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2008-03-04 issue:

A God on the move

How do you maintain a pilgrim identity when you’ve settled down?

by Dennis Byler

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The story that unfolds in the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) stands as a warning to all generations of those who worship the God of the Bible. That story goes something like this:
God calls forth an enslaved people that God liberates from oppression and leads out into the desert. The desert is an uncomfortable place, a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else, to a promised land, a land of comfort and sustainable life, where crops can grow and families can prosper. Yet in the desert that people experience God in searing proximity. A holy presence that lashes out in fury at unholiness. At the same time there is a comforting and protecting presence, a pillar of warming fire by night, a cooling shadow of cloud by day. In the desert mountains, God speaks words of covenant and commandment suitable for all times and places, for those who are willing to be a pilgrim people of God. In the desert, nobody cares about the land. The land is somewhere you happen to be today. It is beautiful and changing. With every step, new features come into sight, while others disappear. But it is not something to be possessed or held on to, certainly not something to fight for.

Then God’s people move on to the promised land, and everything changes. Now they have a stake in the land, this land of their permanent dwelling, this land of prosperity, where they build houses of stone for their children and their children’s children. This land is desirable and necessary and good to fight for. In these houses of stone they have invested their future and the future of their descendants, and from them they will not be moved.

Yet this land of permanent settlement becomes a land of entrapment by other gods. The God they covenanted with in the desert is still their God, but prosperity and settling down has its own rules, its own commandments. Inevitably, it also has its own, different gods. So they compromise. They worship the one and only God yet at the same time look admiringly at golden calves and beautifully carved idols, which look so harmless, so appealingly appropriate for a settled-down people.

Eventually the haphazard community of diffuse leadership, where everything must be hashed out among tribal chiefs, who then must get consensus from the heads of households—all the while needing to heed inconvenient words of truth from charismatic prophets and judges—becomes too difficult to sustain. So they revert to monarchy. The monarchy means military recruitment and other forms of enslavement. A king of Israel will soon marry into the family of Pharaoh, that same line of tyrants they thought they were rid of, back at the Red Sea. But the monarchy also means they get to hold on to the land and pass it on to their children. At first, it even means they can prosper at the expense of foreigners they conquer through continual wars of expansion.

Yet in an only-too-short time—as history goes—the whole scheme came tumbling down in a heap of ruins. To get a sense of the time involved, Anabaptists/Mennonites have already been around about as long as the “eternal” dynasty of King David lasted, before it disappeared into the landfill of human history.

Five times that long, 2,500 years, have since passed, and all this time this people have had to deal with being a pilgrim people with no permanent home. I understand that even now there are more Jews living in New York City than in Israel. Essentially, this people have had to trade in the promise of a land of permanence for the God of Pilgrimage, the God of a people with no permanent dwelling.

Once again, this is uncomfortable living: Queen Isabel of Spain committed horrible genocidal crimes against an ancient and proud Spanish Jewry in the 15th century. In the cold and distant land of Russia, pogroms broke out with distressing regularity. In central Europe, a ruler arose (with the enthusiastic votes, among others, of many German Mennonites) who would eventually hatch a program to exterminate Jews. The irony, in Spain, Russia, Germany and so many other places, is that they thought they could follow their God on the move, and at the same time embrace an identity as Spaniards, Russians or Germans.

But the Hebrew Bible is also our Christian Old Testament, an essential part of our Bible. And it is vital we recognize the tradeoff it is a clear witness to. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t settle down on the land and at the same time follow a God who is on the move. You can’t maintain a pilgrim identity and at the same time identify as Spaniards, Russians, Germans or Americans.

My Swiss ancestors became acutely aware of this and left the beautiful mountains of their homeland for a new, wild land in America. My ancestors on my mother’s side became aware of this again in the 18th century, when they moved from Pennsylvania to Ontario because Revolutionary War fever threatened to eat away at their identity as a people loyal only to God, with no permanent dwelling this side of heaven. The story of my family is typical of many Mennonites and Amish. Other Mennonites in America have perhaps even more dramatic—and often more recent—stories of migration and immigration for a variety of reasons. Some of our sisters and brothers in our fellowship in America were themselves born elsewhere and have experienced traumatic migration in their own lifetime.

Eventually the Bylers and Stoltzfusses (my father’s family) and Hallmans and Clemenses (my mother’s family) settled down in the United States and Canada.

I have had the remarkably unusual privilege of living for many years in three countries (Argentina, Uruguay and the United States) while growing into young adulthood. And I have lived the second half of my life in Spain. I have passports from three countries. I understand it is easier for me to embrace a pilgrim identity than it is for other Christians who live out their lives in a single homeland. But the temptation to settle down still pulls heavily on me. My grandkids are Spaniards, and I want to grow old here in Spain and have them at my side when it’s my time to leave this life. Yet it is my earnest hope that they never cave in to the pressures to fight to defend Spain, whatever turmoil and upheavals the future brings.

I hope I get the chance to pass on to them the heritage of being a pilgrim people, with no permanent home this side of heaven. I hope God gives me the grace to communicate to them the notion that no land is worth fighting for. I hope I can pass on the divine insight that the shiny golden calves and beautifully carved idols, though seemingly harmless, are an enticement and entrapment that bring no end of grief, that it is better to be a persecuted pilgrim minority on the move than to prosper and grow self-indulgent in a land you would be willing to die and kill for.

Dennis Byler works with Anabaptist churches in Burgos, Spain, and is supported by Mennonite Mission Network.

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