A Covenant to Be Resident Aliens

One of the more formative books for developing my understanding of the church was written by Duke theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. Entitled Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, the writers lean into the Book of Acts and other New Testament documents to make the point that, by our baptismal covenant, we vow to be “counter-cultural.” This does not mean “anti-culture,” but rather always a step apart from the culture because our other foot is in the church—the “Christian colony,” the beachhead for the kingdom of God, which we seek to live on earth as it is in heaven.

This stance surveys and measures all cultural norms against the standard of love as Jesus lived it and taught it:

Where the culture encourages distrust, the church encourages trust.
Where the culture encourages meanness, the church encourages kindness.
Where the culture encourages acquisition and hoarding of material and temporal things, the church encourages giving them away.
Where the culture encourages suspicion and fear, the church encourages curiosity and invitation.
Where the culture encourages slogans, the church encourages conversation.
Where the culture encourages despair, the church encourages hope.

That is what we will talk more about this Sunday.

This Sunday, I will also have the privilege of baptizing a baby—one of my greatest joys—into this counter-cultural body called the church. God has already made a covenant with all of us. A parent will make a covenant, and you all will make a covenant—to raise this child within the loving arms of the church and to witness to him how it is, in a complex and dispiriting world, we stand together united as resident aliens, proclaiming Christ’s odd message of unconditional love in a culture that seems so short of the same.

Blessings upon all of us as we, too, take that vow for ourselves.

Connecting God and Grace to Self and Community,

Matt Gaston
Lead Pastor