Mennonite
Central
Committee

Dislocated for Service

Maren Tyedmars Hange and Roy Hange were part of the Iran Exchange Program, and today serve as copastors of Charlottesville (Virginia) Mennonite Church. This reflection was printed in the MCC Peace Office newsletter - July-September 2001 (PDF).

Read more Peace Office Newsletters about Iran

 

What does the Lord require of us? How often do we ask ourselves this question? We express it in different ways: we wonder about our calling, the meaning of life, our next steps, where we are headed, how we go about our work and our lives, and how we relate to the people around us. We have many choices to make to be faithful in our lives and many of those choices we don't even think about until we are forced into ever new situations.

What does the Lord require of us when we go somewhere where we are strangers, or when we have strangers come into our community? How do we love the stranger? How do we learn from and teach strangers? How do we welcome others or receive hospitality? Where do we find community to nurture and sustain us? On our journey of faith and service we cannot assume anything but God's faithfulness.

 

1. Abraham and Sarah
2. Arriving in Iran
3. Stories of Encounter

 

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Abraham and Sarah

Throughout the Old and New Testament we find God's people moving around into new communities, wandering the land from one place to another like Abraham and Sarah, Jacob with his families, Moses and the people. Jesus and the disciples went from one place to another teaching and healing people, the apostle Paul traveled to start and sustain new churches and communities. They were on the journey of faith and founded ways of God's faithfulness.

Abraham was seventy-five years old when he left Haran, his friends, relatives, the familiar places. He went to Canaan, on to Bethel and the Negev, all the way down to Egypt and back up again to Hebron. Abraham did this because God said, Go. He might have stayed in each place long enough to make new friends, to start feeling at home. Maybe he said to God at some point, Hey, I am getting tired of this. I don't want to move one more time, get used to one more custom or one more culture, pack my bags again, get on my camel once again.

Or maybe he trusted in God and simply followed God's order and everything fell in place for him. Our daughter Karina thinks wherever her parents are is home, and she takes it for normal that we move to a new place every couple months. She has not lived in one place for more than four months in the last two years. She has a simple trust that we will take care of her.

Much of MCC's work is wandering in strange lands to see what is good to do and how it is good to be with the simple trust that God will be in the midst of our work.

 

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Arriving in Iran

Several years ago we went with MCC to Iran, to the city of Qom, the center of Islamic study, where Ayatollah Khomeini had studied, and where today students from all over the world prepare themselves to become religious leaders of their Muslim communities and to prepare for the Islamic revolution — a faith-based movement to change the political face of the world.

We were invited by a faith community as part of an exchange program, but this time it was a Muslim community, unlike the Christian community we lived with in Damascus. There were and are no Christians living in Qom. We were the first and only ones. The closest Christian community was two and a half hours away in Tehran. What did the Lord require of us in such a situation? How were we to walk in the ways of the Lord when we were alone? Where were we to find ourselves in the presence of the Lord?

There were no structures in place to walk in God's ways as we knew them, no church nearby that invited us to worship, no group welcoming us to their Bible study, or for fellowship. Where were we to look for the presence of the Lord: when we didn't feel it in familiar ways; in a place where people wondered how to relate to you since you were considered ritually unclean; where you constantly saw war and martyrdom, even of young teens, idealized on TV; where I had to hide myself in a black chador; and where the five-year-old son of a classmate of mine one day came home from day care, which our daughter also attended, marching around the living room chanting "Death to America!" which he learned at the day care. There I could cry out with the psalmist in Psalm 69:1—3:

Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying;
my throat is parched.
My eyes grow dim
with waiting for my God.

But there was also light. There were many people who invited us into their lives, who shared a meal with us in their home, who helped us when we didn't know our way around. These were people who saw themselves as descendants of Abraham and Hagar and extended their generous hospitality to us.

 

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Stories of Encounter

There was Heideh, who in the beginning of our time in Qom took me around the market to show me the best places to go shopping for food and other things. And as we were buying some vegetables, another woman approached us and started talking. I figured she was begging but couldn't understand what she said. What happened was that the woman didn't have enough money to buy food for lunch, and she asked my friend Heideh to buy a cauliflower for her, which she did because of the friendliness of the woman begging.

There was the Iraqi refugee family, our neighbors in the first place we lived in. On one of the first days, when we had barely any food in the house because we were still learning where to go shopping, their eighteen-year-old daughter Mariam knocked on our door and brought us a bowl of soup for lunch. This was our first real meal in our home.

Then there was the Yazdani family with their six children. They were an example in hospitality and whenever we had a problem we could count on Mr. Yazdani. One time when we had to take Karina to the hospital in the middle of the night, he was there to translate and insisted on staying with us for a few hours until she was released.

There were many times when the encounter between our faiths provided new insights. We both studied the Qur'an and Islamics but we also taught.

Roy taught The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder to a group of Muslim professors who teach Christianity at several seminaries in Qom, which led to many fascinating discussions about who Jesus was and what the role of faith is in the world today.

Later Maren began teaching the daughter of one of the professors at the institute where Roy was studying. We studied the history of the church, beginning with the Acts of the Apostles. Fatima will one day become a professor of Christianity and this was a chance for her to learn from a Christian rather than from books only.

Through a faithful allocation of finances and personnel, MCC has chosen to dislocate itself and its constituency positively toward its supposed religious and political enemy Iran, and is now seeing the fruits.

From our perpetual dislocations the last years and our reflections on MCC's role in dislocating its constituency over the years through overseas service, we have come to see more clearly that the journeys of faith in all of the Scriptures began in dislocation:

• the banishment from Eden
• the destruction of the earth by flood
• Abraham's sojourn through the land
• sojourn to and slavery in Egypt
• the exodus and wandering in the wilderness
• numerous exiles in strange lands
• the ethnic cleansings reported in the books of Maccabees
• the alienation from the land by Greek and Roman occupation

In light of all this we can see that for Jesus the cross was the ultimate dislocation:

• from God — in Jesus' sense of being forsaken even as a revelation of God's love
• from community—in Christ's alienation, which became our inclusion
• from hope—in the cross's apparent defeat, which became the hope of the world
• from justice—in the cross's injustice where God's merciful justice was revealed
• from Jesus' family—yet where the family of God was truly begun
• from peace—yet where the War of the Lamb was begun

The cross as the ultimate dislocation of God is then the grace that separates us from our sin, relocates us in God's love and reign and empowers us to give and live in service.

And it is so with the dislocations in our lives:

• the death of loved ones
• moving to serve in new lands
• exile
• birth
• life changes
• early terminations
• war
• becoming refugees

These dislocations are times when almost everything ends and everything can begin again. These are times when God seems most distant, yet when we can be born again into the arms of God.

For our dislocations are a reminder of our mortality: a reminder that it is our spirits alone that matter the most. Our dislocations become the greater Lenten seasons of our lives when all is stripped away and we are told by life's circumstances the very words of the ritual of Ash Wednesday when the ashes are put on the forehead:

"You are dust and to dust you will return."

We all then know that who we are is how we are held in the arms of God, how we are held in the grace of the cross, for the cross for Jesus was both profoundly personal and political.

For as we are held — so we should then hold the world as we in MCC serve the world, "In the Name of Christ."

We do so dislocated from our personal and national interests and are then freed up to see the world as it is, to walk freely and peaceably in the midst of its supposed divisions, and to meet needs as we are able.

One more story is necessary here from our time in Syria:

When Konrad Raiser, head of the World Council of Churches, visited Damascus the Grand Mufti hosted a meal at the Orient Club. Through MCC's connections to the Middle East Council of Churches, Maren and I were invited.

We happened to be seated at a table with the local head of the U.N. Development Program, the Grand Mufti's main English translator, and a Muslim convert friend of his from the United States. As the conversation moved to MCC's work and the Muslim friend of the Grand Mufti's translator told the story of when he had been with MCC workers after World War II taking horses to Europe by ship.

In the midst of two hours of linen, crystal, and the smell of fine food, when this American Muslim remembered two weeks on a ship with the smell of hundreds of horses, he turned to the Grand Mufti's translator and said: "There should be more Mennonites in the world."

He did so reflecting on the spirit of service he saw there in lives dislocated from their own concerns toward the needs of others. These acts from fifty years ago are still echoing through history and hearts.

And in telling this story we now charge you as a committee to write the music of mercy that will echo through the next millennium.

By leading and calling us into being a community that finds God's freedom in dislocation:

• to walk the razor's edge of the world's conflicts calling for a peaceable way
• to send workers into the middle zones of development and relief work
• to speak seeing our words as hammer blows on the swords of contention

May your hope for the world in this new millennium be as fierce and gentle as God's love and mercy made known in one crucified on a cross.

May your work be blessed by the whimsical joy of the Spirit's doing a new thing through you.

And may your labors here be under the light yoke of the Incarnate One who is yet pulling the world toward wholeness. Amen.

 

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