The Stranger

Linking to this Jewish Current remembrance of musician, poet, humorist, theologian, artist, and activist, David Berman, who passed earlier this month. I find it a powerful reminder of how we Christians -- who, after all, did nothing more than follow a different rabbi -- should live out our faith, and how we should not lie down for its freefall into oligarchy and hucksterism.

I thought that, sweeping as it is, was the extent of the piece's message. Then, the authors said:

I may only be a Protestant progressive; but, to me, when someone expresses such complete and utter alienation from their family and their community, it means there's an urgent need for the rest of us to examine, without fear or favor, what kinds of people we exclude when we think of "home".

This has been the burning question, the dominant theme here on Dear Evangelicals. It is wrong in every possible way that I should have to address it yet again.

See, while Jews are, by virtue of the diaspora, strangers in a strange land ...

... we Christians are called to be the stranger:

Read this remembrance and weep -- for David Berman, and for our sins against the teachings of Jesus and the very nature of God, too.