The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary Radical

by Shane Claiborne

I went to Iraq as a missionary. In an age of omnipresent war, it is my hope that Christian peacemaking becomes the new face of global missions. May we stand by those who face the impending wrath of the empire and whisper, “God loves you, I love you, and if my country bombs your country, I will be right here with you.” Otherwise, our gospel has little integrity. As one of the saints said, “If they come for the innocent and do not pass over our bodies, then cursed be our religion.”

The bishop went on to tell me that the church in the Middle East was deeply concerned about the church in the United States. He said, “Many Americans are for this war.” I nodded. And he asked, “But what are the Christians saying?” My heart sank. I tried to explain to him that many of the Christians in the US are confused and hope that this is a way God could liberate the Iraqi people. He shook his head and said, very humbly, “But we Christians do not believe that. We believe ‘blessed are the peacemakers.’ We believe if you pick up the sword, you die by the sword. We believe in the cross.” Tears welled up in my eyes as he said, “We will be praying for you. We will be praying for the church in the US . . . to be the church.”

One of the things that became painfully clear to me in Iraq is that what’s at stake today is the reputation not just of America but of Christianity, and that’s what keeps me up at night. I heard people in Iraq call leaders in the US “Christian extremists,” just as leaders here speak of “Muslim extremists.” Everyone is declaring war and asking for God’s blessing. One beautiful Iraqi mother threw her hands in the air and said, “Your country is declaring war in the name of God and asking God’s blessing, and that is the same thing my country is doing. What kind of God is this? What has happened to the God of love, to the Prince of Peace?” Her question haunts me.

One of the folks I was in Iraq with is Charlie Liteky. In 1968 Charlie Liteky was given the highest award in the US, the Medal of Honor by President Lyndon Johnson. In the movie Forrest Gump, they dubbed Tom Hanks over Charlie as he is given the award. What is not as well known is that in 1986, Charlie joined some of the most decorated veterans in the US as they returned their Medals of Honor and renounced all war.

Over the past couple of years since I was in Iraq, the drums of war have died down and the desperate cries of lonely survivors have rippled across the globe. And in these raw moments of pain, I have seen so many signs of hope that history will not again repeat itself with more precious blood shed. Nearly every denomination in the World Council of Churches declared that the war in Iraq was not God’s will and not in line with any Christian tradition, including just-war theory.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”2 That’s the God I have come to know, a God who is not at all safe, but a God who is good.

A few years back, a friend and I had dinner with Dominic Crossan. As we shared with him our feeble attempts to follow after the peasant revolutionary he wrote about, his eyes gleamed with excitement. You could almost smell the fresh aroma of the gospel as it rose above the suffocating pages of academia. He told me he had met plenty of evangelical Christians, but not too many that still believed that ole rabbi really meant the stuff he said.

A few years back, I was talking with a homeless guy in an alley downtown, and he started sharing with me about God. He was familiar with the Bible but kept talking about “the Christians” in the third person. A little confused, I finally asked him, “Are you not a Christian?” “Oh no,” he said, “I am far too messed up.” I asked him what he thought a Christian is, and he said, “Someone who’s got their stuff together and has things figured out.” I confessed that I must not be a Christian either and that I wasn’t sure I had ever met one, and we laughed.1 We read together the passage where Jesus tells the Pharisees (the ones who “had things together”), “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. . . . I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13).

People are drawn toward folks who have it all together, or who look like they do. People are also drawn toward folks who know they don’t have it all together and are not willing to fake it.

I’m convinced that the world is looking not for Christians who are perfect but for Christians who are honest. And the problem is that we haven’t been honest, and we have pretended that we are perfect. The church should be a place where imperfect people can fall in love with a perfect God.

The truth that we have to lose our lives in order to find them doesn’t sound like a good plan for national security. As old troubadour Woody Guthrie sings, “If Jesus preached in New York what he preached in Galilee, we’d lay him in his grave again” (especially if he did it on Wall Street).

That stuff Jesus warned us to beware of, the yeast of the Pharisees, is so infectious today in the camps of both liberals and conservatives. Conservatives stand up and thank God that they are not like the homosexuals, the Muslims, the liberals. Liberals stand up and thank God that they are not like the war makers, the yuppies, the conservatives. It is a similar self-righteousness, just with different definitions of evildoing. It can paralyze us in judgment and guilt and rob us of life. Rather than separating ourselves from everyone we consider impure, maybe we are better off just beating our chests and praying that God would be merciful enough to save us from this present ugliness and to make our lives so beautiful that people cannot resist that mercy.

Whenever someone tells me they have rejected God, I say, “Tell me about the God you’ve rejected.” And as they describe a God of condemnation, of laws and lightning bolts, of frowning gray-haired people and boring meetings, I usually confess, “I too have rejected that God.” I’ve met a lot of Christians who say, “If people knew about all of my struggles and weaknesses, they would never want to be a Christian.” I think just the opposite is true. If people really knew what idiots we are, in all our brokenness and vulnerability, they would know that they can give this thing a shot too. Christianity is for sick people.

Sister Joan Chittister puts it well: “God consistently challenges the chosen and includes the excluded.”

“This is not an autograph, because there is nothing special about me that is not also special about you. Never forget that you are beautiful, just like everyone else. And never forget that you are a fool, just like everyone else.”

A buddy of mine who is a fairly prominent youth minister just told me about a trip he took with a bunch of teenagers to one of those “mountaintop” spiritual retreats with lots of tears, confessions, and spiritual goose bumps. On the way up, the van had a flat tire of the worst kind—in the rain, no tools, a bad spare. As all the kids stared out the window, his temper escalated and went beyond the tipping point. He lost it and started yelling, cussing, and kicking the blessed thing. Finally, he was able to get the van going, climbed back in, and told everybody to shut up and leave him alone for a bit. A little embarrassed, they headed on to the retreat, with a few snickers coming from the back of the van. He said the retreat was the same as it was every year, with the worship, preaching, and altar call. But that year, something crazy happened. One of his toughest kids from the ghetto told him the week after they returned that he had given his life to Jesus. My friend was a bit stunned and asked him to explain how it happened. “Was it the messages, the altar call?” The young man said, “No, it was on the way up when I saw you cussing at the van. I thought, If he can be a Christian, I can give this thing a shot too.”

In the early days of our community, Michelle, a founding partner of the Simple Way, and I headed out to get a loaf of bread. We walked underneath the El tracks just a block from our house, a strip notorious for its prostitution and drug trafficking, where the air is thick with tears and struggle. We walked past an alley, and tucked inside was a woman, tattered, cold, and on crutches. She approached me, asking if I wanted her services. Our hearts sank, but we scurried on to get our bread. Then we headed quickly home, nodding at the woman as we passed. When we got home and opened the bread, we noticed the bag had a large gash in the side and the bread had gone bad. We would have to go back, and we both knew what that meant. We would have to walk by that woman again. We walked by the alley and saw her in there crying, shivering. We got our bread, and as we saw her yet again, we could not just pass by. We stopped and told her we cared for her, that she was precious, worth more than a few bucks for tricks on the avenue. We explained that we had a home that was a safe place to get warm and have a snack. So she stumbled onto her crutches and came home with us.

As soon as we entered the house, she started weeping hysterically. Michelle held her as she wept. When she had gained her composure, she said, “You all are Christians, aren’t you?” Michelle and I looked at each other, startled. We had said nothing about God or Jesus, and our house doesn’t have a cross in the window, a neon “Jesus saves” sign, or even a little Christian fish on the wall.

shine. I used to be in love with Jesus like that, and when I was, I shined like diamonds in the sky, like the stars. But it’s a cold dark world, and I lost my shine a little while back. I lost my shine on those streets.” At that point, we were all weeping. She asked us to pray with her that she might sh...

Days, weeks went by, and we did not see her. One day, there was a knock at the door, and I opened it. On the steps there was a lovely lady with a contagious ear-to-ear smile. We stared at each other. We see a lot of people, so I was going to try to fake recognizing her, but she called my bluff and beat me to it. “Of course you don’t recognize me, because I’m shining again. I’m shining.” Then I knew. She went on to explain how deeply she had fallen in love with God again. She said she wanted to give us something to thank us for our hospitality but sadly confessed, “While I was on the streets, I lost everything I owned. Except this.” She pulled out a box and apologetically confessed that she smoked a lot and always collected...

Ironically, when I was giving that talk titled “The Scandal of Grace,” I told the story of Bud Welch as I talked about how God’s love extends to all losers, whether Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Saul of Tarsus, Timothy McVeigh, or me. The program team showed a PowerPoint presentation using the “visual edition” of Philip Yancey’s work What’s So Amazing about Grace? In the PowerPoint, different images pop up behind the words “amazing grace that saved a wretch like me,” and different people’s faces are branded with the words “like me”—Mother Teresa, sports stars, celebrities—and one of them was Timothy McVeigh. It created such discomfort that the program team was told to remove the image of Timothy from the presentation before the second service. There is something scandalous about grace. It’s almost embarrassing that God loves losers so much. It flies in the face of the world’s myth of redemptive violence.

Now, hold on—there’s more. Once a week, the mother of Carl Roberts visits Rosanna, one of the girls her son shot and almost killed. Rosanna is now fourteen years old, sits in a wheelchair, eats with a feeding tube, and is unable to talk. But she is not unable to love and be loved. Terri helps bathe her and reads to her and sings with her. Spending time together helps to heal the wounds of this tragedy. Every week when Terri visits Rosanna, she is forced to confront the damage her son caused. But it reminds her that none of us have to be held hostage by the worst moments of our lives. Healing of even the deepest wounds is possible.

In his work I and Thou,8 brilliant European thinker Martin Buber speaks of how we can see a person as simply a material object, something you look at, an “it,” or we can look into a person and enter the sacredness of their humanity so that they become a “Thou.” (And as a Jewish philosopher who immigrated to Palestine to advocate for Arab-Jewish cooperation, Buber knew all too well how easily we objectify and demonize others.) All the time, we look at people—hot girls, beggars, pop stars, white folks, black folks, people with suits or dreadlocks. But over time, we can develop new eyes and look into people. Rather than looking at people as sex objects or work tools, we can see them as sacred. We can enter the Holiest of Holies through their eyes. They can become a “Thou.”

In South Africa, I also learned about ubuntu, which is a similar idea. It means, “I cannot be all that I am meant to be until you are everything you are meant to be.”

I have an old hippie friend who loves Jesus and smokes a lot of weed, and he’s always trying to get under my skin and stir up a debate, especially when I have innocent young Christians visiting with me. (The problem is that he knows the Bible better than most of them do.) One day, he said to me, “Jesus never talked to a prostitute.” I immediately went on the offensive: “Oh, sure he did,” and whipped out my sword of the Spirit and got ready to spar. Then he just calmly looked me in the eye and said, “Listen, Jesus never talked to a prostitute because he didn’t see a prostitute. He just saw a child of God he was madly in love with.” I lost the debate that night.

Growing up, I was told that good people go to church. And then I looked around and watched the news and found a church full of sick people and a world that had some decent pagans. And I studied sociology. My studies taught me that the higher a person’s frequency of church attendance, the more likely they are to be sexist, racist, anti-gay, pro-military, and committed to their local church. And I figured if that’s what it means to be a Christian, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one, or whether even Jesus would want to be one, for that matter. I wondered why Jesus didn’t take back his religion. As I’ve heard my old mentor Tony Campolo say, “If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.”

We asked people to say the first word that came to mind in response to each word we said: “snow,” “eagles” (it’s Philly), “teenagers,” and finally “Christian.” When people heard the word Christian, they stopped in their tracks. I will never forget their responses: “fake,” “hypocrites,” “church,” “boring.” One guy even said, “used-to-be-one” (sort of one word). I will also never forget what they didn’t say. Not one of the people we asked that day said “love.” No one said “grace.” No one said “community.” A few years ago, the Barna Group, a prominent research company, went to every state in the US and asked young non-Christians what their perceptions of Christians were. What they found was heartbreaking. The top three answers were: (1) anti-gay, (2) judgmental, (3) hypocritical. And they did not say the number one thing Jesus said we should be known for: loving.

But I have tremendous hope that a new kind of Christianity is emerging. I’d just like it to get here sooner than later. We live in a world of dangerous extremes. “These are extreme times,” Dr. King said. “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”1 The world has seen Christian extremists who will blow up abortion clinics and dance on the doctors’ graves. We have seen Christian extremists who hold signs that say, “God hates fags.” The world has seen Christian extremists who declare war in the name of the Lamb. But where are the Christian extremists for love and grace?

Then there’s the story, centuries later, of Dirk Willems, the famous Anabaptist martyr of the 1500s. He was imprisoned and was set for execution for standing against the corruption of the church during a dark age of ecclesial history. But he managed to escape and was pursued by guards. (Just because the Bible says we are to love our enemies doesn’t mean we can’t run from them!) He ran through the winter fields of Holland, with one of the guards in hot pursuit. As Dirk crossed over a frozen pond, he heard a deep cracking of the ice behind him, and he looked back to find that the guard had fallen through. In that moment, he faced a critical

decision. He turned around and dove into the water, saving his pursuer’s life, only to be taken back to prison. Despite the guard’s plea for Dirk’s release, he was soon burned at the stake. But think about his witness of grace and love!

“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our houses and threaten our children and we will still love you. Beat us and leave us half dead and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’”

In Iraq, we were invited to Christian worship services nearly every night. One unforgettable night was at St. Rafael’s cathedral in Baghdad, where once again I was reminded of the God of extreme grace. We sang familiar tunes, and the priest got up to give the homily. He had just served six months in prison for his faithfulness to the gospel. What would his message be, at such a crucial moment?

He told the true story of a woman whose son and husband were killed by a police officer. Eventually they caught the police officer and dragged him before the court. In court, as the judge considered the sentence of the police officer, the woman spoke boldly: “He took my family away from me, and I still have a lot of love to give, and he needs to know what love and grace feel like—so I think he should have to come to visit my home in the slums, twice a month, and spend time with me, so that I can be a mother to him, so that I can embrace him, and he can know that my forgiveness is real.”

We all sat silently, struck dumb by grace. The priest urged us all to love our enemies. I have heard that a million times. I have traveled across the country preaching it. But now there was a twist: the enemy he spoke of was my country. The boundaries of God’s grace were being pushed once again. Somehow it seemed so scandalous to ask these beautiful people, who were about to be attacked by the same enemy who had killed many of their family members and decimated their city only ten years before, to love and forgive—again. We are to love those who bomb us? We are to love George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein? The priest led us to the cross, urging us to say, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He admitted that this action is...

Wink points out that Jesus is not just suggesting that we masochistically let people step all over us. Instead, Jesus is pointing us toward something that imaginatively disarms others. When hit on the cheek, turn and look the person in the eye. Do not cower and do not punch them back. Make sure they look into your eyes and see your sacred humanity, and it will become increasingly harder for them to hurt you. When someone tries to sue you for the coat on your back and drags you before the court, go ahead and take all of your clothes off and hand them over, exposing the sickness of their greed. When a soldier asks you to walk a mile with them and carry their pack (as was Roman law and custom), don’t throw your fist in the air like the Zealots, just walk with them two miles instead of one, talk with them and woo them into our movement by your love.

Community,10 religion professor Charles Marsh calls the Simple Way

Just as “believers” are a dime a dozen in the church, so are “activists” in social justice circles nowadays. But lovers are hard to come by. And I think that’s what our world is desperately in need of—lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.

For those of you thinking about college, consider this: don’t just ask how strong the academics are or how good the football team is or even how you like the campus or the town. All of those are good questions, but make sure you also ask, “What do you pay your housekeeping staff?” One of the true tests of a good college is how they treat their workers, and certainly a decent indicator of that is how the lowest paid workers fare in contrast to the highest paid administrators. A good question of any college president is whether she or he would be comfortable exchanging salaries for a year with the janitor. After all, both are just as valuable in the eyes of God.

“No,” I replied, “I will be going as a Christian Peacemaker to be with the families there and voice opposition to the war.”

True revolution is when, as antiapartheid leader and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Bishop Desmond Tutu says (with a huge smile), “the oppressed are freed from being oppressed and the oppressors are freed from being oppressors.” And this is when God heals the land (v.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote a classic titled (creatively) The Prophets, and he throws it down like this: “To us a single act of injustice—cheating in business, exploitation of the poor—is slight; to the prophets, a disaster.

You may recall the old comic in which two pastors are talking, and one of them asks the other, “How’s your church?” The other pastor boasts, “Quite well, I should say. When I got there, we had only thirty members, and I have been there only a year. Now we are seeing over four hundred people on Sunday morning. And how’s your church?” The first pastor says, “Well, I don’t know. When I got there, we were seeing about a hundred. I’ve been preaching the gospel, and I’ve preached that ole church down to ten.”

Our context is quite different. We live among the wealthiest people of the world (top 2 percent), a tough mission field. We are preaching a gospel that declares that it’s easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom. But look on the bright side. After we preach the crowds down, we will not need such expensive buildings. And of course, in a Christian culture shopping for the cheapest grace, the temptation is always to tone things down a little bit. People will be more comfortable around a domesticated Jesus than the Lion of Judah.

There is a brilliant truth I have come to see, largely because of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spiritual writer and fellow resister, whose words are now inscribed on my wall: “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community [even if their intentions are ever so earnest], but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

Bigger is better, so we hear. We live in a world that wants things larger and larger. We want to supersize our fries, sodas, SUVs, and church buildings. Cities build bigger stadiums and conventions want to draw the biggest crowds. Amid all the supersizing, I want to make a modest suggestion: our goal should be not to get larger and larger but to get smaller and smaller.

dwell in temples built by human hands,” we insist that God should. In 2 Samuel 7, King David finds himself in a supersized mansion, living in a “palace of cedar,” and starts to think that maybe God needs a fancier place to dwell. But God rebukes David: “Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling”

Oh—and I did write Bill Hybels another letter, after all the other ones. This one was a happy letter, celebrating the things I just listed, and all the folks who have come to know Jesus through the ministry of Willow Creek. After all, it’s important to speak truth not just as criticism but also as affirmation. And Bill wrote me the nicest letter back.

The pervasive myth is that as we grow larger, we can do more good. But there is little evidence that this is ever realized. My own research and experience would suggest that as congregations grow in terms of staff and property, their giving to causes outside of operating expenses decreases dramatically, especially money given directly to the poor. I just read a recent study that showed that rich people are significantly less generous (proportionately) than poor people, and that large congregations give proportionately far less to people in poverty than do small ones. (In fact, they rarely even have poor people among them.)

As we build our buildings, human temples are being destroyed by hunger and homelessness. The early prophets would say that a church that spends millions of dollars on buildings while her children are starving is guilty of murder. Imagine the scene in a biological family: a father building a mansion while his children are going hungry. He’d be institutionalized or jailed. How much more preposterous should this be in our family of rebirth, in which we have been given new eyes to see others as brothers and sisters?

But the growth is not up but out. It’s about a movement, not a monument. Think about Alcoholics Anonymous. While I don’t think the church needs to replicate AA, I do think we can learn some things from them. Most of us have heard the Twelve Steps, but not we’re not as familiar with the Twelve Traditions, which are phenomenal: http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-122_en.pdf. The leadership of AA has been called a nonhierarchical “inverted pyramid,” very different from much of the church. AA is also self-supporting—no outside donations. (They give the donor too much power.) Anonymity and the inverted pyramid model means no spokesperson. (It has been called a “benign anarchy.”) They neither have nor need any buildings or professional staff. The public relations policy is one of attraction rather than promotion. And it is one of the most pervasive movements in the world—hundreds of thousands have found healing and community.