27 July

Can I interrupt you for a minute?

To be honest, I don’t deal well with interruptions. Those who know me can tell you about the irritable look on my face when someone barges into my office while I’m reading. It takes me a second to remember Jesus’ calling to love my neighbour when faced with interruptions. We’ve all been on both ends of those irritable stares. And that’s not even mentioning the interruptions that come with daily life: a toddler crying, your WiFi provider cutting service again, or those all-too-familiar messages at the bottom of the screen as we wait in vain for a train to arrive: “defecte trein, extra reistijd tot 30 min”.

In his book Reconciling All Things, the Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongole writes that the Christian church is both the “interrupting church” and the “interrupted church”. On the first point, he says that in a world full of powerful voices demanding our attention, the church’s mission is to “...announce, to point to and to radiate a freshness that draws from somewhere else”. We are called to interrupt the status quo with the good news of the kingdom of God.

Yet, at the same time, Katongole insists that in order to be the interrupting church, we must also be the interrupted church. We need to learn to adjust ourselves to the constant interruption of the Stranger. In fact, he says, it is precisely through this interruption that the beloved community learns to see more clearly that we are not a lifestyle enclave. We are not a “spiritual gated community” or a “ghetto of moral righteousness”. Our life together is defined by openness and an ongoing engagement with the Stranger. What’s more, he reminds us that we often forget the urgency of the church’s message. Though we have developed a deep affection for committee meetings and business as usual, the gift of the Stranger who crosses our path draws us back to what truly matters.

Katongole undoubtedly had Dietrich Bonhoeffer in mind. Bonhoeffer once described it like this: We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and cancelling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks, as the priest passed by the man who had fallen among thieves, perhaps reading the Bible. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised athwart our path to show us that, not our way, but God's way must be done.

Marius Louw