Addressing the Unaddressed by Kim Kankiewicz
As part of a research project, I’m reading a book about the history and meaning of street addresses. The book, by Deirdre Mask, is called The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. It’s an engaging book written for a non-academic audience, and I recommend reading it. From Mask’s book, I learned that the majority of the world’s households—including a significant number of households in the United States—do not have street addresses. I learned about organizations and initiatives dedicated to naming roads and assigning addresses in places like Appalachia and the slums of Kolkata. The people behind these initiatives understand that a street address provides access to banking, credit, voting rights, and other participation in civic and economic life.
In a year that has repeatedly challenged many of us to examine privileges and ideas that we’ve taken for granted, this book has shown me another overlooked privilege: my street address. It’s also given me another opportunity to consider my situatedness in the world as a member of the Body of Christ.
As Christians, the gospel is our primary focus—the good news that God can find and redeem us without a physical address. The Israelites marked their doors with blood at Passover not because God’s angel couldn’t otherwise identify their homes, but as an act of obedience and a symbol of the sacrificial lamb to come. Psalm 139 reminds us that even if we settle on the far side of the sea, God’s hand will hold us fast. When Jesus stands at the door and knocks, in Revelation 3:20, he doesn’t need a house number.
The gospel transcends the physical, but it’s interesting that Revelation 3:20, often read as a metaphor for salvation, invokes a physical location—a door leading to a dwelling. Jesus cared about dwelling places and not merely as representations of spiritual indwelling. He and his disciples routinely visited people in the homes where they lived. A home could be an asset for God’s kingdom, as with the house where Jesus and his disciples shared the Last Supper and the homes where the early church met. Jesus didn’t promote property acquisition as an end goal—he had no place to lay his head, and he called some of his followers to leave their homes—but he demonstrated that he cared about people’s living conditions.
Since the days of the New Testament, followers of Christ have negotiated a tension between faith and works. Today this applies especially to the works that we label social justice, which blur the lines we’ve drawn between faith and politics. From our 21st-century vantage point, it’s easy to underestimate the political implications of the Bible. Imago Dei, the teaching that every individual was made in God’s image, radically altered an ancient world that believed kings bore the image of God, and lesser mortals were disposable. Jesus was political when he befriended the friendless and confronted the powerful. Paul’s egalitarian proclamation in Galatians 3:28 was, and still is, political.
It’s one thing to agree that political engagement is part of a life of faith and another thing to discern how God is calling us to engage. Christian political engagement might look like Nuns on the Bus, a ministry of Catholic nuns, speaking against updated voter ID laws that require a physical address and thus disenfranchise thousands of Native Americans who live in homes without addresses. It might look like Communities Creating Opportunity, a faith-based organization in Kansas City, mobilizing volunteers to promote participation in Census 2020 so that residents of all neighborhoods have fair representation and resource allocation.
Despite such examples, I struggle to know how to participate in civic life as a person of faith. Because discernment and follow-through require intentional effort, I admit that my participation rarely goes beyond voting. Many in our congregation actively contribute to the civic life of our community, and I am thankful for them. I recognize that I’ve become complacent. If you’re like me, compelled to engage more actively, where do we start? Maybe the starting point is to expand our idea of Jesus’ knock, which in context is addressed to the church at Laodicea and not to a lone believer. Maybe answering Jesus’ knock is not only about God finding us, but about us finding one another. In other words, instead of waiting until we’re confronted with needs and injustices that have always existed, may we commit to living each day with open eyes, listening ears, and willing hands.