During the last couple of weeks, we’ve talking about faith and race. Please know that I’m not talking about the intersection of faith and race because I feel somehow “smart” on this issue. Far from it!
While it may be totally reasonable to focus our attention on areas of personal competence, I nonetheless believe there is something to be gained, when we move beyond this zone of safety. In the awkwardness and missteps of talking through difficult things, the hope is that we might find room for growth and understanding. Moreover, in acknowledging my own weakness and shortcomings, I make room for Jesus to work in my life.
How do we find growth and understanding? How do people change?
These are good questions to ask of ourselves. A book that has offered me some insight into these questions has been Why Jesus Crossed the Road by Bruce Main, the founder and president of Urban Promise. This book has been formative to me, in part because it totally upset my views on how people change and grow. Once upon a time, as a good Baptist, I would have told you that God changes us pretty much through His words in the Bible and through prayer. I might have also told you that God changes us through His Holy Spirit, without truly understanding how this in fact happens. It was all a bit fuzzy to me.
Too often, when we read the Bible, we focus so much on what Jesus is saying, all those “red letters,” that we sometimes miss out on what Jesus is doing. As a result, while we might claim that our life is all about the word of God, the reality is far from it.
Bruce Main writes:
The problem with traditional spiritual disciplines is that they can all be done in isolation—both privately and within groups—and simply reinforce what we want to believe. The problem with a spiritual life being exercised in isolation is that it allows people to grow without the perspective of others. Surrounding ourselves with people who think, act, look and even smell like us usually leads toward a growth pattern or no growth at all.
To address this problem, a kind of spiritual myopia, Main prescribes that we adopt road crossing as a spiritual discipline.
What is road crossing?
In considering the value and importance of road crossing, we need to look no further than the example of Jesus. Throughout his ministry Jesus crosses the road to spend time with people from other cultures and other economic classes. While we might look at Jesus’ words to us, it would be helpful for us to also examine his actions and how he crossed socio-economic boundaries and barriers. On each occasion when Jesus crossed the road, to speak with a Samaritan woman, to heal a leper or to give sight to the blind, he was challenging the conventional wisdom of his day. Jesus actions challenged the disciples’ prejudices and moved them to consider a different way of seeing people and the world around them.
We do not cross roads to appease our guilt. We do not cross roads so we can check off an exotic life experience. We cross roads to learn and grow. By placing ourselves in the midst of the poor and experiencing a little of their existence, we see with new eyes, feel with new hearts, dream with new minds and contribute with new hands and feet. This is how change takes place. (Main)
The idea of road crossing as a spiritual discipline was revolutionary for me. In my own faith journey, following Jesus, was first and foremost predicated by reading the Bible and living a holy life, which basically meant “hanging with” other Christians from my own church and sitting through really long Bible Studies.
Bruce Main seemed to be telling me that I was missing something really important.
When we cross the road and we meet other flesh and blood people, scripture can no longer be abstract (Main).
What does it mean to care for the poor? What does it mean to be a source of blessing and healing to the people around me? What does it mean to love my neighbor?
My answer to these questions will be very different, depending on the people who surround me and the streets where I walk.
In fact, when Main talks about “road crossing,” he’s not necessarily even talking about what Christians might call “evangelism.” Instead, Main is encouraging something even more basic. Road crossing begins with simply meeting and getting to know people who are different from me. In meeting diverse people, Main writes that we may experience a kind of “jolt” which “challenges us to ask uncomfortable questions that keep us honest and protect us from laziness.”
It would be fair to say that in life, we all make assumptions. We make assumptions about people all the time. We see a person, listen to them talk for five minutes and make a value judgment on whether they are a good person, bad person, spiritual person, or deranged person. What if instead of making quick assumptions, we actually took the time to know them? How might our understanding of them change? What could this change mean for our life?
One of the best parts of Why Jesus Crossed the Road are the many personal stories. Main is the president and founder of Urban Promise and many of his stories are drawn from this experience. Despite the many personal challenges, Main’s life seems like anything but boring. Each story offers a way for us to understand what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
How do we love our enemy?
How do we love the fallen and broken?
What if you walked into a poor community, and discovered the air was almost unbreathable, because the neighborhood was next to sewage treatment plant, what would you do?
Throughout Main’s book are examples of individuals, from the Bible, and from the streets of Camden, who changed in part because they encountered people who were different from themselves. In meeting people and understanding their circumstances, Jesus’ words come alive.
If Main’s book does anything, it most definitely does not offer the quick fix. Road crossing, for all of the ways that it pushes us to live a life of risk and faith, is far from easy. It requires intentional action. It requires a willingness to engage in the awkward, the uncomfortable and make myself vulnerable.
In these awkward places, Main suggests we will find spiritual truth, meaning and the heart of Jesus
As an introvert, and someone who is extremely socially awkward, Main’s book fills me with equal measure of longing and terrifying fear. I am filled with the romantic longing, as my heart is stirred with a reminder of Jesus’ words and what they can mean in my life and in the lives of the people around me. I am also filled with fear, a kind of social paralysis that strikes just as deeply at my heart.
Main has a fair amount of things to say about overcoming our fear. He urges us to follow Jesus example in Gethsemene on the night before his death. Jesus prayed in anguish, confessing his feelings to his close friends. Along the way, Jesus rejected the idea that “spiritual people have to be superhuman.”
Main also discusses other “roadblocks” to road crossing, including indifference and misguided theology. Clearly, there are many things which prevent us or make it difficult to care for those people on the other side of the road. All this reminded me how to make it to the other side of the road, I might need to throw out what seems reasonable in the moment.
Through “Why Jesus Crossed the Road” Main urges us to go deeper, to get past our complacency and to live with a kind of curiosity. The promise as we see the example of Jesus, is a changed life, a remarkable life.
Christian faith is about moving beyond our primal, self-impulses and actively looking for ways to expand our relational circles so we can learn, grow and share the gifts has bestowed upon our lives.(Main)
After reading Main’s book, I can no longer read the gospels, without taking notice of Jesus life and all the ways, he crossed roads, disobeyed social conventions, asked awkward questions, risk rejection and showed love.
In considering how we can have a dialogue on faith and race, I believe it begins with simply crossing the road. Too often, with respect to race Christians think we have it figured out. In our small circle of people who look and think exactly like us we have it figured out. In other cases, we see race in terms having a “right” theology. Instead, we might be good to follow Jesus’ example, step outside of our small circles and begin to have conversations and talk with people.
When Jesus crossed into Samaria, he had a conversation with the Samaritan woman. Even by Samaritan standards, she was a fallen woman. What is Jesus’ response? He has a conversation, which begins with a simple request for a drink of water.
Jesus crossed the road.
Has there been a time when you had a road crossing experience, where you moved passed your fears or people’s expectations? What did this experience teach you?
