Out of Context

“I can’t help but wonder which came first: the impulse to sanitize and tame Jesus by encasing him in abstract theology, thereby removing our motivation for discipleship, or our natural repulsion toward discipleship that forced us to domesticate Jesus to let us off the hook. Either way, when Jesus is just true light from true light, ethereal and otherworldly, we are only ever called to adore him. But when he is true human, one who loved and healed, who served and taught, who suffered and died and rose again, he becomes one we can follow.”
p32 Exiles, Michael Frost

Out of Context

“There is such an enormous gap between our words and deeds! Everyone talks about freedom, democracy, justice, human rights, and peace; but at the same time, everyone more or less, consciously or unconsciously, serves those values and ideals only to the extent necessary to defend and serve his own interests, and those of his group and state. Who should break this vicious circle? Responsibility cannot be preached: it can only be borne, and the only possible place to begin is with oneself.”
-Vaclav Havel – Czech poet, dissident, and prime minister (Exiles p17)

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
-Cornell West – Call and Response

Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized Part V

God Bless America (This ought to be fun since I work with a 501c3 non-profit church that has this painted on the side of their building)

Ched Myers does great work with the idea of “God Bless America” in his article “Mixed Blessing: A Theological Inquiry into a Patriotic Cant,…

In the Hebrew Bible, the imperative “Bless!” occurs only thirty out of the several hundred times the verb barak (“to kneel,” as before a king) appears. OF those thirty occurrences, the majority are liturgical exhortations to “bless the Lord,” mostly in the Psalter (e.g. Ps. 66:8; 96:2; 104:1). In other words, the act of blessing is most often directed toward heaven, not solicited from it! Only four times in the entire Hebrew scriptural tradition do we find requests in the imperative for divine blessing. Even more intersting (or troubling, from the point of view of the “patriots”) is the use of blessing in the New Testament. Of the forty-one appearances of the Greek verb eulogeoo (“speaking a good word”), only twice do we find it in the imperative mood. In neither case does it involve God. It does, however, involve us–and our enemies. In his famous sermon on the Plain, Jesus invites his disciples to “bless those who curse you”. These instructions are later echoed by the apostle Paul: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse”. The lesson is unmistakable: we would do much better to ask God’s blessing on the world, and to bless God by loving our enemies.p199

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III When the Empire got Baptized part IV

What was so evil about Sodom? “now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezek. 16:49). That’s not what we learned in Sunday school.p187

When we are talking about a baptized empire, one that has dazzled the church into fonformity, we are not just talking about the violent militarism of Rome or the United States or Iran or North Korea. We are also talking about a much more prevalent, subtle, and powerful empire that seeps into every home – our daily global lifestyle.188

Quotable Quotes-The Reason for God

The Reason for God-Tim Keller
Chapter 4: The Church is Responsible for So Much Injustice

There is the issue of Christians’ glaring character flaws. If Christianity is the truth, why are so many non-Christians living better lives than the Christians? Second, there is the issue of war and violence. If Christianity’s is the truth, why has the institutional church supported war, injustice, and violence over the years? Third, there is the issue of fanaticism. Even if Christian teaching has much to offer, why would we want to be together with so many smug, self-righteous, dangerous fanatics?p52

Quotable Quotes-The Reason for God

The Reason for God-Tim Keller
Chapter 2: How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?

For many people it is not the exclusivity of Christianity that poses the biggest problem, it is the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Some find unjust suffering to be a philosophical problem, calling into question the very existence of God. For others it is an intensely personal issue.p22

In December 2004, a massive tsunami killed more than 250,000 people around the rim of the Indian Ocean…One reporter wrote: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”

Many other philosophers have identified a major flaw in this reasoning. Tucked away within the assertion that the world is filled with pointless evil is a hidden premise, namely, that if evil appears pointless to me, then it must be pointless.p23

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized pIII

To find Christianity at its best, and the church alive, we need only look to the areas where it is persecuted and peculiar. It’s hard to walk away with any other conclusion but that the best way to defeat the kingdom of God is to empower the church to rule the world with the sword, for then it becomes the beast it wishes to destroy.

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”-Ann Coulter

SIDE NOTE CHECK OUT BLOG BY GREG BOYD AND SEE SHANE CLAIBORNES THOUGHTS ON BOEHNHOFFER ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HITLER

“You’ve go to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I’m for the President to chase them all over the world. If it takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”-Jerry Falwell (side note: Falwell is now dead. Sad to say but this is probably a good thing for the church)

“The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the plante – it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining, and stripping. Sweaters are the antibiblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars – that’s the biblical view.”-Ann Coulter

“You can no more have a Christian worldly government than you can have a Christian petunia or aardvark.”-Greg Boyd, Myth of a Christian Nation

“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”-John Adams

Among the myriad critics of this global-dominance project was Martin Luther King Jr., who initially aimed at race and class issues but later voiced criticism of the US as an imperialistic “policeman of the whole world.”p179

The Stars and Stripes fly over more than seven hundred military stations in more than one hundred countries all around the globe…it participated in an escalated the most belligerent and out-of-control weapons race ever known to humanity: the stockpiling of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons…The US is arming over 75 percent of the world, while it tells folks to disarm, which is like handing out guns to kids in our neighborhood and telling them not to shoot each other.p179-180

“Einstein, who repented of making these weapons, said, “We scientist, whose tragic destiny it has been to help make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used….What task could possibly be more important to us?”-Donald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times

Fortunately, more and more Bible literate Christians are deeply disturbed by the skewed theology of empire. It is becoming more and more clear that the Pax Americana is not helping the world get any closer to understanding the crucified Christ and his gospel of grace.”p182

Tacitus said that people “feared the peace of Rome”, because streams of blood and tears of unimaginable proportions followed in the “peace.”p183

“We are dying and killing for abstract nouns like freedom and democracy…but this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ.”-Letter from a US soldier in Iraq

“Over 50 percent of the Roman budget went towards the Roman military. Of each dollar paid in taxes, 36 cents goes toward the military of the united States.”-John Dominic Crosson

It was once said, if you want to know your idols, consider what you are willing to kill for.p185

“Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly and it’s gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.”-Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue”

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized pI

The more the early Christians reflected on the life and message of their rabbi-messiah, and the more they tried to live the way of the gospel, the harder they collided with the state and its hopes and dreams, militaries and markets. In fact, Christians in those first few hundred years were called atheists because they no longer believed in the Roman gospel; they no longer had any faith in the state as savior of the world. p141

“We are charged with being irreligious people and, what is more, irreligious in respect to the emperors since we refuse to pay religious homage to their imperial majesties and to their genius and refuse to swear by them. High treason is a crime of offense against the Roman religion. It is a crime of open irreligion, a raising of the hand to injure the deity…Christians are considered to be enemies of the State…we do not celebrate the festivals of the Caesars. Guards and informers bring up accusations against the Christians…blasphemers and traitors…we are charged with sacrilege and high treason…we give testimony to the truth.”-Tertullian

“He called Abraham and commanded him to go out from the country where he was living. With this call (God) has roused us all, and now we have left the state. We have renounced all the things the world offers.”-Justin

[Origen, quoting Celsus:] “If everyone were to act the same as you Christians, the national government would soon be left utterly deserted and without any help, and affairs on earth would soon pass into the hands of the most savage and wretched barbarians.” [Origen:] Celsus exhorts us to help the Emperor and be his fellow soldiers. To this we reply, “You cannot demand military service of Christians any more than you can of priests.” We do not go forth as soldiers with the Emperor even if he demands this. [Origen goes on to say that if the Romans followed the teachings of Jesus, there would be no barbarians.]-Origen

“I do not wish to be a ruler. I do not strive for wealth. I refuse offices connected with military command. I despise death.”-Tatian

“We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools…now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the crucified one…the more we are persecuted and martyred, the more do others in ever increasing numbers become believers.-Justin, martyred in 165 AD

“The professions and trades of those who are going to be accepted into the community must be examined. The nature and type of each must be established…brothel, sculptors of idols, charioteer, athlete, gladiator…give it up or be rejected. A military constable must be forbidden to kill, neither may he swear; if he is not willing to follow these instructions, he must be rejected. A proconsul or magistrate who wears the purple and governs by the sword shall give it up or be rejected. Anyone taking or already baptized who wants to become a soldier shall be sent away, for he has despised God.”-Hippolytus, 218 AD

For some early Christians, a true conversion meant that they became a new kind of tax collector or business person, and for others it meant that they would get fired. In the young Jesus movement, if you worked in the brothels and decided to give your life to Christ and his kingdom, then you needed to rethink you career. But it wasn’t only people in the brothels who needed to do this reevaluation; so did folks who worked in the imperial games, made idols, served in the military, or worked in the imperial courts, jails, and markets. And it was the responsibility of the Christian community to support these young converts as they rethought their lives outside the empire.p144

“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 acquires 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 no 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

The globalizing economy in the first-century Roman Empire was exploitative and unsustainable. Some of the best anti-imperial and pro-kingdom images we have from the early church are from John’s book of Revelation…the careful scrutiny of those in power while he was in exile forced him to write using poetry, symbols, and images…John’s writing in Revelation is filled with bizarre beasts like those we read about in Daniel. But John offers another image of the global market and the kingdom of Caesar…”the great whore.”(cf. Rev 18:2-5, 11-14) p148

Claiborne prefers the term “whore” to “prostitute” because prostitute implies a context of poverty and male-domineering sexual exploitation, whereas whore implies seduction and adulterous licentiousness.

Babylon (Rome) was considered to be great. John’s point was to reveal as a fraud what was every day considered normal, insisting that normal is not the same as good. p151

The supermarket of the day was called the agora…to enter the agora, in order to buy and sell, one needed to pledge allegiance, so to speak, to the economy patronized by Caesar…After affirming the center of the imperial economy, the person visiting the market would receive a mark on their right hand, allowing them to enter and to buy or sell:
“[The Beast] forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave to receive a mark [charagma] on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.”-Rev 13: 16-17

“The mark [charagma] of ancient Rome was not some esoteric symbol but a stamp used to certify deeds of sale, and the impress of the emperor’s head on the coinage…John new that while the right hand was holding the Roman coin, empire would transfix the mind of the bearer.”-Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther

[John] did not simply argue that various aspects of the market exploit this or that; rather he placed his concerns in light of a cosmological struggle between right and wrong…is is possible we can’t see the destructiveness of our economy not because we don’t know it’s terrible but because deep down, we feel that it’s necessary and that therefore it’s hopeless to criticize it?p153

Hundreds of years earlier, the prophet Daniel had seared into Israel’s consciousness the sense of empires as “beasts”. 1) John alludes to this, naming the beast 666, the number of the beast who began the long drama of killing the people of Jesus…the Antichrist isn’t who any of us grew up thinking it is. Just as the letter X in Roman numerology stands for ten and V stand for five, so too do Hebrew letters hold numerical calue, and the letters of Nero Caesar add up: nrwn qsr = 666. Of course, this took a bit of calculation to figure out, as John warned, but it would not have been too hard to see what he was alluding to….We might even say that, in some sense, John was rewriting history from the perpective of the Lamb of God – Rome is no longer the prestigious guarantor of freedom at the height of its prosperity (as historians might read the times of John’s writing) but is the power that conspires to slaughter God’s love in the world. p154

Righteous Anger

“While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight, I’ll fight to the very end!”

William Booth

I think that sometimes it is ok to be angry as a Christian. I was thinking about this today. Anna Nicole Smith dies. I have no doubt that she was made in the image of God and dearly loved. But the news followed her story for how many weeks or months going over every single detail of her life? Even my dad’s beloved Fox News channel and his No Spin (like that exists) favorite Bill O’Reilly couldn’t resist covering this subject.

Why do we ignore that 30,000 kids die of malnutrition? Why do we ignore that 27,000 people are still in some sort of slavery and half of them are under 18 years of age. What about when Focus on the Family freaked out when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson had that mishap during the Superbowl and just ignore terrible injustices around the world that might be just a little more important?

A question I am trying to ask myself more and more is what things are really worth getting upset about?

What do I get angry about? It may sound weird but I think we have only so much rage to dispense. I don’t want to waste my energy getting angry at the delivery lady who has a bad attitude (yesterday) or a less than satisfying tax return. I want to harness that energy (we are able to use incredible amounts of effort when angry) for things that really matter. I know that religious people being angry conjours up terrible memories of the crusades but that was religious manipulation by people in power not a reflection of Christ. When Jesus got angry the lame were healed. It was a beautiful kind of anger. An anger that put the abuser in their place and brought life out of those who were viewed as a product or something to be owned or possessed.

I’ve found that anger will always be with me. But can be a powerful catylist when it is filtered through the love, grace and mercy of God. Sometimes anger is like the alarm clock that goes off when the poor and oppressed are neglected and wakes me up from the sleep of consumerism. It’s been said that the true atheist is not the person who doesn’t believe in God. The true atheist is the person who can stare into the eyes of another and not see the image of the one whom they were created in. Lately, recognizing that image in the oppressed has been stirring and anger in my soul.

Grace

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.”
Frederick Beuchner