May 02

Wonderful Description of Community

Intentional Community, Quote No Comments »

A new friend, Julie Foley, sent me an interview of Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou that appeared in Busted Halo.

In it, Aaron provides a wonderful description of community:

BH: From what I’ve read about you, you’ve said that one of the turning points in your life is when you went to live in community with other people in Philadelphia.

AW: Yeah.

BH: How exactly does that work?

AW: Well, people who think that when Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself and love God—these are central teachings and central focuses of our life as Christians—not a belief in a doctrine of Christianity or an acceptance of a religious form but a life lived of love. And that’s going to play out as community. If you have a problem, and I love you, that’s my problem. If you have a joy, and I love you, that’s going to bring me joy. And we share it. We share everything. We share our struggles and our triumphs and our money and possessions. We share our faith and our hopes and our fears and struggle together and try to help other people around us who maybe don’t agree with us or have anything to offer us in return. Just living a life of service—that’s what I got out of the communal life that I tasted there. It’s just a simple life of love that I believe everyone is called to. It’s going to look different ways, but for me that was the realization that Jesus didn’t call me to a belief more abundant or a doctrine more precise. He called me to a life more abundant. He called me to a life where there’s fruit that you can taste and see and touch and smell and feel—tangible reality. “The kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven.” That was something where I’d read the words before, but it had never penetrated my heart before that the Gospel has social implications and an immediate relevance. That was tremendously liberating from this obsession with the purely spiritualized version of Christianity. When it talks about setting free the captives, that’s spiritual. When it talks about “blessed are the hungry and the poor,” that’s spiritual. Spiritually hungry and spiritually poor—that’s in there. But so is the tangible stuff. People need food and they need shelter and they need freedom, both economically and politically.

BH: Was it difficult, having grown up in this culture, to start
living that way?

AW: Ah…I wouldn’t say so, because it’s so bankrupt, the notion of just living for your own desires and pursuing your every whim and trying to ensure financial security. To store up money so that one day you can retire and have 15 years of relaxing until you die – has that worked for anybody? Has that given anybody eternal peace? Has that given anybody that sense of “I know why I’m here. I know the purpose of my life”? I look around and I see the failed American dream. People that are trying to claw their way to the top of the corporate ladder or some social group, and you realize that there’s no real contentment at the top. Whatever little ways that I’ve tried with the band—like, “Oh, we need to get on this label” —you end up wanting something else. Then you get on this radio station, and you want something else. You get in this magazine, and then you want something else. You get on this television station, and then what else? What else? What else? It’s never enough. Jesus calls us to less and less. He calls us to a simpler and humbler and more broken and emptied out lifestyle of service. To me, the moment that I realized that, it all made sense. It was perfectly clear. Everyone is called to that, and there’s room down there for everybody. But there’s only room at the top for one person. That would be a sad world, if our only purpose was to be the most successful or the world champion or the richest man alive.

Nov 12

Fear, Hypocracy, and Me

Commentary, Godliness, Quote 1 Comment »

While reading The New Friars by Scott A. Bessenecker (review forthcoming), I ran across a great quote from Tolstoy:

“Everybody wants to change the world and nobody wants to change themselves.”

As those who know me are well aware, I often fail to adhere to the theology I so strongly purport. I am a theologian who is all about a theology of action, but most of the time I find myself just writing and talking about it, not doing it. In fact, to be completely upfront, I am often trying to convince myself as much as I am trying to convince those I talk with.

The reality is that I know that Christ calls us to suffer, to leave those things to which we cling and cling to him, but I am so afraid. My heart desires to chase after the Master with reckless abandon, but my body says, “Why? You love people. You serve the poor. You proclaim the Gospel. Certainly that is enough.” And, though I live in a society and church that says my body is right, I know it is lying to me. Still I continually give in.

I am a hypocrite. But please do not let my hypocracy dampen the Truth of what I say, for they are two separate issues. The question is not if I do what I say, but if what I say is True. It is my prayer that you may inhabit the Truth of God with great boldness and zeal!!!

Oct 31

Blame Me, Matt Pritchard, for War, Poverty, Hatred, and Suffering!

Incarnational Expressions of Faith, Peacemaking, Quote, Websites No Comments »

Freedom from Fear

Category: Organization Website

A friend in my “Theology of Resistance” class at UVa (which I\\\’ve unfortunately missed the last couple of weeks) is part of an initiative called Freedom from Fear. It\\\’s something I\\\’ve written about before, so I won\\\’t belabor the point, but I really like the vision.

One of their sayings is, “Blame Me for War.” (They use it with the italicized excerpt from the quote below.) Wow! The Church is God\\\’s chosen mechanism for the continual redemption of the world. And as such, we as Christians are uniquely, particularly, and peculiarly equipped to address the hurts of this world. When we fail to do so, we should expect sickness, violence, and suffering to erupt all around us and around our world. We, like doctors who proclaim the sickness and fail to medicate, are responsible for the pain and the lack of healing in our world when we hold the cure and choose to do nothing. There are no substitutes for the Church\\\’s active love of people–not political justice, not just war, not charity, not governmental programs, not morality.

As such, I, personally and as part of the Church, am responsible for the hurt of so many people. It is a failure that I must mourn, repent of, and seek to remedy. If you want someone to blame, blame me, for I am guilty. I possess the elixir and so often fail to use it.

Now certainly, even if we love boldly, care for the poor, live our lives as sacrifices for others, there will still be sin, both personally and corporate, both inside the Church and in the world. We will fail to love people perfectly and people, including ourselves, will make evil choices even given the opportunity to make Godly ones. We will fall short of perfection, but we should not be dismayed, we worship a God who sent His son to redeem a broken world, and who has sent His Holy Spirit as a guide for the Church in His continual action in the world. We must get back up and continue to proclaim our Master as we manifest the Kingdom with our lives.

It is in this context that I ask the question: What would the world look like if we as Christians took seriously the call of Christ to dedicate and sacrifice ourselves in loving the world–the unlovable, the hurting, the enemy in our midst?

In 1968 Jacques Ellul wrote the following three paragraphs:

“One thing, however, is sure: unless Christians fulfill their prophetic role, unless they become the advocates and defenders of the truly poor, witness to their misery, then, infallibly, violence will suddenly break out. In one way or other ‘their blood cries to heaven,’ and violence will seem the only way out. It will be too late to try to calm them and create harmony. Martin Luther King probably came ten years too late for the black Americans; the roots of violence had already gone deep. So, instead of listening to the fomenters of violence, Christians ought to repent for having been too late. For if the time comes when despair sees violence as the only possible way, it is because Christians were not what they should have been. If violence is unleashed anywhere at all, the Christians are always to blame. This is the criterion, as it were, of the confession of sin. Always, it is because Christians have not been concerned for the poor, have not defended the cause of the poor before the powerful, have not unswervingly fought the fight for justice, that violence breaks out. Once violence is there, it is too late. And then Christians cannot try to redeem themselves and soothe their conscience by participating in violence.”

“But now let me give a warning. If the Christian cannot demand, cannot even suggest, that nonChristians should act as though they were inspired by the Christian faith, he must take the same attitude toward the revolutionaries and toward the state. To demand that a non-Christian state should refrain from using violence is hypocrisy of the worst sort; for the Christian’s position derives from the faith, and moreover he exercises no responsible political function. To ask a government not to use the police when revolutionary trouble is afoot, or not to use the army when the international situation is dangerous, is to ask the state to commit hara-kari. A state responsible for maintaining order and defending the nation cannot accede to such a request. The intellectuals can play the game on their own terms; they hold no political office, they are outsiders; so it is easy for them with their high principles to decide what should be done. Christian honesty and Christian humility would prompt the question: ‘If I really were in that official’s position, what would I risk doing?’ And it is a well-known fact that the very intellectuals who criticize power so violently do no better than others once they themselves have arrived in places of power.”

“In the face of a non-Christian state, all the Christian can do is — not read it a moral lecture, not rail at it and demand the impossible; not these things. All the Christian can do is to remind the state that, though it be secularized and its officials be atheists, it and they are nevertheless servants of the Lord. Whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, they are servants of the Lord — for the good. And they will have to render account to the Lord for the way they did their service. Obviously the Christian’s task is not a very pleasant one. He is ridiculed, he is isolated from other political movements; he cannot howl with the wolves!”