(DISCLAIMER: I've been working on this post for about a week, and it's still not what I want, but I have chosen to publish it anyway. I plan to work on it further and hope to submit it to the Ooze for publication...your editing and revision suggestions are more than welcome.)

I just finished reading a book called Sold by Patricia McCormick, one that some of my students are reading independently. It's a fascinating book about a young girl from Nepal who is trafficked into the sex slavery business in India after she and her family were promised she would go to the city to work as a maid for a rich family. It's a fictional story but as is usual, the author followed in the footsteps of hundreds, thousands of young girls like Lakshmi, and based this book on their stories. (She adds that this story is too true for over 12,000 girls from Nepal each year.)

One part in particular stood out and reminded me of the story of the Prodigal Son. One of the ladies in the brothel, Monica, finally works her way out of debt and is free to go. She returns to her village, where supposedly she has a daughter, only to be met there by the elders and relatives and is soundly beaten and told never to come back. Her daughter has been told that she is dead. She shamefully returns to the brothel, the only place that will accept her. (I can only imagine how Lakshmi will be welcomed back to the family that sold her off.)

Over the past few months I've read a few books that detailed the practices of different cultures, books such as Infidel, The Places In-Between, and OnThe Road to Kandahar, just to name a few (I'd highly recommend the first and last, The Places In-Between was not that good). I was reminded of the backward way of living that still permeates these cultures, the patriarchal methods entrenched in the lives of the people and the atrocious treatment of women that is common, even expected, even by the women. And this paradigm has invaded not just Somalia, not just Afghanistan, not just India and Nepal, but most of the non-Western world. I go to visit my friend in Kenya and notice that the women are treated as slaves. When I confront someone on this, I am told it is "the culture." When I hear about a young girl being raped by her uncle or a neighbor and then banished from her family and village, forced to a life of beggary on the streets, I am told that this is cultural. This is not good enough for me.

Of course, I mean not to be caucocentric. We in the West are not immune to this issue. The very people Jesus dined with, the very people that He came to save are no longer welcome in our churches. “Go and clean yourself up,” they are told, “And then maybe we’ll let you in…conditionally.” We say we are protecting the flock, that we are protecting the Name and the house of the Lord…I don’t buy it, it’s not good enough for me!

Have we forgotten how the Kingdom of God works?

It’s been years since I’ve read Crime and Punishment and though I’ve reflected on the text quite a bit since that time, I’ve never quite understood or agreed with Dostoevsky’s message about the Lord, but he emits a great deal of truth about the Kingdom of God:

…but He will pity us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all things…He will come in that day and He will ask…Where is the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness? And he will say, “Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once…I have forgiven thee once…Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much”…And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. “You too come forth,” He will say, “Come ye children of shame!” And we shall come forth, without shame and shall stand before him…” And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before him…and we shall weep…and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all!…and all will understand…”

Philip Yancey wrote a modern Prodigal story in his book What's So Amazing About Grace, I'll summarize:

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old- fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away...

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she's ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she's ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun...

After a year the first shallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. "These days, we can't mess around," he growls, and before she knows it she's out on the street without a penny to her name. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the wrong word--a teenage girl at night in down town Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She's sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home...

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada."...

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, "Fifteen minutes, folks. That's all we have here." Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they're there...

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They're all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads "Welcome home!"

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, "Dad, I'm sorry. I know..."

He interrupts her. "Hush, child. We've got no time for that. No time for apologies. You'll be late for the party. A banquet's waiting for you at home."

Have we in our fallen world forgotten the characteristics of the Kingdom of God? Have we forgotten the story of the Prodigal Son? In Luke 15 the story is told of a younger son who sought to get away from it all, asking for and receiving his father's inheritance. He journeyed to the city for a life of debauchery, intemperance, licentiousness, etc. Like the young girl in Yancey's story, like Monica, as the young girls like Lashmi, he desired to return home, uncertain of the reception he would receive. He was ready for anything, what he obtained was far from what he ever could have imagined.

At the outset, these stories do not seem to be connected, but here is my point. God provides for us a model of how His Kingdom works, and we told to work the same. So many of our cultures today, Western included, are directly antithetical to the Kingdom of God, and somehow we miss that. We accept these as cultural differences and in the name of cultural sensitivity, we allow it to go on without questioning how this fits into our Kingdom theology. We can do that no longer. As followers of the Way, we need to stand up and be counted, to live as ambassadors for Christ, in this world but not of it. We need to act as my friend who as I write is spending a month in India teaching pastors how to lead the flock and is spending a great deal of time changing the pattern of how men treat women in that society. He understands this Kingdom theology and is challenging them to change their culture. Another colleague of mine, a brother from Nigeria who came to the US, went to college and felt a burden for refugees in Eastern Kenya. Right now he is raising up a new generation of Somalis who will understand the proper way to treat women, the proper way to settle disputes, the proper way to live as a member of the Kingdom of God. There are countless others…but the paradigm is the same, the focus is spreading the message of the Kingdom and acting as its citizens.