Thursday, November 30, 2006
Dear in the headlights
Met with a group of students last night for a little bible study time. Typically we study a bit and following this we "pray and praise", which is a time when we stand in a circle and offer up our prayer requests and praises for the good things going on in our lives. Usually the requests involve friends, parents, tests and things other than themselves. So, I stopped them and asked them not to offer prayers about others but share what is going on with them. The room went silent, one studetns actually said "AWKWARD". Earlier in the day at a meeting of adults the same question was asked and the room became just as quite and awkward. I could be wrong here but I know that most of the students and adults wrestle with something other than, "Be with me and my mom" or "me a and my wife are doing good" or "be with my son's girlfriend", "I've got a big test", "my high school football team is in the playoffs". It's not that these are unimportant because they are important but most stuggle with so much more. Anger, lust, lying, sin, relationships, cheating and others that I can't think of right now. What struck me was that as people in relationship with each other that come together week after week (church), most of us simply share the simple, the surface stuff and leave. Leave with the other stuff, sometimes what is the most important stuff, resting inside us waiting to be battled all alone once again. I don't think this is what God ever intended. I don't think it's good to be alone especially when it comes to our insides but most of us are, most of us choose to daily carry our burdens alone. I have been involved with many churches, big, small, one way to believe and another way to belive. Believer sensitive, seeker sensitive and even unsensitive and all of them seem to be a holding station for people carrying around more than they ever should, more that God ever intended. I hope that one day when I ask, "whats really going on with you", we don't clam up, get quite and scared thinking, "if these people only knew". Well, let us know. Let us help carry the burden or find others to help carry the burden, let's do everything in our power to make sure we you never have to deal with whats on the inside alone again.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Something to think about
Beyond Brokerage
Layers of insulation separate the rich and the poor from truly encountering one another. 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 at a safe distance from the poor. Take this poignant example you may have caught wind of: it was revealed that Kathie Lee garments, which have earned Wal-Mart over $300 million in sales annually, were being produced in Honduran sweatshops. These girls, as young as thirteen, worked fifteen-hour shifts under the watch of armed guards and received thirty-one cents an hour. But the great irony is that the garments they were making for Kathie Lee were sold under a label that promised that “a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this garment will be donated to various children’s charities.” More recently, Kathie Lee has been an advocate for workers’ rights. Charity can be a dangerous insulator.
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. We can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing through organizations and never have to open up our homes, our beds, our dinner tables. 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.”
With new government funds and faith-based initiatives, the social-work model can easily entangle the church in the efficiency of brokering services and resources in a web of “clients” and “providers” and struggling to retain God’s vision of rebirth, in which we are all family. Faith-based nonprofits can too easily be the mirror image of secular organizations, maintaining the same hierarchies of power and separation between rich and poor. They can too easily merely facilitate the exchange of goods and services, putting plenty of professionals in the middle to guarantee that the rich do not have to face the poor and that power does not shift. Rich and poor are kept in separate worlds, and inequality is carefully managed but not dismantled.
When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed. And Jesus did not set up a program but modeled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God, a community in which people are reconciled and our debts are forgiven just as we forgive our debtors (all economic words). That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread like a disease — through touch, through breath, through life. It spread through people infected by love.
Often wealthy folks ask me what they can do for the Simple Way [the neo-monastic Christian community of which Claiborne is a part]. I could ask them for a few thousand dollars, but that would be too easy for both of us. Instead, I ask them to come visit. Writing a check makes us feel good and can fool us into thinking that we have loved the poor. But seeing the squat houses and tent cities and hungry children will transform our lives. Then we will be stirred to imagine the economics of rebirth and to hunger for the end of poverty.
Almost every time we talk with affluent folks about God’s will to end poverty, someone says, “But didn’t Jesus say, ‘The poor will always be with you’?” Many of the people who whip out this verse have grown quite insulated and distant from the poor and feel defensive. I usually gently ask, “Where are the poor? Are the poor among us?” The answer is usually a clear negatory. As we study the Scriptures, we see how many texts we have misread, contextualized, and exegeted to hear what we want to. Like this one about the poor being among us, which Jesus says in the home of a leper and after a poor marginalized woman anoints his feet with perfume. The poor were all around him. 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. The poor will always be among us, because the empire will always produce poor people, and they will find a home in the church, a citizenship in the kingdom of God, where the “hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.”
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.”
Layers of insulation separate the rich and the poor from truly encountering one another. 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 at a safe distance from the poor. Take this poignant example you may have caught wind of: it was revealed that Kathie Lee garments, which have earned Wal-Mart over $300 million in sales annually, were being produced in Honduran sweatshops. These girls, as young as thirteen, worked fifteen-hour shifts under the watch of armed guards and received thirty-one cents an hour. But the great irony is that the garments they were making for Kathie Lee were sold under a label that promised that “a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this garment will be donated to various children’s charities.” More recently, Kathie Lee has been an advocate for workers’ rights. Charity can be a dangerous insulator.
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. We can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing through organizations and never have to open up our homes, our beds, our dinner tables. 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.”
With new government funds and faith-based initiatives, the social-work model can easily entangle the church in the efficiency of brokering services and resources in a web of “clients” and “providers” and struggling to retain God’s vision of rebirth, in which we are all family. Faith-based nonprofits can too easily be the mirror image of secular organizations, maintaining the same hierarchies of power and separation between rich and poor. They can too easily merely facilitate the exchange of goods and services, putting plenty of professionals in the middle to guarantee that the rich do not have to face the poor and that power does not shift. Rich and poor are kept in separate worlds, and inequality is carefully managed but not dismantled.
When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed. And Jesus did not set up a program but modeled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God, a community in which people are reconciled and our debts are forgiven just as we forgive our debtors (all economic words). That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread like a disease — through touch, through breath, through life. It spread through people infected by love.
Often wealthy folks ask me what they can do for the Simple Way [the neo-monastic Christian community of which Claiborne is a part]. I could ask them for a few thousand dollars, but that would be too easy for both of us. Instead, I ask them to come visit. Writing a check makes us feel good and can fool us into thinking that we have loved the poor. But seeing the squat houses and tent cities and hungry children will transform our lives. Then we will be stirred to imagine the economics of rebirth and to hunger for the end of poverty.
Almost every time we talk with affluent folks about God’s will to end poverty, someone says, “But didn’t Jesus say, ‘The poor will always be with you’?” Many of the people who whip out this verse have grown quite insulated and distant from the poor and feel defensive. I usually gently ask, “Where are the poor? Are the poor among us?” The answer is usually a clear negatory. As we study the Scriptures, we see how many texts we have misread, contextualized, and exegeted to hear what we want to. Like this one about the poor being among us, which Jesus says in the home of a leper and after a poor marginalized woman anoints his feet with perfume. The poor were all around him. 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. The poor will always be among us, because the empire will always produce poor people, and they will find a home in the church, a citizenship in the kingdom of God, where the “hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.”
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.”
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Writing
Sorry I haven't posted in a while but I'm not really even sure people read this thing. So what's the big deal if I don't write?
Except for you Janie, I really enjoy it that you read this and that you have shared your kind words of thanks and encouragement. They have helped.
I have been extremely busy of late, trying to use the things God has graced me with to make a difference. I have always struggled to get on here and write because I find myself always wanting to be profound or wise or something. So, I never post.
Maybe I will more in the future, maybe I won't. I seem to enjoy reading and living more than writing. But I do want to try to write more and not worry about what I'm saying, just write.
Anyway,till next time.......................
Except for you Janie, I really enjoy it that you read this and that you have shared your kind words of thanks and encouragement. They have helped.
I have been extremely busy of late, trying to use the things God has graced me with to make a difference. I have always struggled to get on here and write because I find myself always wanting to be profound or wise or something. So, I never post.
Maybe I will more in the future, maybe I won't. I seem to enjoy reading and living more than writing. But I do want to try to write more and not worry about what I'm saying, just write.
Anyway,till next time.......................
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Where in the world have you been?
Well, I've been wondering the vast and distance places of my mind, heart and soul and yes it was all done without any form of mind altering drug. Just the drug of thought, which can be a pretty heavy drug for me. I can't possibly type on here all that has gone through my mind over the last couple months but I thought I would update since it's been a while.
EPIC has changed up a bit. Instead of us creating a new and different way of doing the same old church routine which involved asking people to leave their normal everyday life and "enter" into something where they were supposed to feel or experience God. We are wrestling with how to actively LIVE OUT a faith that resembles Jesus. By LIVE OUT, I'm mean OUT in the world, in our homes, marriages, work places, friends (those who have a relationship with Jesus and those who don't), yes actually having friends who don't believe like we do and not for the purpose of "changing them and bringing them into the fold" but just loving them. I recently spoke to a couple people who don't consider themselves Christian and they said that one thing they hate about "Christians" is that they treat them (non-believers) as projects and not people. So, we are in the midst of trying to figure all this out. Come and join in if you want.
My own life has been trudging through the thought recesses as well. I guess it's becasue I'm 38 and although I know I have many, many years in front of me, it still seems old. I'm not sure if I'm normal or not, I think most of the time I'm not, but I just want my life to mean something. To impact something in a real, deep and long lasting way. Maybe it will be in my wife or children or some lone person I meet in life but right now my life seems unfulfilling and I'm just trying to figure it out, or at least understand it, be at peace with it and walk.
I'll keep you posted.
EPIC has changed up a bit. Instead of us creating a new and different way of doing the same old church routine which involved asking people to leave their normal everyday life and "enter" into something where they were supposed to feel or experience God. We are wrestling with how to actively LIVE OUT a faith that resembles Jesus. By LIVE OUT, I'm mean OUT in the world, in our homes, marriages, work places, friends (those who have a relationship with Jesus and those who don't), yes actually having friends who don't believe like we do and not for the purpose of "changing them and bringing them into the fold" but just loving them. I recently spoke to a couple people who don't consider themselves Christian and they said that one thing they hate about "Christians" is that they treat them (non-believers) as projects and not people. So, we are in the midst of trying to figure all this out. Come and join in if you want.
My own life has been trudging through the thought recesses as well. I guess it's becasue I'm 38 and although I know I have many, many years in front of me, it still seems old. I'm not sure if I'm normal or not, I think most of the time I'm not, but I just want my life to mean something. To impact something in a real, deep and long lasting way. Maybe it will be in my wife or children or some lone person I meet in life but right now my life seems unfulfilling and I'm just trying to figure it out, or at least understand it, be at peace with it and walk.
I'll keep you posted.
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