Bodies, Borders and Belonging

I have been thinking over the last little while where did we get this concept that belonging might define who is in and who is out. It is hard for me to identify where this thinking came from. Where Genesis gives us differentiation without alienation. Sky, sea, land and every creature of every kind. Difference exists, from the beginning, but it isn’t organised into a hierarchy. Difference isn’t the consequence of the fall. Difference belongs to the goodness of creation.

Difference is created. Exclusion is not.

And when humanity becomes anxious about dispersal, building a city and tower and saying: Let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered - we know what happens with the Tower of Babel. Then the biblical narrative moves on, the differences bring about borders on land, tribes, nations, insiders, outsiders, clean and unclean. Some of those boundaries are there to protect the vulnerable; others become clear mechanisms of and for exclusion.

Ruth complicates any easy reading of that boundary.

Ruth a Moabite… where Deuteronomy says No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord, Ruth comes along… Moabite, Foreigner, Widow. She doesn’t get merely tolerated. She enters into Israel’ story. So completely that Matthew will eventually place her in the genealogy of Jesus.

Jesus is constantly getting into trouble at the borders. Jesus doesn’t simply welcome outsiders. He repeatedly encounters God, faith and transformation at boundaries. The Samaritan woman. The Syrophoenician/ Canaanite Woman. The Centurion. Lepers. Tax collectors. The bodies considered unclean. Those who’s gender, ethnicity, illness, occupation or behaviour places them somewhere complicated in relation to respectable belonging.

The border is spoken aloud with the persistent Canaanite woman pushing back on Jesus’ I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. She refuses to disappear. The encounter expands. Some of the most important encounters in scripture happen precisely when somebody refuses to remain on the side of the border assigned to them. Churches often imagine, we have something, we cross the border, we give it to them, but scripture asks us “what if God is already there?” What if crossing the borders isn’t primarily about taking God somewhere, but discovering God somewhere we didn’t expect?

Maybe one of the missing pieces is possession? Why did we start trying to possess what God has asked us to tend? My country. My church. My tradition. My table. My body. My home. My God. Possession makes boundaries because we need to know where mine ends, and yours begins. But…

Biblical belonging is frequently covenantal rather than possessive!

God says to Abram; in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed… it doesn’t terminate with the one who receives it… but rather turns outward immediately. When Manna is provided to the Israelites in the wilderness it is enough and cannot be hoarded, and rots when it is people try to own to much of it. Egypt accumulates. Pharaoh stores. Empire produces surplice through exploitation and yet wilderness God teaches a people formed under Pharaoh a different economy: gather what you need. There will be enough.

Worship doesn’t allow you to possess God either. In Isaiah 58 the people fast, worship, perform religion. But God hears the cry of the people who are hungry, homeless and poor. The tenants and vineyard stories that Jesus then tells in Mark 12/ Matthew 21 where the tenants’ violence begins when they behave as though what has been entrusted to them is possessed by them. Kill the other and it can finally be ours. I could keep going with the biblical narrative of covenant of entrusting, not covenant of ownership.

If we swim back to belonging and borders having learnt again what we have just read…

Biblically, even those who are settled are repeatedly commanded to remember that they were once strangers; even those entrusted with land are reminded that the land ultimately belongs to God. So, no one person or group possesses entirely this moment, church, place, or time that we are in.

In marriage, in my relationship with Australia and now England. In church. Within my own body. I recognise scarcity, because I recognise it in myself. I know the tiny panic that occurs when another person’s experience challenges mine. If he is right, perhaps I must be wrong. If this becomes home, perhaps that becomes less home. If another body is beautiful, perhaps mine is less so. Scarcity imagination scales frighteningly easily. I you belong more, perhaps I belong less. If migrants belong, perhaps something is being taken from us. If new people shape the church, perhaps we are losing our church.

Grace is not a scarce resource. Human dignity is not either. Our humanity isn’t in competition!

The truth is that we begin to build borders around belonging when we began to imagine belonging as something scarce. And gosh, this is why we need to talk about sin! I do not need someone else to be outside to know who I am, or that I belong. Sin might be what happens when I take something God has given me to inhabit and decide that I own it. Once something becomes mine, I suddenly feel entitled to determine who gets it. Gift becomes possession. Difference becomes threat. boundaries become barricades.

What conditions have I attached to belonging?

What must my body become before it belongs? What must a migrant demonstrate before they belong? What must a queer person conceal before they belong? What must a newcomer learn before they belong to the church? What must my husband concede before I feel secure in my experience? What must England become before I call it home? What must I relinquish before Australia stops feeling like the measure against which this experience is judged?

I am asking these questions today, on October 7. Saddened by acts of terror, and unable to turn away from prolonged wars and suffering. I am increasingly uncomfortable with any moral imagination that asks me to ration grief, as though recognising the humanity of one requires diminishing the humanity of others.

Closer to where I now live, I hear the consequences of hostility surrounding asylum and migration. Again the language of belonging becomes strangely possessive; Our country, our communities, our way of life. These are complicated questions and pretending otherwise helps nobody. But Christian theology should at least make us suspicious whenever protecting what is ours requires us to stop seeing the human being standing in front of us.

Beloved.

Boundaries matter! They help shape us, keep us safe, allow us to know ourselves and one another, and make healthy relationships possible. But something has gone terribly wrong when a boundary intended to hold a community together becomes the line by which we decide whose humanity matter on the other side.

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to the table. Not my table. Not our table. But the Lord’s Table. We come empty handed. We receive what we did not make. Grace we cannot own. Bread we break and a body given rather than guarded. A means of grace precisely because grace can only ever be received.

This is not easy work. perhaps that is why we must return to the question again and again; “What made me think it was my table in the first place?”