05.19.09

I'm halfway through The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne and can't get over how much his words jump out at me. I'm feeling convicted. I want to share some of them (some of these are actually quotes from other people that he mentions in his book)...


We do indeed have a God of resurrection, a God who can create beauty from the messes we make of our world.

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly.

We are called not to be successful but to be faithful.

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.

We can do all sorts of miracles, but if we have not love, it is nothing.

With the most sincere hearts, we do not want to see anyone walk away from Jesus because of the discomfort of his cross, so we clip the claws of the Lion a little, we clean up a bit the bloody Passion we are called to follow.

Yet over and over in the Scriptures, Jesus warns people of the cost of discipleship, that it will cost them everything they have ever hoped for and believed in -- their biological families, their possessions, even their lives. He warns them to count to cost before putting their hand to the plow. And Jesus allows people to walk away.

God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

Do not worry about your career. Concern yourself with your vocation, and that is to be lovers of Jesus.

We've taken the blood at the foot of the cross and turned it into Kool-Aid.

So I did a little survey, probing Christians about their conceptions of Jesus. It was fun just to see how many people think Jesus loved homosexuals or ate kosher. But I learned a striking thing from the survey. I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80% said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question. I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2% said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

Yet I am convinced that Jesus came not to just prepare us to die but to teach us how to live.

Today the church is tempted by the spectacular, to do big, miraculous things so people might believe, but Jesus has called us to littleness and compares our revolution to the little mustard seed, to yeast making its way through dough, slowly infecting this dark world with love.

In fact, if our lives are easy, we must be doing something wrong.

Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but it is the only answer. This love is not sentimental but heart-wrenching, the most difficult and the most beautiful thing in the world.

There are plenty of people who are miserable in their jobs, for they have not listened to God's call. And I would add there are many Christians who are not fulfilled in their spiritual lives because they have no sense of their gifts or purpose, and they just run to the mission filed to save souls rather than transform lives and communities using their gifts and those of the people they live among. Both lead to emptiness and burnout.

Economists predict that within the next decade, the leading cause of violence and war will be not oil but water.

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.

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.

Live simply that others may simply live.

When we talk of materialism and simplicity, we must always being with love for God and neighbor, otherwise we're operating out of little more than legalistic, guilt-ridden self-righteousness.

It also becomes scandalous for the church to spend money on windows and buildings when some family members don't even have water.

Redistribution is a description of what happens when people fall in love with each other across class lines.

Certainly the thirty-five thousand children starving to death today need not fast to connect to God. Rather we need to fast in order to connect to them and to God.

Poverty was created not by God but by you and me, because we have not learned to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I'm convinced God did no mess up and make too many people and not enough stuff. Poverty was created not by God but by you and me, because we have not learned to love our neighbors as ourselves. Gandhi put it well when he said, "There is enough for everyone's need, but there is not enough for everyone's greed." One of the first commands given to our biblical ancestors (even before 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 (Exodus 16:16). In the story of the exodus, God rains down manna from heaven and assures the Israelites that there will be enough. When they save some for the next day, God sends maggots to destroy their stockpile. (Maybe we need some maggots today.) They are ordered to carry with them on omer of manna (about three pounds) as a symbol of their daily providence of bread. Of course, we hear the subtle echoes of this in the Lord's Prayer as we are taught to pray for our daily bread. (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.

We cannot say we love God and pass by our hungry neighbor.