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There were plenty of folks talking about the gospel and writing books about it, but as far as I could tell, living out the gospel had yet to be tried in recent days.
Back at college, I had asked one of my Bible teachers if he still believed in miracles, like when Jesus fed thousands of people with a couple of fishes and a handful of loaves. And I wondered if God was still into that stuff. I wanted miracles to be normal again. He told me that we have insulated ourselves from miracles. We no longer live with such reckless faith that we need them. There is rarely room for the transcendent in our lives. If we get sick, we go to a doctor. If we need food, we go to a store and buy it. We have eliminated the need for miracles. If we had enough faith to depend on
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“How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?”
Iremember when one of my colleagues said, “Shane, I am not a Christian anymore.” I was puzzled, for we had gone to theology classes together, studied Scripture, prayed, and worshiped together. But I could see the intensity and sincerity in his eyes as he continued, “I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.” Somehow, I knew what he meant. I wondered what it would look like if we decided to really follow Jesus. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what a fully devoted Christian looked like, or if the world had even seen one in the last few centuries. From my desk at college, it looked like
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Iremember when one of my colleagues said, “Shane, I am not a Christian anymore.” I was puzzled, for we had gone to theology classes together, studied Scripture, prayed, and worshiped together. But I could see the intensity and sincerity in his eyes as he continued, “I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.” Somehow, I knew what he meant. I wondered what it would look like if we decided to really follow Jesus. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what a fully devoted Christian looked like, or if the world had even seen one in the last few centuries. From my desk at college, it looked like
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“We are called not to be successful but to be faithful.” That sounds good, but it was the beginning of my years of struggling with the tension between efficiency and faithfulness.
“We can do no great things, just small things with great love. It is not how much you do, but how much love you put into doing it.”
I started to see that the miracles were an expression not so much of Jesus’ mighty power as of his love.
But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus’ love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but they eventually caught some other disease. He fed the thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers. And the incredible thing about that love is that it now lives inside of us.
They had not chosen to live in “intentional community.” Their survival demanded community. Community was their life. The gospel was their language. No wonder Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.”
The previous year, I had been doing a Bible study whose central premise was that rather than waiting around for God’s special plan for your life, you should just go find where God is at work and join in.
In our culture of “seeker sensitivity” and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd.
In our culture of “seeker sensitivity” and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd.
We don’t want folks to walk away. We’re driven by a sincere longing for others to know God’s love and grace and to experience Christian community. And yet we can end up merely cheapening the very thing we want folks to experience. This is the “cheap grace”4 that spiritual writer and fellow revolutionary Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the most deadly enemy of the church.” And he knew all too well the cost of discipleship; after all, it led to his execution in 1945 for his participation in the Protestant resistance against Hitler.
I once heard the saying, “God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.”
As George Bernard Shaw said, “God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor.”
If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you, “Christians believe that Jesus is God’s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.” But if you ask the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent.
If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you, “Christians believe that Jesus is God’s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.” But if you ask the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent.
No wonder the early Christian church was known as the Way. It was a way of life that stood in glaring contrast to the world.
I read a study comparing the health of a society with its economics, and one of the things it revealed is that wealthy countries like ours have the highest rates of depression, suicide, and loneliness. We are the richest and most miserable people in the world.
“Following Jesus is simple, but not easy. Love until it hurts, and then love more.”
Vocation comes from the same root as voice, denoting the hearing of a divine call. Beyond knowing that God has a purpose for our lives, most of us (especially non-Catholics) spend little energy seeking our vocation, especially in light of how the needs and sufferings of our neighbors might inform how we use our gifts for divine purposes.
What if someone works for Lockheed Martin (the world’s largest weapons contractor) or a notorious human rights abuser like Coca-Cola or Nestle or Disney or Gap?
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Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside…but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”
There are the obvious layers like picket fences and SUVs, and there are the more subtle ones like charity. Tithes, tax-exempt donations, and short-term mission trips, while they accomplish some good, can also function as outlets that allow us to appease our consciences and still remain a safe distance from the poor.
It is much more comfortable to depersonalize the poor so we don’t feel responsible for the catastrophic human failure that results in someone sleeping on the street while people have spare bedrooms in their homes.
When we get to heaven, we will be separated into those sheep and goats Jesus talks about in Matthew 25 based on how we cared for the least among us. I’m just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, “When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me,” or, “When I was naked, you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me.”
Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He seeks concrete acts of love: “you fed me…you visited me in prison…you welcomed me into your home…you clothed me.”
Far from saying in defeat that we should not worry about the poor, since they will always be among us, Jesus is pointing the church to her true identity—she is to live close to those who suffer.
I heard that Gandhi, when people asked him if he was a Christian, would often reply, “Ask the poor. They will tell you who the Christians are.”
Our simplicity is not an ascetic denunciation of material things to attain personal piety, for if we sell all that we have and give it to the poor, but have not love, it is meaningless (1 Cor. 13:3).
Simplicity is meaningful only inasmuch as it is grounded in love, authentic relationships, and interdependence.
Simplicity is meaningful only inasmuch as it is grounded in love, authentic relationships, and interdependence.
we must ask what it means to be born again into a family in which our sisters and brothers are starving to death. Then we begin to see why rebirth and redistribution are inextricably bound up in one another, as a growing number of evangelicals have come to proclaim. It also becomes scandalous for the church to spend money on windows and buildings when some family members don’t even have water. Welcome to the dysfunctional family of Yahweh.
The early Christians used to write that when they did not have enough food for the hungry people at their door, the entire community would fast until everyone could share a meal together. What an incredible economy of love. The early Christians said that if a child starves while a Christian has extra food, then the Christian is guilty of murder.
“The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them away.”
(Isa. 58:6 – 7). True fasting is not just depriving ourselves of privilege but also sharing sacrificially to bring an end to the cycles of inequality, an end to creation’s groaning and the groaning of hungry bellies.
One of the first commands given to our biblical ancestors (even before they had the Big 10) while they were stuck in the middle of the wilderness somewhere between Pharaoh’s empire and the Promised Land was this: each one was to gather only as much they needed (Exod. 16:16).
(To pray for “my” daily bread is a desecration; we are to pray for “our” daily bread, for all of us.) Over and over, we hear the promise that if we take only what we need, there will be enough.
Deuteronomy 15 gives us another glimpse of the source of poverty. God goes from saying, “There should be no poor among you” to “If there are poor” to “There will always be poor.”
As Proverbs says, “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’ ” (30:8 – 9).
And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.
“All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don’t tiptoe.”
Sometimes people ask me if I am scared, living in the inner city. I usually reply, “I’m more scared of the suburbs.” The Scriptures say that we should not fear those things which can destroy the body, but we are to fear that which can destroy the soul (Matt. 10:28).
“I have come to see that we Christians are not called to safety, but we are promised that God will be with us when we are in danger, and there is no better place to be than in the hands of God.”
You don’t get crucified for being cool; you get crucified for living radically different from the norms of all that is cool in the world.
In Matthew 13:24 – 30, he gives a firm command to let the wheat and the weeds grow together, and to let God sort them out at the harvest.
There comes a point where we recognize we’re trying to serve two masters, and we have to choose which one we will serve. Our arms are just not big enough to carry both the cross and the sword. We can learn from the bloody pages of history. The more vigorously we try to root out evil by force, the more evil will escalate.
Bono, the great theologian (and decent rock star), said it like this in his introduction to a book of selections from the Psalms: “The fact that the Scriptures are brim full of hustlers, murderers, cowards, adulterers, and mercenaries used to shock me. Now it is a source of great comfort.”
