Here’s a quote from Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon

Salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God’s purpose for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false.

I just acquired a Library card for Vanderbilt Divinity School, which I could get as a “local clergy” status by virtue of working for a church agency. Getting a copy of Gerhard Lohfink’s “Does God Need the Church?” was the impetus for my looking into Vandy’s Divinity School library, in addtion to the other goodies like Hauerwas that I can find there. So when I was checking out Lohfink, I also looked to see what Hauerwas books were there that I had in mind to read and had not read yet, so I found “Resident Aliens” which he co-authored with Will Willimon in 1989. As I got in to it, I wish I had found this in 1989, and that Hauerwas had been one of the oft-quoted authors in my theological education, so that I would have been exposed to this “eccesiological” emphases earlier. It would have attracted me then as well, since The Church of the Saviour had already prepared the ground for me on such matters since 1976 when I first began reading Elizabeth O’Connor. I know that 16 years ago was not such a long time ago, and Hauerwas was not exactly a young man then (he was the same age as I am now), but I was thinking I was going to be reading some “early Hauerwas”, but it sounds to me as if even with Resident Aliens, he started right in on the problem of liberal democratic nation states as carrying on the traditoon of the post-Enligtenment project of the State’s seduction of the church with a promise of power in its “chaplaincy” role.

The theme from the above quote, on “the journey”; the role our story has in a larger story, the story of God and a People of God, this is also significant. The realization that I, that we are coming into that story “in the middle” is both a reminder that we are siginificant onlyu in the context of the story we inhabit, and for your part in that, and also that what comes after is a continuance and a building upon.

We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church. Big words like “peace” and “Justice,” slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what “Jesus Christ is Lord” means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth

“words awaiting content”, to be supplied from the Church’s vision of the Kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus. As a peculiar people; a “colony” as Willimon and Huaerwas describe it, there is much for which to hope as we await a call and a prescence to sustain us in that call. The stories confirm a past history of God’s deliverance, and a present-future promise that God will go before us, to a land that he will show us.