[This is a message I gave at Salem Friends Meeting, Liberty, IN, April, 2008.]

On Friday my wife, Suann, and I drove our daughter back to Indianapolis for her last week of the school year. We've made numerous trips into Indy over the past year and each time presented its own challenges of navigation. Because of the construction going on until the end of 2007 we tried to avoid going straight into Indy on 70 and then from the south attempt to find our way north to the Butler University campus. Instead, we first tried to go from Post Rd. with an east-west approach on 38^th Street. That was complicated by the State Fair traffic, the myriad of intersections, and crazy drivers weaving in and out of traffic. We then decided just to go around Indy on 465 to the north and come at the city from the north taking exit five on route 5, which is Meridian, and that takes us right near Butler. Obviously, that's going the long way around. It's easy to do, but it makes a long trip even longer. If we go that far, we might as well just keep going to West Lafayette [inside joke about Purdue University]. We tried numerous times to find ways to attack or retreat from Indy on a southerly route. On one trip in I turned the wrong direction—I went south instead of north —after getting off 65 and it wasn't until we hit countryside and saw planes landing nearby that we realized we were in the wrong place. Other times we tried to leave Butler going to the south only to discover we were in a scary part of town and construction prevented us from getting on 70. I finally made progress when I figured out how to get from the Butler campus to 38^th Street, to Martin Luther King Drive, on to 65 south, and then 70 east. After several attempts to make the reverse trip, I finally accomplished it and knew where I was going. I commented to Suann, "It's taken us a whole year, but we've finally figured out how to get to and from Butler."

For many of us growing up in small towns or in the country, the big city can be a challenging world. Remember the first time you, who grew up here in Liberty, Indiana, visited the big city of Connersville, Oxford, Ohio, or even Richmond. During elementary school years, you probably went with your family or on a school trip to see Cincinnati, Dayton, or Indianapolis. When you got older, you had your first trip to Chicago. Maybe you visited other major cities, perhaps even going to Washington, DC or New York City. That progression may have continued to the point of having your passport stamped in cities around the world. From some small neighborhood your perspective developed over time as you grew up to include a greater area and a larger concept of what and whom your world includes.

You learned about the world in school, but you didn't really broaden your mind until you experienced places and people different than you and your own. Maybe you stared the first time you saw someone with a different color skin than what you were used to. The first time you saw people dressed differently and speaking a different language you might have thought they were strange or perhaps even dangerous. You began to become accustomed to the fact that, although you share the world with people who look and live differently than you, people are basically the same wherever you go. They are no better and no worse than people like you. In fact, you might even have come to the conclusion that the values and customs of people from somewhere else are even better than your own.

As a teenager you thought the whole world revolved around you. As a young adult, you focused your energy on how to make your life better and to make a good life for your family. Somewhere during that time you will have realized that the world is much bigger than you, and there are more important issues than whether you own a nice home in a good neighborhood, drive a new car, and have the best entertainment center or home theater system in your family room.

That doesn't happen for everyone. Many adults are still children in the way they view the world. Their town is the best. They identify closely with their own political or geographical region and their local sports teams. Everyone ought to speak the same language they do, belong to the same religion and denomination they do, and hold to the same moral values. Perhaps they even want their own ethnic group to do better than others and to be in power. They want their own country to be the superpower and dominate the world. Since God has come to them in a particular way, that must mean it's the only right way, and only people who accept that way have real value and deserve to receive God's blessings and benefits. If others can't agree with their idea of how the world should be, they must be forced to comply even if it takes imperialistic policies, aggressive actions, or the violence of "shock and awe" indiscriminate bombings.

How do you see yourself? What is your primary self-identification? I'm speaking from within the context of a church, so you might expect I want you to say Christian. We're in a Friend's meetinghouse, so you might guess the most important identification is Quaker. Most of your are sitting with family members, so maybe family is the most important. We're a few months away from July 4^th; you're all good, patriotic Americans. Some people put their flag outside their home everyday or wear a flag as a lapel pin. There are churches in which people get tears in their eyes when they hear the words of the song "I'm proud to be an American."

How would it change our way of thinking to say my primary way of thinking about myself is that I belong to the human species? I am related to every human being in the world irrespective of how that other human's ancestors evolved in other places in the world and the ways they developed to think, believe, and act. Or perhaps to even go one step further, we humans share this planet within an interdependent ecosystem and do not have the right to destroy the rest of the planet for our own benefits. In religious language, we are part of God's creation. It's debatable whether we are really the pinnacle of the ascent of evolution or if we are in fact the malignancy that will eventually destroy our own home. You might recall the word's of Agent Smith in the movie "Matrix."

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure.

Christians like us have come to read the Bible in a very selective way to reinforce our own provincialism and chauvinism. Even when we talk about the Bible's own history of transmission and translation, we think of it as beginning with Hebrew and Greek in the Middle East, becoming readily available in the language of the people in German during the reformation, and eventually culminating with English translations in Britain and in the U.S. From the United States, then, the Bible gets translated to the other languages of the world—from us goes forth the gospel. Where did we get such an idea? How chauvinistic! We are neither the terminus to which the gospel was destined nor the terminus from which God's message goes forth to the world to gather the world's sheep into our fold.

The stories of the Old Testament point again and again to the way in which humans should not turn their attention to themselves and their own but realize they are part of a much larger world. Adam and Eve were forced to leave their gated-community called Eden. When people started going in a wrong direction, one man and his family were preserved while God treated all the rest of the human family as one. The story of the Tower of Babel relates how, when one group decided they were the best and only divinity remained to be conquered by erecting a pyramid to the sky, God caused humans to have a variety of cultures and languages and to spread throughout the world. Our Bible traces one ethnic group's belief that God uniquely called their ancestor to come from northern Mesopotamia, from modern-day Iraq, to be given a corridor of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Abraham, whom Genesis calls "the father of many nations," recognized the rights of others to live together and share ownership of the land. According to Gen 23, when Abraham wants to have a burial place, he insists on buying the property from "the people of the land" living there rather than taking it by force. When his descendants find themselves living as slaves in Egypt, it is an adopted, Egyptian-raised child of the Pharaoh who leads the Hebrew people from the foreign land. Although this monotheistic Semitic group with its own particular cultural values seeks to remove their idol-worshipping cousins from some of their cities in the Land of Canaan, to a large extent they find ways to live together with them. Even their national constitution demands they respect the alien living among them. Hear what the Torah says, "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God" (Lev 19:33-34).

The Israelite and Judean kings often marry foreign wives and adopt the ways of others, beginning with David and Solomon. The philosophy and literature of other groups become assimilated into theirs. Their prophets often speak about their need to be a light to the other nations of people. They tell the story of the prophet Jonah, whom God actually tells to go to Iraq—what was then the Assyrian city of Nineveh—to call them to repent of their misdeeds because God cares for them. God tells the pouting Jonah, when God does not destroy them with "shock and awe" like Jonah wants God to, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?" (Jonah 4:11).

Progressive Jews of the centuries before Christ sought to become a part of the world scene instead of being isolated with their own language, culture, and religious texts and ceremonies. Jesus comes out of that tradition as someone who moves outside of his own village and territory. He cares for people from all walks of life: the rich and poor; men, women, and children; Jews, Samaritans, Greeks, and Romans; rural people as well as urban elites; farmers, fishmongers, trades people, merchants, tax-collectors, religious authorities; people suffering from diseases, injuries, blindness, deafness, mental illnesses. Jesus talked about God's kingdom not the kingdom of Israel (and certainly not the kingdom of the United States of America). When the church is born at Pentecost, the gospel message was not proclaimed in one language. Everyone there heard God's message in their own native language. Hear what Acts says.

Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power (Acts 2:7-11)

Many people have the view that the earliest Christianity was a Jewish Christianity that became suppressed and was eventually lost. Some people have tried to recreate a kind of Jewish Christianity with Jewish customs and claim that Christians should all adopt this kind of Christian Judaism. But that's not how it happened. The Christianity that took root and spread was a Hellenistic Jewish form of Christianity. The lingua franca of the day was Greek. It was the language of commerce and travel. It was the language that was the most common to people within the Roman empire. The good news about God's kingdom was for all people--for all people equally, for all people regardless of their particular geographical location, language, and culture.

Christianity quickly became the tool of empires, whether that was the Holy Roman empire, the British empire, or the empire the United States seeks to develop. Those Christians who identify their place in the world as centered in their own group of people and their own nation are allowing themselves to be used in this way in many subtle and not so subtle ways.

How big is your world? Do you spend most of your time thinking about yourself, your own needs, your own condition, your own future, and those near and dear? Or do you see your world as a much larger place, filled with people who look, think, and act differently than you but are essentially the same? Do you give some part of your day to read the newspaper and watch the evening news, not as a voyeur into the sensationalistic and sentimental, but to be informed about the lives of people around the world because you care for all the people of the world? Do you find ways to educate yourself about how the rest of the world lives—how they speak, how they practice their faith, how they express themselves in art and literature, how they feel about their own opportunities for health, safety, and freedom? Do you give some of your money and time to help those who are strangers and foreigners, even those some might call enemies?

The measure of our world is the measure of own souls. Our devotion to God is only as deep as our world is wide. We cannot afford to live our lives any longer in isolation, in selfishness, narcissism, or even well-intentioned patriotism. We are extremely privileged people upon whom is placed a huge burden of responsibility to the rest of the world. Each of us owes it to ourselves and to the world to broaden our horizons, to live responsibly in the world, and in this way to serve God the creator and sustainer of all.