Papers of a Perverse Patriot (4)

Perverse Patriotism is the unique and exclusive loyalty (what we call “faith”) to apocalyptic Jesus that serves him in a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement   

(a.k.a. in polite society as “church”)

A Perverse Patriot Old Testament Text

Jeremiah 29:4-7

^4 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ⁵ Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ⁶ Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. ⁷ But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

In this important text God articulates the dialectical resident aliens/alien residents viewpoint we met in the last post. He addresses the people as “exiles” (resident aliens) but tells them, “Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare” (alien residents). There’s been debate recently about whether exile or diaspora is the best model for church life in post-Christian America. I think that’s a false dilemma. It’s not an either-or but a both-and as we see in the text above from Jeremiah.

Exile/diaspora, resident aliens/alien residents, these are ways of expressing the complex nature of our existence and vocation. In Christ we are both exiles – resident aliens (1 Pet.1:17) those made to live in a foreign land – and those dispersed, alien residents – sent to other lands to live as their new home. Exiles hope for a return to their homeland. The dispersed make the land they settle in their new home.

-We are exiles, God’s people hoping, longing, anticipating, “standing on tiptoes” (Rom.8), to glimpse and enter our true home.

-We are the dispersed, God’s people living throughout the world in various places as their surrogate home (book of Acts).

Exiles are subversives; the dispersed are counter-revolutionaries.

In the first post in this series I described God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement as

-kenotic: pouring our selves out for others, especially those denied recognition, voice, or agency in their lives. This is a subversive practice enacting the solidarity and suffering noted in our last post.

-anarchic: having no agenda to propose or impose on others. Rather it “helps and serves” neighbors and friends by innovating with them fresh solution to their local problems. Again we see the solidarity and suffering which almost inevitably marks such efforts. Such is our sainthood embedded in our world.

-eccentric:   it lives de-centered from itself in an eschatological center that is the future of humanity and the world as God’s new creation dawning among us in Christ and growing in small, unobtrusive, and often unrecognized ways to its (surprising) fullness when Christ returns.

Paul captures this both/and quality of the church as resident aliens/alien residents in 1 Corinthians 7:29-31:

^“I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”

We marry, mourn, rejoice, buy, and deal with the world. But as those whose ultimate hope lies somewhere else. We “seek the welfare” of the place we live but not in such a way that we derive our identity and vocation from it. We are perverse Patriots in those places. Those places are our home-away-from-home or, better, our home-on-the-way-to-becoming-our-true-home. We live in them as those who already experience in some measure that home-life-to-come. We love and serve them out of loyalty to that home-to-come which is, paradoxically, the home-to-come of those  living fully enmeshed and invested in this home that, as Paul puts it, “is passing away.” Thus we cannot share their ultimate commitment to and passion for it and that makes us “perverse” in our commitment to and passion for it. 

Because there is continuity between these two homes, it is after all the same world and bodily life we will have then as now; but different, better, more real (C. S. Lewis), so much so that it will seem completely different but is in fact the fulfillment of the life we have here, only as it was always meant to be.

We can never, then, turn our backs on the forms and fashions of life in this world and act as if they don’t matter to us or those around us. In their welfare we find our own. But we cannot invest so fully in these forms and fashions of life that we will bless them as God-ordained or take the lives of those who live otherwise or cling to our own life in them without reserve.

This is the complicated, messy, ever-changing dilemma we face as those living out the script of the “City of God” amid the “City of Man” (sic) as St. Augustine famously styled it. It what I am calling “perverse Patriotism.”