Anthropological Insight 3

I began this short series with a modest proposal, to wit: “Make a friend who sees life differently than you do. Build the friendship slowly. Test the waters gradually. Explore their view of life, seeking to understand why they think that a particular stance towards LGBTQI+ is important, or what they think we should do as we respond to homeless people on our streets, or any other subject important to you. Don’t try to ‘convert’ them. Try to understand them.”

In this episode, I will apply this proposal to a recent event in the life of the larger church to which I presently belong, the Mennonite World Conference. Every six years, MWC meets in a grand assembly hosted by one of the member churches of the conference. The next scheduled assembly was set for 2028 in Ethiopia. Last month, the Meserete Kristos Church (the host church) withdrew their invitation because of their understanding that Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada have embraced the LGBTQI+ lifestyle and agenda.

This perception is, I think, mistaken, but I will not address it further. My purpose is not to give the truth of what MC USA and MC Canada have actually said or done, but rather to explore the assumptions driving the responses of both sides in this particular case.

First, an impression. My impression is that members of the Meserete Kristos Church see North American progressives as profoundly unfaithful to biblical Christian faith. Further, I suspect that North American Mennonites see Ethiopian conservatives (I am using the labels as a kind of shorthand) as bigoted and reactionary – or as unduly influenced by American evangelicals. I believe that neither characterization is true or helpful.

Consider North American progressives. My experience of North American Mennonites (of whom I am one) is that they generally are wrestling with difficult social and biblical questions and have arrived at differing positions (conservative and progressive) out of a desire to be both biblically faithful and socially relevant. Although I am more conservative myself, I recognize in my brothers and sisters a deep desire to follow Jesus faithfully within a society that marginalizes many people. Progressives see that marginalization occurring especially within the LGBTQI+ community. I think myself that their analysis is perhaps too simplistic, but they have engaged far more within that community than I have. I do not question their good faith. As I listen to their voices, I hear a deep desire for justice and for respect for God’s image in all people. I embrace that desire whatever I think of their conclusions.

Consider African conservatives. The impression that they are simply parroting American conservatives is almost insulting. The colonial process is a reality of their and our history, but even at the height of the colonial era, colonized peoples were active agents in forming their own faith and culture. At this point in time, dismissing their views on the basis of Western influence can be a kind of reverse imperialism: We think we know what they should think and say and seek to impose our views on them.

Why then do they see sexual purity as so important? One commentor I read (on Facebook) after the Meserete Kristos disinvited MWC suggested that the Ethiopians were stuck in a kind of purity culture. The comment is (it seems to me) a mixture of accurate perception and false sophistication. Conservative cultures in general do think in terms of purity, but that way of thinking does not make them less sophisticated or modern. Jonathan Haidt (whom I have referenced before) suggests several foundational themes for morality. Progressives prioritize care for others and equity; conservatives add several other themes, including purity and sanctity. (You can read more about the work of Haidt and others in this area in the article on Moral Foundations Theory in Wikipedia.)

In short, then, conservatives value purity (as well as honour) in a way that progressives don’t. Progressives value care for the individual and equity (i.e., equal rights) more than conservatives do. Conservatives may well value fairness and equity, but they also consider other factors (such as purity).

Apply this to the decision by the church in Ethiopia. North American demands for equity for a marginalized community run into deeply held cultural beliefs about purity and honour and sanctity. Conversation about these clashing positions is hard, especially when we are speaking across ethnic boundaries and when we (in North America) have a history of imposing our beliefs on others. But such conversation remains necessary, and “curious listening” is an indispensable part of continuing in relationship with each other.

I grieve for the disinvitation, because it means we are stepping away from such conversations. The loss of this particular forum, however, can also be a step towards taking each other completely seriously and reengaging with our brothers and sisters across ethnic and cultural and political divides. We need each other, and we need to learn from each other. Which requires “curious listening”.

I repeat my modest proposal: Find someone who stands in a different place from yourself and listen to them, really listen to them -- not to convert them or to prove you're right, but to understand and grow yourself. 

31 December 2025

Shepherds and a Baby

We’ve heard two passages read today. The first – from John 1 – is the great soaring climax to the Christmas story, stating that the impossible has happened and God is fully present in the darkness of our lives. I won’t go deeper into that wonderful chapter this morning, but we hear it as the backdrop to Luke’s story about the shepherds.

Luke 2 is a story that we have heard often. We know it well, but it never grows old. Shepherds out in the field with their flocks. Angels appearing and blazing the skies with their glory and song. Parents with a baby boy in the humblest of places – the antithesis of the glory of the angels. The shepherds again, binding together the glory and the baby.

Glory

Let’s talk about the glory first. Some commentators say that the fact that the shepherds were in the fields at night suggests that this is not actually “in the deep midwinter”. In winter, they would have been in shelter keeping warm. I grew up celebrating Christmas in the middle of the summer, and the scene suggests that Australia and Zimbabwe are closer to their experience than Manitoba is. So, they are in the fields near Bethlehem.

I wonder who these shepherds were. Some commentators note their low status in Judean society – you don’t go to shepherds for high status. Other commentators note that the Old Testament uses the image of shepherd as a metaphor for the kings of Israel – so perhaps they did at least have the respect of the people. One speculation intrigued me. Most shepherds would be out in a more remote area than Bethlehem. Shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem were probably attached to the Temple in Jerusalem. Their flocks would have provided the sheep for the temple sacrifices. If this is the case, the angels chose the shepherds precisely because they were already dedicated to God’s service. And the shepherds were excited because they really were waiting for and already working for the coming of the Messiah.

In the end, however, there’s no getting around it. They were shepherds, and shepherds were sort of like farmers in Manitoba. Respected. Hard working. Getting dirty when they need to. You don’t go to the barn when you want to show off for high society, and you don’t go to the shepherds when you want to show off.

Except that the angels did go to the shepherds to show off. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying …” It must have been an incredible sight. One angel frightened the shepherds, so the angel said, “Don’t be afraid!” What must an army of angels have done? They were too overcome to get out their smart phones and record the event. They could only gasp and gape and revel in the Shekinah glory poured out all around them.

I have seen displays of natural glory, usually in the form of lightning displays. I am profoundly uncomfortable when the skies light up with one lightning bolt after another. I remember driving our son home from a soccer game in Kentucky as the skies grew dark with storm clouds and were then lit up with one flash after another. If you combine that kind of overwhelming power with the clear words of praise to God in the angels’ song, you get something of the experience that overwhelmed the shepherds. Powerful. Uncomfortable. Glorious. Wonderful. Absolutely astounding.

When it was all over and they could breathe again, they started processing. “Let’s go see this baby!” “The angels said, ‘in Bethlehem’. Let’s go see!” And they did. They went and found Mary and Joseph and the baby and the stable. Here was the polar opposite of the display they had just seen. We were just with our younger son and his wife, meeting our youngest grandchild. He was about three weeks old when we first saw him. Babies do not project lightning displays of power. They cry, and they eat, and they sleep, and they wait for a diaper change.

No matter how we dress up the manger scene, it remains a picture of humility and smallness, in sharp contrast to the glory of the angels. The point is that this humility is the vessel in which we find the glory of God. God’s light shining in the angels comes to us veiled in the baby. This is a basic principle of the moral universe: Light comes wrapped in love; power comes to us in weakness; glory is revealed in the small things of life.

The opposite is also true. When people in our world set out to show how great and powerful they are, they cut themselves off from the God who revealed God’s self in the humility of the manger scene. Much of what we do in our world, we do to impress people. The principle of glorious light wrapped in simple family love contradicts our human displays of power.

A Lesson from LOTR

I have seen a series of essays recently in social media, reflecting on ideas from one of the great fantasy books and movies of our day, Lord of the Rings. I have edited one of these essays (by Genny Harrison) for us this morning. Here it is.

 

At the most important moment in modern fantasy, the hero fails. Not quietly. Not ambiguously. He stands at the edge of the world, feels the full weight of evil loosen its grip, and chooses it anyway.

At the edge of Mount Doom, with the fate of the world balanced on a single will, Frodo Baggins does not throw the Ring into the fire. He claims it. The moment every heroic narrative has trained us to expect as triumph becomes instead a confession of failure. Tolkien does not flinch. He lets the hero break.

And yet the world is saved.

This is not a plot twist. It is a moral thesis. The destruction of the Ring happens not because Frodo earns victory, but because mercy extended long before the ending finally comes due. ….

By the time he reaches the Fire, Frodo has endured starvation, sleep deprivation, repeated physical injury, and sustained psychological terror. Modern neuroscience would describe this as cumulative trauma. …

The quest only succeeds because of Gollum. And even that rescue is not redemption in the sentimental sense. Gollum does not transform into goodness. He falls into the fire because of what he already is. The deeper truth is that Gollum is alive at all only because he was spared when mercy looked foolish. First by Bilbo. Then by Gandalf. Then most dangerously by Frodo himself.

The Ring is destroyed not because Frodo conquers it, but because Frodo once chose not to destroy someone else.

This is a devastating inversion of the moral economy most of us were raised to believe in. We are taught to look for visible proof that goodness works. Tolkien gives us an older logic. Moral victories are often retroactive. The most transformative decisions rarely announce themselves as such. They look inefficient. They look naive. They often look like failure.

In the medieval moral tradition that shaped Tolkien, mercy was not sentimental. It was strategic in a way power could never be. Mercy refused to close the future. It kept outcomes unresolved. It preserved the possibility that evil might one day undo itself. …

We live in an age that worships visible dominance. We measure virtue through performance. We reward leaders who claim they can bend chaos through sheer will. Tolkien issues a quiet warning instead. When power becomes the proof of goodness, goodness collapses.

Frodo fails because no one was ever meant to pass that final test.

The world is not saved by the flawless execution of the righteous. It is saved by the accumulated weight of restraint. By choices made without assurance of payoff. By mercy that looked wasted at the time. By patience that looked irrational. By hands that refused the easy kill and kept the future open instead.

…. The modern fantasy is that effort always guarantees justice. Tolkien tells a harder truth. Sometimes the most important moral decisions you will ever make will feel powerless when you make them. Sometimes the victory will not belong to your endurance at all. It will belong to mercy that looked like weakness years earlier.

Frodo does not win.

Mercy does.

And it does not feel triumphant.

 

The idea that God redeems the world through our failures is a complex and difficult one; it is also profoundly Christian. We want to set ourselves against evil and defeat it, when instead we are invited to join forces with a baby in a manger. We don’t join Herod’s side. We don’t join Pilate’s or Caesar’s army. We don’t ally ourselves with the leaders who say they will destroy our enemies. Instead, we choose the baby who grew into the man Jesus. We choose the one who willingly died and accepted into himself the pain and heartache of our broken world. We choose to live out the love and mercy of God revealed in Jesus.

Conclusion

What this looks like, as Genny Harrison reminds us in the essay on Frodo, is doing the right thing because it is right. It may seem hopeless, but we show mercy and love always. We may not see any change around us, but we act out the mercy and love of God each day. Small acts of mercy. Small acts of love. Living in harmony with the Creator of the world.

I said that we may not see a big change in our situation when we do what is right. I may reach out to a brother who is down and out and then see the same person again tomorrow, still struggling. Maybe an analogy can help us see how important the small acts area.

The big changes that we see are like the landscape around us. It’s important to shape the landscape well. We build our homes and devise our social structures and so on. We want these to be good. The small acts – the things we do every day without even thinking – are like the deep places of the earth, the tectonic plates. Tectonic plates under the surface of the earth move slowly, but they move with great force. When they build up enough force, they cause an earthquake that shatters the surface of the earth.

Why would I think that the small acts of mercy and love are the tectonic plates beneath the surface? Because they come from God’s deepest nature – as revealed in the glory of the angels and the presence of the baby. God has made our world so that love and mercy and justice are the bedrock. You can build injustice and division on the surface, but sooner or later the earthquake of God’s love will shatter the surface of our lives. Then, if we have built with that same love, we will find ourselves where God wants us to be.

I think that Martin Luther King’s famous line is making a similar point, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” May we follow the shepherds to the stable this Christmas. May we see the glory of the angels wrapped in the love of the baby. May we respond by acting in ways consistent with God’s light revealed in love. “He has showed you, O man, O woman, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, that you shall do justice and love mercy and be ready to walk after the Lord your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Steinbach Mennonite Church

21 December 2025

John 1: 1 to 5

Luke 2: 8 to 20

Anthropological Insight, 2

In part one, I argued that we could benefit from seeking to enter into the thought world of those groups in our society with whom we disagree. Division is easy to foster, and understanding is a difficult task. But life is better when we understand each other and worse when we fight with each other.

How do we approach others with a stance that seeks understanding? Some might expect that the kind of curious listening I advocate (thanks to an anonymous commentator for the phrase) shows up most often in the big issues of our day – tariffs loom large in our imagination; immigration is a thorny issue dividing even families; and so on. It is good to listen non-judgmentally to those who disagree with us in these and other areas. We will understand vaccine hesitancy, for example, if we listen to the fears and concerns that drive it rather than simply condemning it. Condemnation turns quickly into name calling and real division. But I am thinking of something deeper even than these issues.

Curious listening is listening for the underlying assumptions about life that drive our convictions and our conversations. Seeking to enter the thought world of the other person as a coherent whole. The anthropologist learning the culture of transients who ride the rails (hobos, if you like) enters their world and lives with them. George Orwell’s fascinating book, Down and Out in Paris and London, is an excellent example. He does not judge, and his portraits give real insight into the thoughts and actions of people in France and England who live on the margins of society. Orwell goes beneath the surface of what vagrants simply do to the way they see themselves and the society around them. By the end of the book, we have entered a new world.

Similarly, conservatives who care about progressives in their lives need to listen for the underlying assumptions that drive progressive convictions and actions. And progressives who care about traditionally-minded people in their lives need to listen – not for the conclusions conservatives come to, but to the assumptions about life that lead to those conclusions.

Consider an assumption that conservatives and progressives may think that they share, but that each holds in a way that operates differently from the other. I refer to the conviction that we are all equal – not simply that there should be equality before the law, but that any kind of hierarchy is bad because it contradicts an egalitarianism that is basic to our society. We state it in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”.

Progressives interpret this equality through the lens of equity: Everyone should have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else in society. Conservatives interpret this equality through the lens of personal and individual rights: My view about life is as good as anyone else’s. Both are inconsistent in their application of the assumption, and both are sure that their application is right.

I want to question the assumption at a more basic level. We assume that hierarchy is bad and that egalitarianism is good. The anthropological approach suggests that we bracket that assumption and treat both hierarchy and egalitarianism as ways that societies organize themselves. When we do this, we discover that our culturally egalitarian approach has strengths and weaknesses, and that the hierarchical approach of many African and Asian cultures also has strengths and weaknesses.

For example, we value individual rights and freedoms. We also place a positive value on community. Sherwood Lingenfelter (in Transforming Culture – I give the reference without having checked it) observes that hierarchy in cultural systems tends to correlate with stronger community, and egalitarianism in cultural systems tends to correlate with individualism and consequently weaker community. So, our value placed on individual rights weakens community. Hierarchical systems strengthen community, but they also weaken individual rights.

The anthropological lesson is that both are valid cultural systems, which the people of a society may choose to use. If that is the case, then we in North America should hesitate before condemning others use of hierarchy. Further, we should hesitate before condemning the way that others apply hierarchy or egalitarian thinking. First, we should enter their thought world as far as we can and seek to understand.

What I have just written requires many qualifiers for which we don’t have space or time. Egalitarians obviously accept some form of hierarchy. Individualists also seek community. I am describing general trends in broad brush strokes, but I think that my observations are generally accurate.

A closing thought concerning egalitarian thinking and individual rights. Conservatives appeal to this assumption in such areas as vaccine hesitancy and the restrictions placed on society during the Covid epidemic. As a friend of mine said, “It is almost always wrong to violate someone else’s body in the name of public health.” (My memory of his point.) Progressives are readier to rely on hierarchy in this area – trusting the expertise of the medical profession.

When we come to the issue of abortion, the application of assumptions is reversed. Progressives appeal to individual rights to support choice, and conservatives appeal to hierarchy – the expertise of medical science to assert the personhood of the unborn child. None of us are fully consistent, and we do well to seek understanding rather than simply condemning.

Note that I did not declare my own view on either of these issues. My view is not the point; the point is to seek understanding. So far as my own views go, I am a child of the 60s, and I have the broad egalitarian convictions fostered by “the age of Aquarius”. (And like many other children of the 60s I have become more conservative as I grow older.) Still, I resonate with the Fifth Dimension singing, “All the world over, it’s so easy to see, people everywhere just gotta be free.” It is precisely that conviction that all people should be free that impels me to seek understanding rather than control.

Peace out.

An Anthropological Insight for Living Together

The divide between left and right in North America is well-established. The political antipathy that renders the Senate and House of Representatives unable to function has penetrated families, churches, and educational institutions. We are locked in a battle that threatens to consume us.

Many people have observed this divide, and many have made recommendations to bridge the divide. My suggestion is not unique or better than others. Rather, it is my effort to think through how I can live in a divided society.

I am conservative, but I find attractive many causes espoused by liberals. I have progressive tendencies, but I find that tradition gives me a firmer foundation than simply following the most recent cause in our society. I value personal responsibility, which aligns me with conservatives. I value justice and equity, which aligns me with progressives. I hold traditional values, which aligns me with conservatives. I seek a full life for marginalized peoples, which aligns me with liberals.

I suspect that I am not unusual in this blend of conservative and traditional on the one hand and liberals and progressive on the other. This blend means that I cringe when progressives demean conservatives, and I am wounded when conservatives demonize liberals. I believe, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. I do not believe that either the left or the right has a monopoly on good or evil.

What I want, then, is a way for left and right to hear each other and to back away from the abyss of division. The following comments explore a path drawn from the discipline of anthropology.

A Basic Insight

I studied anthropology over 30 years ago. The discipline has grown and changed, and I have grown and changed – not necessarily together. I remember, however, a basic stance within anthropology, one that is still (I suspect) relevant to the discipline today. Anthropologists tend to be cultural relativists. They seek to explore each culture on its own terms, rather than compressing the culture being studied into the observer’s own categories.

We can call this exploration an emic or insider’s view of the culture – as compared to an etic or outsider’s view. The fact that I refer to culture and ethnicity is a sign of the kind of anthropology in which I was trained. I know that these concepts are disputed and perhaps outdated, but that fact does not alter the basic point I am making: We seek to understand others on their own terms, not judge them by our ways of seeing the world.

My background is in working with the global Christian church. Therefore, the anthropology training I received might be called missionary anthropology. Missionaries assume that the culture of the people to whom they have gone with the gospel needs correction, just as their own home culture needs correction. But missionaries also must suspend judgment when they approach a new culture. The outsider does not know the host culture and has no right to judge it. In fact, judgments by newcomers to a culture are often misplaced.

An example from missionary experience. Brethren in Christ missionaries in the early 20^th century came from a North American context in which evangelical Christians fought against any use of alcohol. Most BICs would have approved of the temperance movement and the prohibition of alcohol.

They arrived in a culture where traditional beer was brewed from maize or sorghum. Unlike North America, beer was as much food as it was drink. Sometimes, people did become drunk, but more often they used the beer drink as an opportunity to socialize, exchange news, and strengthen the bonds of community. The first missionaries who came to Zimbabwe – including Robert Moffat and David Livingstone – accepted traditional beer as an appropriate drink to participate in at the end of a long journey.

When BIC missionaries arrived in Zimbabwe, they assumed that the traditional beer drink was a replica of the worst they knew from bars in the USA. Prohibition was the only stance they could imagine as possible for Christians, so converts had to cut themselves off from one of the basic community-building activities in their culture. Later missionaries (such as Fred and Grace Holland) noted this loss, but the cultural intervention remained as a basic part of Christian faith. Today, prohibition remains the church position in Zimbabwe, long after the North American church has moved on to a more nuanced stance.

Another example. When missionaries arrived in Zimbabwe, they found monogamous and polygamous families. Older men of means would often take a second or third wife. The missionaries came from a culture in which such an action was interpreted as unfaithfulness and lusty – they assumed that the older men had tired of their older wife and wanted someone younger and more desirable. Human nature suggests that this analysis was sometimes correct, but culturally one discovers it is also incomplete.

In traditional cultures, polygamy serves a variety of functions. One is to provide shelter and security for childless widows, as was also the case in Old Testament Hebrew culture (see Deuteronomy 20). Another is to ensure that childless women have an opportunity to bear children (also true in Deuteronomy 20). In traditional cultures, to be childless is a great grief, and an unmarried woman faces real loss.

The missionary response typically was to rule that the polygamist must give up all his wives after his first wife (adding divorce to the sin of polygamy). What happened to the additional wives was a necessary tragedy. As missionaries contemplated this situation, they recognized that the issues were more complex than they had first thought. BIC missionaries in Zimbabwe petitioned the home church at General Conference for direction on how to handle these difficult situations. (The home church sent the issue back to the church Zimbabwe and said, “You deal with it!”)

African views of polygamy were complicated by the testimony of Scripture. As they learned to read the Bible, African Christians discovered that not only does the Law accept polygamy, but Ruth and Boaz are held up as examples of faithfulness, Abraham was a polygamist, Jacob’s wives and concubines combined to aid in the formation of the Children of Israel, and David – the man after God’s own heart – was a polygamist in the grand fashion of a King.

In short, the missionary approach to polygamy would have benefitted from an anthropological stance of cultural relativism. Missionaries could usefully have bracketed their initial judgment of polygamy and waited for African Christians to give direction to the church.

The Basic Insight Restated

Let me restate the anthropological insight. Anthropologists explore new cultural situations through the methodology of participant-observation. They bracket their own cultural understandings and enter the host culture as fully as possible (seeking to become participants), and then they record their observations in as neutral a manner as possible, allowing the host culture to indicate what the elements of their culture mean and how they should be understood.

In my own teaching as a missiologist (student of mission, specializing in missionary anthropology), I have emphasized the priority of the host culture in establishing church structure (the indigenous church), understanding Christian teaching (contextualisation), and preaching the gospel. Missionary outreach struggles to adapt fully to new cultural settings, and the task of communicating the gospel cross-culturally requires a constant stance in favour of the host culture.

This does not mean that the outsider can never speak against elements of the host culture that have gone wrong. It does, however, mean that the right to speak out is earned over a long period of time. Outsiders routinely misunderstand what is happening within the host culture. We must always be ready to accept correction and renew our engagement with our hosts.

This critique of missionary practice resonates within our contemporary society. When I was young, many people in our society admired missionaries. People like my parents were assumed to be good people, respected for their willingness to make personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. Today, many people in our society assume that missionaries were complicit in the colonial project, part of an imperialism that we now see as misguided at best and tyrannical at worst. As a missionary myself, I hear the voices questioning our right to think that we can go to places like Zimbabwe and tell them what to believe.

There is truth in this critique. Missionaries have sometimes acted in ways that betrayed the gospel they preached. The gospel assumes an essential equality between all God’s children; missionaries have sometimes acted as though “all people are equal, but some people [we] are more equal than others.” The critique fails (in my view) at two points: 1) I know from my own experience and study that many missionaries broke this stereotype – missionaries were an essential part of undermining the colonial project; and 2) where the stereotype holds true, it is a human problem rather than a problem with the gospel itself.

Pursue the second point. Human beings tend to evaluate others based on their own understanding of the world. This is true of missionaries, because missionaries are human. It is true of people in general – including progressives and conservatives. Therefore, if the perceived missionary tendency to judge others by their own standards is wrong (as a demonstration of colonialism), the actual practice of conservatives and liberals alike judging others is equally wrong.

In the political arena, we see this tendency worked out routinely. As I type these words, President Trump has said that he will withhold funds from Honduras if its citizens vote for the candidate he opposes. This threat is a clear example of imperialism. Some years ago, some liberals pressured President Obama to withhold aid from Uganda because of Ugandan laws that punished homosexuals. Their effort to make Uganda conform to their standards was an equally clear example of imperialism. People on both the left and the right are inclined to practice the kind of imperialism they condemn in others (such as missionaries) – or worse.

What About the Political Divide?

This brings us to apply my basic anthropological insight to the political divide in Canada and the USA. To state the application is straightforward; to carry it out is extremely difficult. We begin by stating it. Just as the anthropologist and missionary enter a culture as guests and suspend judgment on that culture, we seek to enter the political arena of the left or the right as guests: suspending judgment and allowing our hosts to define what they say and what they mean.

As people wrestle with the political divide in our country, they often say how important it is for us to begin to speak with each other and seek common ground. I am suggesting that the anthropological method gives us a tool for such conversations: We recognize that our hosts (liberals hosting conservatives and conservatives hosting liberals) are in charge of what they have to say, and we seek to understand them on their own terms.

A remarkable effort to do precisely this is Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral philosophy (for example, The Righteous Mind). Haidt began life as a self-described atheist liberal who became a political centrist. As part of his doctoral work, he entered a socially conservative Indian family, seeking to understand how conservatives came to their moral positions. He did not become a conservative, but the effort to understand has transformed his life.

We can’t all do the kind of in-depth study that Haidt did, but we can all take a stance of suspending our judgment of the other side. Liberals can stop referring to conservatives as racist and conservatives can stop referring to progressives as communist. (I omit the stronger epithets intentionally.) Instead, we can see each other as coming from different worldviews and seek to understand the other’s culture.

In the process, there will be culture shock and there will be times we retreat to the relative comfort of our own cultural group; but the longer we persist – neither judging nor condemning – the more likely we are to understand what energizes people who support choice rather than a blanket right to life, or people who are suspicious of government help for the disadvantaged.

It is easy to say, “Don’t judge.” It is far harder to continue to engage while withholding judgment. It is also a necessary step towards healing the divide between left and right. We will not all end up in the middle as political centrists; I see no reason why we should. The best result would be that we become able to speak with each other again so that the political leaders of our country can draw on the best of progressive thinking and the best of conservative thinking. A winner takes all attitude only seeks to destroy, and we are already on the path to mutual destruction.

A Modest Proposal

So, a modest proposal. Make a friend who sees life differently than you do. Build the friendship slowly. Test the waters gradually. Explore their view of life, seeking to understand why they think that a particular stance towards LGBTQI+ is important, or what they think we should do as we respond to homeless people on our streets, or any other subject important to you. Don’t try to “convert” them. Try to understand them. Keep voting for the leaders who promote your view of the world. Vote against leaders whose personal style is to divide and destroy. Vote for leaders who have clear convictions combined with a real ability to connect with the other side. (I have no idea who these leaders are!) Decide today that those you oppose are worth listening to. You are God’s image-bearer, and so are they.

I don’t expect my proposal to solve all the problems we face. I am too old to expect the kind of miracles I thought were possible in the 60s. But I hope and pray that we can learn from anthropologists and missionaries to act wisely in our own sphere of influence.

Daryl Climenhaga

30 November 2025

Promises Kept

Steinbach Mennonite Church

29 December 2024

We have been journeying through Advent and now we are in the Christmas Season. We celebrated the birth of the baby on Christmas Day, and we anticipate the coming of the New Year with the promise of God’s salvation. But what does that promise look like? How will we know when God is doing something good, something really, really good? We’ll talk about that question this morning, and you can wrestle with it throughout the week, indeed throughout the year, ahead. 

Psalm 131

We began by reading Psalm 131. This psalm has the title “a song of ascents”, which suggests that it was sung as pilgrims to Jerusalem ascended to Mount Zion. There are fifteen psalms with this title (120 to 134), of which this is one of the shortest. Tradition says that David composed them. 

Psalm 131, then, describes the state of mind or the heart attitude with which a pilgrim approaches the temple: humility and a holy calmness. The psalmist compares this heart attitude with the peace that a child experiences with its mother – a feeling of complete safety and satisfaction, knowing that one depends completely on the caregiver. With this attitude, then, the pilgrim places his/her hopes in God. The text says, “a weaned child”. I am not sure why. Perhaps we are to think of the independence a toddler feels combined with the toddler’s rush back to mother when any danger is perceived. 

Consider the question drawn from our focus statement: What do God’s kept promises look like? The psalm suggests that God’s kept promises are quiet and comforting, like the comfort of a mother with her child. 

Luke 2

The gospel reading takes place at the circumcision of Jesus. When Jesus was eight days old, his parents had him circumcised. I assume this took place in Bethlehem, about five or six miles south of Jerusalem.

Verse 22 suggests that a short time later Mary and Joseph took the young infant to the Temple in Jerusalem “when the time came for their purification”. From Leviticus 12, we know that circumcision of a baby boy took place after eight days and the purification of the mother took place a further 33 days later. So, six weeks after the birth of Jesus his parents went to the Temple to make the sacrifice to purify his mother. The terms of this sacrifice (a pair of turtledoves and a young pigeon) make clear that his family were lower than most on the economic scale. 

This language is strange to us; we don’t think in terms of pure and impure, clean and unclean. These categories remind us that Jesus entered this world fully and submitted to the cultural categories of his time and place. Although he was and is the Son of God, he was circumcised and his mother was purified, following the Law of Moses given to the Children of Israel.  

While all this was happening, an old man named Simeon came up, took Jesus in his arms, and said, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”  

Then he added directly to Joseph and Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” An old widow named Anna, 84 years old, added her voice to Simeon’s and her blessings to his. These two elderly saints made it clear that the angels had been right: The appearance of Jesus was God’s kept promise to Israel and to the world. 

What does God’s kept promise look like? A baby boy six weeks old. A young mother, probably a teen-ager. And two old people who are ready to die, knowing that God has appeared to them. “Now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” 

Promises Kept

There are many themes we could develop from this brief overview, including the political and economic implications of the way that Jesus entered our world. He was the oldest son in a relatively poor family, and yet he was hailed as the Saviour of the world. Most people around him would have assumed that saving them meant saving them politically and economically. Although Jesus went deeper than that, we could still explore the social and structural dimensions of the various prophecies that surround his birth. 

Instead, I want to examine the way that God’s kept promises take the shape of simple things. Many years ago, G.K. Chesterton put the case provocatively.

Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.  

 

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (From Orthodoxy, quoted by Renovare: Renovaré | A Magical Universe - G.K. Chesterton) 

Chesterton is saying in poetic language what some scientists describe as the anthropic principle – that the laws of physics seem designed to make human life possible. 

What do God’s kept promises look like? This morning’s sunrise is one example. The falling snow is another. In Luke 2, it was the birth of a child. In our own family, it was the birth of a grandson last April. Indeed, we see God’s promise kept in the birth of every baby. 

When I first thought that sentence, preparing this sermon, I wondered if it is true. At Jeremy’s birthday party last August, Corny Rempel sang one of Elvis Presley’s hits, “In the ghetto”. It has the haunting lines, “As the snow flies/ On a cold and gray Chicago mornin’/ A poor little baby child is born/ In the ghetto/ (In the ghetto)/ And his mama cries/ ’Cause if there’s one thing that she don’t need/ It is another hungry mouth to feed.” 

Can we really say that we see God’s promise kept in the birth of every baby? The question of evil and the God of Love is a hard one, which we cannot pursue now, but we must keep it in our hearts and minds as we sing and pray and preach. For the moment, I say this much: The birth of every child is indeed a miracle of God’s love, and you don’t know when or which child will be the one that breaks the mould and proves the rule. 

Take another commonplace event that shows God keeping promises. Last Fall, Louise brought Lois a caterpillar in a jar with a leaf for some food. The jar sat in our house while the caterpillar made its chrysalis and went into suspension. For a week and a half it lay inside its coffin, and then a remarkable monarch butterfly emerged. It sat drying for several hours and finally flew away into our back yard. God’s kept promise. 

Over and over again, in nature, in our families, in the rhythm of the seasons and the sun, we see God’s promise kept for our benefit, for our salvation. 

A Story 

Let me tell you a story. A true story, one which I have told before. A story of how a small ordinary act was in reality a sacrifice through which God brought salvation to hundreds of thousands of people. 

In 1921, David and Svea Flood left Sweden and went to Africa as missionaries. They went to a place called N’dolera. I can’t be sure, but I think it is in South Kivu Province in Congo, not very far from the home of Gaston Mulemba, whom we have known in this congregation. They tried to begin a mission there, but the chief of the local village was unsympathetic. As a result, they were unable to get to know the local people – all except for one young boy that the chief allowed to visit them twice a week to bring them eggs and milk. Svea talked regularly with the boy and told him about Jesus and the love of God. Eventually, he prayed a prayer with her, their only convert. 

In 1923, Svea became pregnant and in the midst of their health struggles with fever and malaria, Svea gave birth to a little girl. They named her Aina. But the pregnancy had been hard, and she had not recovered properly from their fevers. When Aina was 17 days old, Svea died. David Flood was heartbroken and turned his back on God. He felt that God had rejected him and that he had no longer any hope, so he in turn rejected God. He lived for a while with another missionary couple nearby named Erickson, but they also died. In despair, unable to care for little Aina, he gave her to a final missionary family named Berg and returned to Sweden. 

David remarried in Sweden and had several more children, but he remained a bitter and disillusioned man. Clearly, he thought, God’s promise had not been kept in his life. 

Meanwhile, the Bergs (an American couple) returned to their home in South Dakota. So Aina – renamed Aggie – grew up with the Bergs in South Dakota and eventually went off to college in Minneapolis. There she met a man named Dewey Hurst. He went into education and eventually became the president of a Christian college in the Seattle area.

When Dewey and Aggie were in their mid-40s, Aggie found a Swedish magazine with a picture of a grave in Congo, a picture of her mother’s grave. The accompanying story told how a young boy had come to faith through his friendship with Svea Flood and had started a school and church in his village, a church of some 600 people.  

Svea did not know what had happened to her father, but she realized that she had to find him and let him know what had grown from her mother’s apparently fruitless sacrifice. For their 25th wedding anniversary, she and Dewey were given a trip to Scandinavia, and she set about finding her father. When she did, she first met her siblings, his children. They told her that whatever else she did, she should not talk about God. Too much bitterness still remained. 

Svea finally went to the house where her father lived, now an old man in his 70s, blind from cataracts and struggling with diabetes. When he understood who she was, they embraced and mingled their tears. He said how he had not wanted to leave her with the Bergs, but he found that he was unable to care for her at that time. She replied, “It’s all right, Papa. God took care of me.” He stiffened, but she continued with the story of the young boy who had gone on to bring his village to Christ. “The one seed you planted kept growing and growing. Today there are at least 600 African Christians because you were faithful. Papa, Jesus loves you. He never hated you.” 

God came to David Flood that day and healed his bitterness and sorrow. Many years later, Aggie and Dewey Hurst attended a conference in London, England, where that young boy – now the leader of a church that grew out of his ministry – was speaking. They met, and he was able to tell her the story as he had lived it. In time, she and Dewey visited her mother’s grave and celebrated God’s kept promises with the people there. 

It is a mark of missionary stories that we sometimes omit the names of the local Christians who were so instrumental in God’s work. I have not been able to find out the name of that young boy, but I know that he became the head of a larger church of over 100,000 that grew out of that first congregation. God’s promise was kept in the birth of a little girl, the death of her mother, and the willingness that she and her husband showed in going to live in N’dolera. 

Conclusion 

What do God’s kept promises look like? Like the setting and the rising of the sun. Like the hatching of chicks and the growth of crops. Like the resting of the soil beneath the covering of snow. Like care that we receive from doctors and nurses when we are sick. Like the love of our families and friends. Like a visit from a friend when we wonder if anyone remembers us. 

God’s promise of salvation for the world was kept in the birth of Jesus, and we keep God’s promises together as we love each other with God’s love. For God loved the world so much that God gave Jesus, the only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall have everlasting life. Amen.