I ended the column with a summary reflection about what it means to think of Anabaptism as a living tradition in which we can participate by being part of the Mennonite church (among other Anabaptist denominational bodies):

An Anabaptist vision that is simply an essence distilled from various histories turns our tradition into a corpse. Anabaptism as a system of principles ends up killing the past. Once we have a system, we no longer let the twists and turns of our present life give us new ears to hear what we may have missed before. Within a living tradition, old voices are made new as we let our ever-changing world open us to displays of faithfulness from different times and places. Anabaptism comes alive when we locate ourselves within cultures of worship that become spaces where stories can echo back and forth through the ages. (”Faith that lives“–not my chosen title)

Anyhow, that’s were I’ve ended up, at least for now. If you are interested in further thoughts in this direction, I put together a booklet of my reflections. It’s available at the website of the church I’m a part of: CHMF, Mennonites. But I’ll also post it here, if you’re interested:

Isaac Villegas, Life in the Body (2011). (click to download the whole booklet in pdf form)

Below are some passages from the booklet, if you want to get a taste of it to make sure its worth your while.

Chicago, IL:

One of the women asks us as she sits down, “Are you the singing people?” “Yes,” responds Pastor Megan Ramer, “We’re from a Mennonite church nearby.” The woman rests into her chair and sighs, “Oh, that’s good. I always feel better with your singing.” She pauses, and looking around the circle, she says, “You know we’ve missed you.”

…

As we sing, our lives are drawn together. As we worship God, we rest into the presence of the Holy Spirit. The God who breathed life into the first humans now breathes through our songs, enlivening our spirits with the Spirit of God. Singing is our communion, as we share the same Spirit with each of our breaths — drawing into our bodies the breath that comes with the words from the ones beside us.

~

Lancaster, PA:

“Use us to create a new world on earth,” pastor Sue Conrad prays at the beginning of the worship service. As she speaks from the pulpit, the sounds of the world outside sneak through the open windows: the sound of traffic speeding through the city, the piercing rhythm of a car alarm, fragments of conversations along the sidewalk on the other side of the church wall. The church in this city worships with open windows and doors, welcoming the bustling flow of life on the streets, receiving the world of God.

~

Dallas, TX:

A discussion of the story of Esther becomes a call to live as the “pueblo de Dios” amidst forces that seek to destroy the church. Haman, the villain in Esther’s story, becomes a name for political leaders and immigration enforcement agents who sever the body of Christ by taking away “los hermanos y hermanas del pueblo que no tienen papeles” — brothers and sisters who are undocumented residents. But, like the Jews in the story of Esther, “tenemos que orar.” We need to pray because some demons require prayer and fasting. Yet no matter what happens, the pueblo of God can have faith “porque tenemos un abogado en el cielo, a la diestra del Padre” — we trust in Jesus Christ, our heavenly immigration attorney, arguing on our behalf, defending our citizenship in the pueblo of God. Among the various metaphors for describing the salvific work of Jesus, we can add another: our Lord the immigration attorney, el Abogado en el cielo.

~

Goessel, KS:

The Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition is not a static identity in the past that we can reincarnate in the present. Instead, our tradition is a style of radical reformation, as theologian Chris K. Huebner argues in his book, A Precarious Peace. We are a people who are always being re-formed through the movement of the Holy Spirit. And for Luz del Evangelio and Alexanderwohl, the Spirit of God is a movement that is mixing up their stories and identities. The two distinct bodies, each with important cultural distinctions and formative stories of migration, are being re-formed through sharing the life of Christ with one another. As Pastor Steve Schmidt said in his sermon, “The stories of Luz del Evangelio will become our stories. They will become our people.”

~

Durham, NC:

Anabaptism is a living tradition where cultures of faith, like the Mennonite Church, are invitations into an identity that happens to us as we retell the old stories and write new stories with our lives together.

…

What if we made Paul’s longing — “I long for all of you,” he writes in Philippians, “with the affection of Christ Jesus” (1:8) — fundamental to our faithful discipleship in the way of Jesus? In a world where people judge each other from afar, where we admonish sister congregations without ever sharing the intimacy of a worship service, I offer these reflections as an invitation into the longing for communion that Paul describes, the longing for union in the affection of Christ.

~

thanks,

isv

One way that’s quite popular these days is the essentialist approach. Stuart Murray seems to be the current instantiation of this perspective. In his book, The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2010), Murray wants to find an “Anabaptism [that is] stripped down to the bare essentials” (15). He continues: “it is legitimate, and often helpful, to strip back the historical and cultural accretions from traditions that have persisted through the centuries” (44). His work is an “attempt to distill the essence of Anabaptism” (44). Because Stuart thinks he can strip away the husks of contemporary Mennonite communities and get to the Anabaptist kernel, he finds no reason to be in institutional communion with flesh and blood Anabaptists: “I will not become Hutterite, Amish, or Mennonite, but I am grateful that the principles of ‘naked Anabaptism’ are sometimes clothed in Hutterite, Amish, and Mennonite dress” (158-159).

Those who seek to articulate essences and essentials hidden inside so-called cultural wrappings stand in the tradition of Adolf von Harnack, who encouraged Christians to pierce through the transient externals of Jesus and his followers in order to grasp the spiritual universals at the core of Christianity: “[the] highest duty…is to determine what is of permanent value,…to find out what is essential” (What is Christianity?, trans. by Thomas Bailey Saunders [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1986], 13) — “to grasp what is essential in the phenomena, and to distinguish kernel from husk” (12).

This essentialist approach troubles me — and, given the wide-spread support of Murray’s book, it seems like I’m the only one who is troubled by it these days. (For the MCUSA leadership’s promotion of Murray’s work, see the last page of their recent missive: “Desiring God’s Coming Kingdom: A Missional Vision and Purposeful Plan for Mennonite Church USA“). This approach to the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition denudes living witnesses of their encultured expressions of faith. What are most important, according to the essentialists, are the propositions of faith, not the ongoing historical embodiment of faith: and by historical bodies of faith I mean the constant flux and flow of tradition, the passing down of the faith from community to community, and the wisdom found in accretions of historical adjustments, the subtleties of faith revealed through rituals.

No, I cannot dismiss the bodies of witnesses as mere husks within which are hidden the kernels of Anabaptist principles. I decided to throw my lot in with the Mennonite church eight years ago because I believed that Anabaptism begins and ends with bodies — communities of bodies that have given themselves to keeping alive a tradition of Christian nonviolence over the ages, as each generation receives the gift of the past from the hands of those who pass along the memories of the faithful, the legacies of the martyrs. Convictions are displayed through lives of worship which articulate a living Anabaptism; thus, all we can do is locate ourselves within these communities of faith and describe the movements of our bodies as we gather and are sent out, as we preach and pray, as we baptize and eat together, as we sing and share the good news.

In this turn to living communities as irreducible to the passing along of the Anabaptist tradition, I have in mind an insight from Hans-Jurgen Goertz, who calls us to take seriously the “simple religious worship” of the early Anabaptists, and how ordinary Anabaptists “did not always need to appreciate the theological content of Anabaptist ideas, or…have the ability to express them in their own words” (The Anabaptists [London, Uk: Routledge, 1996], 114). While Goertz acknowledges the polygenetic origins of Anabaptism and the heterogeneity of theological convictions of the Anabaptist leaders, he claims that “the way in which it was expressed by its adherents tended to be homogeneous” (ibid).

But here’s trouble for me. While I think the essentialist approach is a dead end for coming up with a Mennonite way forward in our lives of Christian witness, Goertz leads me into a different tension. In our Mennonite church, there isn’t much homogeneity to our daily expressions of Anabaptist faith, and our forms of worship are very different depending on what part of the county we live in and our histories of migration. By no means do I think we should ask some para-congregational body to impose a single worship liturgy and style upon us. If anything, what distinguished Anabaptist worship from the Protestant and Roman varieties was the desire to provide space for ordinary people to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to share revelations from God’s Word. It would be quite un-Anabaptist to homogenize our forms of worship in order to keep our liturgies “simple.”

So, I think I can see the problems with these different attempts to describe authentic Anabaptism. But I am at a loss for coming up with a way to describe what keeps us together as a Mennonite church. The Mennonite church that brought me into the fold looks very different from most of the MCUSA congregations I have visited. My sisters and brothers have welcomed me into the Mennonite family, but I am still trying to understand what makes us a family.

~ Augustine of Hippo

I have always found good company with the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans when he writes about the groaning inside all of us: “for we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).

Does it seem a little unholy to start a conversation about the triune nature of God by paying attention to the groaning in our gut? The Trinity doesn’t belong there, right? Shouldn’t we start up in heaven? Isn’t it a bit self-centered to turn a sermon on the Trinity into a sermon about us? Isn’t God supposed to be way over there, or way up there? As the prophet Isaiah says, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty” (Isa 6:1a).

Now, to be fair to Isaiah’s vision, God isn’t completely distant: “The hem of God’s robe filled the temple” (v. 1b). There is a point of connection between heaven and earth, and that is the Temple. But in Romans, Paul seems to think that God’s presence is even more intimate than that: God is in us, in our groaning, in our sighs, in our prayers, God’s Spirit is a companion with our spirit. Here’s what Paul says: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15b-16). Through the Spirit, God becomes intimate with us, interior to us, completely familiar, a companion. The Holy Spirit is present in our spirit, groaning with us, crying out with us. And with the groaning we begin to get a sense for the Trinity; we become the site of the work of all three persons—Father, Son, and Spirit. Our bodies become God’s home. God rests with us, and in us, not as some outside power, not as some cosmic clockmaker, not as some bearded old king on a throne in heaven. God isn’t an outsider to our lives. God isn’t like a king or a president who might choose to save us by sending his troops. God doesn’t send others to do the dirty work. God sends God. That’s why we confess that Jesus is God. If Jesus is not God, then we worship a God who refuses to jump into our mess, then we serve a God who doesn’t like to get dirty. If Jesus is not God, then we praise a God who doesn’t want to get too close—a God who refuses intimacy, who refuses the risks that come along with becoming our friend, our companion.

This is why the language of God’s sovereignty sometimes leads us astray. When we say that God is sovereign, we probably picture God as one of those kings who makes decrees from on high with an entourage of servants at his command. We picture God as a president who claims victory while never living in the trenches—a distant God, always once-removed from the action. And if that’s what we mean when we call God sovereign, then we don’t really believe in the God who is Trinity, which is simply another way of saying that we don’t have a clue about what happens on the cross. Because on the cross that kind of sovereign God dies. Or, to put it more provocatively, the crucifixion kills our picture of a detached God. The crucifixion of Jesus kills our image of God as the sovereign victor who sends other people to do the dirty work, the risky stuff. The true God, the God revealed at the crucifixion, is intimate with humanity, familiar with our flesh. At the cross we see how God sends God to accomplish our salvation.

Now, the Holy Spirit is how God takes even one more step closer to us. The Spirit draws God even closer, maybe even uncomfortably close. Remember the beginning of the Gospel when the Holy Spirit descends upon Mary’s womb and gives her a son, Jesus. Now that’s close, very close—entering a womb is uncomfortably close. And we have Paul in Romans 8 using, interestingly enough, pregnancy language to talk about how the Spirit is at work inside all of us—not just Mary. Each of us is groaning in labor pains, Paul says, undergoing the travail of the Holy Spirit, awaiting God’s redemption in our midst, feeling the good news being born inside of us. At this point the Spirit reveals an important insight into the nature of God. That is, God doesn’t overpower us. God isn’t a super-sovereign, doing what he wants whenever he wants. God doesn’t rescue us as if he were a SWAT team or a Navy Seal operation. God doesn’t act like a foreign invader of our lives, forcing us to join the mission. None of those images describe God. Augustine of Hippo made this point when he said, “God did not will to save us without us.” God doesn’t save us without us. God doesn’t use external force to get us to do the right thing.

Let me offer a few images to help us get a sense for what God is not. God is not like a surgeon who stands next to her patient and operates on the heart. God is not like a mechanic who looks under the hood and repairs the engine. God’s life is much too intimate with ours for those images to be true. God saves us from the inside; God heals us as if healing her own body. It’s hard to talk about this stuff. Our language seems to break down. The doctrine of the Trinity seems to push us into the limits of language and shows us that the best way to understand is to feel it, to be drawn into this relationship, to feel the Spirit working in your life, to listen for the groaning in your gut.

Let me offer one more picture of the way God works in our lives through the Holy Spirit. This one involves the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. The story centers on the relationship between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Darcy is a gentlemen and one of the richest men around. Elizabeth comes from a humble family. Mr. Darcy falls in love with Elizabeth even though he shouldn’t because of their class difference. It would be a scandal for a man like Darcy to marry someone from the inferior Bennet family line. Yet he can’t help himself, and everything comes out one afternoon when he storms into Elizabeth’s room and professes his love. But it’s all wrong; he gets everything wrong. Darcy doesn’t understand love. His kind of love is one that compels from the outside. Darcy knows his position of social power over someone as humble as Elizabeth. If he wants Elizabeth, he can take her and insult her in the process. Here’s what he says in his profession of love: “My feelings for you have taken possession of me against my will, my reason, and almost against my character!” Darcy knows that a person of such high standing shouldn’t love someone of such low status. So he admits that his love is unnatural, and insults Elizabeth’s family. Not a very wise move. Darcy doesn’t know that you can’t come from on high and force someone to love you, that you can’t make love happen on your own terms; he doesn’t know that love is not coercive. When Darcy finally gets around to the proposal part, he goes on and on about how his kind shouldn’t associate with her kind. He says, “I now hope that the strength of my love may have its reward in your acceptance of my hand.” The strength of my love. Darcy thinks the strength of his love, the sheer power of his passion, should get him what he wants—a “reward,” he says. Elizabeth’s acceptance is a reward, something he earns through his confession. There is no need for him to think through whether or not he has made himself lovable. Darcy doesn’t think twice about whether or not he deserves her love.

Mr. Darcy’s love comes from one high, from the position of a gentlemanly sovereign, a benevolent aristocrat. That’s not how God loves. Now, I should say a little more about how Darcy’s character develops—Katie, my wife, would not be happy with me if I left you with a bad impression of Mr. Darcy! Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s declaration of love from on high, and so Darcy begins to learn that love must first become familiar, intimate. Love comes from companionship—so he spends the rest of the movie learning how to be a companion, and how to love Elizabeth’s strange family. And it’s this companionship that gets at what Paul is saying about the Holy Spirit. God is in our depths, groaning with us. God’s love comes through intimate companionship—walking with us, praying with us, crying out with us. God doesn’t overpower us. God’s Spirit is a hidden presence—willing to go unnoticed, willing to be a humble companion. That is how the Trinity begins to unfold in our lives. It starts as a groan, something beyond words, a sigh. Perhaps a sigh from exhaustion with your life, or a disgruntled groan about the way the world works. You don’t know what to say or how to change things or where to go. You’re just plain stuck, without options. Yet the Spirit is there: your groaning companion, Paul says. The Holy Spirits turns that feeling in your gut into a simple prayer—or, as Paul says, “a cry,” a cry to the one who bore you, the creator, the mother of us all, “Abba! Father!”

The Trinity doesn’t make much sense as a doctrine. But that’s how it goes with the mystery of God. God is not a mystery for us to sit around and think about. The Trinity names an experience, an encounter, a relationship. The Trinity comes as a feeling in our gut, a prayer we don’t know how to pray, a desire we can’t quite get a handle on. This experience is how we know the Trinity is on the move. The best we can do sometimes, the best we can say when we don’t know what to say, the best we can do when everything seems completely unsatisfying, is to go with our gut and groan. For our hope is that our deep sighs echo with the Holy Spirit who leads us into the intimate love of God, a God who is already our companion, a hidden presence among all God’s children. As the apostle Paul puts it, the Trinity comes with a cry:

When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit [the Holy Spirit] bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. (Rom 8:15b-17a)

~

This is an excerpt from J. Alexander Sider and Isaac S. Villegas, Presence: Giving and Receiving God (Cascade, forthcoming).

Here are two stories that I can’t get out of my head as I think about the truth of war. In 2006, in the town 60 miles north of Baghdad, Khalib and his pregnant sister Nabiha were in a rush to get to the hospital. As they made their way down the usual streets, they came upon a new U.S. military checkpoint. The soldiers perceived the approaching vehicle as a threat, so they opened fire and killed Nabiha and the child in her womb. She was 35, and the dead baby was a boy.

War is never kind to women and children, especially to pregnant women. Neither is war kind to the mentally disabled, who are some of the most vulnerable among us. Here’s another story from the WikiLeaks archive. A pedestrian approached a checkpoint. The soldiers thought he was acting oddly, and they interpreted his strange behavior as a reason for suspicion. According to the soldiers, the pedestrian did not respond to their warnings. Fearing that he was a suicide bomber, they shot and killed him. Once he was lying dead in the street, the soldiers searched his body and did not find any explosives. When the dead man’s parents arrived at the scene, they told the soldiers about their son’s disability.

This is our dark world. It’s as if we are returning to the chaos and darkness at the very beginning of the Bible: “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep” (Gen 1:2). Instead of cultivating life, we are using our hands for the work of de-creation, undoing what God has made. Killing is an iconoclasm that seeks to banish signs of God’s presence from the world; to kill a human is to unmake what God has created as a icon of divine presence on earth: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’ ” (v. 26). As we undo God’s creation, we form spaces of void in our world—black holes of death, spaces of chaos and destruction that greedily consume life.

Yet, as we live into the darkness at the beginning of Genesis, we also notice the way hope seems to come from nowhere; in the story, hope is completely unexpected and without a natural cause. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (v. 3). Traditional theology calls this creatio ex nihilo, which is a Latin phrase that means “creation out of nothing.” God can create light and life when they seem like impossible possibilities. God’s work of creation defies the natural course of events. This is the story at the beginning of creation, and this is our same story of hope today: that, as some of my friends put it, “God can make a way out of no way.”

“Let there be light…” The Bible begins and ends with the gift of God’s light in the midst of darkness. At the end of the story, on the very last page of the Bible, we can see a light shining in the darkness. In the last chapter of the book of Revelation, Jesus says, “I am the bright morning star” (Rev 22:16). While it is still dark, the morning star announces the approaching dawn. The light of Christ—the morning star—shines even while it is still night. At the conclusion of the book, the Bible’s ending brings us into the night. To borrow the words from Genesis, darkness is over the face of the earth. The final passage of the Bible does not invite us into a blissful paradise where we wait without a care in the world. No, the end of the Bible leads us into the darkness of the old age. Yet we can see signs of the new day on the horizon, for the light of the morning star is breaking through the night. And as we wait for Christ to begin a new age, the final verses of the Bible invite us into a prayer: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (v. 20).

Those are the words that come to me as WikiLeaks exposes the darkness at the heart of war, which is also at the heart of the power that makes our comfortable lives possible here in the United States. With the sickening new revelations about Iraq, I can’t help but join in the prayer that comes to us at the end of our story, in the final verses of our Bible: “Come, Lord Jesus.”

This prayer is a protest against the powers of death and de-creation, and against the people who administer the violence of those powers. In our world of darkness, where military and political leaders fail to tell us the truth, we can only hope for God to say again those words of life from the beginning of the Genesis: “Let there be light!”

After reading Wipf & Stock’s wonderful collection of republished Concern pamphlets, I can’t help but notice similarities between Mennonite discourse in the 1950s and today. Here’s a passage from the introduction of the 1954 Concern pamphlet:

Are American Mennonites, in spite of their great institutional and even spiritual progress, perhaps after all moving rather toward ‘respectable’ denominationalism rather than toward a dynamic and prophetic ‘grass roots’ movement? And if so, what responsibility devolves upon us in our generation? (Concern, vol. 1, p. 3)

What do you think? Is this the same sort of question that needs to be asked?

I also beginning to wonder if this is a perennial Mennonite concern. Paul Peachey and his friends asked it back then, and plenty of others are asking it again today.

While the Concern group of the 1950s offered important criticisms of their denomination, I am also struck by one of quotes at the beginning of their first pamphlet–an epigraph that offers a kind of framework for their essays:

…send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ sepulchres, that I may rebuild it. (Neh 2:5)

Here’s some local media coverage of our worship service and protest: “Protesters hold demonstration,” and “Taking the Cross to the streets.”

And here’s an excerpt from the short sermon I preached at the detention center as a Cary police officer kept telling me to stop preaching and leave the premises:

This chair here will remain empty as a sign of all the bodies that the department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have hidden from us, the bodies that law enforcement agents have torn from our communities and our families in the middle of the night, the bodies that they have ripped away from our churches. By refusing to let us wash the feet of the people hidden in their detention centers, the federal government has dismembered the body of Christ, they have torn apart the church, they have pierced and severed the body of Jesus.

For the rest of the sermon, follow this link to my church website: “Bodies Matter, part 1”

The best books on technology and worship offer methods for carefully appropriating devices that contribute to the unique form of a congregation’s worship. Technologies should not be imposed from above, but should arise from the communal discernment of the church. I’ve already offered two authors who take this route (see links above).

While I appreciate these critical investigations into the liturgical use of technology, they aren’t haunted by the voices that I can’t get out of my head. They haven’t yet exorcised the histories of terror that come with each bit of technology. From their explorations, one is left assuming that devices magically appear in catalogs and electronic stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. But we know that technologies are not creatio ex nihilo. They have a history; they come from somewhere; and they materially remember what we would like to forget.

Walter Benjamin, the tormented Jewish Philosopher, teaches us to be honest about the history of oppression that produces the cultural achievements that we enjoy. In his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (see Illuminations, pp. 253-264), Benjamin describes how the barbarism of progress delivers to our doorstep the useful fruits of civilization:

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures… For without exception the cultural treasures [the observer] surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

The record of civilization is also a record of barbarism. Truthfulness demands that we wrestle with the barbaric debts of our technological sophistication. Our technologies owe their existence to the losers of history, trampled underfoot as civilization marches into the future. Progress is horrific.

In his book The Lexus and The Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman describes the powers of violence that makes technological development possible (revised edition: New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000). The technologies of Silicon Valley can only happen “in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C.” (443). Technological production requires a flow of capital and a secure market, thus the protection of a superpower. As Friedman puts it, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist” (ibid.). He continues: “the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps” (444). Without knowing it, Friedman corroborates Benjamin’s analysis above by citing the work of the historian Robert Kagan, who writes, “Good ideas and technologies also need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield” (ibid.). Fredric Jameson argues that the link between our military might and technological advancement should be extended to all aspects of our postmodern culture: “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military adn ecnomic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror” (Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 5).

It is hard to imagine a way forward once our ears begin to pick out the cries amidst the rubble upon which rest the storehouses of accumulated knowledge and inventions. As God puts it, “Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10). The screams are paralyzing, if we care to listen. How can we ignore the cries of our sisters and brothers reverberating through our speakers, mediating the melodious voices of our worship teams and amplifying the preacher’s inspired sermon? Every amplified voice is haunted, no matter what the hopeful message may be. How can we redeem technological devices that are possessed with a demonic history? If there’s a way forward, we must not delude ourselves into thinking that we can ignore the dead whose life-blood fuel our technologies.

Romand Coles uses Benjamin to argue that it is “our dead ancenstors who should be the focus of our responsibility” (Coles and Hauerwas, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, p. 32). Coles goes on to say that “we care for the world as we care for the dead.” But this kind of responsiblity is not at all straightforward. He asks: “What does it mean to be responsible to the murdered…?” There is no clear answer. One thing is certain: to ignore those murdered voices of the past is to silence them again. Our task, according to Coles’ reading of Benjamin, is “To be responsible for preventing re-murder” through our stubborn remembering of what the victors of history want us to forget. For Coles, we acknowledge how the victims of the past haunt us. Therefore, if we want to be honest, we have no choice but to live in that tension. But tension-dwelling is the only place where hope may come. It’s those who wait at the tomb who witness resurrected hope. As Harvey Blume comments on Benjamin’s “Theses”, “with complete unforgetfulness goes complete expectation. [Benjamin’s] Judaism is the symbiosis of total memory and total hope” (Blume, “For Benjamin: The Theses of the Philosophy of History,” Telos, no. 41 [Fall 1979], p. 156).

So, our question: is there a way to harken unto the victims of technology that doesn’t lead to paralysis?

Not according to Romand Coles and Stanley Hauerwas in their new book: Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary (Cascade, 2008). Politics is not restricted to something that happens when we vote, they argue. Instead, politics involves all the ways we tend to “common goods” which exceed “settled institutional forms” (3). In other words, politics happens outside the voting booth as well. Politics happens in our neighborhoods, not just in Washington, D.C. Democracy involves “a multitude of peoples enacting myriad forms of the politics of the radical ordinary in ways,” they write (8). For Coles and Hauerwas, democracy is everyday politics that turns us to the importance of “concrete practices of tending to one another” (8).

Coles describes the Civil Rights movement as a story of everyday democracy. He does not focus on the familiar story of Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead Coles turns our gaze from powerful pulpits to the ordinary African-American churchwomen who gave Dr. King something to talk about. Ella Baker is the protagonist of this story. She was a political organizer who spread the Civil Rights movement among everyday folk. According to Coles, Baker’s politics displayed “the arts and the techniques of ‘sitting at the feet’ of the least of these” (78). Her political work in Harlem consisted in “the fine art of strolling,” where Baker sought out discussions with people on the streets. These relationships turned into political networks that birthed life in the midst “depression-era suffering” (61). The Civil Rights movement was not created from nothing. Rather, it flowed from the work of ordinary organizers like Ella Baker. Her democratic politics started at the kitchen table and community meals. Baker was fond of saying, “If you share your food with people, you share your lives with people” (57). For Coles, with whom we eat is as politically significant as what we do in the voting booth. Meals of communion fuel our political imagination.

—-
Stanley Hauerwas finds politics in an equally unexpected place: L’Arche communities. These are groups of people with varying degrees of disability and ability. Assistants live with core members who are disabled and cannot get along without help. While some may wonder how there can be any time for politics in such communities, Hauerwas argues, “one must recognize L’Arche as a politics” (316). For Hauerwas, L’Arche forms a political body, a people, who embody significant political sensibilities. “[T]he heart of L’Arche is patience,” writes Hauerwas, which is “the politics of peace” (316). For Hauerwas, patience is a political virtue in short supply. When the rulers of nation-states keep violence on the table as a political option, they kill their own imaginations. War is a shortcut around the difficult and risky work of patience. L’Arche shows the world that another way is possible. L’Arche testifies, writes Hauerwas, “to what will be missed if we only attempt what we assume will work” (320).

Mennonites will be particularly interested in Coles’ thoughts on footwashing in L’Arche communities, and the way he ties this practice to the work of the Mennonite Central Committee. According to Coles, Vanier’s key insight is that washing another’s feet is also a position of power: “Vanier is very clear that power, even the power of ‘servant-leaders,’ can ‘quickly corrupt,’” writes Coles. We are always tempted, as Vanier puts it, “to exercise authority and help the poor from ‘on top,’ as someone superior, out of pity or even a certain disdain” (219). The greatest danger, according to Coles, is to think that we have everything to give and nothing to receive. Here is where Vanier emphasizes our need to have someone wash our feet—to endure the exposure of someone taking our feet into their hands.

The practice of footwashing displays the profound giving and receiving that is at the heart of MCC, argues Coles. There are “very profound receptive practices that seem integral to work being done by the Mennonite Central Committee and other exemplary Mennonite organizations,” he writes (225). Coles lauds the ability of Mennonites to enter into relationships without wielding power over another, and instead learning from people who are rich in local knowledge. Although Coles is not a Christian, he is profoundly attracted to how Mennonites embody receptivity, which is tied to the virtue of patience and the conviction of nonviolence. He asks, “Could it be that such receptivity is among the most vital liturgical practices in Mennonite communities…?” (225).

—-
As is expected, Hauerwas and Coles constantly think through the work of John Howard Yoder. But they also engage Peter Dula of Eastern Mennonite University and Alex Sider of Bluffton University. Hauerwas closes the first chapter with a discussion of Dula and Sider’s essay, “Radical Democracy, Radical Ecclesiology” (Cross Currents, winter 2006), where they wonder if Hauerwas’ Creedal theology is compatible with a vision of church that is radically democratic—where authority over doctrine and practice is shared by all members. For Dula and Sider, a radically democratic church is fragile and vulnerable.

Hauerwas quotes Dula and Sider to this effect: “a dialogue is democratic when the terms of the conversation are not settled in advance by a framework given prior to the dialogue… Democracy sheds all guarantees and takes the risk of keeping nothing safe” (30). Hauerwas responds: “orthodoxy is the exemplification of the training necessary for the formation of a people who are not only capable of working for justice, but who are themselves just” (30). In other words, orthodoxy names the ongoing conversation with the past voices that continues to call our churches to faithfulness, to work for God’s justice.

The book closes with a transcript of a conversation between Coles and Hauerwas. Coles starts the dialogue by asking Hauerwas to return to his thoughts on Dula and Sider. Echoing Dula and Sider, Coles also worries that Hauerwas’ defense of hierarchical ecclesial authority provides no room for “insurgent dialogical practices and powers ‘from below’” (324). Politics starts at home, and Coles wants Hauerwas to think through the paradox of naming himself a “high-church Mennonite.” For Coles, Mennonite forms of church display an egalitarian and vulnerably receptive politics that is at odds with high-church hierarchy.

In his response, Hauerwas says what he means by locating himself within the Mennonite tradition: “To be a ‘high-church Mennonite’ is my way to suggest that…God is leading us back to the profound unity of Christians—a unity found in our refusal to kill one another in the name of national loyalties” (326). For Hauerwas, Mennonites remind the wider church that nonviolence makes possible ecumenical relationships.

Hauerwas also points to another traditional Mennonite practice that displays a deeply democratic politics: choosing ministers by lot! “I think it is a good test to ask, what kind of community do you need to be for those in leadership to be chosen by lot and, after time, to return to what they were doing before they were chosen?” (326). Hauerwas asks the church (and Mennonites!) to consider the profoundly democratic political witness of choosing ministers by lot. For the most part, the mainstream Mennonite church in the United States no longer performs this practice. What does it mean that our denomination has now created a professionalized class of ministers like me? The political practices that Coles and Hauerwas point to as good news are no longer determinative for our ecclesial politics.

—-

Mary, the mother of Jesus, captures the heart of Coles and Hauerwas’ political vision when she says in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, “The Lord has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things/ but has sent the rich away empty” (vv. 52-53). Coles and Hauerwas teach us how we can sing Mary’s Magnificat and begin to hear the political overtones. In Mary’s song the political landscape is turned upside down—or, maybe, right side up. We don’t take our cues from the politics of Capital Hill, but from the lowly, the humble, the poor—people like Mary and Jesus.

Coles uses Ralph Waldo Emerson to call us to this political vision: “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low” (48). Hauerwas uses the words of Archbishop Oscar Romero: “It is the poor who tell us what the polis is” (229). Political participation starts when we sit patiently at the feet of “the least of these.” They are the humbled and humiliated, like Jesus, who give us new eyes to see the possibility of a world made new, the world Mary prophesied when she heard the good news of the coming of Christ.

We have forgotten, Hauerwas writes, that “Christianity is determinatively the faith of the poor” (107). We profess the faith of the poor, because we say that a homeless Palestinian Jew is worthy of our worship.

I’m not even 30 and I feel like a curmudgeon. I’m not interested in books and movements that herald the promises of our changing world. We are interested in the emergent, the yet to come; we want to be the New Christians occupying the frontiers of change. When I hear this way of talking about our faith, part of me wants to run the other direction. But I recognize that I am also permeated with this generational sensibility. The “new” for me was choosing an old tradition as a way to navigate into the future: I became Mennonite.

We are dying for the new and exotic, something to set us free from a troubling past and open us to the yet to come. New horizons. New frontiers. Our gaze fixed on the emerging future; our backs to the past. We are now suckers for anything “postmodern,” whatever that means. The old ways of our parents are passé. All that stuff didn’t seem to work and we’re tired of it. I wonder if we feel what Sebastian Moore discerned in his tradition as a catholic neurosis:

The effect of being continually exposed to the truth which is doing one no good is distressing to the soul. There can even result a kind of unbelief, an exhaustion of the spirit, which is all the worse for being parly unconscious. (God is a New Language, p.21)

Our spirits are exhausted from the old message. We hear the promises of our faith, but it’s spoken in old accents that inoculate us from the power of the gospel. The old is exhausted and exhausting. Our souls are distressed. The old dialects seem antiquarian — for a different time and place. But we’ve come of age and need to form our own language, our own way of speaking. So we search for some new ways of articulating and listening to our faith because we don’t want to fall away. A song from my Pentecostal past offers the sort of prayer for the new that I hear from my friends: “Holy Spirit, breathe on me.”

But doesn’t the new also come with dangers of it’s own? Isn’t a posture of absolute openness also an invitation to harmful spirits as well? What if we mistake the fresh movement of the Holy Spirit with the self-destructive spirits of this cultural moment? How can we practice discernment of spirits?

Jacques Derrida worried a lot about the problem of promising and destructive spirits. He saw our tendency to rush into the future with open hands ready for whatever promise someone has to offer. Our eyes quickly turn towards the spectacular and interesting. But Derrida reminds us of the importance to hesitate, to linger, to wait. Don’t welcome every new messiah or messianic claim, for that one might be the anti-Christ. Despite popular uses, Derrida’s deconstruction isn’t about destruction. He doesn’t want to tear down the old systems so we can build something bigger and better in it’s place–that’s what he calls the temptation of messianism (i.e., the new is always better). Derrida’s deconstruction isn’t a way to shrug off the old and welcome the new. Rather, it’s a way to linger in the wisdom of the old in order to practice discernment of spirits; deconstruction is hesitation, a-waiting. Deconstruction is a way

to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. The paradox in the instituting moment of an institution is that, at the same time that it starts something new, it also continues somthing, is true to the memory of the past, to a heritage, to something we recieve from the past, from our predecessors…. That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break. (Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p.6)

The old is never something that ends. The future “also continues something.” Deconstruction is about being honest about our past. We don’t repress the oddness of our heritage. We shouldn’t be embarrassed of our particularity. No. That’s simply who we are. Instead, Derrida wants us to inhabit the tension of a past that doesn’t abandon the old while waiting for something “absolutley new.”

If all of this sounds too abstract for you, let me give you an example. It comes from my experience at the 2007 Mennonite Church USA national convention in San Jose. It was a convention to welcome the new. Of the thousands of delegates and participants, I only saw two couples of “plain” Mennonites. I saw them during a worship service. They sat across from me as we listened to a young, hip pastor from Arizona preach. He basically told all of us that we need to leave behind the odd particularity of Mennonite identity so we welcome a new future and a new people. He told us that we are like the Sonoran desert that stretches across Arizona. If we dig through the layers of dry sand, then we can reach the abundant life of water down below. Thus, once we strip away the layers of Mennonite particularity (i.e., the dry sand that gets in the way), we can invite people to enjoy the living water at the core of Anabaptism without all the distractions and oddities. As he preached, I couldn’t help but look at the two women with their head coverings. Apparently they are an embarrassment, an odd left over that distracts outsiders from the so-called essence of Anabaptism. I don’t think the preacher needed a center stage for his message because it’s already coming true for the Mennonites. Not too many plain Mennonites came to the convention. They are already being stripped away. (Side note: I also wonder if embarrassment of particularity is the reason why people like to talk about being Anabaptist instead of being Mennonite).

I find Derrida helpful because he helps us think through how to stay faithful to the past while awaiting gifts that come from the future — messianic moments, he would say. Hope doesn’t mean we have to abandon the people and collective wisdom of the past. Rather, Derrida’s deconstruction helps us see how the present is the playground of the past that supplies cultural wisdom for discerning our future. There’s nothing wrong with hoping for a better future. Derrida wants us to see how our proper posture should be one of patience. We wait for hope. We await the surprise of a graceful future. It’s not something we grasp onto by getting rid of baggage from the past that weighs us down. In fact, those cultural peculiarities and odd traditions carry the wisdom of generations, the gifts for discerning the spirits of the age. We need that wisdom. And we need the people who embody it. We need such wisdom, Derrida says, because we must be prepared for the arrival of “the phantom of the worst, the [evil] one we have already identified” (The Other Heading, p.18). The old helps us resist the seduction of the evil cultural spirits of ages past and learn how to identify them when they appear again. In the words of St. Paul, we must use God’s gift of discernment in order to figure out if we are giving ourselves over to the Holy Spirit or evil spirits of this cultural episode (I Cor. 12, Rom. 6). Our dream for the radically new for which we expectantly wait may indeed turn out to be a reappearance of the worst nightmares of our past.

This isn’t to say that we must live in the past. That’s not it at all. We must always await the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit. Who knows how the Spirit will lead? But it is troubling when our quest of the future involves abandoning the people who have sustained the tradition. Why aren’t they part of the imagined future “we”? There can be no easy dismissal or approval of cultural remnants. As Derrida says in his usually opaque way, “We must thus be suspicious of both repetitive memory and the completely other of the absolutely new” (OH, p.19).

It’s a bad move to confidently embrace the future. But neither can we ignore how our world changes. So, we must linger in that fragile space between skepticism of the new and dissatisfaction with the old. If we want to keep hoping and searching for the movement of the Spirit, the only way forward is through one another. As we linger with the old, those relationships provide guidance for the future. It’s a problem that “plain” Mennonites don’t come to conventions. And it’s a problem when youth aren’t taken seriously. Finding stability in the forms of the past blinds us from the blessed newness of the future. And uncontolled desire for the new leaves us open for the possession of the phantoms of the worst, as Derrida warns us. We are left with nothing to hold but each other as we remember the mercies of God and learn how to wait for new opportunities to taste the joy of the gospel.

Here are a couple wise modern voices I like to listen to. They seem to know what commitment to the church means; they take pains to remember the tradition, yet put to work theologically and pastorally their prayerful hope for the manifestation of the Spirit. Lesslie Newbigin was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor, missionary, and theologian who was appointed bishop of the united Church of South India. Sebastian Moore is a Roman Catholic monk and theologian who dedicates his life to the church as a spiritual director.

Newbigin:

I think it must be frankly admitted that when, in the name of a purer faith or a richer experience, Christians have felt compelled to break with the continuing structure, and have therefore claimed a primacy for faith or experience over order, their children and grandchildren have inherited from them new structures based upon some particular formation of faith or experience which have allowed less spiritual and intellectual freedom than that which the reformers took for granted. (Household of God, p.75)

Moore:

The true reformer is not he who can titillate our jaded palates with novelties that will shock the conventional and rally the discontented to a new orthodoxy. He will bring to our minds things that no one, whatever his theological views, will dare to controvert. He will ask what we think St Paul meant when he said that what proved we were sons of God was the Spirit of God’s Son in our hearts crying Abba Father. He will recall to us the stern and strictly theological claim which our brother makes upon us in the plain teaching of Christ. It is only out of a renewed Christian community that a theology worthy of the name will emerge able to restore that name from its present justly dishonoured position in the minds of men to the honour that properly belongs to it. (God is a New Language, p.153)

——————————————————————-

The Jesus for President campaign came to Raleigh, N.C. on July 22nd. Chris Haw, Shane Claiborne, and their crew took the stage at 7pm. People started filling the seats at 6:30, anticipating the acclaimed campaign. For two and a half hours, Shane and Chris spoke about Jesus and politics to an attentive crowd. Although our Mennonite district took the lead role in bringing them to town, we were a marginal presence. With no money spent on advertising, we drew around 650 people to a midweek event. Duane Beck, pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church, had the idea of inviting the Jesus for President tour to make a stop in our area.

The district pastors (including myself) enthusiastically approved. With the support of our Eastern Carolina District of the Mennonite Church, we explored our ecumenical networks to form a coalition of sponsors. Pastor Spencer Bradford of Durham Mennonite Church approached the North Carolina Council of Churches, which gladly agreed to help sponsor the event. Since our Mennonite churches have small worship spaces, Duane Beck found a partnership with First Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh which agreed to host the campaign. Though the Mennonites did most of the legwork, various churches came together to bring the Jesus for President crew to town.

People of different Christian traditions came to hear Chris Haw and Shane Claiborne preach the gospel of Christ’s peace. In many respects, the evening felt like an evangelistic crusade. One member of my congregation even said that it reminded her of the Campus Crusade rallies she attended as a youth. People from all generations filled the chairs, then overflowed into every available space on the floor and along the walls: white haired folks with canes, young people with pierced noses and tattoos, and toddlers crawling around all of them… a chaos of peoples.

If Chris and Shane are radicals, apparently being radical is no longer reserved for naive and utopian youth. Apparently the wise and mature still have an anti-establishmentarian streak. Although our host church was a black Baptist congregation, the sea of faces was predominately white. But who can blame our African-American sisters and brothers for not showing up? The black church in the South has it’s own sense of radical politics and creative political witness.

Chris and Shane described their presentation as an attempt to exercise our political imaginations. They retold the story of Scripture showing how God is at work creating a new people who don’t easily fit into the established categories of American politics–neither Democrat nor Republican. Although Jim Wallis (and the Sojo machine) uses this same point to justify evangelicals who want to vote for Democrats, Chris and Shane take a more radical route…

(Follow the link to the full report: Interchurch Relations, MCUSA)

If Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message,” is helpful (as Shane Hipps argues), then we must go all the way down; we must dig into the materiality of the medium. We must investigate the conditions that make possible the process of production. Hidden powers are physically remembered in the pieces of technology we use.

Most popular discussions of technology and worship fail to explore the realities of material production–the where, when, why, and how of invention and assembly. From reading these books on media and worship, one would assume that technologies magically appear–created out of nothing. Since electronic devices are available, we have to figure out ways to make them liturgically productive. The problem, according to Eileen D. Crowley, is that “Most churches lag at least twenty years or more behind the art world in the kind of media art they create or purchase and in how they imagine that media might be integrated within worship” (32). Our churches are not on the cutting edge of media. Our liturgical media is passé. We have failed to encourage the development of artists who makes use of anything at their disposal to lead us into an “experience of the Holy” (32)

The best books on media and worship call us to create ecclesial cultures of creative cooperation. Media should not be imposed from above by consultants and experts. Rather, our use of technology at church should arise from the discernment of the people. In Liturgical Art for a Media Culture (Liturgical Press, 2007), Professor Crowley offers such an argument, typical among the most helpful books on liturgical use of media. She engages in a discussion of the dangers and positive possibilities of our media culture for worship and offers reasoned “tools [that] can help a church decide whether this new media  and new ministry are appropriate for their circumstances” (90). While Prof. Crowley wants to situate our modern use of liturgical technology in a long history of multimedia liturgy, she doesn’t engage the history of technological production. Since church has always been a multimedia performance, Crowley argues, then we deceive ourselves when we think that there is a kind of worship that is not already multimedia. “Adding today’s new media to these old media does not make worship multimedia. Liturgy has always been multimedia” (8). She exposes the false distinctions that underlie our usual ways of thinking about using multimedia in worship. We already do! We have done so for centuries.

The problem, according to Prof. Crowley, is that we lack a theologically informed process of ecclesial discernment. She proposes a highly participatory liturgical use of technology that invites as many people as possible to the planning table. Her model “includes all the faithful in the creative process, and encourages the creation of locally produced liturgical media” (90). The problems with technology in worship happen when a select few of experts and consultants impose change from above. They force technological changes to worship without any engagement with the people.

While her model describes a healthy egalitarian and communal decision-making process, Crowley never digs into what matters most: the economic, political, and social realities that make technological production possible. All those factors remain hidden. Her readers are left with the impression that pieces from technology exist creatio ex nihilo. Speakers, screen, computers, and microphones magically appear in catalogs and box stores. Where does the LCD monitor come from? Best Buy or Circuit City. End of story. The shear existence of technologies warrants our use. It’s at the store, so we think through what it will do to our worship and community if we use it. It’s a utilitarian argument.

Thomas Friedman begins to open our eyes to the reality of the conditions that make technologies possible. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), he writes, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist… And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps” (pp. 464-475, quoted in Gorringe, p. 88). Our electronic devices receive their life-blood from weapons of mass destruction. Sophisticated weaponry and well-trained soldiers make possible our technological arsenal for worship. And our indebtedness to Silicon Valley provides the cultural legitimacy to our military machine–they defend our technological way of life. The hidden power of our liturgical electronic art is violence. To repeat Friedman’s line, the assembly of U.S. armed forces is “the hidden fist that keeps to world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish.” How can we worship God with devices that reverberate with effects of violence? Our church sound booths are awash with the blood of victims.

Crowley is right to say that “the creation of media for worship raises social justice issues” (83). But she doesn’t expose the fibers of the dead that hold together our liturgical electronics, nor does she unmask the clean surfaces to show how they are infused with violence. She does not help us listen for the voices. She isn’t haunted by their cries echoing in the microphones and reverberating through the amplifiers. Attempts at redeeming technologies through ethical use simply ignore the issue. Our self-justifying attempts at redemption aid our convenient forgetfulness; we wash our hands and move on. But God is not fooled by our trickery, nor does God absolve our sins of omissive memory: “Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10). God want us to listen with penetrating ears. Can we tune our senses to penetrate through the manufactured technological sensations and hear what technology wants us to forget? Electronic media has a lot to hide in order to make its way into our spaces of worship.

———————————————————————–

Why not start with Karl Barth? In his essay, “Church and Culture” (in Theology and Church, London: SCM, 1962), Barth disallows any uncritical approval of culture, nor does take a consistent stand against culture. As usual, Barth makes things complicated. On the one side of the dialectic, Barth takes up the ax of John the Baptist: “Christian preaching…has met every culture, however supposedly rich and mature, with ultimate sharp skepticism” (quoted in T.J. Gorringe, Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture, p. 18). But later in that same essay Barth has no patience for a spiritualism that ignores our cultural milieu. There is no room, Barth writes, “for a basic blindness to the possibility that culture may be revelatory, that it can be filled with promise.” The seeds of God’s kingdom proliferate throughout the world. Barth pursues the same line of thinking in Church Dogmatics IV/3, where he claims that if “all things are created in and through Jesus” (Colossians 1:16-17), then, as Prof. Peter Dula puts it, “there is nowhere, not even the mouth of an ass, that we cannot expect to find words reflecting the light of the Word” (Peter Dula, “A Theology of Interfaith Bridge Building,” p. 164 in Borders and Bridges: Mennonite Witness in a Religiously Diverse World). Barth goes on to call these diverse worldly witnesses to God’s kingdom “secular parables” (CD IV/3, p. 115). The earth and human culture resound with echoes of the one Word of God which speaks into existence the kingdom of God. Therefore we must pay attention to the places we inhabit, the cultures that permeate us. “The Church,” he writes, “will be alert for the signs which, perhaps in many cultural achievements, announce that the kingdom approaches” (20). The kingdom does come. The question Barth poses to the church is whether she is ready to receive it, however strange it may appear.

It’s a strange possibility to consider how the pieces of culture called ‘technology’ may display God’s kingdom, if only parabolically. Barth won’t let us rule out an abstract category like “technology” without serious engagement in particular technological machineries–he calls them “cultural achievements.” Nor will he take up every new sophisticated invention as a chance for the kingdom to make headway. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy dose of skepticism.

In The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture (Zondervan, 2005), pastor Shane Hipps critically considers the place of technologies in worship. He carefully steers clear of many church leaders who welcome any and every form of technology as the panacea for dying churches. Blindly welcoming technology into church life turns worship into another capitalist commodity. We then become one show among many where Christians can find “new experiences to consume” (15). In Modernity, writes Hipps, “churches heeded consumer demands and sough to reinvent church. They either had to compete in the consumer marketplace on the consumer’s terms or face extinction. In the spirit of modernity, these churches reincarnated themselves as highly competent vendors of religious programs and services” (99). But the answer, according to Hipps, is not a reactionary turn against all forms of technology. “I’m not arguing for some Luddite strategy of literally destroying media” (65). Instead, we carefully and communally discern how modern technologies can aid us as we embody the good news of Christ. In Hipps’ words, “We learn to understand the power of our technologies to shape us, thereby regaining power over them” (122).

Pastor Hipps considers how the internet feeds off our desire for community. “Our electronic media has rekindled our interest in community and made us aware of our total interdependence on one another” (121). Hipps quotes Marshall McLuhan to this extent: “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” (103). The internet has shown us how we are connected to the rest of the world. We inhabit a global village. While the internet displays our interdependence, it also offers us cheap community, a simulacra of intimacy. “In our quest for meaningful connections we encounter convenient decoys–the always-appealing cotton candy communities of the virtual world” (121).

Probably Hipps’ best technological criticism comes into play when he describes the egalitarian nature of church and recent developments in shareware and collaberative technologies. His guide is Marshal McLuhan who writes, “Christianity–in a centralized, administrative, bureaucratic form–is certainly irrelavent…. We must get rid of the hierarachy if we want participation” (125). Hipps welcomes the organization structure displayed in our electronic age. “This shift toward information diffusion and the subsequent diffusion of power are providing us with a helpful corrective to the long history of centralized, top-down authority in the church” (130). This is an example where techonology can help us relearn what it means to be a faithful church. Apparently some streams of technological culture turn out to be Barth’s secular parables of the kingdom.  “Electronic culture is helping us recover a biblical vision for more collaborative and egalitarian leadership models” (143). Church is a non-hierarchical, highly participatory community. Thus decision-making through consensus is the decisive practice that displays this power-sharing organization. But, as Hipps notes, our media culture forms us to be impatient people who value instant results. Thus we have hard work ahead of us in our churches as we try to cultivate virtues and practices of patience that make space for the hard work of communal intimacy. A patient church that takes time to listen to the weakest voices in our midst is a counter-(media)cultural church.

What I appreciate about Hipps’ book is the way he turns a conversation about electronic culture into a argument about the shape of a faithful church–a clever move. Questions about technology and media become unimportant. For Pastor Hipps, what matters is the way we exercise ecclesial authority and how we welcome and listen to friends and enemies. What is missing in his critical engagement is any sustained socio-economic discussion. But he is not uniquely culpable for this blindness. It’s quite typical for church leaders to ignore the question of class when they discuss worship styles, communication technologies, and cultural relevance. To be fair to Hipps, at least he does mention in passing the economic factors of techonological relevance: “Extensive resources are being sunk into editing equipment, audio systems, video projectors, light shows, and more. there is no other period in church history when relevance has cost so much time and money” (154). Hipps does put spending practices on the table. But, at the beginning of the book he tells a story that puts the question of economics on the back burner: “We wondered were the money would come from? Would the screen be obtrusive?…. These were all valid and important quesitons, but we began to believe these were not the most important questions for us to ask” (21). But the only reason why economic issues don’t take center stage is because we don’t worship with needy people. We are sufficiently priviledged so as to ignore issues of cost in our discussions of technology. We can critically use new technologies in our church because we don’t have more important items on which to spend our money. Technological upgrades are a possibility for us because we lack the prophetic presence of the poor.

In Simple Spirituality (IVP, 2008), Chris Heuertz challenges our churches to think how we’ve created cultures of worship that are inhospitable to the poor. “[T]he church…isolates the poor” (72). The poor have their place in the world, and we have ours. Heuertz asks, “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 perfectly amplified music and the crystal clear voice of the preacher on his cordless mic? “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). Our state of the art worship tends toward immorality because we use it to cushion ourselves against 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, anyhow? Heuertz can’t help but think about economic realities: “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). Thus the cost of technology isn’t important to those who don’t have the prophetic presence of the poor. And if we lack their presence, we aren’t living into Christ’s mission: “to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4).

———————————————————-

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.”

—————————————————————

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.

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.

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

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.