As I reported to ya’ll a while back, our Eastern Carolina District of MCUSA brought Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw to town in July for a Jesus for President campaign stop. Laura Graber Nickel from our church in Chapel Hill, N.C., wrote a news piece on the event that ran in The Mennonite this past week (look here). But the editors took out a lot of good stuff. So, with Laura’s permission, below is her full report on the event. Enjoy.

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On a July evening in Raleigh, NC, every one of 500 seats in the First Baptist Church auditorium was occupied.  The 200 people without a chair leaned against the walls and sat on the floor.  Next door at Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, another crowd gathered to cheer their candidate for president.  But back in the church auditorium, through storytelling, song and worship, Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw described an alternative political perspective: Jesus for President.

The pair is promoting their co-authored book, Jesus for President, nearing the end of a month-long nationwide tour that has attracted crowds of 500 to 1000 people at every stop. In Jesus for President, Claiborne and Haw ask Christians to think differently about their political and religious allegiance, re-evaluate the church’s role in the arena of American power and politics and examine the way they live their faith day to day. “We’re saying that we see in Jesus not a presentation of ideas,” said Claiborne, “but an invitation to join a movement that embodies the good news with the way that we live in this world.” Their message includes a strong emphasis on peace and puts a high value on communities of believers who reject the world’s ways and live their lives according to Jesus’ teachings; both familiar themes to Mennonites.

“The Jesus story he’s telling is the same story that we’re familiar with,” said Dennis Boos, member of Raleigh Mennonite Church, at the mid-way intermission break.  He and his wife, Kathy, are reading and discussing Jesus for President with their small group from church.  They described Claiborne and Haw’s focus on the Sermon on the Mount and concern for the poor as two important ways Jesus for President resonated with their Mennonite beliefs.

Claiborne and Haw, who describe their beliefs as a mix of Catholic and Protestant with a Mennonite flavor, acknowledge that much of what they write in Jesus for President has direct connections to Mennonite people and Anabaptist ideas. “Some people have called our book ‘John Howard Yoder illustrated,’ said Haw.  “That’s a great compliment, because Yoder’s definitely in the mix of how we’ve interpreted Jesus.”

In the last section of their book, a collection of stories illustrating how people are living Jesus’ example, they tell the story of a farming community in Belize that was visited by a thief who stole all their money.  In response, the community did two things - printed their own money, which decreased the threat of theft by those outside the community, and, once the thief was released from prison, built him a house.  The farmers from Belize are a community of conservative Mennonites.

So although the principles described in Jesus for President are well-known to Mennonites, according to Isaac Villegas, pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, we could always use a reminder. “Sometimes we need outsiders to remind us of the best parts of our tradition,” he said. “Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw don’t claim to offer anything new about Jesus and politics. They simply piece together the best of what Mennonites have to offer and show how our political theology and political worship resonates with Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day and Gandhi and Oscar Romero, and the list goes on … we are forgetful people and need all the help we can get to remember how Mennonites of the past tend to cultivate a healthy suspicion when it comes to the promises of governments.”

The Jesus for President tour came to Raleigh by invitation from the Eastern Carolina District of the Virginia Mennonite Conference, with partial sponsorship from the North Carolina Council of Churches.  It was Duane Beck, pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church, who first thought of inviting Claiborne and Haw to add Raleigh to their tour.  He envisioned the event as a way for like-minded people with Anabaptist ideas or tendencies to come together in an area of the country where Mennonites were few. “When I came down here [to North Carolina], I assumed there were well over a thousand Anabaptists here, and we didn’t know them and they weren’t all Mennonites and some of them didn’t know they were Anabaptists,” Beck said. “… and my dream was to see if there was a way to network these people together.”  The Jesus for President event was one such way.  It attracted about 700 people, from Pentecostals to Episcopalians, with a few Mennonites sprinkled throughout.

“To me the audience was the most significant part of the evening,” said Nathan Charles, who attends the Mennonite fellowships in both Durham and Chapel Hill. He recognized people in the crowd from many community groups ranging from local Mennonite churches to a local intentional Christian community.  “It made me really happy to feel like all these fragmented pieces that seem so disconnected are part of a larger community, if only for one night,” he said.

“Regardless of what denomination they may be, there’s some Anabaptist stuff that resonates with them,” said Jeff Mountz, a member of Raleigh Mennonite Church, describing the crowd that gathered to hear Claiborne and Haw.  He is an example of the type of person local pastors envisioned reaching through the Jesus for President event.  Mountz was drawn to the Mennonite faith several years ago when he realized it embodied his Anabaptist values more than the church where he was worshiping at that time. To facilitate communication after the event, four area Mennonite pastors collaborated to set up a website with discussion forums, information about local Mennonite churches and upcoming events.  The site, www.anabaptistexchange.com, was projected on a screen in front of the audience before the Jesus for President event began.

The question remains as to whether or not attending a one-night event will make a difference in how people live their lives.  “The jury is still out,” said Villegas.  “My suspicion is that people don’t need more information, we need to surround ourselves with a community on a weekly basis. We need accountability. We need to surround ourselves with imaginative and creative people who help us live the daily grind of following Jesus.”

Making connections with communities of believers striving to truly live their faith is exactly what Claiborne and Haw are trying to do.  “I think what folks are looking for are authenticity and integrity, things that you can really wrap your hands around, as an expression of our faith,” said Claiborne.  He described their tour bus, a converted school bus which runs on vegetable oil, as a small “experiment” in faithful daily living.  “That’s something that folks can see,” he said, “That we’re trying to practice an alternative way of living that is rooted in what we believe.”

Don’t worry. I won’t bombard ya’ll with every sermon I preach. But I thought I’d share this one from this past Sunday since it’s specifically about young anabaptist radicals from a long time ago.

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Title: Spirituality from Prison
Date: July 20, 2008
Texts: Gen 32:22-32; Matt 11:25-30

Alone.

It was night, and Jacob was alone. He left his family and possessions behind on the other side of the stream; now he was alone, surrounded by darkness. And the wrestling begins.

Jacob isn’t a spiritual superhero. He hasn’t mastered the spiritual disciplines; nor has he celebrated them. He isn’t known for fasting. Nor for meditating on Scripture—obviously, since it wasn’t written yet. And he isn’t a prayer warrior.

Jacob isn’t known for any of those spiritual practices. Instead, he’s known for his trickery and tenacity. He will get what he wants no matter what. His name, Jacob, Ya’aqov, means heel catcher and deceiver. His name remembers his struggle with his brother, Esau, in Rebekah’s womb (Gen 25). And his name remembers his trickery and deception later when he steals Esau’s birthright blessing. Jacob, his very name, testifies to his devious ways.

Now his past catches up with him. Due to his deceptions and trickery, Jacob is no longer welcome in the land of his father-in-law, Laban. As Jacob is on the verge of returning to his homeland, he must meet his brother, Esau, again. Jacob knows this won’t be a pleasant reunion since he stole Esau’s blessing when they were young.

His suspicions are confirmed when he hears how Esau is preparing for Jacob’s arrival: “When the messengers returned to Jacob, they said, ‘We went to your brother Esau, and now he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him’” (Gen 32:6). That’s not exactly a welcome home party to look forward to. Esau is coming to meet his brother with a small army! And Jacob foresees the mass slaughter of his people.

Jacob is now alone, feverish, his head swimming with images of the death of all he has. The night is haunted with his ghosts. Tomorrow he will face his brother-turned-enemy. But for now, he is alone, it’s dark, and the wrestling begins.

Jacob proves true to form. He’s tenacious. He won’t let go. God and Jacob, struggling, caught in each other’s embrace, two bodies bound together, flesh upon sweaty flesh. They wrestle through the night.

(pause)

When I was little, I would spend a lot of time with my grandparents on weekends. They took care of me when my parents worked. Despite my mom and dad’s protests, my grandfather would let me watch boxing matches with him on the television. My scrawny grandfather loved to watch these big men beat one another to a pulp. And he was very good at picking the winners.

Now, if my grandfather was watching this fight in Genesis 32, I’m pretty sure he’d put all his money on God. It’s not even a match. But Jacob does pretty well for himself, fighting against all odds. He takes God to the last round. Daybreak is approaching, and God strikes Jacob below the waist and wounds his hip. He tells Jacob to let him go. “But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me’” (v. 26).

Jacob wins by hanging on. He doesn’t put God in strangle-hold, or some painful, arm-twisting pin. No, Jacob wins by hanging on. If we want to talk about spirituality, that’s the best picture we’ve got—it’s about hanging on to God.

(pause)

The stories of Mennonite beginnings are all about what it means to hang on to God no matter what the cost. If there’s anything unique about Mennonite or Anabaptist spirituality, it’s that it is born in prison. We are entrusted with a spirituality of the tortured, passed down through the centuries. Our songs and prayers come from places of darkness and loneliness, from dungeons where people sang to sustain their souls as they awaited the next round out beatings. Our confessions and theologies come from places that look more Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay than our universities and seminaries.

There’s a hymnal called the Ausbund. The core of that hymnal are songs composed by imprisoned Swiss Brethren, who were later called Mennonites. While in the dungeon of Passau, Austria around 1535, they put their faith to words and music—the songs were called, “songs of the cross.” They would pass them along to their sisters and brothers in the faith on the outside who would then sing them as an act of solidarity. These songs were their spiritual union. The “songs of the cross” spread from community to community and formed the substance of faith for a people who couldn’t read, but were gifted with musical memory. Our current Mennonite hymnal still has a few of these hymns; we still sing their prison songs.

Let me read from a few of these Ausbund hymns. This first one if from George Blaurock—a Catholic priest turned Anabaptist, later tortured and burned as a heretic (Song #5):

God the Father through his faithfulness
Will never forsake us
Renew us daily, O Lord
In our everyday living

Through Christ we call on you
As through your tender suffering
We know your faithfulness and love
Along this our pilgrim’s way

Here’s another hymn. This one from a young woman, Annelein of Freiberg. They first drowned her then burned her. She was probably 17 years old (Song # 36):

Eternal Father in Heaven
I call to you from deep within
Do not let me turn from you
Hold me in your eternal truth
Until I reach my end

O God, keep my heart and mouth
Watch over me, Lord, always
Do not let me part from you
Whether in anguish, fear or need
Keep me pure in joy

To walk in your strength in death
Through tribulation, martyrdom, fear and need
Keep me in your strength
That I may never again be separated
From your love, O God

These are bits and pieces of the spiritual gifts we receive from our martyrs, the songs of the tortured, our spirituality from prison. (Hymns taken from Early Anabaptist Spirituality: Selected Writings, ed. by Daniel Liechty).

These songs were central for Anabaptist and Mennonite spirituality. A century later, some Dutch Mennonites complied another kind of spiritual literature: a huge book called The Martyrs Mirror—nearly 1,200 pages, story after story of martyrdom. In the early 17th century, a Dutch Mennonite, Thieleman Jansz van Braght compiled stories of Christians dying for their faith, starting with the death of Jesus and moving through the centuries. Mennonites raised their children on these stories of martyrdom. It was their devotional literature, what they read before going to bed, what they read to sustain their spiritual lives.

I’ll read a short excerpt from one of the entries. It’s toward the end of the book when we finally get to the Anabaptist martyrs. This is a prison letter from Elizabeth, a Dutch Anabaptist martyr. She wrote it before her execution in 1573 to her infant daughter whom she calls “my dearest lamb”:

“My young lamb, for whose sake I still have…great sorrow; seek, when you have attained your understanding, this narrow way, though there is sometimes much danger in it…. My dear child, if we would with Christ seek and inherit salvation, we must also help bear His cross; and this is the cross which He would have us bear: to follow His footsteps, and to help bear His reproach… He went before us in this way of reproach, and left us an example, that we should follow His steps… O my dearest lamb, that you might know the truth when you have attained your understanding, and that you might follow your dear father and mother, who went before you…. Follow us my dear lamb, that you too may come where we shall be, and that we may find one another there.” (from The Protestant Reformation, ed. by Hans J. Hillerbrand, chapter 14).

(pause)

What kind of spirituality is this? It’s much easier to confine spirituality to our prayer life. But what kind of spirituality takes these stories, these songs, these prayers, these letters—what kind of spirituality takes them seriously? I have two thoughts.

This first one might make you think I’m crazy. Since our spirituality comes from the faith of prisoners, we should develop a spirituality that will sustain us in prison. Spirituality is our preparation for prison. What will sustain our faith when we are tortured and imprisoned? I know, that’s hard to imagine. It’s practically impossible to imagine people around here putting us in prison for our faith. Sure. But remember: the nature of governments can change in an instant, and our history books tell us story after story of how political powers can change over night, or over a few years. A few weeks ago, we heard the story of Joseph and Israel in Egypt. They were happy to live peaceably in Goshen; but they became Egyptian slaves in an instant. Our situation can suddenly change as well, and this could throw us in work camps or prisons.

So, we need to ask a question: what sustained the tortured faith of the martyrs? Well, they knew their bibles. Their hymns penned in prison testify to their biblical knowledge; the lines of the songs are quotations from Scripture sown together. They sang the bible from memory. We also have the notes from their torturers and interrogators–they kept decent records. And in those records we find the prisoners constantly quoting Scripture in response to interrogations, or as they were beaten. Their biblical knowledge was their source of comfort; memorized Scripture sustained their faith.

So, study Scripture, memorize it, struggle with the Word, listen and engage our Sunday sermons. There’s a chance that you may need those stories and words to sustain your faith in prison.

Here’s my second thought. It’s easy to dismiss stories of martyrs as irrelevant to our spirituality. We just aren’t in the same situation. They are a world away from us, and don’t have much to offer as we think about our lives. But this is why the Martyrs Mirror is so interesting. It was compiled and published in 17th century Holland, where the Dutch Mennonites definitely weren’t persecuted. In fact, their situation was quite the opposite. The tables had turned. Mennonites were enjoying the good life in Holland during the Dutch Golden Age. They lived comfortably among the most prosperous people of Europe at the time. And van Braght, a cloth merchant and minister, thought their prosperity was dangerous, so he gave his people the gift of the martyrs in book form.

This is what he wrote in his preface:

“‘It is certainly more dangerous now than in the time of our [mothers and] fathers who suffered death for the witness of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Before ‘Satan came through his servants openly like a roaring lion,’ seeking to destroy the body; now Satan comes ‘as an angel of light,’ seeking to kill our faith through ‘the desire of the flesh, desire of the eye, and the pride of life.’” (taken from Brad S. Gregory, “Anabaptist Martyrdom: Imperatives, Experience, and Memorialization,” p. 501 in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spirituality, 1521-1700, ed. by John D. Roth and James M. Stayer).

Isn’t that interesting? Van Braght thought it was easier to be a Christian during times of persecution. The right thing to do was very clear back then. It’s harder now, and more dangerous, he says. That sounds true to our lives as well. I mean, what does it mean to be faithful? What does it mean to honor the faith of the martyrs? It’s not so clear. It’s a struggle; the struggle of spirituality. The best we can do is struggle together.

And our model is Jacob, struggling with God, in the dark–he can’t see so clearly. And through this struggle, Jacob gets a new name: Israel. No longer will Jacob be known as a deceiver. He and his people will be called Israel, which means “those who struggle with God.” And that’s who we are. We are people who keep the struggle alive. We keep on struggling with God, wrapped up in a wrestling match with the Lord. Spirituality is the name of this intimate embrace, holding onto God no matter what.

And the good news is that this way of life frees us from sin—all that stuff van Braght talked about: the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eye, and the pride of life. The good news is that this struggle with God liberates us, it’s the struggle of freedom. As Jesus says in our passage from Matthew: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt 11:29-30).

Benediction (paraphrased from Elizabeth’s 16th century letter to her infant daughter) :

May it be to God’s glory that I did not die for any evil doing, and may you strive to do likewise. Never cease from loving God above all, for God will never cease from loving you. And now go and follow that which is good, and seek peace, for you shall receive the crown of eternal life—the crown of our Lord: the crucified, bleeding, naked, despised, rejected and slain Jesus Christ, our faith and our hope.

Christopher L. Heuertz, Simple Spirituality: Learning to See God in a Broken World. InterVarsity Press, 2008. Pp. 159. $15.00, US.

I wish I read this book more slowly. It’s a very accessible read, but that doesn’t mean it should be read quickly. Heuertz wrote a vulnerable book, one that puts his heart on display, and I couldn’t help but want to let his words do work on my soul–but that takes more time. Heuertz doesn’t claim to offer any secrets to spiritual success. Instead, he shares what God is teaching him through his friends, who happen to be the poorest of the poor. Through the ministry of Word Made Flesh, Christopher and his wife Phileena have discovered God’s love poured out in the poor, God’s presence in brokenness. Heuertz is on a wandering journey, learning to see God among the hungry in Brazilian favelas and the children sex slaves in Thailand. Can we see what he sees? As Jesus asks, Do you have eyes to see?

The book is organized around 5 virtues, each of which are chapter titles: Humility, Community, Simplicity, Submission, and Brokenness. The threads that bind these together are Heuertz’s engrossing stories about his friends. They are the context. His spirituality isn’t a call to close your eyes and think about God; instead, friendships with the poor make friendship with God possible. Solidarity is primary: “We literally live among the dying as an act of solidarity with our neighbors and our God” (20).

But Heuertz doesn’t start there. His beginnings are steeped in American evangelicalism. He writes, “Growing up in an evangelical Christian home, I was introduced to a very familiar, very informal God. I was culturally conditioned to perceive God as ‘on demand’ and at my beck and call” (36). But the beauty of God and God’s deep longings for the poor saved him. Scripture introduced him to “Someone beautiful… this God who cares for those in need–I mean, really cares for them” (37). And Heuertz began to fall in love with this God of the bible, a God who has a special place in his heart for the humiliated.

When we usually talk about humility, it’s something we can do in the privacy of our thoughts–something we can decide to do if we only have the will power. We pray and think to ourselves, Well, I’m going to work on being humble today. But this sounds like a ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ spirituality. For Heuertz, we learn humility from the humiliated. He writes, “Perhaps those on the margins, the unrighteous and the people who live in poverty–those familiar with humiliation–can see purity more clearly through their unpretentious ‘impurity’… Perhaps we have something to learn from their humility” (34). There’s no privatized technique for mastering a spirituality of humility. Humility isn’t a possession. We learn humility from those who re-present the humiliation of Jesus. We receive the gift of humility when we sit at the feet of the poor; they infuse us with the virtues of Christ. They are the ones who can save us from our domesticated Jesuses. Here’s Heuertz in his own words (37):

It is in our intimate relationships with people who are poor, or more accurately our friends who happen to be poor, that our tainted views of God are transformed. It is our intimate relationships with our friends on the streets or in red-light districts that open our blinded eyes to really see Jesus for who he is. Through their desperation and forced vulnerability, they help us see what intimacy with God looks like. We are compelled to follow our friends who are poor to God’s heart.”

Our parents were right: we are who we hang out with. Our friends shape who we are. That’s not something to run from. Humans are relational animals. There’s no such thing as autonomy; it’s a delusion. The fibers of our being, Heuertz notes, “are made for relationships” (54). But we can choose with whom we form these friendships. Our hope is that the church may be a place where those friendships can happen. But what does it mean when our churches don’t welcome the poor? Or, to put it more strongly, what does it mean when we aren’t begging the beggars to worship with us? Heuertz doesn’t mince words: “If our community makes no room for those who are poor, our community loses all credibility” (58). While Jim Wallis is trying to fight for justice on the national scale, Heuertz offers a much more intimate vision, one that transforms our daily lives: “We work not for justice for everyone but instead to ensure that we’re on the ‘right’ side of the poverty line” (58). Are we on the side of the poor? That’s his question. This isn’t a political platform for a lobby group. Rather, it’s about what side of town we live on. Who are our neighbors, who are our friends, who sits next to us when we worship, who eats at our table? These questions mess with our lives. They haunt our everyday decisions. But these questions also send us to the poor, who offer us intimacy with God. And typically God shakes up our lives so he can offer us an unimaginably better one. Jesus: “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.” But overflowing abundance gets really messy. “We want to let God in,” writes Heuertz, “but usually on our terms. We want to make room for Christ to reign on the thrones of our hearts, but only a clean Christ who doesn’t make a mess of our lives” (63).

Too often our churches are havens from the real world of death and oppression. Thus Heuertz asks, “The world is a place marked by suffering and poverty. Where is the church?” (65). Too often our churches are clean drugs that make everything better in our heads–an opiate, as Karl Marx once said. We worship because we like to close our eyes; we want to remain blind to how our lives are in bondage to sin. And this blindness keeps us from seeing the light of Christ. Heuertz quotes Jean Vanier, “We can even hide in various groups of prayer and spiritual exercises, not knowing that a light is shining in the poor, the weak, the lonely and the oppressed” (61).

Jesus didn’t hide from the harsh realities of life. Jesus didn’t outfit worship spaces with the comforts of middle-class culture. He didn’t make sure his followers had seats with cup holders for their coffee. Jesus didn’t buy the best sound equipment so the wannabe rock-star worship team could jam for the Lord. No. Heuertz writes (69),

Jesus’ ministry was not to the upper class, the educated, the elite or the most influential social figures. Jesus came and ministered among those who were poor, with the poor and as a poor man. His ministry was to the children, those who were begging, victims of leprosy, the woman at the well, the woman caught in the act of adultery, the tax collectors, the fishermen communities and those on the margins. Jesus came to the common people and lived alongside them. As a church, we must learn new ways to celebrate our faith inclusively so that those on the margins of society will feel welcome–and so that our love and acceptance of the other will aid in our paths to holiness. Jesus’ ministry was marked with a distinctive compassion for the oppressed poor.

Has the church followed this way of Jesus? Not really. It’s more often the case, Heuertz says, that “the church…isolates the poor” (72). The poor have their place in the world, and we have ours. “Do our multi-million-dollar sanctuaries in North America send the same message?” Even if they did stumble into our worship services, could we hear their silent cries over the cool music and the soothing voice of the preacher? “As the statistics of poverty grow, the church only sings louder so as not to hear the staggering numbers and the cries of the victims” (71). Heuertz makes me wonder if most of our churches make us immoral.

What we are desperately missing is what Heuertz calls “the prophetic presence of the poor” (82). Our churches look and feel different when we worship alongside someone who doesn’t know where they will sleep that night, or a parent who has to prostitute themselves so they can put food on the table. How much does that cordless microphone cost? How much we eat and what we waste takes on new meaning if we’ve seen what Heuertz sees: “my waste was offensive…. My poor friends became a prophetic presence” (83). “We would often invite local friends (many of them extremely poor) to join us, their presence a constant reminder not to waste” (86).

At the heart of Heuertz’s book are these friendships with the poor. And it sounds like his life is all the more rich because of them. Our lives are possessed by our possessions; we are slaves in need of Christ’s redemption. The call to a simple spirituality is the possibility of making those friendships that liberate us. The gift of God’s grace doesn’t baptize the lives we live; instead, grace sets us free for a new way of life, Christ’s abundant life, freedom. But this freedom can’t be enjoyed without the ones to whom Jesus gave his Father’s kingdom: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” All we can do is open ourselves to receive. We beg from the beggars. That’s how we learn simplicity. “This is not simplicity for the sake of simplicity of lifestyle”–which is what Real Simple magazine is all about. Instead, this is “simplicity for the sake of relationship–relationship with God and relationship with each other” (97). The simplicity Heuertz describes begins with submitting our lives to the prophetic presence of the poor. They will teach us what humility and simplicity looks like. We start with submission; we submit the lives we’d rather keep private to the gaze and advice of the poor. We enter into those intimate and messy relationships that provide “the opportunity to submit to the cries and the needs of my friends who suffer” (120).

Some may find all of this a hard pill to swallow. We may want to separate our love of God from our love of the poor. But Heuertz holds them together in a single vision of following after God. It’s all about God. He’s deeply evangelical. He’s simply sharing with us the Jesus he’s learning to see. And this Jesus is resurrected flesh that still bears the marks of suffering. That’s the profound argument of his closing chapter: Brokenness. “It’s terrible to imagine how to remove a dead body form a cross,” Heuertz writes (137-138):

I can only guess that they would have had to either pull the nails out, aggravating the wounds even more, or pull the body off, leaving the nails embedded in the cross. Either way, the holes in the corpse of Christ, those in his hands or wrists and feet or ankles, must have been gaping, atrocious. I wonder what happened to such gaping holes in the corpse over the course of the forty hours Christ’s body was dead.

And what happens to these holes when Jesus is resurrected? John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus appears to Thomas with open wounds. “[H]is resurrected body still bears those open wounds–those still-fresh lacerations, cuts, gashes and holes” (138). So, Heuertz asks us, “where do we find his open wounds today?…. Unless we have the courage to put our hands into the hurting places of Christ’s body–the hurting places of the world–the world won’t have reason to trust that God is good” (140).

I am now haunted by this wounded Jesus. Heuertz’s friendships have given him eyes to see this Jesus. After reading his stories of profound sorrow and joy, I don’t know if I’ve seen the same Jesus. But I want to. And I am grateful to Heuertz and his friends for showing me that such an abundant life is possible. I can’t begin to do justice to Heuertz’s storytelling; that’s what makes the book a must read. Read it for the stories of real life, of real friendship, of people we can never meet because they are dead now. And also read it for the joy of abundant life, the joy of Christ’s resurrected life, a life broken open for us.

Note for YAR contributers: The publishers of Simple Spirituality, Intervarsity Press have offered to send YAR contributors free books from their catalog for review here on the blog. If you’re interested, you can start by taking a look at their new releases or upcoming books. If you see a book you’d like to review email admin@young.anabaptistradicals.org
with the title and your mailing address.

I know it’s old hat for many of you radical anabaptists to talk about how Jesus is political. But, none the less, I thought I’d invite ya’ll to an event we’re having down here in North Carolina. A couple of my friends will be making a stop in Raleigh for an event. Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw are touring the country for their new book and holding rallies along the way. I know the Triangle (i.e., Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) is far away from Menno country. But if you go through the hassle to get down here, I’ll find somewhere for you to stay. The campaign stop is sponsored by our Mennonite district churches (ECD) and the North Carolina Council of Churches. Here’s an edgy blurb for the event:

On Tuesday evening, July 22nd, we will celebrate the political campaign that has lasted 2,000 years. But this movement of the people is quite different from what the current American democratic parties are up to. It all started in a Palestinian village: a woman from the wrong side of the tracks birthed someone who would change the world. This boy grew up and started a campaign that ignited a revolutionary fire of love across the land. Sure, the empire killed him, like they do all revolutionaries. But the rumor is that his followers are still at it; they have kept the memory alive. Come hear the good news; and maybe pledge allegiance to a very different king. It’s free, so show up early if you want a seat.

Jesus for President: 7pm, July 22nd, Raleigh, First Baptist Church (101 S. Wilmington Street)

Spread the word.

Here’s their website: Jesus for President

** Update **

CNN just did a piece on the Jesus for President campaign. Look here

Tim asked me to introduce myself before contributing to this blog. So here goes…

I guess I’m young–although my wife has discovered a recent influx of white hairs on my head. And I guess I’m Anabaptist–although my parents had me baptized as an infant. But I don’t think anyone wants to include me among the “radicals” since I’m a pastor. Everyone knows that pastors aren’t radical. They are (we are) just pastors.

My name is Isaac Villegas and I pastor a Mennonite congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As I’ve discovered from wearing name tags at Mennonite conferences, my last name is a giveaway: my family tree isn’t rooted in Europe. My blood flows from south of the border. I’m the child of Catholic immigrants from Latin America who settled in Los Angeles, California. My ecclesial story meanders through various traditions. But my first memory of church is set in a modern cathedral, with lavishly adorned priests walking down the center aisle, incense wafting through the rows, and Christ’s transubstantiated presence beckoning from the altar of eucharistic mysteries.

But my family was pentecostal Catholic at heart, and that kind of hybrid Catholicism didn’t happen in our LA neighborhoods. So we turned to the anarchic pentecostal and storefront charismatic movements. Then evangelicals took hold of me during college. But they left me high and dry when I wrestled with the need for a faithful response to 9/11. The Mennonites saved my faith; they offered a communal witness of peace that took seriously the bible and the miracle-working power of the Holy Spirit.

I moved to North Carolina to help start a house of hospitality called the Rutba House. When we discovered that lots of other folks were doing the same things, we invited everyone we could think of to Durham for a conversation on “a new monasticism.” (If you want more information, we put together a book of essays: Schools for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism.)

While I experimented with what we were calling “neo-monasticism,” I worshiped with the good people at Chapel Hill Mennonite. They taught me how to do church Mennonite-style–granted, a grass roots (i.e., radical?) variety of Mennonite that makes most sense to me. And for some crazy reason they thought it was a good idea to call me as their pastor. Only the Holy Spirit does stuff that crazy.