The eCrozier

How does a young missionary’s death speak to our current state of relationships in America? It turns out, maybe quite a bit. You may have read about John Allen Chau, a young American missionary who last November was killed by the Sentinelese, an isolated tribe on an Indian Ocean island after trying to convert them to Christianity. As we’ve come to expect, the judge-jury-executioners of social media were quick to pounce. One wrote: “John Allen Chau is not a martyr. Just a dumb American who thought the tribe needed ‘Jesus’ when [they] already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.” The organization who sponsored him, “All Nations,” was equally hyperbolic describing him as a “martyr,” saying that the “privilege of sharing the gospel has often involved great cost. We pray that John’s sacrificial efforts will bear eternal fruit in due season.”

So, who was Mr. Chau: A deluded zealot or a faithful follower of Jesus? His family wishes everybody would just shut up and know he was “a beloved son, brother, uncle, and best friend.” But in order for people to “shut up,” they’d have to step away from the self-righteous judgmentalism dictated by their religious and political partisanships and move toward a different spiritual and emotional place, one that doesn’t demand they immediately define the other, whoever the other is, in simplistic catch-phrases. You see, the story we tell ourselves about who we are inevitably shapes how we try to make sense of a narrative like the death of Mr. Chau. Our culture insists our story requires choosing sides immediately into either the “pro” or the “anti” camp.

My hunch is that Mr. Chau wasn’t the caricature that either his detractors or his hagiographers contrived. Like the rest of us, he was a mixed bag of foolhardiness and love, ignorance and devotion, sin and faithfulness. In other words, he was human. If we have any hope of living together compassionately and justly, then we must learn to accept one another’s humanity for its messiness. Only then can we heed Dr. King’s warning from over 50 years ago: We will either learn to live together as family or perish together as fools.

We need to give one another a break from the incessant calling out of one another’s sins by admitting we often hold other people to a higher standard of moral uprightness than we’re willing to hold ourselves. I’m not promoting moral laxness. As we’re shaped by our faith in Jesus and his teachings, we should respond to people’s behavior as we see it. But it ought to be infused with empathy for their complex humanity. It ought to account for the thrust of grace given in Jesus Christ. And, any response we offer should be grounded in a complete honesty about our own personal story, a story that someday will have its own detractors and hagiographers. Harrison Scott Key, writing in The American Conservative, pokes fun at himself and all of us who have trouble being honest about our own stories: “If there’s one thing my long internship at Jesus Enterprises, LLC, has taught me, it’s that I should be much more watchful of what’s inside me than what’s inside you. That is where we have to start, I am told, by the invisible God-Man who has limitless powers to change the weather or the outcome of a sporting event.”

+Scott