Chronicles of the Broken Machine

The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey

October 30th, 2005

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

Firstconge.org

630-469-3096

A few years ago I tried to move into a self-storage unit. My reasoning was that it wasn’t so different from an apartment complex, really, except for the fact that rooms were much smaller and had no plumbing, heat, or electricity. And my brother had an apartment right across the street from one of these huge U-Haul complexes, six stories of steel corridors and box-shaped rooms—or rather, affordable housing, depending on how you look at it. I figured I could rent one of these 10x10 storage facilities for about $50 a month and take showers at my brother’s place across the street.

I knew it was crazy. It might just be crazy enough to work, I told myself.

Needless to say, my brother wasn’t very fond of this idea. In a desperate attempt to safeguard his kitchen and bathroom from my freeloading scheme, he quickly informed me that those storage units can only be unlocked from the outside, and that moving into one of these things would be equivalent to burying myself alive.

Acknowledging this wisdom, I decided to bite the bullet and spend a little more money and find a more acceptable place to live. Turning my eyes from the vast storage facility, I decided to find an old U-Haul truck, park it on a pleasant plot of land, and live out my days in claustrophobic and affordable simplicity. I was determined to think outside the box on this, even if it meant living inside one.

At the time, this seemed like a really romantic concept.

But my hopes were dashed a second time when someone informed me that buying an old U-Haul wasn’t good enough, as I’d still have to pay for the land that I parked on. And that was when I realized that there isn’t ten feet of space in this country that hasn’t already been discovered, seized, fenced off, sub-divided, zoned, sold, bought, paid for, and restricted.

I felt as though someone had just driven a nail into the planet and hung a “No Trespassing” sign on the gates of the world.

***

But if I could just get that broken old U-Haul seaworthy, then I could have probably sailed it to some remote location in the frozen wastes of say, Siberia, what one writer referred to as “a desolate landscape of vodka and ice.” Or perhaps I could have headed for the Iraqi/Jordanian border, a place that Left Turn Magazine called “a land of desolation,” where “coils of razor wire stretch into the desert whilst sun-grayed plastic bags caught in their sharpness flap in the hot, dry winds.”

Maybe, just maybe, I could park a U-Haul in a place like that and not be pestered by zoning boards or tax collectors. In a place like that, maybe no one would care.

But then, I might as well just move to Edom, a country that Isaiah describes as a land of boiling pitch and acrid, sulfurous soil, a land overrun by goat-demons, where cities burn in an everlasting fire.

Now there’s an idea: I could park my U-Haul in Hell.

It fascinates me, the way that some people look at other countries, especially those of harsh climates or unstable infrastructure…or those that we call our enemies. The temptation to demonize them is strong, and that’s exactly what happens to Edom in the scriptures. Depicting Edom as a kind of hell on earth is simply not fair. The fact is that Israel and Edom were ancient enemies that hated one another with a pure, unadulterated passion. Theirs is a history of betrayal and violence, stretching all the way back to the book of Genesis. And their view of one another is biased, to say the least.

But this ancient worldview is all too typical of the modern world, or civilization, as we like to call it. We look at places like Siberia, or Iraq, or even modern, industrialized places like Canada and France, and we scoff. We have pictures of these places in the mind’s eye, pictures put there by news reports or television shows or movies.

I flip to Siberia in my head and see an arctic wasteland, vast plains of ice peppered with military bases patrolled by men in big Russian hats. I scan the images of Iraq in my mind and see nothing but rubble, sandstorms, Al-Queda operatives and machine-gun turrets mounted on desert jeeps. I think of France, and I see Parisian streets, haunted by grease-painted mimes that eat nothing but croissants and fancy cheese.

I think of Belgium, and I can only think of waffles. This is a problem.

***

It all leaves me wondering how other countries look at the U.S. In an interview with GQ magazine, British broadcast journalist Ted Coppell says this about his first trip to the States as a child:

“I had overslept and missed the approach past the statue of liberty. My first impression of the United States, therefore, was of a huge billboard on the New Jersey shoreline. One gleaming drop of coffee hung from the lip of a gigantic cup. ‘Maxwell House Coffee,’ read my welcome to America. ‘Good to the last drop!’”

When people in other countries look at America, is this raw capitalism all they see? Do they see a land overrun—not by hawks or goat-demons—but by strip malls, reality TV, fast food franchises, billboards, and terrible pop music?

When they think of America, what do they see?

***

Stereotyping is dangerous. But the real trouble runs much deeper than this. It flows deep in the dividing line, in the invisible trenches that divide the nations. And it crawls along the white picket fence that separates neighbor from neighbor.

Now, I’m not even remotely against the idea of owning land or property. I live in America, and I love to own things as much as the next person in line.

But the problem is that people don’t always share the things that they own with the next person in line. Human beings have an unfortunate tendency to draw a deep line between “yours” and “mine,” between “us” and “them.” And too many people refuse to share what’s “mine” with “them.”

Especially when “they” live beyond the border. The lines in the sand are drawn, and they’re fiercely defended. No trespassing. No parking.

***

Last week, our guest preacher Jane Fitzler-Hoffman did a wonderful job of showing us a truly desolate landscape. That landscape was Angola, a place where hospital patients sleep in stairwells and children play on garbage heaps. But what was truly wonderful was her depiction of the Angolan people, beautiful people who shine in the dark hour of their hardship.

It reminded me that there are good people everywhere. Even in the Siberian ice. Even in the hot Middle Eastern sands. Even in Edom. And it reminded me that it’s the people that matter, not the culture, or the climate, or the political situation, or the value of the real estate. It’s the people. Every single one of them.

I’m truly grateful to see this community of faith stepping up to transcend borders. I’m grateful for the Angola Ministry team, and the support they’ve received from this church. And I’m grateful for the upcoming program on immigration trends and immigrant rights, because it shows that we’re expanding our global minds.

And that’s important. Because when I think of the perfect world, I don’t see a land split into nations. I see a single, undivided, interconnected machine. Not a rusty device of wires and wheels, but an organic masterpiece of forests and oceans; a planet of God’s people.

It’s God’s machine. And it’s not looking too good these days.

Perhaps the machine started to fall apart when we put the wrong fuel in the tank. We tried to fuel the great planet earth with empires and nations. We fed money into it, like we were kids at an arcade. We fueled the machine with war, and it caught fire. We tried to fuel it with gasoline…but we started to run out.

This is God’s machine. And I don’t really care how corny this sounds: the only fuel that works is love.

***

If we’re going to make this thing work, we’re going to need some help from God. We’re all going to need a little Grace. Because the only way to start putting this broken machine that we all call ‘home’ back together is to work together. We need to heed the words of Christ, who calls upon us to love all of our neighbors and gives us the strength to do it, even when it isn’t easy.

Unfortunately, not everyone sees it this way.

In 2003, a group of Christians formed an organization called Christian Exodus. The aim of Christian Exodus is simple, if ambitious: to relocate as many born-again Christians to South Carolina, where they will make their stand against the U.S. Government in an attempt to secede from the Union. Once this is accomplished, they will establish an independent, theocratic state that respects only one law—God’s.

While this is a well-meaning endeavor, I have to say that I just don’t agree with their philosophy. I honestly believe that as Christians we are called to live in community—but not an isolated community of Christians. As much as the world may go against the Christian grain, I believe that we are nonetheless called to live in the world, like Jesus did, to be a living part of God’s divine machine. We’re called to break down barriers, not create new ones.

We’re called to help unite the broken nations, “that they might all be one.” We aren’t called to live in a proverbial storage facility, locked away from our neighbors, buried alive in our own private tombs.

One world. It might just be crazy enough to work.

Amen.