JOY - Advent Week 3

Becoming an Outsider

My identity of an outsider was shaped by my childhood early school experiences. Growing up I attended 8 different schools before graduating from Temple High. The constant change of new schools cemented the idea that I was “not from here”. In addition to always being the new kid, I also grew up with an unusual religious and cultural identity.

I was raised in a Pentecostal christian church which emphasized separation from the world and dramatic emotional and spiritual experiences. While I was encouraged to tell people about my faith, the chaotic services dissuaded me from inviting friends. Without notice, people would break out into dance, speak out in a heavenly language which no one understood, or yell out in response to the words of the pastor. In addition, the moral framework was such we were discouraged from engaging in popular culture such as dancing, movies, or music.

My sense of being an outsider crystalized in one event in college. I remember going to a fraternity rush event where everyone was smoking cigars, something expressly prohibited in my background. Dressed in the standard navy blazer, all my peers seemed to excel in making small talk while I awkwardly stood in my black suit. Suddenly, the band started to play, and the entire crowd began to sing a song I had never heard. It was Sweet Home Alabama. In this moment, I fully felt my strangeness.

God’s Outsiders

Whether as part of an ethnic or religious group, suffering imposter syndrome at work or being the black sheep in a family, most people understand what it is like to be an outsider. The Old Testament scriptures address this universal human condition. God intentionally set up his law to keep his people distinct from the surrounding cultures. They ate differently. They worshipped differently. They dressed differently. From their calendar to their diet, they were set apart from the peoples around them. This distinctiveness was not merely pragmatic. God was communicating to them his profound holiness. He was utterly transcendent, and like him, his people would be set apart to show the surrounding peoples that Israel’s God was something completely different.

But being an outsider with their neighbors, meant being an insider with God. He told them, “you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” God had initiated a special relationship with Israel in which they were supremely special to him from all the peoples of the world.

While the peoples around them believed in local gods tied to the land, Israels God made all lands and all peoples. At best, the nations around them worshipped lesser beings, at worst, they bowed down to useless hunks of wood and metal. Israel saw themselves as the chosen people of the only God worthy of worship, the one true God of all lands.

This new spiritual reality called for a new vision for the chosen people. God gave them this special relationship because they had a special role. They were to be priests to the peoples of the world. This special role is what required their distinctive cultural practices.

Forgetting Who They Are

But Israel struggled with their divine calling. They often lacked the fortitude and faith to maintain their distinction. They had trouble seeing their role as God’s special people meaningful in the midst of their life among the nations. They repeatedly abandoned God, and they did not maintain their faithful and exclusive worship of the one true God.

In the book of Hosea in the Bible, God compares his relationship to being married to a prostitute that keeps going back to her pimp. In this book, we see God’s tender affection for his people despite their unfaithfulness. In the end, God has to demonstrate tough love to Israel, and allows foreign invaders to destroy their nation, but gives them a promise to restore them.

Decades later, God restored them to Jerusalem, but it was never the same. With the exception of a short 80 years out of 500, Israel was ruled by other nations. With the coming of Rome, the Jews were once again under the rule of another nation, fighting to maintain their distinctive identity. At that time, the leaders of Israel instead saw the whole world as outsiders while they prized their insider status with the God of the universe. If they could only get their regular people faithful, they would have God would return to his Temple, and Israel would receive the promises of being God’s special people. The outsiders, the Gentiles, the Romans, would finally experience the judgement they deserved. But, that isn’t how God saw it. They had remembered their special status, but they had forgotten their special role.

Israel’s special status of God’s chosen people was linked to their being a nation of priests. In our cynical age, we might think, “They abuse children.” or “The persecute the downcast,” or “They hoard power and wealth for themselves.” Unfortunately, this has been the reality in many places.

However, the ancient world saw priests as a intermediators between God and man. They facilitated the connection between God and the people. Imagine an entire nation dedicated to facilitate a profound connection to the divine by which all humanity might experience God. This was the calling God placed on Israel. It was into this situation that Jesus came.

Remembering and Redefining

God had even encoded this calling into Israel’s architecture. His temple was a metaphor to the connection between God and man, and it was intentionally inclusive of the outsider. God had designed his temple to have a special court designated for nations that were not Jews to come learn about the Jewish God and worship him.

The court of the Gentiles was a symbolic space that the Jews were to use to make their role as a kingdom of priests a reality. In the time of Jesus, the priests had replaced the area around the temple designated for the nations as a kind of exploitive marketplace for religious life. They had substituted a place of worshipful invitation to a place of commercial enterprise to benefit the insiders.

Jesus, as God’s son, understood how this exclusion of the gentiles betrayed the heart of God. This is the only time we see Jesus visibly angry in the Bible. He literally starts flipping over the tables of the merchants as a sign of his mission to restore the true purpose of Israel.

The restoration of the priesthood to the nations was core to Jesus’s mission. God could not depend on the leaders of Israel to lead them in being a kingdom of priests, connecting man and God. Jesus, God incarnate, himself would embody this priesthood in his own person. He would be the gateway between God and man. The Apostle Paul, previously one of these religious leaders, said that Jesus had erased the distinction between Jew and non-Jew: in Jesus, all the people of the world could have the insider status that previously only the Jews occupied. More than just a religious statement, this was a new reality that the early church took to the entire world. It was a message that transformed millions of people and entire societies. It is a message that we need to hear over and over.

Outsiders Today

Despite decades of roots in Temple, I still fight experiencing a feeling of being an outsider. An external perspective might see me as a leader in my business, in my church, and a long-time resident, but these details are not always the determining factor in the way a person feels.

There is an uncomfortableness that goes along with being human. As hard as we try, we know that there is a difference between what we aspire to and who we are. This sense of failure and guilt confirms our worst fears about where we belong. It resonates with our experiences of being an outsiders, and gives us clues to our deepest needs.

Jesus came to cure us of this experience of guilt by literally removing it the guilt. He as priests assumes roles of both priest and sacrifice. By faith in Christ, we can know that we will not end up on the outside because we are worthy of fellowship with God. Jesus tells his disciples to take joy that their names are written in the book. This book is the guest list for the ultimate party at the end of time celebrating a union between God and man. Jesus came to make possible an expansion of this guest list to include people from every tribe, tongue and nation, people like you and me.