For Wilshire Baptist Church
Have you checked your passport recently? I last used mine in 2014 and assumed I was good to go for a trip to Canada in the fall, but when I pulled it out of the bottom of my desk drawer I discovered it expired in 2017. So I’m hustling to get it renewed.
Other than the deadline, the renewal application was actually easy because nothing important has changed: name, birthdate, height, address, Social Security number. They don’t ask about weight. It hasn’t changed either, but I’m not bragging because that is mostly genetics. But so is hair, and I was asked about my hair color, which made me pause. For the first time in my life I had to skip the “brown” box and check “gray.” My hair started turning colors 25 years ago, starting in the front and working toward the back, following the same pattern and timing as my father.
They ask about eye color, and mine are different shades of blue depending on what I’m wearing. They don’t ask about teeth, but if they did I’d have to claim some replacements. It’s weird to think about yourself as a car that no longer has all of its factory-installed parts.
They don’t ask about faith or denomination on the passport application. They used to on lots of applications and perhaps they once did for passports but they don’t now. And that’s good because there are too many stereotypes rolled into that, and stereotypes often are based on ugly extremes. I could check a box for “Baptist” and a customs agent might put me on a watch list for gun-toting, homophobic, xenophobic, male chauvinistic racists because that’s how we’re often painted based on some of the more vocally outrageous among our numbers.
But I’m also glad they don’t ask because the Baptist I am today is not the Baptist I was when I was 10 or 20 or 40 or even 50 years old. And most of that is because I’ve more fully embraced what I believe to be the true meaning of being a Baptist, which is to tend to my own faith and let my neighbors tend to theirs. But then that sounds like Baptists have nothing to do but pat ourselves on the back and sing “hallelujah” because we’re saved; we’ve cleared customs and our passports are good for all eternity. But that’s not what I’m saying.
My personal Baptist faith – which also is very much hereditary and like my hair color is changing through the daily experiences of life – tells me that while I shouldn’t care about the boxes others check on their passports, I definitely should care about the boxes we force others into by our words, our silence, our actions and our inaction. Those boxes include poverty and all that encompasses, as well as injustice and marginalization. These are not problems we can solve by just praying from our cloisters or by going door-to-door and changing boxes from “None” to “Baptist.” These are problems that require our hands and feet in the acts of delivering shelter, food, education, medicine, opportunity, hope, respect and love. Those last four items on the list are perhaps the most powerful and yet require the least resources. You’d think they’d be easy but they require that we denounce and disprove those stereotypes that plague us.
When I got my first passport in the 1980s, I believed my faith was defined mostly by my personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. That relationship is still paramount, but today I believe it is defined by my relationship with my neighbors. It’s a faith turned inside out – a faith lived outside the checked boxes.