I was stood by the door waiting for someone else to arrive when a refugee banged on it. I was annoyed. It wasn’t opening time yet and it’s always awkward explaining that across a language barrier. I took my time coming to the door and fiddled with the key, hoping my body language would set the tone for a short conversation.

“We’re not open yet”, I said as I cracked the door open and felt the chill of the early December cold snap.

The Iranian man looked me earnestly in the eyes, thrust a heavily laden shopping bag into my hands and said in a heavy accent:

“I’m sorry, I can’t come today”.

He flashed me a grin that showed his missing teeth, leaned over to hug me, turned his bike around and rode off up the hill.

I’d known Ebrahim (not his real name) for a few weeks – maybe a month – since another refugee had introduced me to him. I’d heard rumours of his generosity, but this was my first experience of it.

I shut the door to the church against the cold, and as I locked it my mind wandered back to an interaction with John Barclay – a professor at Durham University. I was a PhD student at the University of Nottingham at the time, and he was a world-leading theologian who had been invited to give the Firth Lectures. It was as close as you come in academia to meeting a rock star.

He came to mind as I closed the door because in those lectures, he argued that one of the key reasons the first Christian communities grew was because they practiced risky generosity.

The first followers of Jesus were likely poor enough that they relied on each other to get by: you can borrow my coat today because I’m going to need your saucepan tomorrow. That was not unusual in the ancient world and lots of communities were generous in that way.

What made Christians unique was that they were much more willing to risk including outsiders – they were willing to give to people who they didn’t know well enough to be able to rely on them giving back.

I retreated from the door wondering what had just happened and whether Ebrahim would get a decent meal today if he couldn’t come to our drop in. But mostly, I wondered why he was being so generous and I was so stingy. I mean, one of us is rich by almost any metric – and it’s not Ebrahim.

As I turned round, I saw Sami (not his real name) across the room. He’s been around longer than Ebrahim and has actually been helping us by translating sermons into Farsi for other Iranian refugees. He was already inside because he was helping us today.

They show up with gratitude, and give generously of the very little they have. They practice this risky generosity with no guarantee of return.

I know a bit of Sami’s story – how he has arrived in the UK seeking asylum because his family found out about his faith and suddenly he was no longer safe in his own home. I’ve seen the scars he got from living through that story. And yet, when Sami manages to find a way to work under the radar to supplement the pittance he’s living on and make his days more meaningful, he is as generous with what he earns as he is with his time.

There’s something striking about the risky generosity I see in Ebrahim and Sami. I can’t imagine living through what they’ve endured, but they show up with gratitude, and give generously of the very little they have. They practice this risky generosity with no guarantee of return – not least because the church is so mindful of being taken in by a sob story that we make big demands before we’ll baptise or send letters of support for anyone. It challenges me. Despite the fact that I’m the rich one, my asylum seeker friends seem closer to the attitude of the first Christians than I am.

It particularly challenges me when I then read stories about small boats, Home Secretaries and Rwanda. Because somehow people like Ebrahim and Sami seem to go missing in all the debate.

I’m not in a position to solve immigration, and I’m not for a second pretending it’s not complicated. But I thought about Ebrahim, Sami and John Barclay again when my children’s CofE primary school told me what they were teaching my boys about British values and Christian values. It’s probably no surprise that there was no mention of this kind of risky generosity that was in fact a hallmark of the first Christian communities and that I think I’ve seen in these brothers from another nation. I think that’s a shame.

There’s no doubt that the Bible talks clearly about God providing for his people –wealth is not bad, and Jesus’ call to give it all away came to one particular person rather than to every follower. But God’s own generosity runs like a thread throughout the story told in Scripture.

Maybe that’s why Paul writes that ‘God loves a cheerful giver' . The original Greek word translated ‘cheerful’ there is hilaron and we get the word ‘hilarious’ from that root. It might not be funny, but within the conversation we tend to have about wealth it is surely laughable for Ebrahim to give away a bag full of goodies when he has nothing? It’s risky, certainly: better to hold onto the money as you might need it next month if the Home Office moves you without warning again. And yet, he gives.

And because he gives, he challenges me. If John Barclay is right – and I think he is – Christians have always been the kind of people who take risks to welcome others into their community. That makes no sense if you’re trying to keep your own food and energy bills down in the face of inflation. It’s laughable, in fact. But apparently, that’s the kind of giver God likes – a hilarious one!

I think he likes that kind of giver because when he looks at them he sees the image of his own generosity. After all, according to Genesis, that’s the image humans were made to carry. Seeing Ebrahim and Sami giving reminds me that for all the complexity of the immigration debate these are human beings. Their risky generosity challenges me to live up to the actual values of the first Christian community.

Article

Change

Character

Purpose

Virtues

14 May 2024

6 min read

Life is messy, take part

James Baker's political vocation sheds light on why character counts in this networked world.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Two men in seats adress a pyjamap-clad Ronald Regan.

James Baker, left, briefs a recovering Ronald Reagan, right, in hospital .

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

Few White House Chiefs of Staff have been better than James A Baker III. Nicknamed the ‘Velvet Hammer,’ Baker was originally a Democrat, and only introduced to politics in his forties. But he made up for lost time, serving as the original catalyst behind President Ronald Reagan’s time in the Oval Office. He later served as Secretary of State, helping maintain peace following the Cold War.

In their recent biography of Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, Peter Baker (no relation to James) and Susan Glasser write that, when called out of his retirement to lead the Republican strategy in the Bush-Gore 2000 Florida vote recount, ‘Baker’s reputation was so formidable that Democrats knew they would lose the moment they heard of his selection.’ More precisely, Baker ‘was not defined by his era; he helped to define it.’

And yet, the calm, cool and collected former Texas lawyer was – by the end of his tenure as White House Chief of Staff – broken. In Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers, a history of American White House Chiefs of Staff, a former Reagan staffer reflects that in a conversation long after their tenures, ‘Baker’s eyes filled with tears. He told me what it had been like for him to be chief of staff in a White House riven by different philosophies and ideological outlooks. And every day various people would try to take Jim Baker out.’

Baker, a problem-solver and political moderate, battled with his more ideological counterparts for the ‘soul’ of the Reagan presidency. This battle was ‘more emotionally grueling and deeply painful than almost anyone around him knew.’ His struggles were a harbinger of the more divisive American politics to come. Surrounded by long-time Reagan loyalists, he was an unexpected selection for the Chief of Staff role. He ran the Gerald Ford and George Bush presidential campaigns against Reagan but was recognised by the Reagans as the right person for the job. Baker kept focused within the Reagan Administration despite team members undermining him.

Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.

Through his participation in the world, Baker reminds us that life is messy. This is especially the case when engaging in communities involving competition between multiple worldviews, philosophies, or ideologies. Keeping the ship steady amid such variation comes with emotional cost. But participation is better than withdrawal from the scene of action, and into the safety of technology.

Balancing between perspectives requires a personal sense of restraint. Peter Baker and Glasser note, for instance, that ‘one of the keys to Baker’s success over the years was knowing when to back off’ in meetings. This balancing is difficult. Baker succeeded in his political vocation in part because he participated in this swirling mix of perspectives, but the balancing involved suffering.

What can we learn from Baker on the messiness of life? What does he show us about the living-out of a vocation? Baker was clear-eyed about his calling: that of serving his friend Reagan (and afterwards his close friend George Bush). He put his strategy and negotiating skills to good use as part of a larger life project. This calling strengthened Baker’s persistence, despite the trials and tribulations of participation in the world. Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.

‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’

Sherry Turkle

How did Baker discover his political vocation? And what is a vocation? The philosopher Robert Adams defines vocation in his Finite and Infinite Goods as ‘a call from God, a command, or perhaps an invitation, addressed to a particular individual, to act and live in a certain way.’ The theologian Oliver O’Donovan defines vocation somewhat differently in his Finding and Seeking. He describes it as ‘the way in which the self is offered to us…. The course of our life that will come to be our unique historical reality.’ O’Donovan focuses on service, where vocation is ‘not a single function, but an ensemble of worldly relations and functions through which we are given, in particular, to serve God and realise our agency.’

Sometimes, as O’Donovan suggests, a calling captures our attention, even if we only know the immediate next step, as if stepping from a quayside onto a boat (a helpful metaphor used throughout O’Donovan’s work). For Baker, it was the death of his first wife that precipitated a call from his friend George Bush. In this conversation, Bush asked whether Baker would be interested in volunteering for a campaign, to help take his mind off his grief. What was initially a way to help keep his mind off a trauma became, over time, a life project.

Baker thought carefully about the world and the people around him as precursor to action. He epitomised the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who writes that individuals should participate ‘in the times and places which confront us with concrete problems, set us tasks and charge us with responsibility.’ We must remember that people are multidimensional. This is not easy, Baker as a case in point through his political vocation.

Unfortunately, while recognising this is a realm of considerable debate, aspects of our culture discourage genuine engagement in the world. Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, describes ‘networked life,’ where individuals use technological devices (we might think today of WhatsApp or Instagram) to withdraw from hard, in-person conversations. She says that people nowadays tend to communicate with others on their own terms. It is easy for people to engage – or disengage – others whenever convenient.

Yet, as Turkle writes, ‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’ Networked life is for Turkle an escape from the messiness of life. It prevents encountering others as they really are. This leads to weak personal foundations: personal characters built on sand rather than on rock. It helps to be tested by conflict with others that are different than ourselves. This testing helps to reduce narcissism, in which we think more about ourselves than about the wider world.

Marshall McLuhan, in his Understanding Media, reflects on the Greek word narcosis meaning numbness. The service of networked technologies, to which Turkle alludes, is in McLuhan’s eyes a worshipping of these technologies as God. This numbing via the worshipping of technology is contrary to Baker’s more engaged way of life – encountering others in person in their complexity.

We can remind ourselves that life is messy. What we think we see upon first impressions may evolve upon continuous examination. And what is previously unseen may become evident over time. Jesus states that ‘For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light’ and later, that ‘Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.’

The genius of James Baker was found not in academic intellect, but in his ability to understand others through real engagement in the world. This understanding of others, serving them, was the cornerstone of his vocation. Former White House speechwriter and now-columnist for the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan once commented – as reported in The Gatekeepers – that Baker ‘was a guy who didn’t seem to move forward with a lot of illusions about life or people or organizations or systems.’ Baker embraced the messiness of life, but also the importance of taking part to serve others and help restore the world.