Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas

Christians have children, in great part, in order to be able to tell our children the story. Fortunately for us, children love stories. It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God’s creation (a fact we would not know without this story). We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living—and not because “Children are the hope of the future,” but because God is the hope of the future.

The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism.

Christians ought to ponder what an amazing act of faith it was for Jews in the face of constant and death-dealing Christians and pagan persecution to go on having babies. People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow.

When it comes to the confirmation of the truth of the gospel, disciples are often more surprised than anyone else when, wonder of wonders, what Jesus promises, Jesus really does give.

Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God.

A journey requires not only an end, a goal, but also the ability to keep at it—constancy.

Yet, what if our true selves are made from the materials of our communal life? Where is there some “self” which has not been communally created? By cutting back our attachments and commitments, the self shrinks rather than grows. So an important gift the church gives us is a far richer range of options, commitments, duties, and troubles than we would have if left to our own devices. Without Jesus, Peter might have been a good fisherman, perhaps even a very good one. But he would never have gotten anywhere, would never have learned what a coward he really was, what a confused, then confessing, courageous person he was, even a good preacher (Acts 2) when he needed to be.

Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had become “free” or “his own person,” but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices.

Through such common commitments to constancy as getting married or having children, we have the uncommon experience of trusting other people in a world that would make us strangers. We learn the virtue of patience, of being willing to be part of the journey, even when we are not always sure of when or where it ends. What extraordinary patience it requires, in a world that demands results, for a pastor to have to wait twenty years to see even a glimpse of the Kingdom at a place like Shady Grove. How long did it take the Hebrews to get from Egypt to the Promised Land?

We really are, if we are to believe Hebrews or Deuteronomy, examples of God’s determination to bring the world back into a right relation to its Creator—which finally is what peace is about.

Our fate is transformed into our destiny; that is, we are given the means of transforming our past, our history of sin, into a future of love and service to neighbor.

The people at Shady Grove, by telling the Story, were enabled to tell their story in such a way that they could look back on their history with honesty (repentance) and see their future as a gift (forgiveness), as an account, no less significant than Deuteronomy 6 or Hebrews 11, of God with us.

Because we have experienced a story of how One came to us and received us as strangers and forgave us as friends, we expect to receive strangers and to be offered forgiveness elsewhere. Our story enables us to have community on the basis of something more substantial than “melting pot” blandness, to have community rather than eternal hostility among subgroups because we are so different. Shady Grove received the gift of membership in a peculiar community. Our particular community knows the story that tells how the Risen Christ returned to his friends, even when they were his betrayers, and because we know it, we know to expect him to return to us, to stand among us, to forgive us, even to bless us.

The disciples went forward by looking back, by rejoicing in the sense of hope that comes from the realization that God does not leave us alone, and will not let us stay as we are. Through him, we really are getting somewhere.

the fundamental issue, when it comes to Christian ethics, is not whether we shall be conservative or liberal, left or right, but whether we shall be faithful to the church’s peculiar vision of what it means to live and act as disciples.

American Christians have fallen into the bad habit of acting as if the church really does not matter as we go about trying to live like Christians.

What impressed us about Falwell’s statement was that it began to recognize that Christian ethics are church-dependent.

Christian ethics only make sense from the point of view of what we believe has happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Practically speaking, what the church asks of people is difficult to do by oneself. It is tough for ordinary people like us to do extraordinary acts as Jesus commands.

The habit of Constantinian thinking is difficult to break. It leads Christians to judge their ethical positions, not on the basis of what is faithful to our peculiar tradition, but rather on the basis of how much Christian ethics Caesar can be induced to swallow without choking. The tendency therefore is to water down Christian ethics, filtering them through basically secular criteria like “right to life” or “freedom of choice,” pushing them on the whole world as universally applicable common sense, and calling that Christian.

While Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel honors that Torah and demands obedience to it, in the Sermon he intensifies it, drawing the obedience demanded of Israel into sharp relief, and thus depicts again for Israel how really odd it is to be a people called by God.

The Sermon, by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony, not because disciples are those who have a need to be different, but because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows us the world to be alien, an odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us. Jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone.

Yet Jesus makes no such claims. Rather, as the concluding verses of the Sermon make explicit, disciples turn the other cheek, go the second mile, avoid promiscuity, remain faithful to their marriage vows because God is like this.

Our God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish, makes his sun to rise on the good and the bad. This is the God who is specifically, concretely revealed to us in Jesus, a God we would not have known if left to our own devices. Our ethical positions arise out of our theological claims, in our attempt to conform our lives to the stunning vision of reality we see in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Disciples of Christ are those who journey forth from the conventional to base their lives on the nature of God, to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48).

Yet what impresses about the Sermon is its attention to the nitty-gritty details of everyday life. Jesus appears to be giving very practical, very explicit directions for what to do when someone has done you wrong, when someone attacks you, when you are married to someone. It is clear that Jesus certainly thought he was giving us practical, everyday guidance on how to live like disciples.

The Sermon is not primarily addressed to individuals, because it is precisely as individuals that we are most apt to fail as Christians. Only through membership in a nonviolent community can violent individuals do better. The Sermon on the Mount does not encourage heroic individualism, it defeats it with its demands that we be perfect even as God is perfect, that we deal with others as God has dealt with us.

The Christian claim is that life is better lived in the church because the church, according to our story, just happens to be true. The church is the only community formed around the truth, which is Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life. Only on the basis of his story, which reveals to us who we are and what has happened in the world, is true community possible.

Christian community, life in the colony, is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus.

The Sermon implies that it is as isolated individuals that we lack the ethical and theological resources to be faithful disciples. The Christian ethical question is not the conventional Enlightenment question, How in the world can ordinary people like us live a heroic life like that? The question is, What sort of community would be required to support an ethic of nonviolence, marital fidelity, forgiveness, and hope such as the one sketched by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?

Whenever a person is baptized, be that person a child or an adult, the church adopts that person. The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-yearold, “Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be.

Our ethics do involve individual transformation, not as a subjective, inner, personal experience, but rather as the work of a transformed people who have adopted us, supported us, disciplined us, and enabled us to be transformed.

The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

As Barth says, “[The Church] exists . . . to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise” (Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2).

Ethically speaking, it should interest us that, in beginning the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, Jesus does not ask disciplines to do anything. The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative, mood. First we are told what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are to do.

The Sermon rests on the theological assumption that if the preacher can first enable us to see whom God blesses, we shall be well on the road to blessedness ourselves. We can only act within a world we can see. Vision is the necessary prerequisite for ethics. So the Beatitudes are not a strategy for achieving a better society, they are an indication, a picture. A vision of the inbreaking of a new society. They are indicatives, promises, instances, imaginative examples of life in the kingdom of God.

What if all this is not new and more stringent rules for us to observe but rather a picture of the way God is? Of course, we are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is.

But the basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is—God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. This is not a strategem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we will feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world in the Christ.

The whole Sermon is not about how to be better individual Christians, it is a picture of the way the church is to look.

Although delay of the parousia, the return of Christ, is fully admitted by Matthew (24:48; 25:5, 19), this delay serves to underscore Matthew’s interest in the formation of community rather than to diffuse it.

In the Sermon we see the end of history, an ending made most explicit and visible in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

Nowhere in the Sermon are believers encouraged to abandon this life or the world.

So discipleship, seen through this eschatology, becomes extended training in letting go of the ways we try to preserve and give significance to the world, ways brought to an end in Jesus, and in relying on God’s definition of the direction and meaning of the world—that is, the kingdom of God.

So the first step to peace is letting go of ourselves, our things, our world. The cross, of course, stands for us as the sign of one man’s ultimate dispossession of this world in order to inaugurate a new world.

Our hope is based not on Caesar’s missiles or Caesar’s treaties but on the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.

The removal of eschatology from ethics may account for the suffocating moralism in our church. Moralism comes up with a list of acceptable virtues and suitable causes, the pursuit of which will give us self-fulfillment. “The Be Happy Attitudes.” Or Christianity is mainly a matter of being tolerant of other people, inclusive, and open—something slightly to the left of the Democratic party.

Without eschatology, we are left with only a baffling residue of strange commands, which seem utterly impractical and ominous. We ignore the commands on divorce and lash out at our people on peace.

The Sermon begins with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (5:3). Martin Luther comments that this is the first Beatitude because, even if one feels spiritually rich at the beginning of the Sermon, one will feel terribly poor and needy by the end!

We have learned, in the colony, that it is not only difficult to forgive, it is difficult to receive forgiveness, because such an attitude reminds us of our utter dependency on God. We are poor in spirit. And in our poverty, God blesses us. In the colony, every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we are given important training in how to forgive and to receive forgiveness. Here is a community in which even small, ordinary occurrences every Sunday, like eating together in Eucharist, become opportunities to have our eyes opened to what God is up to in the world and to be part of what God is doing. If we get good enough at forgiving the strangers who gather around the Lord’s Table, we hope that we shall be good at forgiving the strangers who gather with us around the breakfast table. Our everyday experience of life in the congregation is training in the arts of forgiveness; it is everyday, practical confirmation of the truthfulness of the Christian vision.

Rather, here are words for the colony, a prefiguration of the kinds of community in which the reign of God will shine in all its glory. So there is nothing private in the demands of the Sermon. It is very public, very political, very social in that it depicts the public form by which the colony shall witness to the world that God really is busy redeeming humanity, reconciling the world to himself in Christ. All Christian ethical issues are therefore social, political, communal issues.

Square one is that colony made up of those who are special, different, alien, and distinctive only in the sense that they are those who have heard Jesus say “Follow me,” and have come forth to be part of a new people, a colony formed by hearing his invitation and saying yes.