Give Thanks

Give thanks to the Lord, the God of the poor, for He is good and His loving faithfulness endures Forever--He will never cease until all are liberated and all are restored. Give thanks that the God of the poor has invited us to be a part of his work of rescue, that God has opened himself in grace and mercy to us despite our indifference and our hatred for the people around us. Since God will never cease in His work of restoration, we only find life when we somehow find ourselves moving in the direction of His peace and redemption. This is why our gratitude must be paired with compassionate generosity; because the God to whom we are grateful is a God who frees slaves and relentlessly seeks peace. And that for which we are thankful is the same faithfulness which still moves in the direction of the cross.

Trade as One

Trade as One is one of my new favorite websites.

Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or Misunderstood

The argument has been made, starting with C.S. Lewis and followed by others, that Jesus of Nazareth was either a liar, a lunatic, or he was Lord. Here's how the argument works:

Liar: Either Jesus was a liar, making false claims to deity in order to claim some kind of power (which is unlikely because he did nothing to take power for himself)
Lunatic: Or Jesus was a lunatic insofar as he really believed he was who he said he was and actually died for this identity even though it wasn't true.
Lord: Or he was and is Lord, he was actually who he said he was.

But nowadays, anyone who leaves the argument there is not paying attention to the questions of scholarship let alone the questions of culture. The presupposition behind the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument is that Jesus actually was going around making claims to deity. In actuality, Jesus said a lot more about the Kingdom of God than he ever said about himself. It is arguable whether Jesus saw himself as God or not. It is true that, if we are to trust the gospel accounts, Jesus saw his vocation as caught up with that of Yahweh. He did see his work as strangely bound up in what God was doing in the world and his life as caught up with God's presence with his people.

People will often look to the Johannine gospel account rather than the synoptics to argue that Jesus thought he was God: they'll look at Jesus saying, "I am the way, the truth and the light, no one comes to the Father except through me" as the ultimate claim to deity. But John 14:6, taken literally with context, in that Rabbis sometimes referred to the Torah as the Way the Truth and the Life, would be a claim to be the Torah, which is an incarnation of God, but few would argue that the Torah is God. Jesus way may be the only way but that does not necessitate a claim to divinity... in fact it's far fetched to say so since Jesus refers to "the Father" as something other than himself. The same is true of verses like "I and the Father are one." A claim to oneness with God is close but is not the same as a claim to being God. The simple phrase "I and the Father..." implies a separation explainable within trinitarian theology but it does not necessitate that Jesus though of his oneness with God the same way we usually do. Whereas John's gospel does little to necessitate a rational understanding in Jesus' mind of his identity as divine, the synoptic gospels do even less.

All this is not to say that Jesus was not God but it is to say that Jesus may not have thought of himself that way and he certainly didn't go around making broad claims to deity. Therefore one could accept that Jesus did not have to be crazy to think of himself the way he did--as uniquely involved in God's work in the world and in the coming of God's Kingdom (in fact, many saw themselves this way and were essentially wrong). He may very well have been wrong in his claims but his willingness to die for them may still be rational, that is, if ever a willingness to die for something can be rational. If he was a liar, he was bad at it for his lies profited him only death. Therefore Jesus could have been a liar, a lunatic, the Lord, or he may have been none of the above if the presupposition that Jesus thought he was God is wrong. He may just be misunderstood by interpreters who assume his claims were irrational is not true. Thus the argument gets us nowhere among savvy people.

I would argue that Jesus is God, that he saw his vocation as such and that his presence and solidarity with people was God's presence and solidarity with people. I would make the claim that Jesus' death on the cross was God's death on the cross. I would base this partly but not solely on Jesus' claims about his work and identity. The primary basis of this claim is what we have after the fact. What do we do with all that Jesus said and did? What does it say about God and God's Kingdom? After the culminating event of Jesus' life, i.e., the resurrection, we have the responsibility of working out what has happened theologically. There is no other conclusion which makes sense of what Jesus said and did, in embodying God's Kingdom and bringing salvation, other than the conclusion of his shared identity with Yahweh. This is how the first Christians eventually dealt with it and it's the only way for us to do so. The place to start then is not the claims of Jesus but the response of the disciples after Jesus' death. Many would-be Messiahs came and went, preached and were crucified. Disciples would would go back to their trade after their rabbi failed, as the disciples of Jesus did after his death (remember that Jesus came to some of his disciples after his resurrection while they were fishing in John 21). But what could have prompted the disciples to continue Jesus' ministry other than resurrection. Perhaps either they were liars, lunatics, or the resurrection had indeed brought the reign of God through Christ into the world.

Beyond Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is celebrated quite differently now than it once was. Long before there was an American holiday called Thanksgiving, in Biblical history, days were commemorated for the purpose of giving thanks (usually for specific events in salvation history). These days were always connected with events through which Israel experienced the undeserved grace of God. These days were not days of feasting and shopping and consumption, rather, they were days of prayer, fasting, and sacrifice. These were days in which people turned their whole posture toward gratitude. But gratitude has less to do with our Thanksgiving than Turkey has to do with helping the poor.

We say our thank you's to God and then we turn our hearts toward our stuff again--consuming for ourselves the gifts God has given us and waiting for the big Christmas sales to start. We know no other way. Prayer and fasting are nearly absent from the celebration. Part of this is because our theology of stuff has changed. Rather than looking toward a point of salvation, recognizing it as undeserved or even unfair, we look to our possessions and we see them as deserved and as ours for our use--"God is doing a good job keeping up his side of the deal so now I'll enjoy what I've got... thanks." We actually get trapped in this kind of thinking.

We get trapped in the kind of thinking that says that the only response we have is to say "thank you" and then keep on eating. But we are invited into something so much better. We are invited to extend God's unfair grace to others. We can, in fact, go beyond "thank you." We can share our blessings with others which is so much greater than just using our possessions for our personal consumption. We can take these undeserved gifts and offer undeserved sharing with others. Gratitude and generosity cannot be separated. Hear the words of Matthew 18:

"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.' But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."

The servant's response was not a response of gratitude for the best and only response to an undeserved gift is a mirrored generosity. It's the only response and it is indeed the best response because the joy of shared life is greater than the bitter consumption of goods. There's a way beyond thanksgiving and it is the way of mirroring God's generosity and undeserved grace. Perhaps we might revive a posture of prayer and fasting in our Thanksgiving celebrations. Or perhaps our celebrations, if matched with loving mercy, can be our gracious response. We are no longer trapped by our stuff. We are invited to share it.

In Jesus Christ, Thanksgiving offers to us something bigger than itself--a way beyond a "thank you" and consumption--an escape from the cultural mistake of thinking that the only response to gifting is saying "thank you." We are invited to return to everyday life with the awareness of our undeserved gifts, offering a renewed generosity to those in need and experiencing new life through mercy.

Thanks-GIVING: Gratitude Through Generosity

How often do we take the gifts God gives us for granted? I don't just mean that we take them for granted in that we forget where they came from or that others don't have them, but we can know where our gifts come from, realize others don't have them and still take them for granted. How? By forgetting what they're for.

God makes resources available to us not so that we can simply enjoy them and thank God for them, even thanking God that we're not like those who have less access to resources, but God gives us this access to resources, these blessings, for the blessing of others. This is the pattern of God's covenant: "...I will bless you...all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" (Genesis 12:1-3). It was never God's intention that the people of Israel would be blessed for the sake of their own blessing but so that they might see the ultimate blessing in the blessing of the world. The greatest reward is not our being able to use our resources without restriction, however nice that may be, but it is our ability be a part of God's work of blessing that we might see other blessed by the generosity of God through us. We take blessings for granted when we do not share them and thus find the life that is truly life through our shared life with others. That's the best and only way for us to truly enjoy our gifts and to understand true gratitude: by giving them away.

How often do we interrupt God's invitation to generosity with our thanksgiving rather than allowing our thanksgiving to flow from our generosity? How often does God give us enough bread that we might share it with others and we say "Thank you Lord for your blessings" and continue to eat and get fat? We can't truly celebrate gratitude for our blessings if we do not remember what they're for, where we came from. God continuously reminds Israel that they were slaves in Egypt so that through memory and gratitude they might be drawn to mirror God's generosity and so that gratitude might flow from generosity.

"In the future, when your son asks you, 'What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the LORD our God has commanded you?'tell him: 'We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand'" (Deut. 6:20-21).

This year during Thanksgiving let us celebrate thanks-GIVING that from gratitude, from our memory that we were slaves in Egypt, will flow radical generosity that we might match God's generosity. Let us remember, as we eat and drink and give thanks, those on the under side of society, those in need, and let us remember why God has blessed us.

Try this: as you eat your thanksgiving meal, enjoy family and friends, and celebrate the blessings from God's hand, try praying "give US this day OUR daily bread" and keep the hungry in mind. Allow your meal to be a Eucharistic meal, a meal of hope for the hopeless, a meal in which gratitude leads to generosity and generosity leads to gratitude, calling our past liberation into the present and calling our future liberation into the present, that it may be for you a new reminder of God's radical invitation into his work of redemption. Open you table, if only in your heart, to Jesus and find true gratitude through generosity.

"Jesus and Nonviolence" by Walter Wink

I just finished reading Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way by Walter Wink. Wink is a professor of Biblical Interpretation and Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. Another book he's written which is definitely on my list is called The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium. Wink is a genius and a must read for anyone interested in liberation theology (not that he's a liberation theologian), Jesus & Empire discussions (not that he'd necessarily use the Empire language), or, in this case, nonviolence.

Wink submits an third option, one which he sees as not his own but of Jesus, apart from the "fight or flight" options we have been trained into so very long. He argues that nonviolence is the only form of resistance which does not "mirror" the oppressor being resisted and which "creates... social instruments for change that already embody the better life they seek ahead" (page 102). On page 72 Wink writes,

"Violence simply is not radical enough, since it generally changes only the rulers but not the rules. What use is a revolution that fails to address the fundamental problem: the existence of dominion in all its forms, and the myth of redemptive violence that perpetuates it?"

Therefore in all our work for social change, in all our revolutionary ambitions, and in siding with the oppressed we must embody God's Kingdom for the not only do the ends not justify the means but they desperately depend on them. Wink, though he seeks an alternative to violence does not promote the second option which we usually think of as the only other option: "flight." He seeks a radical new way, Jesus third way, which aggressively seeks change and empowers the oppressed to assert their humanity but also embodies a dominion of love, i.e. God's dominion. We must resist evil, he explains, but we must love our enemies and offer to them the gift of opportunity to be redeemed unto the oppressed. The third way is no less courageous than the way of violence (it may indeed be more so) in the pursuit of justice.

Wink doesn't only deal in pragmatic examples (although he has plenty of examples) of the "effectiveness" of nonviolence but offers this option in a way that transcends effectiveness and "means and ends": "Means and ends coalesce as people create for themselves social instruments for change that already embody the better life they seek ahead" (page 102). "With Jesus a way emerges by which evil can be opposed without being mirrored" (page 27).

This book was very helpful and I would highly recommend it to anyone who cares to embody the Kingdom of God here and now.

Russell Athletic Violates Human Rights... but not anymore

About 7 months ago I wrote a post about the violations of Russell Athletic against human rights in Honduras. But today I heard the good news that student protests in the United States have helped end the struggle.

"The often raucous student movement announced on Tuesday that it had achieved its biggest victory by far. Its pressure tactics persuaded one of the nation’s leading sportswear companies, Russell Athletic, to agree to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when Russell closed their factory soon after the workers had unionized."

Read the New York Times article.

The Kingdom Has Come Near

The Kingdom of God has come near. It's here, among us now as with the Holy Spirit we model for the world the new way under Christ's reign. All things are now subject to Christ--his politics, his ethics, his compassionate economy--but not all things are yet obedient. Let us invite the world into obedience and into the beautiful dance of God's dominion. As Abram was called into a land unknown to bring blessings yet unseen, let us venture into unknown land and be the visible body of unseen blessings. As Christ was born into the world let New Creation be born in us.

Victim to Victimizer or a New Way?

The pattern often goes like this: one group is victimized by another, the oppressed do something to assert their humanity, the oppressed gain some level of equality or are at least invited by the oppressor to assimilate, the oppressed then take power for themselves, and finally the victim becomes the victimizer. This was the pattern for Israel who, having been freed from Egypt, took slaves for themselves. This is still the pattern for Israel who, having suffered in the Holocaust of the 1940's, displaces and victimizes the Palestinians. This was the pattern for the U.S. settlers who, having escaped the tyranny of the "old world," escaped into the "new world" only to massacre the Natives living there. And this may yet to be the pattern of those oppressed by segregation who, through the Civil Rights Movement, asserted their humanity and are still fighting for equality in this country. The reason I bring this up is because we have to see the possible future before we can choose a better future.

The election of Barack Obama can be seen as a sort of culminating point in the history of the Civil Rights movement--a milestone event if not a culminating end to the struggle of black people in America to gain equality. A black U.S. president is a symbol of hope in so many ways but is it equality or is it assimilation? Is the victim becoming the victimizer?

I think now is the time to call the United States to a new way, a way in which the victim does not become the victimzer. Barack Obama has inherited a policy of systemic oppression through economic oppression as well as through the violence of war. What can Barack Obama do to break the pattern and to never become the victimizer? What can we do? Can we go a different direction? Can the oppressed find the answer to the "crucial moral and political questions of our time"? Can we realize the "need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression"? (Martin Luther King Jr.) We are called to trust not in Presidents and politicians. We are called to something bigger than countries and world leaders.It's not about Barack Obama, it's not about the Civil Rights Movement, it's about the Kingdom of God.

"Jesus moved from the culture of sacrificing others for one's own gain to a new culture of sacrificing self for the sake of others. This new culture would become known as Christianity. It is important to see the sacrifice of the cross not as the one sacrifice of Jesus but as the final movement in the sacrificial process of an entire lifetime, a life that refused to victimize anyone. Jesus sacrificed himself in many ways to redeem and rehabilitate the victims of the world. He was the victim who did not become a victimizer. He always offered something new and surprising. He went from being a victim to being a liberator, a generator of new life. Like Jesus, out of our own suffering today we are called to usher in something new so that all of us together, in new partnership, may have a better life. Out of the wounds and pains of cultural poverty, new cultures will emerge, and that will be a gift not only to the poor but to all of humanity."
_Virgilio Elizondo
(Daniel G. Groody, The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology, pp. 167-168)

I received this e-mail from Jim Wallis yesterday:

It has been eight years since the United States military began operations in Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I know you join me in lamenting the suffering, violence, and death on both sides of the conflict. Our scriptures and history teach us that war is not the answer to building the peace and security we are striving for in this world.

I’ve joined with other faith leaders in sending an open letter to President Obama, urging him to build a new strategy in Afghanistan that leads with bold humanitarian aid and development instead of more military escalation. Will you join me?

Tell President Obama: We need a whole new approach in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the options being debated are far too narrow and are unlikely to bring the peace and stability we so desperately need to end this war.

The two strategies contending for prime time - counterinsurgency, requiring a substantial escalation of troops, and counterterrorism, relying on precision targeting technology to apply military pressure on the most dangerous operatives, often at the expense of civilian lives - don't address the deep moral and practical issues we face in Afghanistan.

There are many moral concerns at stake in President Obama’s decision: legitimately protecting Americans from further terrorism, protecting the lives of our men and women in uniform, protecting the Afghan people from the collateral damage of war, defending women from the Taliban, and genuinely supporting democracy - to name a few.

Focused and effective humanitarian assistance and development can no longer be an afterthought. They must be central to any strategy the U.S. government puts forward. The president must choose nonmilitary strategies to lead the way, rather than the other way around, which often just makes aid and development work another weapon of war.

Tell President Obama: More war will not bring peace.

We know what can rebuild a broken nation, inspire confidence, trust, and hope among its people, and most effectively undermine terrorism: massive humanitarian assistance and sustainable economic development.

And it costs less - far less - than continued war. The Congressional Research Service has said it currently costs about $1 million per U.S. soldier, per year in Afghanistan.

We all share in responsibility for a war that has been waged in our names and with our tax dollars. Join me and many faith leaders across our country in praying for the president as he considers a new strategy in Afghanistan.

After you pray, sign our letter to President Obama urging his serious consideration of a humanitarian and diplomatic surge, instead of more military options. We'll make sure it gets to the White House.

Blessings and peace,

Jim Wallis

What Would You Do?

In light of my recent discussion on Facebook with some friends on the subject of nonviolence, I have decided to pickup a book which has been sitting on my shelf. I had planned on reading the Politics of Jesus by Yoder before I got to this one but this one is just so pertinent to recent conversations. It's called What Would You Do? and actually the long title is If a Violent Person Threatened to Harm a Loved One... What Would You Do? It's John Howard Yoder's attempt to take the quandary ethics "what if" question seriously and to approach it responsibly in the realm of ethics. Hopefully it will help me better offer my perspective in light of the "what if" questions. Perhaps, if it calls for one, I will write a review when I'm done.