God is not American
God is not American.
Oh, but how we make Him so in our prayers. Oh, how He functions based in the constraints of what we know in our minds.
Sure, God meets us where we are. Sure, God the Father is the source of our very image and as the maker of our soul knows our every circumstance and allows us to create limited images of Him in our limited minds, but, I’ll say it louder – God is not American.
The only way we can truly know other people is to know God; and, the only way that we can exist in the fullness of what God made us to be is to know, and therefore love, people. People who were tossed into the wind, scattered among the world, and created pockets of culture that do not look like, act like, or sound like the one you were raised in, whichever that one may be.
When we read or listen only to stories of a God working in the lives of those with whom we relate, we restrict God to who we are.
Long before I moved to Haiti, I visited on a 10-day trip. I mainly watched. I watched as the 71 people who I was with brought their version of God to another country. At the time, I didn’t know Jesus. What I struggled to understand at the time, and am just beginning to confront now, was how these people, whose hearts were so well-intentioned, could dare to walk into a country that had recently survived an earthquake that killed over 300,000 people, a cholera epidemic imposed on them by outsiders, and a crushing widespread poverty, with stories of our God.
Like these people don’t know God?
Like these people haven’t watched as God gave and took?
Like these people hadn’t seen our God make orphans?
Like these people didn’t know our God.
If you can’t feel the frustration behind my words, this is me telling you, nothing makes me more angry. Nothing is more disrespectful to the impeccable body of Christ than the notion that God is a better God among the privileged.
But these people had such full, well-intentioned hearts. These people knew Jesus. These people wanted nothing more than to talk about Jesus, but they couldn’t. And that was problem number one.
In The Big Truck That Went By, Jonathan Katz writes:
“Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them ‘I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being’”
As a missionary who stepped into a whirlwind of culture, consumed by a language, I quickly learned how a language barrier can rip us to shreds and stop relationships in their tracks. Listen I’ve heard the testimonies of people who return from trips abroad and share their Kodak moments of how love & smiles transcended the need for speech. I buy it. I’ve had my moments. But sustainability? Investment? Relationships? Growth? We need words. We need words to communicate on a level above that of a happy toddler. Don’t get me wrong, we need the unfiltered, loud, messy joy of a toddler quip just as much, but I have a feeling you’re getting what I’m saying. We need words to build.
When God scattered the people (Gen 11:7), He did so because the people were wanting a tower to Heaven, but thank the Lord the story doesn’t end there. I say this almost every day, but thank the Lord for the restoration of the New Testament. When Jesus at Pentecost sent the Spirit to humans, He empowered language. In Babel God scattered the people, but at Pentecost God honors diversity and fulfills the product of a scattered world by enabling worship in every language (Acts 2).
My understanding of the fall of Babel is that God knew that language would create a divisiveness that almost nothing else could. He knew that the scattering of the people would cripple unity, and in doing so, would be our reckoning.
When God took away our bridge to the world, He did so intentionally.
We’ve been talking a lot about diversity lately, rightly so. How to enrich our lives to support understanding and empathy.How to create unity in a country that was founded with incredible divisiveness woven into it’s very core. In doing this focused reflection recently, I’ve been drawn back to what it means to me to read the Bible in another person’s language.
To do this is to attempt to uphold the dignity of another person’s cultural implications. It is to look another country in the eye and plead for forgiveness in the ways you will get it wrong, in the phrases that will go over your head, in the way that the story of Noah’s Ark will bring them back to the 2007 flood that took their mom, while you were in a second grade classroom a world away. To step into another persons’ language is far more than simple word-learning.
To step into another person’s language is a glimpse at the living, breathing body of Christ. It is a sliver of the dynamic and transformative word of God that cannot be diluted by the divisiveness of this world. My favorite way to attempt to understand this is to read and study the Bible in another language.
Fact: The Bible has been effectively translated, in its fullness, almost 700 different ways. In certain parts, thousands of ways.
God is not American.
As Americans, we are often incredibly ethnocentric. Our patriotic pride in our nation is a good thing, but must be bridled with our understanding that our primary citizenship is in the Kingdom of God. We often place our nationality over our faith, leading us to assume God also takes on the American identity. In this, we disgrace the diverse, complex, body of Christ that is visible only from a birds eye view of the collective world.
God is not American.
I know you know this, but how often do you think about it? How often do you give God space in your mind to exist just as well in your home as He does in the unreached people groups of east Asia. How often do you sit and consider how present God was in the devastating natural disasters of the third-world Caribbean, or how he was just as present in your conversation with your neighbor last week? If this is our God. If our God is this dynamic. If our God is this diverse. If our God is everything to everyone at every moment, how can we not see God in all people?
What is radical about this to me is the reality in our own homes. Our own streets, cities, states. I don’t have to write to you about my life in Haiti, or beg you to understand what is happening in the poorest parts of the world right now. I don’t have to record injustices that make me nauseous to explain to you what life is like outside of your bubble, because you have a task large enough when I ask you to start by reading something you don’t understand today.
Pick up a book by an author born in another country, another time. Make it the Bible. Bring Google translate if you aren’t proficient. Put a little effort in. Then, when you see words like servant, flood, or hungry, open your mind to a world outside of your own. Let the work that you put in to understand be the fruit of its own labor.
One of our pillars here is Mental. What I’m suggesting isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t the only way towards a cultural reckoning, but what a gift from God it might be if we all took His word and allowed it to teach us more about each other.
The devil himself, who lives and thrives in the details of division, cannot even dilute the living word. This is our unity. This is our legacy. This is our mission. This is our reckoning.
As you’re doing this, remember that when God scattered the people, He did so intentionally. We are the body of Christ. What a shame it would be to live our entire earthly lives and never even attempt to know another limb of our own body.
I don’t always know where God wants me. I have been overwhelmingly blessed with a set of diverse experiences that God led me on, mostly, only after he gracefully opened my eyes to the way He loves, enables, and desperately wants to uphold culture. Haiti is my home now, but I am still just like a little kid learning to swim in a culture that is not my own, but that is God’s. To reckon with that is to acknowledge that all cultures are God’s. Around the world, and here in America, too.
God is in each of us.
When God took away our bridge to others, he did so (again, in my God dream) not with the intention that we would hide away, but with the intention that we would do the work, build the bridge, and revel in the reconciliation of the Body, knowing that the more we can make this earth look like Heaven, the more we glorify the name of God.
So? Try it. Know a few words in another language? Go for it. It’s worth it, I promise.
God isn’t American, and in Heaven, we won’t be either.
Leeanne Leary is a missionary serving in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and a member of the Army Reserves. She is a graduate of Mount St. Mary's University and The Citadel, where she earned a degree in Literature and then an MBA. Since graduation, she has worked in education and business development, and is passionate about many things, but mainly just Jesus. You can read more of her writing by subscribing to the Seeking Excellence blog.