Filed under: Christianity, Consumerism, Peace and Justice, Shane Claiborne, quotes | Tags: Christianity, Consumerism, Hermas, Jesus for President, justice, Shane Claiborne, spirituality, wealth
This one’s extremely challening and I’m going to have to sit with it for a while:
You who are God’s servants are living in a foreign country, for your own city-state is far away from this city-state. Knowing which is yours, why do you acquire fields, costly furnishings, buildings, and frail dwellings here? Anyone who acquired things for himself in this city cannot expect to find the way home to his own City. Do you not realize that all these things here do not belong to you, that they are under a power alien to your nature? The ruler will say you do not obey my laws, either observe my laws or get out of my country, Take care lest it prove fatal to you to repudiate your own laws. Acquire no more here than what is absolutely necessary. Instead of fields, buy for yourselves people in distress in accordance with your means.
-Hermas, 140 AD
Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, Jesus For President (Michigan: Zondervan 2008 ) 146.
Filed under: Capitalism, Christianity, Consumerism, Peace and Justice, Politic, Shane Claiborne | Tags: Capitalism, Christianity, Consumerism, Jesus, Jesus for President, Shane Claiborne
Jesus is ready to set us free from the heavy yoke of an oppressive way of life. Plenty of wealthy Christians are suffocating from the weight of the American Dream, heavily burdened by the lifeless toil and consumption we embrace. This is the yoke from which we are being set free. And as we are liberated from the yoke of global capitalism, our sisters and brothers in Guatamala, Liberia, and Sri Lanka will also be liberated. Our family overseas, who are making our clothes, growing our food, pumping our oil, and assembling our electronics–they too need to be liberated from the empire’s yoke of slavery. Their liberation is tangled up with our own. The new yoke isn’t easy. (It’s a cross, for heaven’s sake.) But we carry it together, and it is good and leads us to rest, especially for the weariest traveler.
Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, Jesus For President (Michigan: Zondervan 2008 ) 113.
Filed under: Christianity, Peace and Justice, Politic, Shane Claiborne, love | Tags: Jesus for President, Justice Revival, Shane Claiborne
Last week I attended a luncheon hosted by Shane Claiborne at the Justice Revival in Columbus, OH. He asked us to share with the people at our table about the person or experience that made us start to really care about social justice. To me, this was a brilliant question. It was obvious that there were people in the room on all sides of the political spectrum. Shane’s radical message no doubt offended some while those of us who agreed sank further into our self-righteousness indignation.
But when I reflected on the experience that I would share about, I was totally disarmed. I thought back to a trip I took to Mauritania in West Africa. One night a young mother asked my friends and I to pray for her nine month old son. He was suffering from malnutrition and parasites which made his stomach abnormally large and round. Her home of four walls and a dirt floor was dark. We gathered around her son and each placed a hand on him. We said prayers hoping to change his circumstances.
I don’t know what happened to the boy after that. I don’t know if any of his circumstances changed. But as I reflected again on this old story of mine, I realized how much that experience changed me.
At the luncheon, when it came time to share my story, my voice started trembling, I teared up, and couldn’t talk. The old story had new meaning and it began to work on me in a powerful way. Not able to finish, I had to pass on to the next person. Feeling totally disarmed by God’s love, I looked at the people in the room around me in a different light.
Working for justice isn’t about being dynamic, one step ahead of the rest, or even being “right”. It’s about people with real lives and real stories. Anything more than that is an imitation of working for justice (and something that will most likely be watered down, put in a box, and sent to the market).
I’m still reading Jesus For President and I’ll be sharing some interesting quotes later in the week.
