Sunday, March 11, 2007
cities of refuge.
Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Tell the Israelites to
designate the cities of refuge, as I instructed you through Moses, so that
anyone who kills a person accidentally and unintentionally may flee there and
find protection from the avenger of blood. When he flees to one of these
cities, he is to stand in the entrance of the city gate and state his case
before the elders of that city. Then they are to admit him into their city
and give him a place to live with them. If the avenger of blood pursues
him, they must not surrender the one accused, because he killed his neighbour
unintentionally and without malice aforethought. He is to stay in the city
until he has stood trial before the assembly and until the death of the high
priest who is serving at that time. Then he may go back to his own home in
the town from which he fled.
Joshua 20:1-6
I woke up this morning and made myself a cup of strong milky tea and a bowl of cereal, hoping to retreat into my room for breakfast, to spend a little time with the Holy Spirit, to make a decision of solitude, even if it were only to be an hour. There is madness in stillness, though that’s where God says I’ll find him. Or is it where I’ll know him?
My expectations for time with God, and thus I am cutting into that time now by writing, are to be deeply moved by the Holy Spirit. I expect guidance from Him who lives inside me but also all around me. I expect at times to be brought to knees or tears or both. I expect vivid pictures to enter my mind and I would be open to God speaking as if over coffee. I expect my inside tsunamis to become glassy seas. I expect to be convicted like a dagger through my heart. If only the spiritual world would come and swallow me whole, then I would know my reality!
This morning I pulled an old liturgy leaflet out of my bible, and the page it was in lay open there on my duvet as I ate my cereal. And the caption of this passage in Joshua stuck its hand out of the pages and grabbed my eyeballs. Cities of Refuge. Before I read the passage I assumed what the cities must be. How kind of God to order cities for strangers, for asylum seekers, for those who have contagious diseases. I knew it!, I thought. I knew my God loves the widow and the orphan, the poor and the oppressed, the downtrodden and the marginalized. And I knew my God must also have this City of Refuge for me, when I’m feeling like those words above. My heart jumped at the idea of Cities of Refuge! I think I might have even in that moment created a ministry with the stolen name. Cities of Refuge, A Home away from Home.
Because the words in this book were inspired by the Holy Spirit, they have a way to cut through the grey matter of our beings. Even a silly two paragraphs in the Old Testament Joshua. As I read the passage I was proven very wrong. The cities of refuge are not for any of the groups that had originally come to mind. The cities of refuge are for the wrongly accused, for their protection and for the sake of justice. Why would this be so important to God? Why a whole other city, with gates and walls and elders and assemblies, and not just a room, or a day, or another law?
I think it’s because God is just and anything with a touch of injustice in it cannot be close to God. Some know more than others that these days it’s very trendy to talk about social justice and the poor and AIDS in darkest Africa. For the sake of our own social lives it’s good to know some stats to pass around at dinner parties and friends’ houses, to know to say that we love what Bono stands for and initiates, and we may even have wondered about the sincerity of our I’m-really-concerned faces. But I’m not entirely convinced that us knowing about injustice and shedding the unusual tear is in any way what the Church’s response to injustice should be.
It is the profile of the wrongly accused that I want to put the spotlight on today, inspired by my friend Joshua. Those people who have fallen into our locked stereotypes, those people who we have completely figured out—it seems that those are the people God wants to build a city for and around. (Different for all of us, but here’s a few to start us off: the mentally handicapped, the homeless, city people, country people, different denominations of Christianity, gay people, immigrants, hippies, the financially successful, Middle Easterners…)
God have mercy on them when we beat at the gate, demanding they be brought to us to be judged. Keep them un-surrendered and safe. Protect them from our easy judgements, from our loose tongues, from our suffocating boxes, from the way we love to assume we have all the perfect evidence to condemn for the sake of our comfort. God have mercy on them but also us, their avengers of blood. Because if we look to you to see how you would handle the world’s accused, I believe you’d build them a city to protect them from me.
Erin Seibel
10 March 2007
