Jesus Experiments

I'm really enjoying the opportunity to connect with a small group of friends from Common Table in a gathering we have titled "64". This group, loosely based on the Beatle's song, "When I'm 64", is focused on examining our lives through the lens of these questions: "What will my life look like when I'm 64? What will I be known for? In what (or whom) will I have invested my time and resources?"

We kicked things off last month by reading through a gospel of our choosing as we walked through a cemetary. There's something about noting the brevity of human life while reading the words of Jesus... Then we got together to discuss our first experiment.

Mike wrote an excellent summary of our time together:
We had a nice time cooking together and catching up on life, and talking about our impressions from the graveyard walking and gospel-reading we've been doing. As we did so, a theme seemed to emerge: we've all been struck by just how engaged Jesus was with so many people. Sometimes superficially, and sometimes substantially, but seemingly quite intentionally at every turn. Too, we noted that though he certainly spent most of his time with the powerless and the poor, he also hung with some rich and powerful folks, and we spent some time pondering his enigmatic parable of the Shrewd Manager, and trying to see how we fit into this alternately wealthy and poor culture in Northern Virginia.
As we continued to talk, we noted how we tend to notice roles, rather than people. To not know our neighbors, or our co-workers, or the people with whom we interact and live among every day. We talked about our tendency to objectify the people whose job it is to serve us, and to objectify those who we are tasked to serve. To gloss over people, rather than to really connect with them. So our experiment is this: once a day, to pause to see a person, and then to find a way to show them mercy. We plan to write down at least three of these encounters over the next two weeks, so that we can share them when we get together.

I wasn't as regular with my experiments as I should have been, but I found myself surprised by the way some people responded to my humble attempts at "showing mercy". Here's one thing I'm realizing: most people in service-related fields don't expect you to notice them and they rarely expect empathy and mercy. In our consumer oriented culture, many people seem to expect to be treated as a commodity.

For me, much of this first experiment can be summed up in the African concept of ubuntu (a word that has it's origins in the Bantu languages of Southern Africa.) South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes the concept of Ubuntu in this way:
"Ubuntu is the essence of being human. And in our language a person is ubuntu and unbuntu is a noun to speak about what it means to be human. In essence, it is something that you find especially in the Old Testament... We say a person is a person through other persons. You can't be human in isolation. You are human only in relationships..." (Vanity Fair, 2007)