A Call to Be Inclusive

A lot of introspection has gone into the achievements of the last six decades of Indian independence. Thinking has begun about the future of India. Former President Abdul Kalaam had challenged the country to first begin envisioning as a country by sharing publicly his 2020 vision. Now we have people beginning to talk of India in the next 60 years. This is a good question to begin thinking about, although it is possible that it is not very easy to envision so far into the future and the vision of 2020 is some thing that we can more easily grasp. In the last two decades or so, the economic landscape of the country has been so transformed that we are getting used to measuring success and progress in plain vanilla economic terms.

Economic growth and empowerment is important; but is that enough? I think some how that it is more important and vital that we grow and mature as a nation, as a country and become a more inclusive society in every way, which today we are not. Without that inclusiveness, our economic growth and financial growth will carry us nowhere as the vitals of the nation will keep getting eroded with money generated being used not to bring prosperity but to hire, train and deploy more troops and police, kill and maim more people, fill our prisons more and more and construct new ones and in the process perpetuate a cycle of increasing discontent. We must learn to break that deadly cycle.

We need to learn to be an inclusive people at two levels – economic and emotional and Christians need to be leading the way because in the Kingdom to come , all the Nations , Languages and cultures and customs purged of their fallen ness will pay homage to God in all their finery. Yet in India, all we have is a political integration which Nehru, Sardar Patel had some how hastily patched up but without the emotional and the economic buffering and the result is discontent practically every where in the country. We are proud of being the largest democracy in the world in the sense that we have elections every five years or sooner, but a good question to ask is if the common man thought that this was adequate enough or representative enough, then why would insurgency flourish in so many parts of the country? We have the right symbol in the shape of a reasonably fair electoral process, but without giving people a sense of belonging and emotional integration, we don’t quite have the substance of democracy.

But political integration alone is not enough. The kingdoms of this world, we are told, will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. Think of the way we view strangers in our midst. Are we not defensive about them and do we not work to protect ourselves from them? Our parent’s persistent counsel, never speak to strangers; to the policy of our police forces which urge us to report the presence of strangers. It may be a linguistic coincidence that stranger rhymes with danger, but our natural fear of the foreign and our social conditioning against those we don’t know, both tie them tightly together.

We all make judgments of strangers, and assess them according to their similarity to the norm. Do they match our expectations? Challenge our fears? Appear strange or startling or disquieting? What will they do to rock our comfortable world? It is hard to accept outsiders. After all, if they were one of us we would already know them. We’d see them at parties or attend the same concerts. We’d be able to fit them into the larger pattern of our society. This is how the world used to be. People lived in small towns or social circles, divided by class and ethnicity. Everyone had their place and was expected to stay there, moving within certain bounds. So you knew who was miserly, and who had failed 6th grade, and you heard the stories about your neighbor’s first wife. When push came to shove, everyone stuck together. You knew where you belonged. People are tribal creatures. We form relationships within circles of cultures that have expected behaviors and forms of communication. We learn how close to stand to each other when we talk, what kind of eye contact to make, the rules of hospitality when paying calls or celebrating a birth.

Having said all that, as Christians, we know where Jesus could usually be found: among the strangers most religious people considered unfit for their presence and deserving of exclusion from their company. He was constantly among those classes of people he taught us to care about: the tax collectors, like Matthew and Zacchaeus; the sinners, like the thieves on the cross; the women, like Martha and Mary; the children, like those he took up into his arms and blessed, over the protest of his disciples; the Gentiles, like the Syrophoenician woman who was willing to eat the crumbs that fell from Israel’s table; the poor, like the widow who gave her last mite; and the lame, the halt, the blind and the lepers, like the ten he healed and received thanks from only one.

But perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for a broad, open theology of God’s inclusive love is none other than the man who began his journey at the opposite end of the theological spectrum, the Apostle Paul. Paul was an expert in religious exclusivism and triumphalism. He was a Jew, a Pharisee in fact, an expert in keeping and interpreting the Law of Moses. He was so zealous in his faith that he attacked and hounded and persecuted the followers of Jesus. In fact, he was on his way to Damascus to root out Christians and have them imprisoned when he was knocked off his horse and blinded and turned around by God, a remarkable conversion if there ever was one. And then, the scholars tell us, he began a theological journey from narrow exclusivism to a broad, open, grace filled theology of the cross, which finally concluded, amazingly, that God’s purpose in Jesus Christ is as big as the world itself. God sent Jesus, not just to save a few fortunate ones who happened to be lucky enough to hear the news and believe it, but to heal and restore and redeem the whole creation.Paul began as a Pharisee — proud of his exclusive ethnic and religious identity, with an enormous wall of tradition and rules and laws and rituals to protect him from others — and by the time of his death he was saying and writing things like: “In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…. He is our peace … he has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” With every terrorist attack, walls and fences between people are rising and not breaking down in our country. And our work as a church, as a community of God’s people seems to be neatly cut out for the next six decades at least…..