“Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God”

(Ephesians 5:1-2)

There is a creation story as told by the Ik, an African tribe of hunters and gatherers who live in the mountains near Lake Rudolph. As the anthropologist Colin Turnbull recounts it in The Mountain People, their creation story used to go like this:

God, or as the Ik called him, Didigwari, lowered the first Ik from the sky

on a long vine, carefully and gently, and then when he saw that it [the small mountain of Lomej] was a good place he lowered others, more and more. They were big and healthy and strong. He gave them the digging stick and told them not to kill other men, but to hunt and to live by hunting and gathering. But the men hunted and got meat and refused to give it to the women, so Didigwari became angry and cut the vine so that man could not climb back up, could never again reach him, and he went far off into the sky.

That was the creation story as the Ik used to tell it.

But when Turnbull went to live with the Ik some years ago, he found they had stopped telling their traditional creation story to their young. Turnbull discovered the Ik had become a starving tribe, and in their preoc­cupation with the problem of survival, they had sloughed off all the religious and social customs that had characterized their lives for centuries.

For “progress” had come to their ancestral home in Africa. The Kidepo Valley, their ancient hunting ground, had been turned into a game preserve where it was now unlawful to kill animals. The new, emerging African nations began to enforce strict boundary controls and barred the Ik from their historic cycle of wandering from Kenya through Uganda and Sudan follow­ing the herds and flocks of game. The new order in Africa proclaimed the Ik, a hunting and gathering people, were to be transformed into a farming people and live on a rocky, mountainous terrain, which has now become drought plagued. The inevitable result has been starvation for the Ik.

As the Ik slowly starved and edged toward extinction, Colin Turnbull watched the deterioration of their culture and their character. All the conven­tions of society, family, and government were slowly stripped away. All compassion and mutual care for each other disappeared. The very old and the very young were the first to be driven out of the family to die. A cold, cruel individualism became the dominant Icien aspect in the daily struggle to survive.

One day, when Turnbull fed a starving, blind woman abandoned by her family and neighbors, she suddenly started crying. When asked why she was crying, the woman replied that all of a sudden the strangers reminded her, as they fed her, “that there had been a time when [her own] people had helped each other, when [her own] people had been kind and good.” The memory of that long gone day brought tears to her eyes.

There is a creation story that Christians have told from generation to generation. It is the story of a God who put a man and a woman in a garden paradise and then drove them out because of their disobedience. But the Christian creation story does not end there, like the Icien story of a god who cuts the vine from the sky so people cannot climb up to him anymore. Rather, the Christian story of creation and alienation moves on to a climax of reconciliation and redemption. The Christian story tells of the divine descent drama of the God who, instead of hiding himself in the sky when people sin, comes down to earth himself and in the person of his own son is killed by violent men and is raised from the dead.

The key verses of Christian Scripture echo this message of the divine descent drama: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:16-17). That son did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but “humbled himself’ and was born “in the likeness of men” and “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:7-8).

The creeds of the Christian church enshrine the same divine descent drama. They recite the faith that “the only begotten son of God … who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven” (Nicene Creed) “… suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead” (Apostles’ Creed).

The central sacrament of the Church reenacts this divine descent drama. This is the action of the liturgy — the God-man, the Creator-Redeemer, the God who does not hide himself in the sky from sinful man, but who comes to earth to sit at the common table of mankind and says: “This bread is my body broken for you. This cup is my blood shed for the forgiveness of the sins of the many. This do in remembrance of me, for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you reenact the descent of your God from highest heaven’s bliss to the lowest depth of human woe and sin.”

The Apostle Paul insisted that it was not enough to tell and retell the Christian creation-redemption story, not enough to summarize it in creeds and swear belief that the story is true, not enough to be present from time to time when the story is reenacted in reverent liturgy. Saint Paul insisted the only worthy response from man to the divine descent drama was actually to get into the act and participate in the drama.

Listen: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God.” The Revised Standard Version translates “be ye followers of God” as “be imitators of God.”

What can that mean for us — sinful, weak men and women, here today and gone tomorrow — to be imitators of God? We are not unfamiliar with the notion of the imitation of Christ that Thomas a Kempis made famous in his classic book of devotions. To imitate Christ for Charles M. Sheldon, the clergyman and author of In His Steps, meant to walk in Jesus’ steps, to think at every moment, “What would Jesus do?” and do just that as nearly as we can judge from his example and his ethical teachings.

But how does one imitate God? The only possible explanation is that we are to imitate God in the divine descent drama, that we walk through the life that is given us with that love of God that Christ brought into the world regnant in our hearts. That prevenient love of God for lost sinners who do not deserve it and who can never merit it — that must become our ruling passion if we are to be imitators of God.

In Africa today there is a tribe that is slowly dying. The Ik ceased to tell their creation story when their primordial order of life was upset by change and the fight for survival stripped their lives of every other value. Deteriora­tion, starvation, and destruction followed when they ceased to live by whatever glimmer had been given of the nature of God and his relationship to them.

What happens if we cease to tell the Christian story of the drama of the divine descent because of the changes in our lifestyle and our affluence and our technological progress? What happens if our faith in the validity of that story fails? What happens when we hesitate to get into the act as imitators of God in the drama of the divine descent?

Colin Turnbull sees striking parallels between our Western culture and the more primitive society of the Ik. Some signs of rampant self-interest indicate that we, like the Ik, are rapidly on the way out. Individualism is dominant in our culture. Turnbull asks: “What has become of the Western family? The very old and the very young are separated, but we dispose of them in homes for the aged or in day schools or summer camps instead of on the slopes of Meraniang…. Responsibility for health, education and welfare has been gladly abandoned to the state.”

Turnbull discerns in the Icien tragedy that qualities sometimes held to be basic to humanity — family, cooperative sociality, belief, love, hope — are not inherent human qualities at all and that they can be dispensed with, and will be junked, when and if men and women decide they threaten survival.

But this should be no new discovery for one acquainted with the Christian story of the divine descent drama. The gospel has always main­tained that men and women are lost and doomed unless God rescues them. The keeping of the love commandment-to love one’s neighbor as oneself is always, as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr perceived, “an impossible pos­sibility.” Impossible from the point of human achieving by human capabilities alone. Possible only by divine grace. Man can love his neighbor as himself only via God. When man knows himself a sinner saved by grace, with the divine love reaching down to him and through him to his neighbor, then can be woven the glorious texture of family and neighborhood and community and world order that will hold together in mutual responsibility all the children of God.