Exactly Who Is In Charge Here

A General Conference Reflection by Schuyler Rhodes

  “Consider your own call brothers and sisters; not many of you were (are ) wise by human standards, not many were (are) powerful, not many were (are)  of noble birth. Bod chose (chooses) what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose (chooses) what is weak in the world to shame the strong;   “God chose  (chooses) what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are so that no one might boast in the presence of God. “    1^st Corinthians 1:26-29 NRSV (parenthesis are inserted by me).

            I am packing to go to Portland to the General Conference of the United Methodist Church and my heart is not what I’d call “strangely warmed.”    A friend asked me how I was feeling about it all, and I responded without thinking that I was experiencing a “malignant apathy”  about it all.   The words just slipped out and betrayed a growing anxiety I was feeling.   Actually, it’s not true.   I feel neither malignancy nor apathy, but I do feel the tension rising.  I do feel people readying for struggle.   I do feel the shuffle and static of people and their causes, both just and unjust, and it gives me pause.

            It gives me pause to think about our story, about us.   And as I cast my thoughts across the landscape of our Judeo-Christian journey it strikes me that God has an interesting particularity about who gets chosen to lead the people to justice and new life.

            I note that God did not choose Pharaoh to liberate the Hebrew people.  Wait.  He couldn’t choose Pharaoh because it was he who had enslaved them and he was reaping quite a profit from all that free labor.   No.   God chose this Moses character who was wanted for murder and was hiding out in the hinterlands.  What was God thinking?

            God chose a  country bumpkin shepherd with a harp to be King of Israel.   No royal lineage or pedigree here.    And when God chose to come among us, God didn’t come as Herod.   He came as the son of a carpenter, a relative nobody.

            It seems to me that when change is in the air, as it most always is, change doesn’t come from the top down, from Pharaoh or Herod.   It comes from the bottom up.   Change wells up from below and flows like a spring to the surface of our institutional reality,  and sooner or later those at the top acknowledge it…..because their feet are getting wet.

            I wonder, as we gather  in rainy Portland to consider weighty matters, if we will pause to listen to  those who  seem to have no status, those who are on the margins, those who don’t have the right pedigree or credential.   I wonder if we will pause to look around for the unlikely ones God has chosen to lead and to articulate new vision.   And I wonder if we will  realize that the vision and leadership for the future probably will not come from  the institutional church or those who vie for power within it.    No.  It will come from those who have been shoved away, those who are named as sinful and unfit.  It will come from a fugitive, wanted for high crimes and misdemeanors.   It will come from some rube playing a harp or ukulele.   It will come  from a carpenter.   It will come from a place where we are not looking.