No Little Places
To understand our lives and ministries in a non-Gnostic way demands that we have an understanding of and commitment to a theology of place and a theology of glory. A theology of place commits us to understanding that God is a God who has interest in and works through the places where we find ourselves. There is a necessary corollary to omnipresence, and that is that we cannot not be in God’s presence! Wherever I find myself, through a sense of God’s leading, that is the place where God was before I arrived and where God is with me. Francis Schaeffer said it best some years ago in a book title: No Little People – No Little Places. If God is present and if God is at work in his world, then there is no such thing as a lesser place or an inferior position. Such concepts are, of necessity, removed from our sphere of thinking.
Unfortunately, evangelical Christianity has often adhered instead to a theology of economy, especially in the West. We have bought into the declarations that bigger is better, more well-known is better than less-known, and that to succeed we must climb the ladder and never remain where one is or step down. Unfortunately, this keeps people out of the will of God on many occasions. The Lord Jesus Christ, however, indicated otherwise and clearly stated this in the words, “Whoever would be greatest among you must become the servant of others….” (Mark 10:44). And though not universally practiced, it is the emphasis Jesus himself puts on both greatness and servanthood. The idea that God is at work wherever God places me, trumps any thought I might have of somewhere else being a better place for me (in secular terms we have used “the grass is always greener on the other side” metaphor). Certainly a theology of place calls me to make the place God calls me, necessarily the place of best, fullest, richest, and most productive ministry I can expect to have. To allow the actual location, size, reputation, or fame of a particular ministry to determine its value in God’s dispensation is, by a theology of place, rendered non sequitur.
A theology of glory is closely knitted to this understanding as well. Paul in I Corinthians 10:31 writes, “On this basis, whether you eat or drink or anything else you do, do it all to God’s glory.” So I not only have the confidence of my place being the place God wants me, but that the purpose God has for me in that place is that he receive all the glory for my being there. So what I am doing is theologically defined and why I am doing it is theologically confirming. The simple is the great – the great is also the great. Each is as God would have it be. The curate, though administratively subordinate to the rector, is not theologically diminished by being a curate! A rector of a large parish does not overshadow the rector of a smaller parish simply because of the size of the place. Ministry in a big city is not “more” ministry than ministry in a small town. The list could continue ad infinitum. The point is Scripturally made whether we buy it or not.
Some might say they are “sacrificing” something to do the work of God. However, this could be to miss the focus of doing the will of God. The person who gives up the lesser to discover the greater has not sacrificed – she or he has done what God desires! We often chuckle at the story of the Christian preacher who humbly informed her congregation of the publication of her new book, Humility and How I Attained It. There is a certain oxymoronic reality to the title and a deep lesson that some things thought attained are actually missed altogether. Such is true of the concept of “sacrifice.” Just when we think we have sacrificed, we are confronted by those who have really sacrificed – possibly given all – and do not know it or recognize it. Instead of seeing sacrifice, they see the reality of a grace-empowered life in Christ, doing what Christ has called them to do. So the reality of sacrifice looms large, often at the precise point where we have looked at “the things of earth” rather than at the call of Christ. This is not to say that God does not call us to sacrifice...he does. God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. In obedience, Abraham made his way up the mountain saying, “God will provide” (Genesis 22). And the words of the Lord through Samuel are, “To obey is better than sacrifice” (I Samuel 15:22). God calls it sacrifice; we, on the other hand, call it obedience. It is all in the focus – a matter of perspective.
Christian history is littered with the unknowns who did the foundational work behind the scenes, unsung, so that those later, who would become “famous” in the work of Christ, might build on their foundations. Sacrificial living is a virtue we must never see in ourselves, for upon its recognition, we are in danger of becoming less than sacrificial. Just as we never attain humility if we think we have, so with the sacrificial living we are called to.
Often it is heard in somber (sometimes even condescending) tones, that so-and-so has given up so much to do _________, and then we fill in the blank with the ministry they are called to do. Unfortunate, at best, is this evaluation.
Tony Campolo relates a story that reflects the epitome of the lesson we must learn. He writes:
“My wife and I were returning from New Zealand after a preaching mission, and we stopped in Honolulu to take a break from the long trip. We got off the plane with plans to catch another one on to Los Angeles some five hours later. In the meantime, we headed into the city and took a walk on Waikiki Beach. As we strolled along, we came upon a very strange looking man standing with a Bible in one hand and waving his finger at every passerby with the other. He was barefoot and wearing a dirty Tshirt and tattered trousers. To everyone who passed he pronounced the judgment of God on those who would not accept Christ.
“As we passed him I said to my wife, ‘It’s guys like that who are an embarrassment to the Kingdom of God. People look at weirdos like that and get turned off to the gospel. Guys like that leave me a bit disgusted.’
“An hour or so later we were heading back to catch the bus to the airport, and we came upon the same man. To my surprise, there were two very normal-looking, properly dressed men standing with him. He had his arms around their shoulders, and as I passed I could hear that they were saying a prayer, surrendering their lives to Christ. My wife looked at me and simply said, ‘Well? How many people did you lead to Jesus today?’” (From Let Me Tell You a Story: Life Lessons from Unexpected Places and Unlikely People.)
I am convinced no one could tell that “weirdo” that he was not in God’s place, doing God’s will! To dress him up and put him in a “respectable” parish would probably kill his witness altogether!
The “no little people – no little places” of Francis Schaeffer is as pertinent now as when he wrote it and when Jesus taught it. To do the will of the Father is ultimate. And lest this be pious platitude, we are called to put feet to doing God’s will. Both of us love New York, the State and the City. Do we miss them? Yes. Would we go back if God called? Yes. But God hasn’t called us now to New York. God clearly called Trinity School for Ministry to be the pipeline of his call to us to live and minister in Ambridge. LaVonne misses her active academic librarian position and I miss the multi-racial and multi-ethnic makeup of the precious faculty and student body at Nyack. Have we sacrificed those things to be in Ambridge? To use the Apostle Paul’s emphatic negative: “Let it never be!” Absolutely not – we have left them behind as a part of our former ministry and experience. Of course we would like to use the term sacrifice, but it may just not be the best way to describe what we theologically mean. The fascination of doing what God wants sets aside and neutralizes any lustful longing to return (the struggle notwithstanding). Just as the person is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to keep that which he cannot lose, so too, we move from that which we are no longer called to serve to serve that which we can neither deny nor leave. When God signifies the deed for the place of ministry, any other place, of necessity, is a place of lesser or former ministry.
One of Jeff’s favorite authors is Rabbi Abraham Heschel. He writes in his book, I Asked for Wonder, concerning Israel (the application to the Christian is obvious): “Judaism is a theology of the common deed,…dealing not so much with the training for the exceptional as with the management of the trivial. The predominant feature in the Jewish pattern of life is unassuming, inconspicuous piety rather than extravagance, mortification, asceticism. Thus, the purpose seems to be to ennoble the common, to endow worldly things with hieratic beauty; to attune the comparative to the absolute, to associate the detail with the whole, to adapt our own being with its plurality, conflicts and contradictions, to the all-transcending unity, to the holy.”
To “ennoble the common”: such the eternal Christ did in the incarnation. Ours is to carry out his will, continuing that which he began and finished. There is so much that is common – all of it as a matter of fact – and all of it needs to be adapted (read: redeemed) to the holy. Ambridge is common. Even New York is common. God wants them both blazing with his glory.
The place to which God calls us – whether unknown or famous, little or big – is the holy place where God desires his will to be done and his glory to be cared for. If we leave all, give up all, simply to obey his good call (and what a privilege to obey!), can’t we expect to find him not only preparing the way but already there when we arrive?
The Rev. Dr. Jeff Mackey is Trinity’s Academic Dean; his wife, LaVonne, is Children’s and Reference Librarian at the Laughlin Memorial Public Library in Ambridge. They came to Trinity in July 2005 from Nyack, NY.
