A Subversive Gospel

I believe that most of us, regularly, feel left out - misfits, we don't belong. I didn't learn the secret handshake or get the decoder ring that would make sense of this life. Others seem to be so confident, sure of themselves, "insiders" who know the ropes, old hands in a club from which we are excluded.

One of the ways we respond to this is to form our own club, "us four and no more," or join one that will have us. Here is one place where we are "in" and others are "out." The clubs can be formal or informal, in gatherings that are variously political, social, economic, cultural or religious. But the one thing they have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity, or self worth, is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those others out, so we can savor the sweetness of being insiders, is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

Nowhere is the price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the immense mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a "membership." But with God there are no outsiders.

Luke is a vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who were outsiders to the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (shepherds), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor, the infirm (lepers). He will not tolerate religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in (haven't we all?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.