Actions effect the smallest things

jarrodmckenna

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“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
— Albert Einstein 

The picture below reminded me of these thoughts.  Even the smallest actions effect everything else… 🙂

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it’s a strange sence of humour but it’s the only one I’ve got… from http://little-people.blogspot.com/

Risking failure in a world of success

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Jarrod McKenna

Jarrod McKenna’s Wednesday’s with Gandhi:

“My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realise it not by saying, “Lord, Lord,” but by doing God’s will and God’s work… Do you know that there are thousands of villages where people are starving and are on the brink of ruin? If we would listen to the voice of God, I assure you we would hear God say we are taking God’s name in vain if we do not think of the poor and help them.  If you cannot render the help that they need, it is no use talking of service of God and service of the poor. Try to identify yourself with the poor by actually helping them.”

–Mohandas Gandhi, (March 31, 1927) from “Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings” by John Dear, p. 81

For you or your community what does ‘doing God’s will’ when it comes to ‘the least of these’ look like? What are you inspired by, that it might look like? What do you long for it to look like?

What does it look like to move from ‘church charity’ run by some sweet old ladies, to being a people of missional solidarity?  (not to disrespect radical nannas everywhere doing awesome stuff!)

Our crew have really struggled with this stuff. I don’t mean struggle in the noble sense. I mean struggle in the sense of it being bloody hard! Nearly as hard as living with each other 🙂  And like much of our life as community, it’s left us with not much to show other than some colourful (and painful) stories and a burning desire for God, for healing, for justice, for the kingdom and an awareness of our own brokenness and sin. Should we all move overseas to the slums we have only visited with our expensive cameras? Should we all just join UNOH?  What does it mean to practice hospitality when you’re continually stolen from, physically threatened and taken advantage of?  When all you’re left with is their used needles, hardcore porn, broken promises, and debt. When you show up in court to support them but they dont. When the trees you spent so much time planting and watering in the neighbourhood garden are ripped up. When you’re dumped with other people’s toddlers for days on end while they get high and you have to decided do you ring DCD and your only comfort is the lament of the Psalmist and your sisters and brothers prayers. Only to find out that our parts of the body of Christ are bagging you out without praying for you or seeking to correct or encourage you. Please don’t hear me writting these things out of bitterness. I write as a brother struggling with what ”actually helping them” (as Gandhi put it) looks like (anybody else?).  Sometimes I come out of visiting in prison and just feel like crying for a day. Maybe these are the stories we need to tell too aswell as the times we come out feeling totally inspired.

Recently I was contacted by a pastor (of what most would consider a successful mainstream church), who had opened up his home to someone who had lived on the streets for years. This Pastor wanted to talk through the heart ache of seeing someone throw away the opportunities offered to him because he was stuck in cycles he couldn’t break out of. Maybe these stories are as important to share as the “success stories”? Maybe these are the stories that can ween us of the quick fixes and easy answers that we can so often hear to our worlds deepest problems. Maybe if we told these ones too we’d celebrate God’s transforming grace all the more! And real joy would truely be our strength.

Some of our crew were recently hanging out with a similar community to us in the States called ‘The Simple Way’. The Simple Way have a huge public influence through the success of Shane Claiborne’s wonderful book “The Irresistible Revolution” (which I highly recommend!!)  But we were joking if we were to write a book it would be “A how [not] to” (shout outs to Pete Rollins who I also highly recommend!!!!).  Maybe our book would be called ‘The Resistible Revolution’ or ‘The Very Resistible Revolution’. )

Anybody else need to voice failed efforts? Gandhi said, “Freedom without freedom to fail is no freedom at all.”  God, please keep us from the “success” that would keep us from entering into the pain of our world. And keep us from the failure that would stop us trusting only in the power of resurrection and the liberating joy that comes with it.

jarrodmckenna

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp2jI465C0g] 

Ploughshares legend, Ciaron OReilly, send this, well worth a watch:

“1968, 9 Catholic anti-war activists raided a draftboard in Catonsville, Maryland, USA destroying draft cards in nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War. Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip and six others were sentenced to prison. Christian Brother David Darst died before sentencing. Daniel Berrigan wrote a play based on the trial later turned into a film by Gregory Peck. Hollywood stars, including Tim Robins & Martin Sheen, gathered recently to do a reading of the play in opposition to America’s present wars.”

Gandhi and ‘son of God’

jarrodmckenna

Jarrod McKenna

Jarrod McKenna’s Wednesday’s with Gandhi:

“Jesus expressed, as no other could, the spirit and the will of God. It is in this sense that I see him and recognise him as the Son of God.”
–Gandhi, (October 1941) from “Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings” by John Dear, p. 79

How does Gandhi’s understanding of ‘Son of God’ sit with you?

I’d like to suggest it’d be fruitful to consider what another non-Christian probably meant by “Son of God” and what the Apostle Paul meant in context.

The Unnamed Soldier

We don’t know his name. And there is little recorded about him. What we do know: He was a solider who’s job declared “good news”. The Good News of the ‘Son of God’ bringing salvation and justice to the world because he is now Lord of the whole world and calls for our allegiance. I know what your thinking,

“Jarrod, I thought you said he wasn’t a Christian?”

He’s not. CaesarThat’s the language used by the fastest growing religion in Jesus’ day, the Cult of Caesar. The ‘Cult of Caesar’ announced Caesar as Divine and provided the spirituality for the Empire’s invasion, colonisation, oppression and continual domination. This unnamed soldiers job was his spiritual act of worship, to oversee the brutal and public humiliation of those who would challenge the hegemonic control of the world by it’s true Lord and Son of God, Caesar, the Roman Emperor. The Empire did this through Caesar’s saving methods, means, politics, ethics and spirituality; VIOLENCE. In particular for this centurion, his job was overseeing the violence of crucifixion which made a spectacle of would be revolutionaries that would challenge Caesar as Divine Ruler of the world.

Yet, one Friday the politics, ethics, spirituality and allegiance of this centurion of the oppressive Empire did a radical life changing back-flip. As Mark Gospel records it chapter 15:37-39:

With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

“SON OF GOD?!” These words are not in the mouth of a Jew referring to the rich Jewish imagination associated with this term; the real King of Israel, the real liberating anointed leader (messiah). These words are instead in the mouth of someone who as a Roman Centurion knew the term “Son of God” to refer to his violent political leader, Caesar.

Yet, after maybe watching the death of thousands via crucifixion, something about the cry and the way this nonviolent messiah died, brought him to a conclusion that still threatens the heart of violent empires everywhere (including Burma this week). In this bloodied dying revolutionary he had seen and heard real power. Real leadership. Real sovereignty. Real divinity. The real ruler. The ‘Son of God’ that instead of ruling with violence would expose the “comic backfire” of violence and the structures which have institutionalised it’s reign, making a spectacle of it and triumphing over it “by the cross.” (Colossians 2:15)

Tom wrightAs N.T. Wright has said,

“A close comparison of the “good news” of the Caesar cult with Paul’s words shows that Romans is, among other things, a deliberate parody of the [violent] pagan message. Paul’s readers in Rome must have understood this, and he must have intended them to. Paul’s ideas do not derive from the Caesar cult, as some have suggested; they confront it.”

The Apostle Paul is not, as some theologians have argued, (and sadder still, some Christians practice), lifting his ideas from the cult of Caesar worship in an act of political vasectomy to neutralise and hellenise a Judaism that would bow the knee to the Empire’s violent agenda. Instead the Apostle Paul is practicing the nonviolent ’spiritual jujitsu’, (to nick Wink’s term), that Jesus taught to subvert the language Empire (and it’s spirituality of domination and violence) to expose and undermine it.

The early church, filled with the Holy Spirit, did just that and it often cost them there lives. Much like the unarmed actions of the Buddhist monks in Burma this week, the early church showed a fearlessness in the face of the rebellious principalities and powers. Yet unlike the monks and their brave actions (which I admire deeply) where not simply fueled by the desperation of the situation but by the resurrection of the Son of God; the dawning of God’s nonviolent dream for creation. Unquestionably they understood the cross to be what God has done for us, empowering us to “put away the sword” and to take up the cross as our way of defeating evil (as seen in the early churches refusal to fight wars for first three centuries of Christianity).

Tragically today we even have church leaders who accuse those who challenge the hijacking of Christianity in service the diabolical exploitation of God’s good earth and the poor as ‘twisting the Scriptures’. That accuse those who are calling the church to obey Jesus Christ and therefore love our enemies like he did, (through the way of costly love NOT the way of ’smart bombs’ and preemptive strikes) of distorting Jesus for our own agenda.

I wonder if the challenge of a pagan solider at the cross of Jesus, the courageous unarmed Buddhist monks in Burma and the context of the Apostle Paul’s writing, will be enough for us to see how often we have made “Son of God” mean less than, (as Gandhiji put it), “Jesus expressed, as no other could, the spirit and the will of God”. More than that, I wonder if the Scriptures will be enough for Christians to believe like the early Church did that Jesus is not less than the Messiah, God incarnate, God revealed fully to be nonviolent Love.

And calls us to live in ways that reflect such a love as revealed in Jesus.

here is one small way you can support the Burmese Protestors 

to leave a comment on backyardmissionary.com click here

chaser boys and the larrkin Jesus

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Jarrod McKenna

Jarrod McKenna’s Wednesday’s with Gandhi:

Gandhiji

“Jesus was the most active resister know perhaps to history. His was nonviolence par excellence.”
-Gandhi -Vol.84, June 26, 1946

I too hold that Jesus is not less than, as Gandhi put it elsewhere, “the greatest practitioner of nonviolence in history.” And while we could whine and moan in long self righteous diatribes about the extent of the distortion of Christianity today that often merely provides a ‘spirituality’ to accompany the satanic destruction of God’s good creation and the oppression of the poorest of poor all in nice sanitised suburban packaging that has somehow separated the nonviolent ‘Way of Jesus’ from ’Jesus being the Way’ making a mockery of the cross with it’s pro-power, pro-war, pro-greed stance, …that’s a little to easy 😉 and all gets a bit tiresome.

So instead like to suggest some Australians who might also seem odd at first when considering people to help us gain an imagination for one aspect of Jesus’ controversial and crucifixion inducing nonviolence that is often overlooked. His provocative, disarming, larrikin-like humour. I want to make the case that nonviolence, Jesus’ nonviolence that Gandhi considered “par excellence”, is what we were created for, as St. Irenaeus put it “The glory of God is a human fully alive” and to be fully alive is to be creative, fun and often funny! In considering this God given creativity to reflect the ”disarm[ing of the] the powers and authorities, making a spectacle of them” APEC comes to mind and the actions of… The Chaser boys!

Chaser lads as Osama at APEC

For those that missed it here’s a link to the BBC’s coverage on youtube (click here)

In all honesty sometimes I hear nonviolence, (or love, or justice) being talked about… and it’s so bloody boring!  Asked to think of creative ways to get back at our enemies our imaginations run wild yet invited to imagine blessing our enemies in transformative ways that speak truth to power and we often go blank.

We’ve been sold the lie that loving our enemies is just for saints or super humans not recovering sinners like me.  As if those words where abstract philosophies to be written about in big books that gather dust instead of those words being evocative of our experience of the God revealed in Jesus.  Nonviolence (or love, or justice, or beauty) sadly become words that no longer open us to what God wills the world to be ultimately, (that we have seen start in Jesus) but instead stagnant principles that don’t challenge the empires we are living through.

One of the most humbling shout-outs EPYC has received has come from that mega-phone of amazing grace, Shane Claiborne author of The Irresistible Revolution who said reflecting on his time in Iraq,

“One of the doctors I met in Iraq said (with tears in his eyes), ‘This violence is for people who have lost thier imagination.’ Jarrod McKenna and the good people of EPYC are prophets of imagination. They are on a mission to create new heroes and sheroes and to reclaim God’s dream for this world. And as they help young folks to learn not to hurt each other, hopefully the nations will take some lessons.”

I believe the Holy Spirit empowers us all to become prophets of imagination.  Prophets of Jesus’ creative  way out of the cycles of violence and retaliation. Then we’ll be able to resist the temptations to have our understandings of ‘nonviolence’ (or love, or justice) be made sanitised, safe, nice and all a bit Fat-Cat-Humphy-Bear-Barney’s-Worldish.

Jesus’ nonviolence provocatively and prophetically turns over tables in the temple while much we often consider ‘nonviolence’ is cowardly concern for owns own innocence rather than confronting injustice. This is only compounded when our understanding of Jesus gets separated from the earthy and engaging Jesus of the New Testament. (evangelicals are not exempt from when they treat the Scriptures like a context free collection of memory verses!) I’m not sure if it’s been in the interest of keeping Jesus ‘holy’ that we’ve often lost his earthiness, playfulness, creativity, anger, edginess, and humour. We’ve taken an amazing human and in the interest of saying he’s also ‘fully God’ made him less than ‘fully human’ (which is as heretical as saying Jesus isn’t the full revelation of God). We’ve made Jesus a bit 2-D. A bit plastic toyish. A bit weird and other worldish. A bit not as human as us. Comic bookesk. A bit cardboard cut out. A bit hard to call ‘brother’. And ultimately a bit boring!

I think the opposite is true. I think the more we witnesses to the fully humaness of Jesus the more the sandal of the incarnation comes to light. I think the New Testament witnesses to a fully alive, larrikin Jesus. As N.T. Wright puts it “the humility of God and the nobility of humanity.” Or as St. Ephrem the Syrian put it in the fourth century contemplating the Christ who reveals God to be a love that does no harm,

“it is so right that humans should acknowledge your divinity,

It is so right for heavenly beings to worship your humanity.”

Let’s pray we’ll have the imagination to follow the larrikin Jesus, the miraculous Patch Adams of Palestine, in his way of disarming humour.  We’ll hear the call to be practical jokers of the peaceable kingdom that pull the pants down on our suicidal society bent on unsustainabllity and self destruction. We’ll walk the narrow road of the sacred silliness of love in a world of satanic serious which spends each fourteen times the amount of money we need to end absolute poverty around the world on weapons whose sole purpose is to take life.

May we come to see a messiah, God’s idea of a real king, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, fulfils prophecy in such a surprising and disarming way that it makes an ass out of the Roman military war horses and the Jewish expectations of a violent messiah in an inspired and moving act of holy clowning that’s as ridiculous as the expected liberating leader arriving on a tricycle when everyone is expecting tanks. Maybe the Chasers boys can help give us eyes to see.

Gandhi, Dave Andrews and a ‘bigger Jesus’

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Jarrod McKenna’s Wednesday’s with Gandhi:

“Because the life of Jesus has the significance and the transcendency to which I have alluded, I believe that he belongs not solely to Christianity, but to the entire world; to all races and people, it matters little under what flag, name or doctrine they may work, profess a faith, or worship a God inherited from ancestors.”
-Gandhi “The Modern Review: Oct. 1941”

I remember the first time I wrote in my journal in 2001, “Jesus are you bigger than Christianity?” At the time I was one of two white people within eight blocks living in East Nashville with Karl Meyer. Karl is an amazing man who became a Christian through Dorothy Day who started the Catholic Worker Movement. Karl had a photo of in his living room of him up front of the Civil Rights marches in Chicago shoulder to shoulder with two other organisers. On one shoulder Thich Nhat Hahn. On the other, Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. After writing “Jesus are you bigger than Christianity” in my journal I wasn’t sure if to worship or ask for forgiveness. (From memory I did a bit of both.)

I have a mate who had a life changing experience watching “South Park” when he saw Gandhi in hell with Hitler. (God can use anything I guess).

I know for many this might provoke questions of who’s going to heaven (or hell) and who’s not. But that’s not what was going on in my head and heart when I was was journaling while living in this poor neighbourhood where I heard guns shots. My questions weren’t coming out of an understanding of the gospel ‘as fire insurance for the afterlife’ nor ’sin management’. Nor where they coming out of a liberal ’social gospel’ that reduced the gospel to ideals and principles. Instead they were arising out of a burning desire in me for an alternative to the fundamentalism and the liberalism which is so often on offer.

I longed for a Christianity that was ‘evangelical’ in the sense of being ‘good news’ to our hurting world that had integrity when it came to the context of the early Christians and how they would have understood the gospel (instead of just arguments of the sixteenth century read back into Scripture). I became convinced that the gospel is about God’s will being done “on earth” as Jesus taught us to pray and that we don’t “go to glory” rather biblically glory is coming here and it has broken in through Jesus! (notice the direction of the New Jerusalem or the Son of Man… this however has not effected the sales of ‘left behind’).

Gandhi famously refused to become a Christian yet daily spent 2 hours meditating after reading the Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. (Anybody know any Christians who spent 2 hours meditating on Christ’s teachings today?) Repeatedly when asked for the inspiration of his nonviolent revolution in India he would not fail to mention Jesus and his teachings. Gandhi’s dedication to Jesus and practice of his teachings cannot be doubted, nor can his dedication to his Hinduism (albeit a Hinduism that looks like Jesus. So much so Gandhi was often accused of “Christianising” Hinduism and was finally shot by someone who believed he was corrupting Hinduism.)

I have a friend who, like Gandhi, makes many uncomfortable with his ability to live in liminal space between 2 ‘tribes’ which compete for him yet he feels, to be faithful, he has to be the bridge between. Like Tony Campolo he’s a sociologist, who never divorced his field from his faith. But more than a bridge, a better metaphor might be a prophet.

Dave AndrewsHe’s the kind thinker that would be interesting if he didn’t practice his ideas making him so dangerous. He the kind of guy who is an influence on many but quoted by few because of fears that they to might experience the ‘blessings of being cursed’ that are seen in his life because of the way he challenges the principalities and powers. He has a gentleness and humility that is intimidating to the shamsters who travel the speaking circuit enjoying the fanfare and praise while merely talking about what he quietly speaks with his life away from the cameras and applause. Like Gandhi he has been written off by many Christians. Not because of his witness, his life, like Gandhi’s, has become a modern day metaphor for Christ-likeness. But he has been written off for suggesting that maybe Gandhi isn’t burning in hell for not becoming a Christian (it wan’t South Park that convinced him).

Dave Andrews

What is more interesting is that he hasn’t compromised on the centrality of Christ, nor avoided the question, nor departed from Scripture. But like Paul he’s suggested that maybe the “circumcisions” of our day make a mockery of the gospel. That the gospel was never about fire insurance for the afterlife nor sin management but God’s desire to heal creation which has broken into reality in Christ. His name is Dave Andrews and his books are a gift to the church at this time in history and a valuable companion to anyone thinking missionaly.

Like Gandhi we all wont agree with everything Dave says (we’re still talking about where an ecclesia fits in the ‘open set’ in his book Christi-Anarchy). But like Gandhi to ignore his life and writings is to miss a rich opportunity for our own journey and how better to bring others on that journey with us toward a the Jesus bigger than the boxes we put him in and a Christianity that does Christ justice.

first published at backyardmissionary.com 

sincerity trumped by selling sex

jarrodmckenna3 Comments

“What does APEC stand for?” asked one agitated protestor to the scantily-clad young women.

Neither could give her an answer.

“I think that was actually the most ridiculous thing I have seen in my life,” said a 14-year-old protestor, who was attending the rally with her mother.

“Trying to sell sex when we’re trying to get a point across,” the disappointed young girl said.

The Zoo girls arrived first, with five models in bikini tops and tiny shorts drawing the majority of the cameras away from the protest itself — much to the organisers’ dismay.

here’s the full article

Called to transcend violence

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NtgjNLNpao]Everything must change

“This peacemaking work was not an expression of defeat or weakness at all, but rather, it required a courageous and confident commitment to transcend violence.”-from Brian McLaren’s “Everything Must Change”

Brian McLaren may be one of the most important voices in mainstreaming Christian nonviolence. His newest book, “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis and a Revolution of Hope” continues his journey and this trajectory pursuing the God of Peace. Brian McLaren has been amazing in his support for ‘Empowering Peacemakers’ (or EPYC) and other initiates for (eco)justice and conflict transformation.Brian McLaren“In my travels around the world, I see a lot to inspire cynicism -including a lot of shabby religious stuff I’d rather not even give examples of. But I also meet people who inspire hope and courage in me -emerging young leaders who “get” Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God, and who are living it and giving it away. They see the integral nature of mission – that it brings together God and humanity, humanity and creation, grace and nature, contemplation and action, evangelism and social justice, faith and politics, the making of disciples and the making of peace. Jarrod McKenna and friends are beautiful examples of this new breed of emerging integral leaders. I thank God for them. May their tribe increase!” –Brian McLaren