiles to worship at his temple. How God’s people treat both strangers and the poor, he says, will be a sign of how they will be judged—either blessed or cursed. The children of Israel needed to be constantly reminded that they were chosen not for their own superiority, strength, and power but rather for their ordinariness, smallness, and limitations, attributes that required them to trust in God. They were chosen not as a special blessing for themselves but to be a blessing to others—and to the world. And their temple is described by the prophet Isaiah as “a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isa. 56:7).

The story continues as God miraculously enters the realm of humanity with his Son, Jesus Christ, as the fulfillment of God’s purposes and the inauguration of his kingdom. Instead of taking up the long-awaited messianic mission of leading Israel in military victory over its oppressors, Jesus shatters all nationalistic expectations and proclaims that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” (John 3:16). He fulfills Isaiah’s prophecies of a “suffering servant” to save humanity rather than being the warrior king that nations always prefer (Isa. 52:13–53:12).

Not only does Jesus affirm all nations’ access to God’s salvation, but as we have just seen in his parable of the Good Samaritan, he had the audacity (at least that is what some of the listeners would have thought) to depict Israel’s ethnic enemy as the moral protagonist in the story. After Christ’s ascent to heaven, we see the coming of the Holy Spirit, which creates a glorious display of cultural diversity at Pentecost (Acts 2); and the gospel spreads throughout the Middle East and far beyond the Jewish community. The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, highlights the cross of Christ, which breaks down the barriers between God and human beings and also mends great human cultural rifts—like the one between Jews and Gentiles.

In Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Colossians, Paul proclaims a unity in Christ among Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. All are now one in Christ Jesus. The Galatians 3 text quoted above was used as a baptismal formula in the early church and taught directly to converts in order to change their cultural sense of themselves. The three barriers named correspond to the most historic divisions between human beings: race, class, and gender. That all of those divisions are healed in Jesus Christ is the claim of the early church. Jews and Gentiles now lived and worshiped together, slaves were treated with the same respect as masters, and women found a freedom of expression unheard of in the patriarchal ancient world. The New Testament indicates how radically different and diverse the welcoming culture of the early church was in its own context, which other historical accounts confirm. Its egalitarian living and sharing, as described in the first chapters of Acts, provoked great cultural attention and lent a powerful impulse to the evangelism of the early Christian community. Freedom, welcome, affirmation, and equality were as attractive then as they are now, and the first Christians exemplified these qualities (unlike some of our churches today).

Finally, as foretold by the apostle John in Revelation, even in the future of God’s reign human culture is not abolished and replaced with a new, otherworldly, heavenly culture—not at all. Rather, human cultures in all their diverse manifestations of language, ethnicity, and nationality are preserved in holy unity. Indeed, their collective but distinct expressions become the means to express the heart of human vocation: to worship and glorify God. Revelation 7:9–10 says, “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”

Thus we have a hopeful and radical vision of diversity throughout biblical history with the purpose of bringing a divided humanity into reconciliation with God and one another. And there is a clear and consistent theme that “outsiders” have an important place and role in that community of faith and should be embraced and included rather than condemned and banished. Indeed, those relationships with the outsider can even become instruments for our salvation.

God Bless America?

I got lucky and married Joy Carroll, a wonderful woman who was born in London, England. She’s a Brit, and my two boys are bilingual—or as they say, “half” American and “haaf” English. Joy was one of the first women ordained in the Church of England as a priest, is from an evangelical family, and knows her Bible well. Soon after we met, she was here for a visit and kept hearing the phrase “God bless America” everywhere she went. She even saw the slogan on some bumper stickers. She was puzzled, and asked me, “Don’t they know that’s not found in the Bible?” Now Joy actually loves her new country and has become a US citizen (we have the picture from the ceremony at the Library of Congress, with the whole family waving American flags!), and she thinks it’s great to ask God to bless your country—“God bless the UK” too—as long as you don’t think that God has especially blessed America. Or, as my boys like to say, “God bless the world.” Where do we find our identity: in nation, culture, class, race, gender—or first and foremost in God and a new and international community of God’s people? There is a long tradition in this country of attributing divine purposes to the founding of the United States and even of invoking a religious mandate for “American exceptionalism.”

But what does the Bible say about nations? For the most part, they don’t come out very well in the Scriptures, and while God uses both good and bad nations for his purposes, they are not often seen as central to God’s plan. There are some very tough words in the Bible about “the nations.” The psalmist puts them in their place: “The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. . . . Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth” (Ps. 46:6, 10). God’s transcendence over every nation and their false exaltation of themselves are clearly set forth in many biblical texts. Psalm 59 calls out to Yahweh: “Awake to punish all the nations; spare none of those who treacherously plot evil. Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city. There they are, bellowing with their mouths, with sharp words on their lips. . . . But you laugh at them, O L; you hold all the nations in derision” (Ps. 59:5–8). Isaiah describes the nations’ lack of importance, despite their own sense of self-importance: “Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales. . . . All the nations are as nothing before him; they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness” (Isa. 40:15, 17). There are not many words of exception in the Bible to the follies and illusions of nations and God’s power over them.

What’s Right and Wrong with American Exceptionalism

The Bible clearly does not affirm or predict America as Israel’s exceptional replacement as the chosen people of God. The idea of the “new Israel,” as some have called America, ignores that fact and forgets that there is still an old Israel in the world whose covenant with God has not expired. But the primary Christian focus is now on a universal and international community centered in Jesus Christ, who breaks down the principal human barriers and divisions—race, class, and gender; there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. So for Christians, any conversation about the future of the world and the exceptional vocation of humanity does not start with a nation-state. It must start with the new multinational community of the church. We can say it even more clearly in regard to American exceptionalism. Jesus’s followers in the United States are called to be Christians first and Americans second. As simple and basic as that affirmation is, it remains a radical statement of interest, identity, loyalty, and priority.

So there is no divine mandate for American exceptionalism in the sense of a unique, special, and exceptional relationship between God and the American nation, regarded as unlike all other nations. Of course, God uses and works through all nations—both the righteous and the unrighteous. But when politicians say that God has granted the United States a special role in human history, they are theologically wrong and politically dangerous.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, has studied the polling on American exceptionalism and reports:

Americans who affirm the idea of “American exceptionalism,” a belief that God has given the U.S. a special role in human history, have a distinctly more militaristic approach to foreign policy than those who do not affirm this idea. Those who believe in American exceptionalism are more likely to favor military strength over diplomacy as the best way to ensure peace, and they are also more likely to say torture can be justified than those who do not believe God has given the U.S. a special role.[25]

Cal Thomas, a conservative Christian columnist, asserts “a huge difference between affirming American exceptionalism and the claim by some that God favors America more than other nations. That is idolatry. Jesus didn’t die and rise for Americans, who did not exist in His time, but for everyone from every land and for all time.”[26] Or as Politico columnist Michael Kinsley says, exceptionalism easily becomes “the theory that Americans are better than everybody else.”[27]

Perhaps most important, the danger of American exceptionalism comes in making “exceptions” for America’s actions when we violate our best values or accepted international rules of behavior. That’s what creates disasters and the kind of blatant hypocrisy that is seen by others around the world. Ignoring human rights is wrong, and America is no exception. Supporting brutal regimes is wrong, and America is no exception. Fighting unjust wars is wrong, and America is no exception. Torture is wrong, and America is no exception. Making and using weapons of mass destruction is wrong, and America is no exception. There can be no exceptions for breaking basic principles and values. When that happens, everyone loses.

American history has much that is unique. But we often make the mistake of thinking that “different” means “better.” Theologian Brian McLaren says it well:

When exceptionalism degenerates into a sense of national superiority, entitlement, smugness, and inflated self-importance, it simply becomes a camouflage for pride, an attractive quality in neither politics nor ethics. Such dangerous pride, the Bible says, goes before a dangerous slide. . . . In whatever ways America has been uniquely blessed, with that blessing comes not exceptional geo-political privilege but exceptional moral responsibility. It doesn’t give us additional moral “exceptions,” but rather intensifies our moral obligations to our neighbors. As Jesus said, from those who have been given much, much will be expected. Exceptional blessing means exceptional responsibility.[28]

Why I Love My Country

Of course you can love your country. I love mine. But patriotism, loving your country, is different from nationalism, which can make an idol of a nation and put its interests above all others. When I watch The Sound of Music with my kids, I must confess I always get teary-eyed when Captain von Trapp sings “Edelweiss,” a love song to his native Austria. But he simply loves his country; he is not practicing Austrian exceptionalism.

What do I love about America? I love the land, one of the most spectacularly beautiful countries in the world (and I’ve visited many of them). I love walking our long stretches of beaches, hiking our majestic mountains, seeing the desert skies, walking beside the rivers, sailing along the coasts, and visiting hundreds of lakes in my home state of Michigan, where I camped as a kid. I even love some of our big cities! “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plains.”[29] I love our many diverse cultures, including their music, their food, their art, their sports, and their particular stories and histories.

And I do love baseball. My wife, the Brit, is a Little League baseball commissioner, and I’ve coached both of my sons’ teams. Baseball is a wonderful American game, unlike any other in the world. A night at any ballpark in America is a great night for me. And so is walking over to the baseball field right next door to watch a Little League game after dinner with everybody sitting on the hill.

I especially love our best national values: freedom, opportunity, community, justice, human rights, and equality under the law for all of our citizens of every race, creed, culture, and gender, not just for the rich and powerful. In particular, I love our tradition and history of democracy, its steady expansion here, and how it has inspired the same all over the world. We take legitimate pride in seeing how our founding documents have been the models for many new nations.

For me, a very vivid personal experience of that history comes from South Africa, ten years before their first free elections, which put Nelson Mandela in office. I had literally been sneaked into the country to support their persecuted faith leaders and help develop new strategies and partnerships between the South African and American churches. One night, I was staying in the Soweto Township home of Frank Chicane, the head of the South African Council of Churches. Late that evening, Frank wanted to show me something and spread some papers out on his kitchen table. He confided in me that Nelson Mandela, even while still in prison, had asked a few people to begin the drafting of a new South African constitution. And Frank was one of them.

As he began to show me the work, I noticed two other documents on the table: the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Ironically, at that very moment there were two South African military vehicles outside Frank’s house: the one that always parked there to monitor Frank and one to monitor me, because the government had discovered I was in the country. The South African regime of apartheid was being supported at the time by the American government’s “constructive engagement” policy, but inside a little house in a black township, a dissident clergyman was drafting a new constitution based on the documents that announced American freedom. Despite the contradictions in all that, I loved that exceptional contribution from my country.

What I don’t love is when my country violates its values and ideals and behaves badly, as when we supported the white South African government for far too long, as well as too many other terrible dictatorships around the world. I don’t love when my country acts out of greed and only for power, or with blatant hypocrisy, or like an empire. The gospel has never lived easily with empire. Christians have a prophetic vocation, in whatever nation they live, to lift up the values of the kingdom of God and call nations to honor their best values in light of those principles.

Martin Luther King Jr. did that the best. America was wrong about race—just wrong. My little church in Michigan was wrong about race. King held his Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other. And he challenged the nation to change. King’s critique was based on the American values we were violating as well as the biblical values we were betraying as Christians and Jews. Likewise, the Arab Spring of 2011 saw youthful protesters force the United States to remember and restate its democratic values, which it had ignored for decades throughout the region of the Middle East. Why? Because of oil. We forgot our values, and a new generation of Middle Eastern activists is making us remember them again.

I also love our American social movements: abolitionists who fought to end slavery, civil rights activists, suffragettes, labor organizers, human rights campaigners—these are my heroes. But ultimately, I love the Jesus movement: the kingdom of God, which knows no nation-state and is God’s plan for the world.

God and America

In American history, we’ve seen two ways to lift up faith in public life. One is by invoking the language of faith to hold the nation accountable to God’s intentions, calling us to justice, compassion, humility, and even repentance, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently did. The other is to invoke God’s blessing on ourselves and on our nation’s activities, agendas, purposes, and wars. We’ve seen both. Patriotism, as Michael Dyson says, is the “critical affirmation of one’s country in the light of its best values, including the attempt to correct it when it is in error.”[30]

Again, if we’re Christians, we critique America by our Christian principles—not the other way around. There’s no disputing that fellow believers in the body of Christ around the world do not share our belief in American exceptionalism. And the body of Christ internationally often disagrees with much of American foreign policy, such as the war in Iraq. Even conservative evangelicals in Great Britain disagreed fundamentally with our invasion of Iraq.

N. T. Wright is a New Testament theologian and also a Brit who says he loves the United States and likes to visit. He writes this:

I want to say, Yes, God has called America to a special place in the world at this moment in history. In the Bible God calls many nations and peoples to particular roles and purposes. . . . However, it is clear throughout scripture that God calls wicked and violent nations as well as righteous and peace-loving ones—and that, when the former have accomplished his purpose, God will judge them according to what they have done and the spirit (e.g. of arrogance, carelessness of life, etc.) in which they have done it. . . . So just as I believe God has granted America a special role in human history, I believe that God has granted e.g. Norway, Nigeria, New Zealand, Nicaragua, etc. a special role as well. And what God calls in one generation may move and shift over time; the great Old Testament prophets saw God’s hand in the rise of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Syria, Egypt and Rome—and also God’s judgment on all of them for the ways in which they carried out their commission inappropriately.[31]

The problem with American exceptionalism is that it sometimes has a very low view of sin. America, like any other nation, is a nation full of many sins. We underestimate the power of sin when we put too much stock in American virtue and let America off the hook, even for violating our own best values. Do we love America enough to tell the truth about its bad behaviors? That is what prophetic faith does. Christians believe they are part of a global community, and our first loyalty—ahead of any loyalty to a nation-state—is to the global body of Christ. And that should be true for every Christian, no matter what country he or she lives in.

Brian McLaren describes the only kind of exceptionalism that is theologically justified: “What we want is to be a good and distinct people, the best possible version of ourselves, not merely fulfilling (and exploiting) some national myth of manifest destiny, but instead creating a national legacy for our children and grandchildren, a great nation among other great nations, through wisdom, justice, freedom, compassion, and action.”[32]

A Microcosm of the World’s Future

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of “the beloved community,” a vision that appears throughout his speeches and writings. But his concept was always more theological than political.

In an article adapted from their book Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., authors Kenneth Smith and Ira Zepp describe how central the concept was for King.[33] We sometimes forget that Dr. King was also Rev. King, a Baptist preacher as well as a civil rights movement leader. On many occasions, King said the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott wasn’t just equal access for both blacks and whites to all the seats on the bus but also “reconciliation” and “redemption, the creation of the beloved community.”[34] And when it came to a mission statement for his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King boldly asserted, “The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living—integration.”[35] And in a sermon delivered on the last Christmas Eve of his life, King declared: “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.”[36] Smith and Zepp say that King held a powerful vision of a “completely integrated society, a community of love and justice wherein brotherhood would be an actuality in all of social life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith.”[37]

King certainly fought for desegregation and equal access to all public facilities and services, but that was a battle against the negative and brutal force of segregation. Integration was a positive force, he felt, for the kind of new community he wanted to see for America. You can legislate against injustice, and King knew the nation needed to. He said the law could not make white men love him but could keep them from lynching him.[38] But King knew you could not legislate reconciliation and love; yet that was the basis for the beloved community. For King, both the civil rights movement and the true church—the church as it was meant to be—were really a microcosm of what society was supposed to be and what history would ultimately be. The campaigns of the movement were always around specific and concrete demands—like civil rights and voting rights—but the spiritual and philosophical vision that both inspired and drove King was that of the beloved community.

Historian Charles Marsh sums up the relationship between the civil rights movement and the mission of the church in King’s mind: “The fading of the ‘old order’ and the emergence of a ‘new age’ is not written into the genetic code of American history as its manifest destiny.”[39] In other words, the progress from the civil rights movement was not destined or ordained by the American nation. Those gains were not inevitable. Rather, claims Marsh, the “beloved community depends on a theological, one might say ecclesiological, event of the cross. In other words, the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind radiated out from the fellowship of the faithful.”[40] Those historic achievements of the civil rights movement radiated from the community of faith into the wider society. That is because the cause of the movement was, in fact, deeply moral and theological and not just political. Marsh says, “If ‘segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we all have in Jesus Christ,’ as King said, then reconciliation demonstrates to the world the truth that ‘in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile (Negro nor white) and that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.’”[41]

King was, in fact, making a democratic argument that was based in the theological meaning of Galatians 3:28, which we have been discussing. And King believed that the christological facts of what occurred at the cross had now created new social space in American society. Marsh concludes with how Dr. King’s theology changed sociology:

Thus, the beloved community is the new social space of reconciliation introduced into history by the Church, empowered by the “triumph and beat of the drums of Easter.” . . . The beloved community is established by the “great event on Calvary” . . . “the great event that stands at the center of our faith which reveals to us that God is on the side of truth and love and justice,” as King explained in his Dexter sermon, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians.”[42]

Therefore, Martin Luther King Jr. is valuable to us not only as a civil rights leader and a Christian minister but also as a prophet for what we are visioning as the common good. He was both a theoretician and a practitioner of how we are supposed to relate to one another in a society. What are the obligations we owe each other? How are things supposed to work, and why? Why can’t we just live as individuals, and why are we so caught up in these nets of social relationships? In one of King’s most profound reflections about our personal and social relationships, and about the basis for them, he tells us about the “structure of reality”:

All I’m saying is simply this; that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.[43]

The Children of God

My own pastor, Dr. Jeffrey Haggray of First Baptist Church in Washington, DC, speaks more and more about “the beloved community.” The inspiration for him comes from the apostolic expression of that kind of community in Acts 2:42–47 and from the visions in the book of Revelation of that diverse community’s worship, which we have already discussed. But the heart of it for Jeff Haggray is found in the fourth chapter of John’s first epistle, which describes how “perfect love casts out fear.”

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (1 John 4:16–21)

This is a demanding concept of love—that those who say they love God but do not love their brothers and sisters are “liars.” We can’t see God, but we say we love him; yet we can see our brothers and sisters and don’t love them! This is the Bible’s “fullest teaching on love,” says Rev. Haggray, and that love is at the heart of the beloved community. John’s epistle answers all the arguments about who we are supposed to love—it is all of God’s children and not just those who are baptized into our faith community.

All people are God’s children. Whatever race, tribe, culture, class, nation, gender, or sexual orientation we are from or identify with, we are all God’s children. All people are created in the image of God; all people are part of the family of God. There are no “outsiders” to the kingdom of God because all are welcome. And the believing community is supposed to live that out and teach that truth to the rest of the world. The faith community is to extend hospitality and welcome to the stranger and the outsider as a testimony to them that they are part of God’s family. These are theological commitments that, as in the case of King and the civil rights movement, can have social and political consequences.

Pastor Haggray takes what he calls “prayer walks” around Washington, DC, and has become especially conscious of the changing demographics of our nation’s capital. He passionately describes what he has seen on those long walks and how the city is such a diverse place of cultures, tribes, and nations. And the human pictures of that community have given him a vision for the mission of our church—to be a place where all the tribes are welcomed into a beloved community that wants to follow Jesus. The parish around our church evidences that international community, thriving along Massachusetts Avenue and Embassy Row, Dupont Circle, 16th Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Connecticut Avenue, all with diverse cultures on display. And as Jeff watches all those people, he is imagining what it would take for us to welcome them and how our church could be transformed to be that welcoming place.

We have already discussed that famous text from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” That’s a very familiar passage for evangelical Christians. But the next verse, verse 17, says, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Somehow the churches have focused more on the condemnation than the love. And our condemnation of others is usually manifest in a return to our tribal identities.

“Who is this Jesus?” a new world wants to know. “What is this gospel?” and “What does it mean for me?” the people from many tribes are asking. In answer, Jeff Haggray says we have to “peel back as many layers of ‘cultural religion’ or ‘cultural Christianity’ as possible, including traditions and cultural influences that conceal the basic claims of our faith; for a complex world will not be persuaded to follow Jesus by a culturally bound message that is shrouded in parochial influences and preferences.”[44]

Paul says in his Epistle to the Romans that our cultural conformity is an obstacle to our true worship of God:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:1–2 NIV)

There is a clear and negative connection between worship and cultural conformity. Not conforming to the “pattern of this world” is related to our “true and proper worship.” This text jumped out at us as young seminarians nearly four decades ago as we viewed what we called “the American captivity of the churches.” Christians are often drawn to their natural groups and their cultural preferences, and they “condemn” those who don’t fit those preferences and even discriminate against other tribes who are not their own—as white Christians did to their black fellow Christians. J. B. Phillips has my favorite paraphrase of that text: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.”[45] And that is always the danger—staying inside our tribe and defining that as true worship while relegating all others to the status of outsiders. As we have seen, the biblical narrative strongly advances a gospel that breaks down our human barriers and especially welcomes the outsider, who could, if allowed, be a messenger of salvation for us.

And the way we express that faith is through our life together as a beloved community in the world—by the ways we live together, treat each other, worship together, pray together, serve one another, and serve our community to embody and model God’s love for the whole world.

What My Mom Taught Me

My mother used to give us kids two instructions: first, if there is a kid on the playground that nobody else is playing with—you play with that kid. And second, if there is a bully picking on other kids—you be the one to stand up to him or her. Those two principles have served me well. And I can almost hear my mother’s voice sometimes.

On one occasion, I wore purple while speaking at an evangelical Christian college, and I was pleased to see people passing out purple ribbons just before chapel and announcing why. We were joining others across the country who believed that bullying should never be tolerated at any time, at any place, or for any reason. The purple was to commemorate “Spirit Day,” in memory of young people who had taken their own lives as a result of harassment and bullying inflicted on them because of their sexuality. We all wore purple because we were followers of Christ.

A bully is a person who habitually intimidates, harasses, or commits violence against those who are smaller, weaker, or more vulnerable because of their “outsider” status. A bully stands in opposition to all of what Christ taught and lived. This sort of harassment is indefensible. And the stories of young kids being so bullied that they take their own lives have been heartbreaking to hear.

That bullies target gay and lesbian people should mean that Christians give extra attention to protecting and standing up for them. That any community or group of people is regularly the target of harassment and hate means Christians should be on the front line of defense against any who would attack.

But many bullies don’t know they are bullies. A bully might think that his or her words don’t matter that much or affect others that greatly. A bully might think that he or she is being funny or just kidding around. A bully might think that he or she is just saying what everyone is thinking.

There is disagreement within the Christian community when it comes to issues of human sexuality. And there will be theological differences and biblical work going on for some time around issues like gay marriage. Probably, people who are young now will find the way forward because their generation has made this an issue through the relationships they have with people who are gay. They believe in equal protection under the law for everybody. And they believe that all God’s children should be welcomed with the gifts, talents, ministries, and relationships they bring that have authenticity and integrity. I agree with them. But even before we find all our answers, there should be a united front against all who would disrespect, disparage, or denigrate anyone created in the image of God.

Here is what I have learned about “outsiders.” My tribe taught me to be afraid of them and to stay away from them because they were dangerous. But I didn’t. So I broke the rules by going to where they were. I have often said that I’ve learned the most about this world from being in places where I wasn’t supposed to be. The outsiders have taught me more about the real world than the insiders ever have. And the outsiders were a vehicle for my learning the true meaning of the gospel. I think that’s why God is always telling his people to welcome the strangers, the foreigners, the poor—the outsiders.

For many young believers today that means welcoming undocumented workers and fixing a broken immigration system. It means collaborating with young Muslims to build better communities and a cooperative future. It means trying to free those being trafficked or exploited. It means making the poor, more than the rich, the measure of their vocational choices. And it means treating gay and lesbian friends as their brothers and sisters. It means always listening to the outsiders.

The evangelical college students that day joined in prayer for the family and friends of every young person who had taken his or her own life because of bullying. They wanted to send a message of hope to any person who has been teased, harassed, or bullied by another because of his or her sexual orientation. And even if they were not clear about their own views of homosexuality or gay marriage, they were standing in the way between bullies and their victims.

At an evangelical Christian college in the Midwest, there was a lot of purple. And the airline security official who checked my boarding pass before my flight home saw my purple ribbon and said, “I see you’re wearing purple today; that’s a good thing.”

Days later I was taking my boys to school and raised the issue of bullying and gay teen suicides to see what they had heard about it. My twelve-year-old, Luke, of course knew all about it, while seven-year-old Jack hadn’t heard yet. But Jack spoke of a boy on the playground of his school who was sometimes a bully to others. Before I could say a word, Luke said to his little brother, “Now Jack, you need to talk to him. He will respect and listen to you because you are an athlete, a good student, and very popular. Kids who are strong need to be the ones who stand up for those who get bullied. Jack, part of our job is to make sure nobody gets bullied at our schools. Understand?” Jack said, “Yes,” and I could just feel his grandmother smiling. It will be commitments like Luke’s and Jack’s that help create a beloved community and make a way for the common good.

Epilogue

Ten Personal Decisions for the Common Good

The common good and the quality of our life together will finally be determined by the personal decisions we all make. The “commons”—those places, as we noted earlier, where we come together as neighbors and citizens to share public space—will never be better than the quality of human life, or the human flourishing, in our own lives and households.

Here are ten personal decisions you can make to help foster the common good.

1. If you are a father or a mother, make your children the most important priority in your life and build your other commitments around them. If you are not a parent, look for children who could benefit from your investment in their lives.

2. If you are married, be faithful to your spouse. Demonstrate your commitment with both your fidelity and your love. If you are single, measure your relationships by their integrity, not their usefulness.

3. If you are a person of faith, focus not just on what you believe but on how you act on those beliefs. If you love God, ask God how to love your neighbor.

4. Take the place you live seriously. Make the context of your life and work the parish that you take responsibility for.

5. Seek to develop a vocation and not just a career. Discern your gifts as a child of God, not just your talents, and listen for your calling rather than just looking for opportunities. Remember that your personal good always relates to the common good.

6. Make choices by distinguishing between wants and needs. Choose what is enough, rather than what is possible to get. Replace appetites with values, teach your children the same, and model those values for all who are in your life.

7. Look at the business, company, or organization where you work from an ethical perspective. Ask what its vocation is, too. Challenge whatever is dishonest or exploitative and help your place of work do well by doing good.

8. Ask yourself what in the world today most breaks your heart and offends your sense of justice. Decide to help change that and join with others who are committed to transforming that injustice.

9. Get to know who your political representatives are at both the local and national level. Study their policy decisions and examine their moral compass and public leadership. Make your public convictions and commitments known to them and choose to hold them accountable.

10. Since the difference between events and movements is sacrifice, which is also the true meaning of religion and what makes for social change, ask yourself what is important enough to give your life to and for.

Finding the integral relationship between your own personal good and the common good is your best contribution to our future. And it is the best hope we have for a better life together.

Notes

[[1]]. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (speech, Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968), http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm.

[[2]]. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Only Road to Freedom,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 58.

[[3]]. John Lewis, “We Haven’t Built the Beloved Community,” GRITtv with Laura Flanders, October 8, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsTE8rtC1Gc.

[[4]]. See Gen. 4:9.

[[5]]. Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 355.

[[6]]. Ibid.

[[7]]. Greg W. Forbes, The God of Old: The Role of the Lukan Parables in the Purpose of Luke’s Gospel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 63.

[[8]]. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 358.

[[9]]. J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108, summarized at http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/darley_samarit.html.

[[10]]. http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/darley_samarit.html.

[[11]]. Ibid.

[[12]]. Ibid.

[[13]]. Luke 10:37.

[[14]]. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 345.

[[15]]. Sharon Ringe, Luke (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 160.

[[16]]. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 348, 352.

[[17]]. Rod Norland and Alan Cowell, “Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria Shelling,” New York Times, February 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/middleeast/marie-colvin-and-remi-ochlik-journalists-killed-in-syria.html?pagewanted=all.

[[18]]. See http://www.notforsalecampaign.org.

[[19]]. “In China, Human Costs Are Built into an iPad,” New York Times, January 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=all.

[[20]]. “Human Rights and the Supply Chain,” Nokia website, http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/people-and-planet/impact/supply-chain/human-rights-and-the-supply-chain.

[[21]]. Umair Haque, Betterness (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), Kindle edition, locations 689–90.

[[22]]. “Responsibility at Nike, Inc.,” http://nikeinc.com/pages/responsibility.

[[23]]. BBC News, “Tracing the Bitter Truth of Chocolate and Child Labour,” March 24, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_8583000/8583499.stm.

[[24]]. World Economic Forum and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Sustainability for Tomorrow’s Consumer: The Business Case for Sustainability (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2009), 8, http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-Global/Local%20Assets/Documents/Bus-Sustainability-print_OK.pdf.

[[25]]. Public Religion Research Institute, Old Alignments, Emerging Fault Lines: Religion in the 2010 Election and Beyond (Washington, DC: Public Religion Research Institute), 19, http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/2010-Post-election-American-Values-Survey-Report.pdf.

[[26]]. Cal Thomas, “Of Course America Is Exceptional,” Washington Post, November 29, 2010, http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/cal_thomas/2010/11/of_course_america_is_exceptional.html.

[[27]]. Michael Kinsley, “U.S. Is Not Greatest Country Ever,” Politico, November 2, 2010, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44500.html.

[[28]]. Brian McLaren, “American ‘Exceptionalism’ Can Degenerate into Superiority,” God’s Politics (blog), December 3, 2010, http://sojo.net/blogs/2010/12/03/american-exceptionalism-can-degenerate-superiority.

[[29]]. Katharine Lee Bates, “America the Beautiful,” originally published as “Pikes Peak” (1895).

[[30]]. Michael Eric Dyson, “A ‘True Revolution of Values,’” excerpt from Pride (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Beliefnet, January 2006, http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2006/01/A-True-Revolution-Of-Values.aspx.

[[31]]. N. T. Wright, “God Calls Nations to Special Roles,” Washington Post, November 30, 2010, http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/nicholas_t_wright/2010/11/god_calls_nations_to_special_roles.html.

[[32]]. Brian McLaren, “America the Exceptional,” Sojourners, January 2012, http://sojo.net/magazine/2012/01/america-exceptional.

[[33]]. Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp Jr., “Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community,” Religion Online (originally published in The Christian Century [April 3, 1974]: 361–63), http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1603.

[[34]]. Ibid.

[[35]]. Ibid.

[[36]]. Martin Luther King Jr., “Christmas Sermon on Peace” (Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, December 24, 1967), http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/christmas-sermon.

[[37]]. Smith and Zepp, “Martin Luther King’s Vision.”

[[38]]. Martin Luther King Jr., in The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1962.

[[39]]. Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 50.

[[40]]. Ibid.

[[41]]. Ibid.

[[42]]. Ibid.

[[43]]. Martin Luther King Jr., “social justice” speech (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, December 18, 1963), http://www.wmich.edu/library/archives/mlk/transcription.html.

[[44]]. Jeffrey Haggray, “Our Mission, Our Message” (sermon, First Baptist Church, Washington, DC, March 18, 2012), http://www.firstbaptistdc.org/multimedia/listen-to-weekly-sermons.

[[45]]. Rom. 12:2 (Phillips New Testament in Modern English).

Jim Wallis is president and CEO of Sojourners and editor in chief of Sojourners magazine. He is a best-selling author, public theologian, national preacher, social activist, and international commentator on ethics and public life. Wallis has written ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It and The Great Awakening, and is a frequent speaker in the United States and abroad. He has written for major newspapers and appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, on shows such as Meet the Press, Morning Joe, Hardball, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The O’Reilly Factor, and on NPR. He also teaches at Georgetown University and has taught at Harvard University.

www.ongodsside.com