Brian Hamilton

Christians at the United Nations, with the Grain of the Universe

Printed in The Swinging Bridge on 28 October 2005.

“Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” Paul says, “but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” That is, the quests of Jews or Greeks and the quest of Christians are in some sense incommensurable—‘signs’ and ‘wisdom’ in Jewish or Greek imagination cannot finally describe Christ crucified, whom Paul calls “the wisdom of God.” Better said, perhaps: the good news of the resurrection confounds our quests and redefines our directions in a way that doesn’t in the first instance ‘make sense’ to other people living out other stories.

That the good news doesn’t make sense, however, implies for Paul not silence or compromise but proclamation. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” God’s foolishness is capable of astonishing and overwhelming—even saving—human wisdom. The church, then, can relinquish the urge to wrest control of history from ‘the wise,’ because the resurrection proves to us (and this is precisely the foolish part) that the wise don’t actually have control. Instead, the church must proclaim who really rules the world, and proclaim what that rule looks like in word and practice. In another’s words, the resurrection means that it is Christ on the cross who definitively reveals the true grain of the universe—this is the foolish good news that Christians preach.

Six Messiah students spent fall break (20-23 October) in New York City, across the street from the enormous headquarters of the United Nations, discussing policy, reform, and in short the future relevance of the United Nations to the violence and division that still threatens to envelope our world. We sat amidst other Christians, in the workplace of the Mennonite Central Committee’s liaison to the United Nations: a group committed to engaging the U.N. in conversation from the distinct perspective of the a church that refuses to participate in violence. It seems odd to hear of Christians (as Christians) sitting under the shadow of a primary world power, especially given Paul’s diatribe about the ‘foolishness’ of Christian conviction, but the MCC-UN office stands in the good company of other Quaker, Methodist, and Lutheran liaisons, to name just a few.

It does seem odd, at first, that a people well aware of their foolishness—even calling attention to it by maintaining the name church—would dare venture before the United Nations. But these Christians are engaging in exactly the sort of proclamation that Paul encouraged. These Christians embrace an alternative story (one of cross and resurrection rather than progress toward universal human rights) which, rather than hindering their work, makes it possible to astonish and overwhelm the U.N.‘s imagination with new possibilities. Most importantly, perhaps, these Christians understand themselves as extensions of a much larger church politics that not only engages the U.N. but also feeds the hungry and preaches the gospel—the church communicates not only in words, but by our missional existence. Our churches do not approach the U.N. intending to enforce their own vision in U.N. decisions, because the U.N. does not actually have the power to change history. Christ crucified does, they insist, so the U.N. can only understand its purpose rightly by understanding its place within God’s new kingdom. These church liaisons, then, demonstrate profoundly that relinquishing the control of history to God does not entail social irresponsibility, but rather redefines our task as fundamentally one of witness, not of control.

We at Messiah College would do well, I suggest, to learn from these Christians at the United Nations that our primarily responsibility to the world takes the form of testimony to the grain of the universe revealed in Christ. Christian education, then, is not about creating leaders capable of navigating the wiles of power politics, but about training us into a powerless people capable of coherent witness to our crucified Lord. This way of being carries the potential to transform not only the world but each other, as we strive together to embody the new kingdom that Jesus inaugurated. The church, unlike the United Nations, does not mistake the wisdom of the cross for foolishness—“but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, [we proclaim] Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” May God grant us the grace to trust the foolish wisdom in the name of Christ our Lord.

26 October 2005 |
tags: Mennonite, Political Theology