*As I have been doing some reading on the idea of a "theology of the city", I thought it would be good to revisit this post. Hope you enjoy.
One of the central themes in Terry Theise’s new book Reading Between the Wines
is the idea of connectedness. Throughout the book, Theise shows how
globalization presents itself in the world of wine and creates
disconnect and fragmentations not only in the business of wine, but also
in the taste of wine itself.
With pun unavoidable, Theise longs for a rooted-ness
in his wine. Practically, this looks like artisan wine makers who know
their land, their family, and their role as a steward (not a master) of
the vines and barrels.
Theise waxes
poetic in his reflections upon the Mosel valley in Germany. Every March
Theise travels to Mosel to taste the new vintages that at times have
been world class. One wine family in particular, the Selbachs of
Zeltingen, is his foil for explaining connectedness.
The Selbachs
are a generational wine family, and in the 90’s Hans Selbach died and
passed the torch to his son Johannes. Theise, in what proves to be a
powerful section of prose, contrasts the death of Hans, and the death of
his own father. Hans died in the living room surrounded by family, was
wheeled through the house one last time, wheeled through the bottle
cellar (with one of Hans’ other sons remarking that “it was as if you
could see and hear the bottles stand and applaud papa”), and then buried
on family property, in the same soil in which the vines grow. Theise’s
father, unnamed, died in a hospital room in Manhatten, and is buried in
an enormous cemetery in Queens. Theise doubts that he, “could even
find the gravesite.”
Point being
here, you can’t separate the Selbachs and the wine they make. There is
no substitute. The two are connected in an invisible yet vital way. To
disconnect the Selbachs from their land, would be to disconnect them
from the world of wine. They could not, and would not, do wine anywhere
else. Which is completely contrary to the way the world of wine is
going these days, with “fly-around” vintners and transplants trying to
make overpriced wine of all kinds.
Given this lay
of the land, Theise describes the Selbachs kind of connectedness in wine
and in life as one that, “salves a kind of loneliness. Though it isn’t
my home, it is at least a home, and the people are particular people,
and the wines are particular wines. I spend too much of my life driving
among strip malls and their numbing detritus, and so when I descend the
final hill over the Eifel and the village of Zeltingen comes into view,
sitting peacefully along the Mosel, I have a momentary thrill of arriving. Here is somewhere. I see it, I know it, I will soon embrace people who embody it—and I also get to taste it.”
Too much of the
wine world is defined by “international consultants” and wineries that
import grapes from somewhere else, hire someone else to mix, and produce
wines that taste like someplace else.
This is true in
many fields of work today. Globalization has touched the world in an
irretraceable way. There is no going back. But how do we go forward?
More important
to my interest here, is do we, or how do we, see globalization in the
church? How many pastors are trying to produce someone else’s
community, and farm out the task of shepherding a particular people in a
particular place to homogenous ministries that anyone can buy? To what
degree does the church need a rooted-ness?
Given the fact
that the Bible calls us pilgrims and exiles in this life, there is a
certain degree in which Christians will always feel a longing to
arrive. There is a tension between the already and the not yet.
Whatever city or town you live in, that is not your ultimate home as a
Christian.
This reality
then causes me to question, in what sense do we as churches need to be
raising up indigenous leaders to plant indigenous churches (churches
that somehow “embody” the culture)? Does Theise’s kind of connectedness
fly in the ecclesial landscape? Should it fly? How much is an
indigenous leader blind to the defects in his culture so that he can
prophetically speak the gospel in that soil, and seek to change it? In
other words, in so far as a pastor is like a farmer (2 Tim 2:6), isn’t
his job to till up the soil, and to produce a community that does not
look like the world’s community in a certain place, but to produce a
covenant community that is counter-cultural, and that stands out as a
light in a dark place?
I can’t help
but think of Abraham in this regard. Instead of God keeping him where
he was as an indigenous leader, God called him to, “Go from your country
and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show
you.”
In the NT we
see Paul appointing someone like Titus who was a journeymen with Paul,
to be a local pastor in a place different from his birthplace.
I guess I am
wondering how much I too long, like Theise, for a connectedness and
rootedness in culture, yet at the same time realize that in God’s
wisdom, he constantly upsets our idea of “home” in the tender process of
having us set our sights on the New Jerusalem that is yet to come.
In short, place
can become idolatrous. The city can become idolatrous, a way of hiding
our real need to be connected to each other in word and sacrament,
rather than with the cultural affiliations of the world.
In a recent
conversation I was reminded about Cain’s fear in Genesis 4. His fear
was that, “he would be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,”
something too great for him to bear. God then graciously marks him.
Then Cain has a son, Enoch (which means “to dedicate”) and he names the
first city after his son. His fear was disconnect, his fear was to be a
wanderer, to be fragmented from a place and from a people. So he
builds a city.
In contrast,
look again at Abraham. Hebrews 11 says that, “Abraham obeyed when he
was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an
inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going…living in
tents…for he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose
designer and builder is God.”
In a very real
way, the response of faith in a fallen world is that of accepting the
role of exile, the role of wanderer, the role of fugitive in the world.
In contrast, the other response is to cope by yourself, which is the
response of Cain. Building a city and building a community dedicated to
your own fear of being a sojourner, and thus dedicated to a fleeting
city to try and stabilize the soul, is the response of fear and not
faith. In contrast to Cain, we are called like Abraham to seek a
lasting city yet to come, and let our fearful hearts find stability in
the peace of Christ as he comes to us in our weak churches, and in our
peculiar communities that the gospel (not the city) creates. Our lack
of faith tends to want to build communities around something other than
the gospel. We long to find identity in the structures of the world
over-against the structures of the Spirit. May God grant us the faith
to look at the city and see a phoney alternative, and may God grant us
the faith to look at the wasteland and see the way home.
We all have
this longing for a place. In the world of wine Theise puts it like
this, “I don’t have time to waste on processed wines that taste as if
they could have come from anywhere, because in fact they come from
nowhere and have no place to take me. We crave spirit of place because
of our own need to be located, which reassures us that we belong in the
universe. We want our bearings. We want to know where home is. We can
deny or ignore this longing, but it will scrape away at us relentlessly
while we wonder why we feel so homesick, why we never feel whole.”
From Cain to Theise, our great fear is to be a wonderer, consumed by our
disconnect. By faith however, we connect to the world to come in word
and sacrament, over-against the constant temptation to connect to the
city by synchronizing its ways with the way of the gospel.
My, how I feel the tension….
