#jesusdojo

[azspot]

"Mass deportation" is possibly the most unchristian phrase I've ever heard.

John Amandola

[azspot]

We’ve been talking about Quaker qualities, reframing our Quaker testimonies. We’ve discussed equality as democratic discernment, peace as consistent compassion, simplicity as generosity, and today I want to speak about integrity as integration, by which I mean all the elements of our lives fitting seamlessly together until they become an example of unified beauty. The Quaker testimony of integrity is not just about telling the truth. Our testimony of integrity is about living a life of integration, so that there is no daylight between what we say and believe and do. They are all of the same piece.

Quaker Qualities

[azspot]

If the teachings of Christ form the indispensable standard of Christian spiritual life, then it is clear that Christianity as a historical project has been in many respects a ghastly failure, and in no way more conspicuously than in many of the terms its institutional embodiments accepted as the price of alliance with empire and state.

David Bentley Hart

[azspot]

Well, I think our habit of separating spiritual from practical concerns would’ve been unintelligible in the first century, just as it would’ve been unintelligible to separate civil society from religious culture or personal obligation from social obligation in the context of Judaism or in the days of Christ. In fact, I always find it funny when persons of a more libertarian bent within the church argue that we should separate Christ’s words about caring for the poor from our political commitments, our notions of social policy, because he was talking about private charity, which is good for the soul, not about the structures of social justice. Of course, this is a distinction that to a first-century Jew would’ve been absolutely meaningless. There’s no such thing as that sphere of private moral concern separated entirely from the embodied communal life of people of Israel. And the same, I think you could say something similar about the notion that the kingdom is a spiritual reality but it’s also a practical and a political reality and a social reality.

David Bentley Hart

[azspot]

Who are the Judases in your life, who are the wild jackals and ostriches, the people that might need a good foot washing? Or here’s a better question – Are you a Judas that needs someone to wash your feet? I know I’ve been a Judas in my life. Maybe there’s some Judas inside of all of us. Maybe to be authentically Christian means to admit that there are times when I am not authentically Christian. We don’t always get it right. And you know what? Jesus loved even Judas. Jesus washed his feet. Like Jesus, sometimes we need to say “No” to Judas, even the Judas within us, but we also need to remember to wash Judas’ feet.

How To Be Authentically Christian in a Hostile World

[azspot]

It cannot be stressed too much: love of enemies has, for our time, become the litmus test of authentic Christian faith. Commitment to justice, liberation or the overthrow of opposition is not enough, for all too often the means used have brought in their wake new injustices and oppressions. Love of enemies is the recognition that the enemy, too, is a child of God. The enemy too believes he or she is in the right, and fears us because we represent a threat against his or her values, lifestyle, or affluence. When we demonize our enemies, calling them names and identifying them with absolute evil, we deny that they have that of God within them that makes transformation possible. Instead, we play God. We write them out of the Book of Life. We conclude that our enemy has drifted beyond the redemptive hand of God. I submit that the ultimate religious question today is no longer the Reformation's 'How can I find a gracious God?' It is instead, 'How can I find God in my enemy?' What guilt was for Luther, the enemy has become for us: the goad that can drive us to God. What has formerly been a purely private affair — justification by faith through grace — has now, in our age, grown to embrace the world. As John Stoner comments, we can no more save ourselves from our enemies than we can save ourselves from sin, but God's amazing grace offers to save us from both. There is, in fact, no other way to God for our time but through the enemy, for loving the enemy has become the key both to human survival in the age of terror and to personal transformation. Either we find the God who causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, or we may have no more sunrises.

Walter Wink

[azspot]

Curiously, though he forbids a change of clothes, a bag of money, bread for the journey, Jesus allows his disciples to take a walking stick. It’s a strange allowance, and yet, perhaps it makes sense. A staff is helpful to those whose legs are tired, whose balance is challenged through exhaustion. To see someone walking with a staff is to see someone admitting to a vulnerability—the need for a crutch. (Religion is a crutch, the skeptic scoffs. No, religion teaches you how to acknowledge all the crutches that allow us to walk.) Thinking about trees, like hickories, who live from such a small and fragile beginning and grow into such strength, I have to wonder if perhaps Jesus offered his disciples a portable example of how they were to live. In their hands, all along the way, they held a strength that had been made powerful in its weakness, the wood of a tree that had begun as a fragile seed.

The Power of Weakness

[azspot]

Christianity is a way of life. It’s not just a commitment to a dogma or doctrine, not just a certain attachment to values in the abstract. It cuts so much deeper than that. It’s a highly complicated, variegated structure of feelings and of virtues—even before values. Virtues have much more gravitas than values do.

Cornel West

[azspot]

In truth the church has too readily been on the wrong side of this defining question of shared wellbeing all too often. Too often the church has echoed and legitimated the interests of the moneyed. The church has had two theological strategies for such a misguided illusion. First, we have spiritualized and privatized our sense of salvation, thus easily supporting the most mistaken individualism at the expense of the common good. Second, we have much too much emphasized life-after-death and otherworldliness that took away energy from the urgency of justice and mercy in this present world. The antidote for the church of course is to accent its this-world care for the neighborhood, and its communitarian conviction that as neighbors we are all in it together.

We the People

[azspot]

Part of the problem with the normal Christian way of viewing war and participation in it is that certain things are taken for granted which were actually rejected in the early church and in the writings of the early church fathers. They wrote that Christians cannot participate in war or violence. It seems to me that the merging of the church and state which took place in the Constantan era is a fundamental part of the problem. In my reading of Jesus’s words above to the Roman governor Pilate, there can be no fusing of church and state, of God’s kingdom and the kingdoms of this world. Regardless of what else we parse from Scripture, and we need to wrestle with all of it, in the end Christians are supposed to be followers of Christ. And God’s kingdom is present in Christ and in the church. We live according to a different order, which makes no sense in the scheme of things as they are on earth. We live in a different rule and reality. And it includes the way of the cross in this life, the way of Christ, who taught us to love our enemies, to not physically resist evil, to follow his example.

what if all Christians were conscientious objectors to war? (part one)

[azspot]

It is this transparency that makes our cooperation and collaboration possible. When our intention is to contend with others, we will always have our secrets, always have one thing or another we keep from one another. But when we collaborate, we open ourselves up, we do not mask our true and real selves As Friends, to commit ourselves to community is to make honesty and openness a priority. We have nothing to hide. We are not in a contest for supremacy. We are in a partnership for the betterment of the world. This is the Quaker vision for community, whether in our friendships, in our marriages, in our meeting, in our world.

Philip Gulley

[azspot]

Suffering is inevitable, and no one is exempt. Suffering is inevitable. To live is to suffer, to live is to experience loss. There is simply no avoiding it. There have been persons I’ve known who I’ve envied, thinking their lives were perfect. Beautiful home, bright children, wealth, good health, popularity, hair. They had it all. But every time I have felt that way about someone, I have eventually learned that even their lives had seasons of suffering and loss. Every one. Every person I have ever met. Suffering is inevitable. No one is exempt. And if we believe we are exempt, if we believe we deserve to sit squarely at the top of life’s heap, untouched by hardship or tragedy, then suffering, when it finally and inevitably visits us, will twist and deform us, and maybe even break us.

Christianity 101: The Challenge of Suffering and Evil

[azspot]

What I think also needs to be done is that we’ve got to have activism within the churches: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, the whole American church establishment. We all are guilty. We’ve all chosen Mammon over God. We’ve allowed ourselves to be spiritually formed by capitalism, shaped by the logic of the markets. But we’re also all capable of realizing a different eschatology, living for a different end, seeking the kingdom of God. We need to learn how to be Christians.

Eugene McCarraher

[azspot]

Reading the stories of many of the early Christians, I find that they were surprisingly like us. They were influenced by the surrounding culture in their thinking about finances, food, marriage and sexuality, patriotism and nationalism, and so on. More than anything, it is convicting how many of them, like our actor friend whose story we just learned, went to church on Sunday, but spent the rest of the week compartmentalizing their faith—just like so many Christians do today, often inadvertently, without meaning to. And it is convicting, furthermore, to see that at times, cultural sin did not flow from a rebellious heart, but simply resulted from a lack of better options. How well do we today support those in our own churches who seem deeply sinful, but perhaps are more similar to this actor convert than to someone rebelliously fighting against God?

Will the Real Cultural Christians Please Stand Up?

[azspot]

What is needed is to discern where God is already at work, and then join in. Of course, what we are longing for and waiting for and struggling for is nothing less than a resurrection of the dead – which only God can call forth. There are spaces in life where the deep richness of life can be experienced, but who of us has really experienced a true and genuine resurrection of the dead or the creation of a new heaven and a new earth where all of creation is set free? That’s the kingdom in all its fullness! That’s something we ultimately have to wait and hope for, even while we live in the here and now in ways that show that we are attuned to God’s justice and righteousness, God’s great Jubilee.

Christian Collins Winn