Gangs and Sanctification?

I participated in an interesting meeting yesterday. There is a group of ministers here in Hattiesburg that have been gathering every couple of weeks to talk about the growing violence in our town, particularly that related to gangs. At this point a lot of thought and dialogue has taken place in these meetings (good stuff for sure), along with several educational opportunities… but not much action yet. In any case, yesterdays’ meeting was good, and we began to talk about some more concrete ways to move forward.

One of the suggestions, and one I liked a lot, was that we get to know a gang member, or maybe several, in an attempt to better understand the life and issues we are thinking about. We talked about bringing someone to our meeting, but it is hard to ignore the fact that few if any gang members are going to be willing to go to a meeting with a bunch of straight- laced clergy types. Heck, I am not even sure I would want to go to that… especially if I knew I was the focus of their conversations.

So maybe we need to go to them. This is a frightening thought for some of us. There would certainly be some danger, and a lot of unknowns… But somehow this course really appeals to me, and so I spent most of yesterday thinking about that. Why in the world would I want to go hang out with gang members?

In my mind I clicked through the normal list of reasons. This would be a good opportunity for me to learn, so that I might be of more help. This would be a chance for me to get involved in these lives and maybe do something meaningful… really make a difference. This would be an opportunity for me to connect these guys to God in Christ perhaps. All of these seem like good reasons, but I kept coming back to another thought, one more selfish I guess. I kept coming back to the idea of sanctification.

As one in the Wesleyan tradition, I have a strong belief that once a person has acknowledged and accepted God’s grace in Jesus, she are regenerated, or made new, and sets out on a long path toward sanctification. Sanctification is just a big way of saying that we are on the path to being made perfect in Holy Love: the loving of God with our whole hearts and minds, just as we love our neighbors completely and without reservation. Understanding sanctification this way, I can not help but wonder if this call I am sensing on my life, this call to be with those who are hurting, to somehow immerse myself in ministry with the poor, even those caught up in the power of violence, is not a step in my pilgrimage toward sanctification. Is it possible that for me to move forward in my walk, to continue following Jesus, I need to intimately touch those he would touch? Or perhaps, as Jesus indicates in Matthew 25, this is where He actually is, in the suffering gang member, or the kid on the verge of falling into the gang life. Could it be that the my next step toward holy love, the kind of love that Jesus lived, is to go and be with these that are hurting and in desperate need?

Clearly getting involved with those trapped in violence and poverty is a risky step. But what if not taking this step is even more risky? What if refusing to take this step means not moving further along my path to Holy love? Jesus said that to have life, the sort of life he was offering… life of holy love… we must be willing to give up our lives. Could this be what he was talking about?