Live Generously

I am quickly becoming a big fan of Relevant magazine. It is a refreshing change from the status quo of the Christian media culture, and publishes interesting articles about, as their cover advertises, God, life, and progressive culture.  I appreciate the magazine’s ability to talk about matters of faith in a real way while remaining very much, well, culturally relevant.  Their cover stories are always great, but this issue’s was particularly good.

The story was called 7 Burning Issues, and it featured questions related to injustice, war, consumerism, faith, culture, politics, and gay rights.  You know, standard fare, nothing too difficult or controverisal ;-). To make it even better, the panel answering the questions included Brian McLaren, Shane Caliborne, N.T. Wright, and Jim Wallis, four of my favorite authors/thinkers/cool guys whose books you should all read. Their answers were all really fantastic…here are a few excerpts that really stuck out to me, with my comments in italics (hopefully this isn’t illegal!).

Wallis on social justice: “The message to Christians today is very clear.  Any gospel that isnt good news to poor people simply isn’t the Gospel of Jesus Christ; any evangelism that doesn’t include social justice ignores the perfectly integrated life and message of Jesus.

The false dichotomy of evangelism and social justice simply has to be overcome if either are going to have any sort of significant impact.  I’m reminding of a professor I had at Fuller last quarter who said that Christians must learn to “lead” with social justice, honesty, integrity, humility, and values of that sort, because if we simply “lead” with the four spiritual laws in a culture that doesn’t really much care we aren’t going to get anywhere.  That also kinda sounds like something Hal said yesterday morning in church…good works lead to good will that leads to the hearing of the good news.  There’s a lot of truth to that, and there is also a lot of truth to the idea that to be Christian is to be a person of good works.

McLaren on how we should respond to homosexuality: “When the issue of homosexuality comes up, people quickly say, “What about Romans 1? What about Leviticus?  What about 1 Corinthians 6?” I want to say, “Well, what about 1 Corinthians 13? What about James 3?”

McLaren is right on here.  Passages like 1 Corinthians 13 and James 3 must be our criterion for interpreting passages like Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6.  Does that mean we ignore what Romans 1 and 1 Cor. 6 say?  Certainly not.  It does simply mean that we seek to show love first.  Period.

Claiborne of interacting with culture: “part of what I think we have to do is not just figure out how we interact with the culture,  but create a new culture where we bring one another to life and call each other to the best of who God wants us to be.  So it’s not “How much secularism can I get away with?” but “How can I be set apart is a way that celebrates the distinctiveness of who we are as people in this world who are resident aliens?”

That point is absolutely huge.  At the end of the day it’s really about us as Christians changing the questions we are asking.  He is right to point out that many of us, myself included, are often seeking how much ’secularism’ or ‘worldliness’ we can ‘get away with’, which in my few reflects a major problem with our hearts.  It’s as if our goal is to resemble the world most closely, rather than setting ourselves about from the world for the purpose of living as the people of God.  I guess the question then becomes, are we willing to hold ourselves to the high standard that a new way of thinking would require of us?

And finally, N.T. Wright on money: “Money becomes a god very, very easily.  So giving it away cheerfully and wisely is a step towards really saying money is not the ruling force in our lives.”

I’m currently listening to an amazing series of messages by Andy Stanley at North Point Church where he is talking all about the heart.  One of the messages was on greed. He hammered home the point that prioritized, percentage giving is probably the most effective means of countering greed in our lives.  He added weight and credibility to the point by adding that if people are skeptical of him then they can give somewhere else.  He and Wright and correct is saying that the only way any of us can hope to get a handle on our greed is to make giving a priority.

So those are just a few small excerpts.  I highly encourage you all to pick up this issue and read the full article.  That’s all from me for now…I’m going on a mini technology fast now, so I won’t be back online until tomorrow afternoon.

For the last several weeks the folks over at Sojourners have done a series of posts on their God’s Politics blog (which is nearly always well worth reading) in recognition of the five year anniversary of the Iraq war. I have perused a few of them, and have found them to be at least interesting and at most insightful. I particularly enjoyed the always snarky Shane Claiborne’s post about celebrating Good Friday by going through the stations of the cross on the base of weapons juggernaut Lockheed Martin. I would expect nothing less from him.

I also enjoyed a post written last week by N.T. Wright (whose book I am currently reading) entitled Easter’s Challenge to Empire. In it, Wright talks through, well, the challenge that the truth of Easter brings to the empires of the world. And while Wright, in this instance, applies this concept specifically to issues of war and peace, I believe it is vital that–especially in the Easter season–we who claim to follow Jesus remain connected to the reality that his death and resurrection ushered in an entirely new way of living and an entirely new way of understanding reality (and an entirely new way of writing run-on sentences with too many commas). The whole post is well worth reading, but here are a few notable excerpts:

“It is the task of the followers of Jesus to remind those called to authority that the God who made the world intends to put the world to rights at last, and to call those authorities to acts of justice and mercy which will anticipate, in the present time, the future, coming, final victory of God over all evil, all violence, all arrogant abuse of power.”

“Where then is God in the war on terror? Grieving and groaning within the pain and horror of his battered but still beautiful world. Stirring in the hearts of human beings the desire for a more credible structure of global justice and mercy. Burning into the imagination of human beings a hope that peace and reconciliation might eventually win out over suspicion and hatred, that the world may be put to rights and that we may anticipate that in the present time. The Christian gospel, revealing the mysterious God we discover in Jesus and the Spirit, offers a framework for discerning where God is at work in the midst of the dangers and opportunities that confront us. All of us in our different callings are summoned to this task; some of you, perhaps, to make it your life’s work. Jesus is Lord. The Spirit is powerful. God is doing a new thing. Let’s get out there and join in.”

Good stuff. Ok, now I need to review the assigned reading so that I don’t look like a moron in class tonight.

A few years ago I was told that I absolutely must read this book called The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical written by a guy named Shane Claiborne, who at the time I’d never heard of. To be honest, I am frequently told that I absolutely must read such and such book, so I didn’t really think much of it. Eventually, after being given the aforementioned mandate by several people, I went ahead and ordered the book. And it absolutely blew me away. Shane’s ideas are nothing short of radical, and its voices like his that the church desperately needs. Since reading The Irresistible Revolution I’ve tried to read everything by him that I can, I’ve been to see him speak, and I even bought a little button when I saw him speak that said “God Bless Everyone” and had an American and Iraqi flag on it (I attached it to my computer bag, but sadly it eventually fell off). Needless to say when I heard about his new book, Jesus for President I was pretty excited. It just recently came out, and I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but these quotes (taken from a review of the book posted on Amazon), are certainly intriguing:

“Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual values of humility, gentleness, and sacrificial love.”

“We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world.”

“Rather than placing our hope in a transitional church that embodies God’s kingdom, we assume America is God’s hope for the world, even when it doesn’t look like Christ.”

I look forward to hopefully sitting down with this book and having it kick my butt in a couple of weeks once finals are over. Publisher’s Weekly has already called the book “the must-read election-year book for Christian Americans.” They’ve got a pretty nifty website for the book that’s worth checking out. If Shane can avoid getting tagged as an ultra-liberal (which some would argue he already has), I believe he has tremendous potential to do a lot of good for the Kingdom of God in a generation that is growing weary of the tired old ways of doing church.