2012-09-09 Journeying with Paul (Leslie Hawthorne Klingler).pdf

Journeying with Paul
Leslie Hawthorne Klingler
September 9, 2012
The story of Dan Terry, a Christian humanitarian worker in Afghanistan for nearly four decades, is told in
Making Friends among the Taliban, a forthcoming book by Jonathan Larson being published by Herald
Press. It includes the following account:
Anyone who has yet to ride the long-distance trucks and buses of Afghanistan cannot say
that he or she has experienced the country. The mountains readily humble vehicles built for
comfort—their rocky tracks tearing out all pretense and sophistication from cars and trucks not
engineered for such terrain. All that survive are frames of solid steel and diesel engines that snarl
at trouble. Should travelers retain any illusion of ease or comfort, it will vanish at the sight of
derelict Soviet-era tanks marking the way, their gun barrels pointing blankly at distant horizons.
For the passengers and cargo in the hands of intrepid Afghan drivers, each journey is a
wager from beginning to end. But such road conditions look positively pleasant when compared
to the odds of getting past the Kalashnikovs at roadblocks in times of civil war. In 1996, when the
Terry family set out by bus from Kabul in hopes of finding a home in Mazar-i-Sharif, they rode
straight into the teeth of just such odds.
For the move, Dan had reserved the entire rooftop luggage rack of a public bus for the
family’s household gear. Like some vision from the American Dust Bowl era, the bus lumbered
along, crowned by the skeletons of a previous life: desks, tables, chairs, wardrobes, and other
belongings lashed together helter-skelter. Wearing traditional attire, the Terry family had taken
their places on the bus with their Afghan neighbors, breathing private prayers for heaven’s mercy
along the way.
On the northward trek, the bus negotiated the warlord roadblocks one by one. At each
roadblock, gunmen swaggered onto the bus and barked commands, extorting what they could
from compliant passengers. Survival rules are simple: sit at the back with your head down, avoid
eye contact, and keep silent.
Few passengers were prepared, though, for the brutality that awaited them at one
roadblock. The driver’s assistant, obviously still an apprentice at this edgy business, somehow
attracted the ire of a gunman. Flaring words gave way to a beating with a rifle butt. As the
passengers shrank in fear from what must surely follow, Dan stood to his feet in the crowded bus

and began taking photographs. The gunman immediately stopped the beating as he and his
comrades fastened their attention on the impudent foreigner documenting their behavior. They
stormed back to Dan’s corner of the bus, shouting curses, and ripped the camera from his hands.
Feigning innocence, Dan apologized, assuring them that they were welcome to take the
offending roll of film to guarantee that they would not be incriminated. And then, ever so
naturally, he swung his arm firmly around the gunman’s bandolier and shoulder in a strong
embrace and said, “My brother, the camera is mine.” With that, he gently reached over and
retrieved it with a broad smile. The unnerved comrades-in-arms retreated, clutching the spent film,
and waved the bus with its odd passenger on its way.
Some of those who witnessed this encounter still cluck their tongues to think that a
foreigner could have been so naïve as to provoke such an incident. “He should have known that
his camera would rile the gunmen,” they say. But Dan was far too savvy to think that either he or
his camera would escape notice. Rather, in the heat of the violent encounter, he could not sit idly
as cruelty ran its grim course; he intentionally drew the attention of the bullies to himself and
away from their Afghan victim in the best way he knew how.
When I first read this story, I asked myself, “What was Dan thinking, putting himself and his family at
risk like that? At the same time I marveled, “How did he spontaneously act so much like Jesus?” As with
most of the stories in the book, I was both in awe of Dan’s actions and critical of them. Dan seemed to do
things more with his heart than with a mind logically weighing the consequences. His continual
embodiment of his convictions astonished and disarmed me—as it did even the most war-hardened
individuals.
As I got to know Dan Terry through the book, I grew increasingly impressed by him. Dan was a brother
in faith who lived daily his Christian freedom in a country and a world defined by divisions, conflict, and
self-protection. “The barbed wire,” writes Dan’s friend Michael Semple, “is a sign of our troubled times,
when people conclude that Dan’s ‘open door’ only invites trouble.” Michael asks, “is the era of men and
women like Dan, over?” Are the only doors left open the doors of the foolish and of those inviting
martyrdom?
In August 2010, Dan and nine other aid workers were attacked and killed in a remote valley during a
medical tour. Their deaths made world headlines. As I read the New York Times’s brief biographies of
these ten individuals, I sensed in each the power of the Holy Spirit and their dedication to living
according to God’s call of love, regardless of the consequences. I felt proud to be a fellow Christian.

But is Michael Semple right? Is the Christian life only for fools and those inviting martyrdom?
The answer to Michael’s question, perhaps, lies implicit in the life and writings of the apostle Paul. . . . .
another, we must acknowledge, whose life ended in violence.
Over the past months, we have visited many of the New Testament churches, following Paul’s letters and
footsteps in those first Christian communities. We have witnessed Paul’s burning sense of mission and his
deep love for his new brothers and sisters in Christ. We have watched him blaze the path of the gospel
through social, political, and physical boundaries. We have witnessed his sufferings and shared his joy.
What, then, can we take away from all this? What does Paul teach us about the Christian life? What does
he show us about how we should perceive the world and our participation in it?
While Pauline studies fill volumes and command lifetimes, perhaps we can spend a moment today
summarizing a few things we have learned from Paul on our summer journey. Let us focus in particular
on his physical, social, and spiritual “map”—How did he understand his landscape, his journey, and his
home? Let us consider how his perspectives might inform our own.
How did Paul perceive his landscape—his world? Like Dan Terry’s environment in Afghanistan, Paul’s
terrain was rough and hostile. As an ardent Christian, Paul was a persona non grata among his own
people. Facing such dangers, the typical person might build protective walls and try to survive inside
them as comfortably as possible. But people like Dan Terry, like the apostle Paul, know that following
Christ means that we can no longer confine ourselves to the expected and supposedly “safe” moral,
ethical, social, or even physical maps of our world. We are called to love, and love cannot be constrained.
“[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor.
13:7-8).
Life outside of Christ is a life navigating the world’s continual discrimination and competition, trying to
remain as motivated, comfortable, and accompanied as possible. Often, any good or expansion of
opportunity that we garner for ourselves involves harming others, or at least compromising their sense of
dignity or opportunity. Without the eyes of grace, we perceive our environment as a territory that never
expands, with limited resources that never renew—so life is always a game of getting as much as we can
for ourselves at the expense of others.

When we die to ourselves and rise in Christ, we lose our ability to follow the rules and boundaries of that
old life, because they are, in essence, the opposite of the principles of the kingdom of God, which are
reconciliation, unity, and ever expanding love.
In the words of Eugene Peterson, Paul tells the Galatians: “It is absolutely clear that God has called you to
a free life . . . use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows. For everything
we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's
an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be
annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?” (Galatians 5:13-15)
In the same passage, Paul reminds people that Christian freedom does not equate with lawlessness. It is,
rather, adherence to God’s love. And if we do not allow God to extract us from our old patterns of life and
bind us to God, we Christians become particularly pathetic and ugly. We become grave-tenders.
In his book, Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan provides a thought-provoking metaphor for Christians who
continue to live by the world’s map, or norms and standards. Speaking of a Christian gathering he
attended called Creation, he writes:
The fact that I did not hear a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or
overheard at Creation shouldn’t be read as a knock against the acts themselves, much less as
contempt for the underlying notion of Christians playing rock. These were not Christian bands,
you see; these were Christian-rock bands. The key to digging this scene lies in that one-syllable
distinction. Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off evangelical
Christians. It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it
operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach” people. As such,
it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability (the artists would say clarity), which in
turn means parasitism. Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—“if
you like Drakkar Noir, you’ll love Sexy Musk”? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every
successful secular group has its Christian off brand . . .So it’s possible—and indeed seems
likely—that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellenceproofed
itself.
While you may or may not agree with Sullivan’s conclusions about Christian rock, I do think his point
can be applied to Christians who try to live as the world lives while calling it Christian. We are not only

not supposed to live according to those old patterns, we are no good at it anymore. As I mentioned before,
a church that lives with the world’s values is not only sinning—it is one of the most pathetic gatherings of
human beings that exists.
Citizenship in our former lives, brothers and sisters, is closed to us. As Paul writes in Romans 2, “God is
kind, but he’s not soft. In kindness he takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life change.”
To the Romans (6), Paul says, “If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in
our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in
baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind; when we came up out of
the water, we entered into the new country of grace—a new life in a new land!”
The key quality of our new land is freedom in the Spirit that overcomes all boundaries with love. To the
Colossians, Paul writes, “Words like Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and irreligious, insider and
outsider, uncivilized and uncouth, slave and free, mean nothing. From now on everyone is defined by
Christ” (3:9-11).
The apostle Paul lived in full awareness of Jesus’s call to break down human divisions, as did Dan Terry
in Afghanistan.
Another person who knew that all human boundaries are in the end to be torn down by God’s love is
Mother Grace Tucker, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who recently passed away at the age of 93. A black woman
from a broken family, Grace founded a church, even when denominational rules prevented her from being
its pastor. She later started a nondenominational congregation with open doors too the city’s diverse and
roughened poor. "Her motto was that 'everybody is somebody,' " a friend said. “And she loved
everybody." Mother Grace’s map of faith had no barbed borders; she neither confined herself to the
world’s boundaries or constricted others to them, rather, she followed the guidance of the Spirit in her and
in her brothers and sisters. Her map guided her through remarkable life that touched tens of thousands.
Another key thing that the journeys and letters of the apostle Paul teach us it that only tents and caravans
belong in the terrain of faith in Christ. Faith is the hope of a fullness yet to come; it is recognizing that we
are not home yet, but that we will be there someday. While in our former lives we spent our days trying to
create permanency and security, in our new lives we acknowledge that every day is a journey.

As people on a journey, we cannot construct immovable fences, we cannot assume that the wells from
which we now drink or the earthly foundations upon which we now construct our lives are ours for longer
than the present time. We cannot amass unnecessary material wealth, for excess becomes a burden. We
cannot assume we always know where we are going, and what others think of us is going to change with
the nature of the territory we traverse.
The metaphor of the Christian life as a journey is one of the most apt and familiar metaphors of the
church. The Old Testament is the story of God moving God’s people through time and space, both
allowing and disregarding the boundaries, borders, and lines in the sand that they constantly draw. As
God’s people make their way through history, God continually urges them to a new and richer way of
living, where human divisions no longer hold ultimate sway over our hearts and minds.
By the time of Paul, the message is clear: “You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same
direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one Master, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of all, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).
Embracing our status as lifelong travelers means being willing to release all but God’s love. We must
loosen our grip on our earthly treasures, our loves, our control, and even many of our convictions and
beliefs. We let go; we move on, we follow Christ.
Accepting our status as travelers also means we move on from both our successes and our failures. For
example, the Holy Spirit required that Paul leave Ephesus forever so the local people could take full
responsibility for the church there. “And so this is goodbye,” Paul says to the elders of the church in
Ephesus, “Now it’s up to you. The Holy Spirit has put you in charge of these people” (Acts 20).
Paul was also asked to move on from failure. When he was in Jerusalem, God told him, “Hurry up! Get
out of here as quickly as you can. None of the Jews here in Jerusalem are going to accept what you say
about me” (Acts 22:18). Fully embracing our callings to travel with our Lord should make it easier when
God asks us to admit failure and move on.
Sometimes, it seems, God moves us from the comfort and stability of familiar land into the wilderness.
We ask, “God where am I? Where are you? Why am I here? Why does my life feel so barren, so empty?”

It is in those moments that God reminds us of our traveling companions, God’s people. We are not given
a permanent home here on earth, but we do have an itinerant home—the motley caravan of the church on
the way. In that caravan is where we belong: the church is our security; it is our home.
Paul constantly talks about his dependence on his brothers and sisters in Christ. Not only did his fellow
Christians offer spiritual sustenance, they also provided Paul with extremely practical help. They financed
his journeys, they fed him and provided him with lodging, and they freed him from prison more than
once—just to name a few occasions when they came in handy. Friends make all the difference.
When we embrace our identities as members of the rag-tag caravan of believers making our way by the
light of Christ, our wilderness becomes free and open space to praise our Lord. “We find ourselves
standing where we always hoped we might stand, “ writes Paul in Romans 5, “out in the wide open spaces
of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.”
So how do we navigate our way in our new lives of freedom in Christ? This is one of the most important
lessons from our summer travels with Paul. If we follow Paul’s example, we will stop obsessing about our
own journeys, about where we are, about how we are doing spiritually, and about where we will go next.
We will truly begin to travel our Lord’s way because we will understand that the whole Christian
endeavor is to simply live in resonant response to the active love of our Maker.
Paul tells the Romans, “God does not respond to what we do; we respond to what God does. Our lives get
in step with God and all others by letting him set the pace, not by proudly or anxiously trying to run the
parade” (Rom 3). Our life in the Spirit does not involve constantly redoubling our own efforts; rather, it is
simply embracing again and again what the Spirit is doing in us and in others. It is patient, responsive
living.
So how does this kind of life look from the outside?
It may look nomadic; but it is inextricably bound to the family of God moving ever homeward.
It may look like it disregards borders and boundaries; but ever heeds the limits of God’s will.
It may look foolish; but it recognizes that real foolishness is trying to stay at home in our sin.
It may appear to seek martyrdom, but it acknowledges that the only truly dangerous place is outside of the
will of God.

So come, let us celebrate our shared desire to follow Christ and to know the mind of the One who leads us.
Let us listen to our brother Paul, who urges us, “God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places
to go!” (Romans 8).
Let us pray together with the help of Thomas Merton and the apostle Paul:
Our Lord God, we have no idea where we are going. We do not see the road ahead of us. We cannot
know for certain where it will end. The fact that we think we are following your will does not mean that
we are actually doing so. But we believe that the desire to follow you does in fact help us to do so. And
we pray that we have that desire in every step that we take. We hope that we will never take a step
without that desire. And we know that if we do this, you will lead us by the right road, though we may
know nothing about it. Therefore, we will trust you always, though we may seem to be lost and in the
shadow of death. We will not fear, for you are ever with us, and you will never ever leave us to face our
perils alone, for
Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.