counter culture advocates

by austin pfeiffer

Last night at the Franklin House we had our usual Sunday Dinner and Discussion. The topic was James 3:18, the namesake verse for Peacemaker Revolution. We were discussing how the verse relates to conflicts of our city. We decided first, that Shalom, the idea of holistic peace in a universal sense, was not what was being referred to by making "peace." We saw it as a general aura of reconciliation, but without differences. As we went on we decided peace making is NOT two things.

First, you are not an arbiter, Christians that is, because we are not the judge nor the objective source of reason. Second, we are not an advocate for humans. The counter culture of Christians as makers of peace in society, enters here. Christians advocate God, the creator of the world, and as doers of peace, Christians seek to restore the world to its intended unity. If that is the case, peacemaking has everything to do with advocating God and peace, and does not end by advocating the oppressed or seeking justice.

We talked about some heated decisions by local business people and politicians regarding tax money and investments in the city and our group fell on both sides of every argument. We talked about our next door neighbor, a man suffering from throat cancer and out of work, who was evicted from his apartment. The counter culture here is to engage not just the unjustly evicted, the victim of capitalistic ambition, or the overlooked by government care, but engage the oppressor, the landlord, the investor, the mayor.

Our idea of Christian community centers on the microeconomic, the micropolitical, the neighborhood approach to change. We hope to change our corner of the world, take care of our orphans, widows, slaves, on our street and hope that others will do the same in their nest. If we engage our neighbors, all of them, not as arbiters, not as judges, not as representatives of the disenfranchised, but act as advocates for reconciliation in the cases of economic, social, government injustice, then we can call ourselves...makers, doers, of peace.

Ivy and Dead Trees

What is paper but thin slices of dead tree? Pages cannot breath in carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen straight into our thirsty lungs. The Bible, as a book, is a collection of slender, two dimensional, pieces of lifeless, breathless limbs. Reverberating in the halls of the hearts of our generation is the desire to see life and for many, that life is only seen in the action of social justice.

Many before and after this writer have noted that today, Christianity is for the most part, a dead religion studied by professional students known as pastors. A sweet drink it is to swallow down the satisfaction of understanding something intellectually. On Sunday nights, when we gather to eat a meal and read the Bible, its easy for our group to slip into a conversation about the pages. What is the context, why is it relevant, where did it take place, who is the writer. Of course many of these questions can serve the purpose of furthering the expedition, but for the most part, they are just a tasty liqueur.

On the ivy covered gates of the ivory towers and the tinted glass windows of church offices, many sit and discuss series titles, sermon ideas. For the restless and curious, these things force withdrawl and a matriculation into the ranks of spiritual ambivelance and social activity. Tragically, we find ourselves quickly seeing the benevolence of seeking justice and are unable to reconcile God's word as alive and active in the same way, because its presented as a text, which a man has interpreted and expects you to absorb from a church sponsored syllabus.

So a proposal to both parties...

To the skeptic: Jesus said the burden of being with him is easy and light. Seek justice like Jesus did, but seek him too, because he is there and he is alive.

To the pastor: Stop talking about the Bible like a simple text. Of course your intellect is born out of reverence towards the book itself, but its no longer percieved as living and active, created before words, when you treat it like a puzzle, a source for material, or something to spend more hours discussing in offices and classrooms than living and loving on the streets of the world.

One Humble Suggestion

by eric lange

If you ask someone well schooled in the basics of modern Christianity,
they can explain to you quickly the basics of what you need to believe
to make it to heaven and encounter God again.

It’ll go something like this:

1. God loves you.
2. Humanity is sinful. God doesn’t like sin, and that creates a break
in our connection w/ him
3. Jesus came to bridge that gap by dying for us
4. We can get back to God by accepting Christ’s sacrifice for us.

It’s remarkable that we’ve been able to work the basic message of
Christianity down into such an easily presentable format
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Spiritual_Laws>. While there’s a lot
of truth in those statements, reducing the Christian message to a set
of numbered statements (an effort that fits well with the suburban,
post-war spirit of 1950s America) misses a great deal of the true spirit
of Christianity.

The church has often emphasized easy-to-follow outlines to bring the
basics to people in a controlled, clear to understand and
non-threatening manner. Christ’s death seems to fit well in conceptual
systems like this – since it happened in the past, we can always apply
20/20 hindsight to an issue. But the resurrection doesn’t fit as easily
into the numbered statements. Just as you can’t adequately describe your
best friend through bullet-points or ordered lists, you can’t fit the
unpredictability, spontaneity and creativity of the risen Jesus in any
outline.

If we began to live by emphasizing the resurrection of Jesus, life
simply wouldn’t be as predictable. It’s impossible to count all the ways
that it could be different.

One humble suggestion:

Jesus’ resurrection was the unexpected victory that suggested, even
when things seem overwhelmingly bleak, another way of living is possible.

Even when everything seems to be suggesting things can’t change, we
can point to Jesus’ resurrection as proof that even in impossible
situations a better life is possible. Broken relationships can be
restored. Oppressed people may be freed from injustice and domination.
This world can be a better place.

Emphasizing the resurrected Jesus means it’s OK to be hopeful.

wait...

by eric lange

Jesus’ words about ‘the least of these’ are often repeated among those who are more ‘service-oriented,’ and are interested in caring for the poor:

‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:40)

It’s a pretty sentence, and it’s also a nice idea. No one’s against serving the poor as concept. The problem is when it stays at this idealistic level – when the poor begin to have names and faces, serving them can become far more difficult.

Sometimes, the ‘least of these’ are inarticulate. They can be slow to “get it.” They aren’t pretty. They can even smell really bad. Even worse, they’ll take advantage of your good nature. They don’t really want help – they just want to use you.

So how do we respond in that situation? Some might say that these weren’t the type of people Jesus mentioned, and that “you gotta be smart” to make sure that you’re dealing with the right people. It’s too easy to waste time, energy, and money on people that will never change.

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?” (Matthew 9)

Certainly one thrust of this criticism is that Jesus has chosen to identify with a group of pariahs, social outcasts and marginalized peoples – and that Jesus is somehow dirtied or changed in the process.

But this question can also be read as a type of warning. Ask a typical Jew of the time who, of all the people in society, is the greatest cheater, he/she would undoubtedly say a tax collector, someone who cooks the books to increase personal profit by selling out their national heritage to collect money for Rome. The fact is, Jesus was associating with people who, in essence, made a living out of using people. Why would they treat Jesus any differently?

So what was different about Jesus? What makes him able to interact with tax collectors and not be cheated, to be around drunkards and suddenly they all magically sober up? I’m sure Jesus had a finely tuned sense of divine discernment – he could cut to the core of every person, see through their crap, and transform their lives.

“Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us!’

When he saw them, he said, ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were cleansed.

One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, ‘Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?’” (Luke 17:11-17)

So, even though Jesus ‘helped’ all ten people, only one person had the goodness to return to Jesus. Did Jesus’ healing simply not work?

Fact is, it’s much easier to only focus on ‘the good ones,’ giving up on those bad eggs that just don’t seem to get better. But that’s the major challenge – as we become more and more like Christ, I suppose we get better at seeing the beauty in every person, acknowledging they were made in God’s image and are deeply loved by their Creator. And it’s my own personal sinfulness that most often keeps me from seeing that.

Make Poverty History (3 of 3)

Poverty is a deep issue beyond simple material needs, and therefore it cannot be overcome through simple economic development alone: even as world hunger is eliminated, this basic ideological and social reality of “poverty” will remain unchanged. The divide between rich and poor is growing, and the poor are still ignored and marginalized.

Any attempt to end poverty must realize the depth of this issue. Sobrino’s says that these efforts must help the poor resolve - “Not only as the insatisfaction of their basic needs, but also as the ignorance and indignity to which they are condemned; the depredation of their cultures and the deviant offense which is done to them with respect to peoples of abundance.”

When faced with those situations of acute human suffering, it is all too easy to become numbed to the overwhelming horror of it all. People become statistics, and they lose their individuality, uniqueness, and humanity. Often, it takes those impassioned expressions of human emotion for us to realize the depth of their suffering - and to see them as human again. It took a mother’s impassioned grieving for her 2 murdered sons finally convinces the king to allow them a proper burial (2 Samuel 21), or the grief of Queen Esther to make the Babylonian king to realize the horror of his plans of genocide. Voices like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel make it is possible to move past the overwhelming and sickening statistics to understand the full depth of the Holocaust.

Many people claim that, as advocates for the poor, they must be “a voice for the voiceless.” They must bring the concerns and stories of the poor to a society who cannot (or chooses not to) hear them. An important contribution, but it ignores the fact that the poor already have a voice and it is being ignored. Whatever work must be done must therefore help “Amplify their voices” as much as possible. Those who wish to help should not “champion their cause” but instead to work with them to enable the means to tell their own story.

The poor must be given the means of self-expression that will allow the rest of humanity to realize the reality of their sufferings and rediscover their inherent beauty and value as human beings - and the best way to do that is by encouraging and empowering their capacity for artistic expression. Through art the poor can tell their stories of marginalization, poverty and oppression in a way that allows the world to understand the reality of their experiences - making it human. It sounds a bit silly, but art just might be the next great means of fighting poverty.

Of course, this is not to say that “art,” as a pure form, will solve anything. Brutal poverty, starvation, and illness still exist today, and each demands pragmatic and creative solutions (the kind of program that an economist might develop). James had a similar criticism against people that ignored physical needs: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?” (James 2:15-16)

Even within James’ words is the implicit requirement to care for the lost humanity of the poor - from the beginning, he takes for granted that his audience will see the needy as “a brother or sister,” an assumption that should not be made today with our social systems that create distance between poor and non-poor. Even more, plans for economic development operate all too often as if those involved are simple “cogs in the machine,” where they fit into a master plan that ignores the cultural context or worldview, thereby reinforcing the ideology that the “Developed World” knows best, and that all others should take notes and abandon their ways of life.

Make Poverty History (2 of 3)

Throughout the Hebrew Bible there are commands to defend the poor. Laws were designed to feed and protect them: Israelites were instructed to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that the hungry could gather what food they needed (Lev 23:22), and after a period of time they were supposed to cancel all debts owed to one another and return the land to its rightful owners (Lev 25:8-54). Nonetheless, as the kingly elite took control over the country, it became easy to overlook and ignore the plight of the poor. During these times God’s prophets rose up to remind those in power that God chose to defend the poor and to take up their cause:


The LORD takes his place in court;
he rises to judge the people.
The LORD enters into judgment
against the elders and leaders of his people:
“It is you who have ruined my vineyard;
the plunder from the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people
and grinding the faces of the poor?”
declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. (Isaiah 3:13-15)

The prophets held the unique role of being God’s voice for the society: while the nation ignored and marginalized the impoverished, the prophets reminded the powerful that their wealth came through “grinding the faces of the poor.” The use of the word “face” is significant: those in power live at a distance from the poor and therefore they cannot cross the barriers that have been created to dehumanize their relationships with the poor. In ignorance (or perhaps downright malice) they cannot see that their actions harm and damaging fellow human beings. The oppressed have faces, stories, and are loved by God. The prophets’ voice made sure that they remembered that.

Ultimately, when Jesus came to earth he chose to live among the poor, (2 Cor 8:9, Php 2). He explained that he was sent for them in particular (Lk 4:18-21). And, in his life and teachings he aimed to humanize the poor, to know their names. Of all the characters Jesus mentions in his parables - a prodigal son, a shrewd woman, friends and family members - only one has a name: the beggar Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), while the rich man in the parable remains nameless.

Jesus’ work with the poor cannot be reduced to the fact that he fed five thousand people, or that he was able to heal the crippled of their illnesses. What is most remarkable about Jesus was not these healings and miracles, but the fact that he removed their anonymity and restored their humanity while the rest of society ignores or marginalizes them. “It isn’t that Jesus healed lepers, it’s that he touched lepers.”

Make Poverty History (1 of 3)

Jesus statement, “The poor will always be with you,” has been understood as a near-universal truth throughout human history. Poverty and hunger have defined life for the vast majority of the inhabitants of our planet for as long as human beings have walked the earth.

Spurred on by a remarkable combination of improved global infrastructure, creative thinking, advanced problem solving, and marketing appeal by Bono, there has been a recent departure from this view. Suddenly, those who strive to “Make Poverty History” aren’t ignored or dismissed as pie-in-the sky dreamers or idealists. Economists and policymakers are making pragmatic and well-executed plans to eliminate global hunger.

And, in many ways, this approach has done great things. Programs in many Latin American countries, and especially China & India, have grown healthy middle classes, and development plans have successfully fed the hungry, created jobs, and improved the quality of life for millions of our world’s poor. As the world begins to focus its energies on these major humanitarian crises, they are achieving results. Has Jesus’ observation been proven wrong?

One of the major issues that this program faces is a very simple one: exactly what is “poverty?” It’s a question with no easy answer, but certainly it goes beyond a simple materialistic definition of “lacking” some basic good. Jon Sobrino says: “We indeed believe that the generic term ‘poverty,’ with all its historical fluidity, has no substitute that expresses the negation and oppression of humanity, the shortage, the disdain, and that many millions of human beings do not have a voice or name.”

And that issue is far deeper than simple issues of hunger – that kind of poverty deals with long histories of prejudices, conflict, and exclusion.

***The contributor responsible for the above is Eric Lange, a Wake Forest graduate who is an avid reader of books both ancient and modern on Christianity, and whose perspective is uniquely informed by his time spent in Christian communities in Sierra Leone, Louisiana immediately after Hurricane Katrina, and his travels to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and more.***