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want to love the poor, and I also need to recognize my own poverty, my own complicity in systems of injustice. I don’t want to make caricatures or sob stories or manipulations or success stories out of another person. I would like to love. I
Love and justice
To the world, it’s foolish to choose peace instead of war. It’s foolish to forgive. It’s foolish to be kind. It’s foolish to hope. It’s foolish to offer grace and conversation. It’s foolish to care for our weaker brothers or sisters, let alone change our own behavior to accommodate their growth and discipleship, their freedom and their journeys. It’s foolish to live without legalism and “clear boundaries.” It’s foolish to make it our business to pursue a quiet life. It’s foolish to lay down our power. It’s foolish to be silent and listen to others instead of rushing to make our own point. It’s
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Foolishness
Foolish things will confound the “wise” of our world. Those things all do seem foolish to me. So much of what Jesus and the early church calls me to in Scripture seems foolish to the world. They confound me. They often go against my very real instincts to burn down bridges and shut down dissent and pick fights and turn over tables and draw lines in the sand. But I think that when we are foolish in the ways of a disciple, we live prophetically in the Kingdom of God.
Live the foolishness
I’ve come to see hope as a radical act of faith and courage, an embodiment of the Kingdom, and vital to our work for justice.
Hope is radical
have hope because I believe in the power of the grass roots, because I believe in the little ones and the little ways. I have hope because of the unnamed and unnoticed and uncelebrated disciples in our world who simply get on with it. We are engaged in the reality of living out the hope of glory in our real, right-now lives in the trenches.
More hope
In the pursuit and work of justice, hope is subversive.
Hope is subversive
Hope isn’t withdrawal or blind ignorance; it’s not burying our heads in the sand and singing about Gospel ships coming to take us away, nor is it pretending that it’s fine, we’re fine, everything’s fine. Many things in our world are not fine. Hope dares to admit that.
Hope dares to admit all is not fine
Walter Brueggemann
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And every time I heard that message preached, it subtly communicated something rather wrong to my young heart: if it’s not big and audacious and obvious, it’s not good enough for God.
Wrong
Jesus Himself said, “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers (Matthew 23:8 NIV).
All equally worthy
In Israel, leaders were set apart by anointing, by rules, and by expectations. But in the early church, this system of leadership was dissolved by the Lordship and Headship of Christ. “As God intended to be Himself king over Israel, so Christ has come as God’s king over His newly constituted people. As head of His church, all others, including leaders, function as parts of one body both sustained by Christ and growing up into Him.”4
Leaders part of the body of Christ
All our work has the potential to be the ministry of Christ. In this way, church leadership follows Jesus’ model of servanthood, not of “lordship.”
Church leadership is servanthood
Over the years, we have had to learn the hard way that everything we do can be for the glory of God. Our work, our play, our advocacy, our lives both inside and outside Sunday morning church. Truth is truth, and it will set you free. Everything we do can be infused with the Spirit.
Everything we do can be for the glory of God
Richard Rohr writes this: “You do not ‘do’ acts of peace and justice as much as your life is itself peace and justice. You take your small and sufficient place in the great and grand scheme of God.”9
Richard Rohr
Like Paul, “pray that our God will make you fit for what He’s called you to be, pray that he’ll fill your good ideas and acts of faith with His own energy so that it all amounts to something.”10 We serve the God Who Sees, and I want to see with those eyes.
Fit for what he's called us to be
One soul is as valuable as thousands, millions. One soul is as important as ninety-nine. One soul is worth leaving behind everything to rescue. If there is one soul in your care, one face in your loving gaze, one hand you are holding, then you are holding the world. The work you do today, the love you give and receive and lavish on the seemingly small people and tasks—all of these “little” things tip the scales of justice and mercy in our world. Everything we do, from the mundane to the glamorous to the difficult and all points between, can testify.
Everything testifies
Few theologians have influenced me the way that Walter Brueggemann has—perhaps N. T. Wright and Dallas Willard are up there with him—from my political and economic engagement to my vocation as a writer to even my personal discipleship. His work on the “liturgy of abundance” versus the “myth of scarcity”11 is primarily for the big picture—the empire, economics, justice for the poor, war—but because I am one
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The myth of scarcity tells the powerful to accumulate and take and dominate, to be driven by the fear
Myth of scarcity
These core beliefs can lead us to the treacheries of war and hunger, injustice and inequality.
Leads to inequality
The prophets wrote and stood in bold criticism against those who—out of the fear of not enough—built their empire on the backs of the poor and oppressed.
Empires
But the Kingdom of God is more than enough. It is an act of faith to live with the narrative of abundance instead of the fear of scarcity.
Abundance
We’ve got to hustle, hustle, hustle to get ours and then to keep it. But in the liturgy of abundance, we can practice Sabbath. Exhaustion and burnout are symptoms of our fear of scarcity, but wholeness, joy, and rest are hallmarks of a life lived within abundance. In fact, Brueggemann calls the practice of Sabbath an act of resistance because we are saying no to “the culture of now.”
Sabbath as resistance
Jesus was the full embodiment of what it means to be human in the way God intended. He uplifts instead of tearing down, He heals instead of wounds, He lays down His life instead of fighting to survive, He chooses compassion instead of numb acceptance, He is water to a thirsty soul, bread to the hungry, oil of joy for mourning. And instead of death, He is life. Life!
Jesus as the full embodiment
The less hero worship, the less celebrity, the fewer big-name camps, the fewer video venues and names in lights, the better off the Church.
Less celebrity in the church
don’t mind the little ways. I find God in the ordinary quotidian rhythms of my life, I do. Breaking bread and pouring wine happens in my living room. Few things restore my soul like ordinary work—cleaning, walking, cooking. The real transformations of my life didn’t come about at a conference or a Sunday morning service or during a mountaintop moment; the real transformations in my spirit and my character and my life were born and tended and raised in the daily mundane habits and faithfulness of my life. I like the idea of being planted in the house of God, of putting one’s roots down into a
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Little ways
As E. M. Forster wrote, we were finally able to let go of the life we had planned, in order to have the life that was waiting for us.
Life
The heavy burdens of our evangelical hero complex, our identity, our questions of worth and being used by God, all of it—in that moment, we surrendered them. We laid them down on the altar, set them on fire, and stood back at last. They burned down to ashes before our eyes, and yes, some younger version of ourselves ached with the loss of it. But the exhaustion disappeared, the feelings of worthlessness, the crippling misidentity went up in smoke.
Letting the PhD go
pray that when people, often well-meaning, try to quiet your questions or placate you or numb you, you would remember that God has not given you a spirit of fear but a spirit of love and power and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7).
Quiet your questions
pray you would embrace your place in the Body of Christ, your right to learn and test, your right to read and explore.
Embrace your place in the Body
