Recognizing the Word that is Spoken


It has been well over thirty years since I first began work in Christian ministry.  My first paid service was as in my college days when I served as a Lay Pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Fairbanks.  The church had two worship services, one in English and one in Iñupiat Eskimo.

One day I asked one of the elders at the Iñupiat service why the Iñupiat people accepted Christianity so quickly and so whole-heartedly in Alaska’s arctic.  As near as I could tell it had happened within only one or two generations.  At the time, many of my own college classmates were questioning the validity of the whole concept of faith (let alone accepting Christianity), and the Iñupiat response stood in such contrast to what I was seeing elsewhere that I couldn’t help but ask the question.

The elder gave a two part answer.  He began by telling me the story of Maniilaq, a prophet from the Kotzebue region who hung hides to dry-cure above his house.  He told the people that these hides would mark the coming of a hugely important event.  When those hides finally fell from the hanging poles, that would be the time when a new messenger would arrive to bring a new Word about God.  The people should therefore watch the hides and be ready.  The year the hides blew loose from their hanging poles was the same year the first missionary arrived.

The second part of his answer has rested with me more powerfully than the first.  He told me that the story of Maniilaq is only one of the signs  of God’s consistent faithfulness to all creatures in the world.  God had been among the Iñupiat people from the beginning.  The Iñupiat values they lived by were based on, the way of lief they had been taught reflected the very same God expressed in the person of Jesus Christ.

More to the point, this wise elder pointed out that the coming of Jesus was the fulfillment of the Bible’s Old Testament.  He told me that the old teachings of the Iñupiat people were also their Old Testament.  Jesus, he told me, is the fulfillment of their own ancient wisdom, and the gospel of love brought by Jesus opened up their own teachings for all people.

It is my suspicion that my friend’s interpretation described here would not be shared by all of Alaska’s Iñupiat Christians.  The story is much more complex, of course, and the many other historical influences that were at play (the coming of western diseases, the influence of western traders and whalers, etc.) played very significant roles, and the work of the missionaries as doctors, teachers, and sometimes as bald faced propagandizers did not enter into his account to me.

Still, what he told me was the important part he wanted to share.  God has been at work throughout creation, and the coming of the first Christians into an area should never be viewed as the first arrival of God’s revelation to any people.  God is at work everywhere and in all peoples.  However, the quality of people’s interpretation of God-with-them varies.  There is better naming and worse naming, but God is already present and already at work, nevertheless.

There are many ramifications that follow from this learning.  How do we understand Jesus’ proverb “Seek and you will find” for people who grew up in a non-religious culture, or in a culture from another religion?  For Christian people, there are better teachings and worse teachings in our own religious family.  How do we deal with the diversity of thought, and how do we discern the better teachings and examples?

For Christians, it is important for us to claim an explanation (a “naming”) of our own faith that we believe to be a better explanation rather than a poorer one.   It has always been important for us to recognize that when God sought to send the true Word to humanity, God “spoke” that Word in and through the life of a person, Jesus Christ.  The Bible has authority as Word only insofar as it points us to the pre-existing Word that predates humans and predates all creation.  God spoke that Word among us in the man, Jesus.  The Bible is the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus, but the Bible is not Jesus and should not be worshiped.  The Bible should be used to discover God who, in Jesus, is uniquely revealed as the healing, transforming, saving Word that is somehow poured out upon, and in and through all creation.

All of creation is a big, big place, and includes all peoples.  Somehow, our eyes need to be open to God’s presence and work through it all.  It requires a greater sense of relatedness to all things, and even all peoples.  It requires seeing ourselves and the world with new eyes.

As Jesus told someone who was trying to understand, we all need to be reborn:
Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water [born of creation] and Spirit [born of God]. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  (John 3:5-9)

The Spirit is like wind, blowing wherever it may and affecting everything.  Where, I wonder, will I see the Spirit’s effects today, and how shall I respond

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