As we think about what it means to be an ally and look at the continuing legacy of white supremacist Christianity, the Beattitudes in Matthew and Luke have a lot to offer us.

Too often, when we read differing version of Jesus’ words in different gospels, we try to ignore them. But I think these two passages speak deeply to beautiful, complimentary truths about the movement that Jesus invites us into.

In short, the beatitudes in Matthew focus on spiritual and emotional virtues: poor in spirit, mourning, meekness, thirsting for righteousness, mercy, pureness of heart, peacemaking and the being persecuted for righteousness.

As I grew up learning these, I thought of these as things I do on my own. It was up to me, as an individual, with God’s help to be merciful, pure in heart and meek. It might be hard, but it was fundamentally a personal struggle that God and I worked on.

It’s easy for us to look at the beatitudes and say, as the Bishop of London did, “This is just a spiritual thing. Jesus wasn’t concerned with people’s economic or political well being. All he cared about was their spiritual virtues.”

But let’s take a closer look at the Luke passage:

Looking at his disciples, he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

21 Blessed are you who hunger now,

for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

22 Blessed are you when people hate you,

when they exclude you and insult you

and reject your name as evil,

because of the Son of Man.

23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

24 “But woe to you who are rich,

for you have already received your comfort.

25 Woe to you who are well fed now,

for you will go hungry.

Woe to you who laugh now,

for you will mourn and weep.

26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,

for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

In short, blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated. Woe to the rich, well fed, those who laugh and those of high status. With the possible exception of mourning and laughing, these are all the material conditions that the Bishop of London was so sure Christianity wasn’t concerned with.

Jesus was very consciously countering the message of shame that the poor, hungry, hated and excluded people experienced in his day. They weren’t that much different from who is shamed and who is honored today. In 2 Enoch, a Jewish book written around the time of Jesus, we get a pretty long list of who society honored:

2 Enoch 42:2

As one year is more honourable than another, so is one man more honourable than another, some for great possessions, some for wisdom of heart, some for particular intellect, some for cunning, one for silence of lip, another for cleanliness, one for strength, another for comeliness, one for youth, another for sharp wit, one for shape of body, another for sensibility, let it be heard everywhere, but there is none better than he who fears God, he shall be more glorious in time to come

It’s the rich, the smart, the strong, the attractive (that’s what comeliness means), the witty and those with nice “shape of body.” Sound familiar? These are still things that our society values.

These are the norms that Jesus is turning upside down. Because we’ve heard the beatitudes so often, they don’t have the surprise impact they did back then.

Jesus isn’t just making a one time declaration here. This isn’t a fix-it-and-forget-it moment. This is the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a foundational text of his ministry. In both the Matthew and the Luke texts, it’s specifically addressed to his disciples:

Matthew 5:1-2:

1 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them.

Luke 6:20:

20 Looking at his disciples, he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

This is what Jesus is inviting his disciples: the absurd, radical, crazy, foolish work of turning the world upside down. This is what he was talking about in the great commission when he said,

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,” (Matthew 28:19)

And he was clear what the consequences would be. That’s what he was talking about when he said, “Take up your cross.” James Cone points out that the cross then was like the lynching tree. As I pointed out last week, they had a shared goal of controlling the oppressed. So Jesus could just as well have said, “Take up your lynching tree” and follow me.

What does this really mean practically? I come back to to the term “Becoming an Ally” when thinking about practice. I believe that it’s one way we can join Jesus in turning things upside down. I’m just going to focus on one aspect of that:

Listening with Humility

I said that the Matthew and Luke beatitudes are complimentary and this is where that becomes really important. Just as a slave-holding Christianity focuses exclusively on a spiritualized Jesus, we can get too focused on the Luke version and ignore the beatitudes as recorded by Matthew. Let’s look at the first one in particular:

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

It’s about humility. About submitting ourselves to God and to each other. This is absolutely critical when trying to be an ally. If I decide I’m going to stand with the oppressed and turn the world upside down, I can get into a world of trouble if I’m not submitting myself to those oppressed people. If I don’t know how to listen with humility.

I’ll be really honest. I know this is important, because it’s something I’m bad at. I really want to be the white hero swooping in to save the day like in Dancing with Wolves and Avatar. I like to think I understand racism and I’ve sorted it all out.

I struggle to be honest with myself and other when I fall short, when I screw up, when I let my prejudice show. I don’t like feeling ashamed. I really don’t want to think about these things.

In his Ted Talk “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race” (embedded below) Jay Smooth, an anti-racist activist, puts it this way: “When you believe that you must be perfect in order to be good, it makes you averse to recognizing your own inevitable imperfections and that lets them stagnate and grow.”

Sounds complicated, right? Smooth calls racial issues “a dance partner that’s designed to trip us up.”

Smooth uses the metaphor of tonsils. Getting rid of your racial prejudice is not like having your tonsils taken out. Racial prejudice isn’t like that. If someone suggests that something you did or said was prejudiced or racist, you can’t say, “No, I had my prejudice removed back in 2005 when I did that one training.”

Jay Smooth suggests a different way to talk about racism. When someone comes up to us and says, “You have something stuck in your teeth,” we feel a moment of embarrassment and then we set about the unpleasant task of digging it out.

That’s how I need to work at responding, as a white person, when a person of color challenges me on my racism. A moment of shame and then move on to digging it out.

The goal in listening with humility is for talking about racial prejudice to be more like dental hygiene. We don’t say, “What do you mean, I have something stuck in my teeth? That can’t be! I’m a clean person.”

So “listening in humility” is like this: It means that when someone calls you on something they thought was prejudiced, don’t jump immediately to defensiveness. You almost certainly didn’t intend it, but 400 years of white supremacy don’t go away overnight. I as a white person am soaked and marinated in it.

This act, in and of itself, is a blessing. Being listened to and taken seriously is a way of honoring someone.

This is just one specific part of the concept of becoming an ally. But its something that everyone can do. And it chips away at the legacy of white supremacist Christianity that Dr. King spent his life fighting.

It may seem simple, but I think if we could talk about racism like we can talk about dental hygiene, we can bring together the wisdom of both Matthew’s and Luke’s beatitudes, and we can be stronger as the body of the Christ that God calls us to be.

Here’s the video of Jay Smooth. I highly recommend it:

P.S. If you’re within driving distance of Philadelphia and want to go deeper with these themes, I highly recommend the upcoming Damascus Road Anti-racism Analysis training in Philadelphia on February 24-26.

Here’s another video:

P.S. We didn’t actually getting around to the technical work of taking the site down. Sorry about that.

MLK day is day when we appropiately focus a lot on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christianity and the prophetic witness of the movement he led against racism and white supremacy.

We sometimes forget that most of the white people who Dr. King challenged were Christians. I think it is as important for me as a white person to understand the faith of the segregationists as it is to understand Dr. King’s faith. This is one way I can do my work and understand whiteness in the work of anti-racism.

Let’s start by taking one step back and looking at slaveholder Christianity. Specifically, the faith of white Christians who owned African-American slaves here in the United States. I’ll be drawing heavily on the first chapter of The Black Christ by Kelly Brown Douglas. You can read the whole chapter here.

Christian slaveholders were known to be crueler to their slaves then non-Christians. In chapter 10 of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass he wrote:

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists. Very near Mr. Freeland lived the Rev. Daniel Weeden, and in the same neighborhood lived the Rev. Rigby Hopkins. These were members and ministers in the Reformed Methodist Church.

What’s going on here? Why in the world are Christians worse slave holders than non-Christians? Now it may be tempting for us today to say, “Oh, they weren’t really Christians,” but I’m afraid that’s too easy an out. Their Christian tradition still shapes our tradition today.

African-American theologian Kelly Brown Douglas points out two characteristics of slave-holding Christianity:

First, after a person is converted to belief in Jesus as Christ, his or her salvation is automatic… this freed many slaveholders to do whatever they deemed necessary to keep their slaves under control.

…

Second, because Jesus ministry is ignored, his liberating actions do not become a standard for Christian actions… The Christian feels no obligation to treat others, especially the oppressed, the way Jesus treated them. Again, enslavers are free to be as cruel as they want towards a slave, while being assured salvation.
(Black Christ, p. 18-19)

In other words, in order to integrate their faith with their owning of slaves, slave owners spiritualized Jesus. White supremacist Christianity has nothing to do with your material conditions. Brown-Douglas quotes the Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London in the 18th century, laying it out very clearly:

The Freedom which Christianity gives, is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and Satan, and from the Dominion of Men’s Lust and Passions and inordinate Desires; but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond or free, their being baptized and becoming Christians, makes no matter of Change in it.

The Bishop was quoted in this Proslavery Petition, November 10, 1785 to the General Assembly of Virginia from the “Free Inhabitants of Halifax County.”

Unfortunately, these values didn’t go away at the end of the civil war. Between 1919 and 1939, according to Robert Moats Miller, white people in the United States “hung, shot, burned, gouged, flogged, drowned, impaled, dismembered, garroted, and blowtorched” to to death more than 500 black people in lynchings. (from the The Protestant Churches and Lynching, 1919-1939, The Journal of Negro History, pp. 118-131)

This lynching happened In Marion, Indiana in 1930, two hours from where I grew up in Goshen. 2,000 people participated in this lynching. The names of the black men in this photo are Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. A third man, James Cameron escaped at the last minute and lived until 2006.

Because of how disturbing the images of Thomas and Abram are, we often miss the smiling faces of the white people in these images:

What is behind these smiles? A presentation by Dr. Joy DeGruy first drew my attention to these smiling faces and during a presentation she did at the annual White Privilege Conference in 2010. She pointed out the deep sickness of white supremacy and it’s symptom of dehumanization of black and white people that made these smiles possible.

It might be easy for us to say, “Oh, those people weren’t Christians.” But that’s too easy. Yes, these are sinners, but so are we. Walter White was an anti-lynching activist and president of the NAACP during this period. He said: “It is exceedingly doubtful that lynching could possibly exist under any religion than Christianity” - (quoted in Amy Louise Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle” , p. 50)

This lynching happened In Omaha, Nebraska in 1919. And 4,000 people participated in the riot aimed at lynching this man, Will Brown. The riot is chronicled in harrowing hour by hour detail on Wikipedia.

Again we have the smiling faces.

Dr. James Cone in his presentation, “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree” (video here) points out that these weren’t just random acts of violence. Rather, they worked like Crucifixions. Crucifixions were set up to keep Roman slaves and poor people from political revolt. In the same way, lynchings were meant to keep black people in their place: that is subject to white control and oppression.

30 years later this same bigotry was on display in reaction to the lunch counter sit ins. This photos is from the a 1963 sit in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.

While overt bigotry like this is not acceptable today in the way it was then, but that sickness behind those white smiles at the lynching do not go away so easily. They haven’t disappeared as cleanly as we would like to believe.

For example, In the 5 years I’ve lived here near the corner of Pratt and Ashland, it’s become really clear how disrespected the black and Latino kids who hang out on this corner are. I’ve seen police officers call them animals. When I suggested to the officer that this wasn’t appropriate, he told me I didn’t really know them. While this officer happened to be more honest than most, it becomes pretty clear that this is the view held by most officers.

Four years ago, I wrote here about watching an officer sit in hiscar and watch as two black kids fought each other. When I asked him why, he said he was worried they’d grab his gun. Would he have acted the same way if I as a white person were being attacked? This officer was smart enough not to wear his racism on his leave, but the results are the same.

It would be easy for me to see this problem as one limited to jaded police officers who have been soaked in the racist atmosphere of the Chicago Police department. But unfortunately, the problem goes deeper than that. Indeed it such a critical issue, that Mennonite Church USA had anti-racism as one of its four vision and goals from 2000-2010.

We in the US Church today, need to consider slaveholder and segregationist Christianity as we read the bible. Next week I’ll share about how this lens affects how I read the Beatitudes and some practical things ways it helps me to think about how I can be an ally to oppressed people.

The movie is a slice of day-to-day life for Ceasefire staff, known as Violence Interrupters. From the summer of 2009 through the spring of 2010, we watch Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra as they seek to personally engage with victims and perpetrators and, perhaps most importantly, victims and their friends on the edge of becoming perpetrators.

All three of the interrupters have a personal history of involvement with gangs and violence themselves. They understand what’s going on for the kids and young adults (age 14-25), but they also have credibility. Ameena is the daugher of Jeff Fort, a high profile gang leader, and she made her own name for herself. Cobe and Eddie both served prison time. At one point at a staff meeting, a Ceasefire leaders says there is "500 years of jail represented here, that’s a lot of wisdom."

As someone who has spent my whole life in the Mennonite Church and many years with Christian Peacemaker Teams, The Interrupters is an introduction to peacemaking done in a very different way.

This movie does not explicitly talk much about systemic issues like racism or economic injustice, but all but one of the Ceasefire leaders featured are men and women of color confronting violence in a language and style that is their own, not imposed or borrowed. This is not mediation done Sunday school style. My wife Charletta describes it this way:

"By matching the intensity of words and anger, they validate the experience of pain and trauma, yet urge youth not to respond with violence. In the heat of the moment, they plead with victims not to retaliate or they will end up in jail, maybe dead. Let it rest, walk away, what’s done is done, where does violence get you?"

The principles of restorative justice are on display. There’s a scene where a 17-year -old boy who has spent two years in jail goes back to apologize to the people in the barber shop he robbed. One of the women who was there when he robbed them tells the ex-robber exactly how painful and traumatic that moment was for her and her family over the last three years. The pain and anger are not glossed over. In fact they add credibility to the redemptive moment.

The theory behind Ceasefire is that violence spreads like an epidemic. Just like society used to see tuberculosis or plague victims themselves as the problem, today we usually individualize violence. Instead, Ceasefire treats violence as we would an epidemic: by stopping the spread. They identify the spread of violence as a two step process:

1. The grievance. It might be that someone disrespected you, or looked at your girlfriend. Or maybe they called the cops on you. Or maybe they killed your friend.
2. Violent retaliation. This is addressing the grievance by fighting the person or pulling a gun and shooting. "If you don’t retaliate, people will just walk all over you," one girl in the film says. Violence is defense of your honor.

This means that a lot of the work of Violence Interrupters is relationship building with those most at risk, those who have been most exposed to violence and are on the edge of retaliation. But in some cases, there isn’t time for that. The camera is present for a number of bloodied heads and one attempted stabbing in which Ameena intervenes. We also follow Tio Hardiman, director for Ceasefire in Illinois, as he visits an Interrupter shot when he approached two men fighting.

The Interrupters is an important reminder for Mennonites that we don’t have the corner on peacemaking. We have a lot to learn from Ameena, Cobe, Eddie and all the other Violence Interrupters out there. See when the movie coming to your city or arrange your own screening.

Photo Caption: Violence interrupter Cobe Williams and Lil’ Mikey, Photo by Aaron Wickenden/Courtesy of Kartemquin Films

Just wanted to remind everyone that bigotry is not confined to the continent of Africa. I didn’t include URLs because I would rather not contribute to traffic counts on some sites.

“Isn’t it appalling that the United States of America would try to force the acceptance of homosexuality on other nations but at the same time we would not force them to take care of their religious minorities and they would permit discrimination and persecution of Christians?” - Pat Robertson

or someone named Janet Mefferd, described as a radio talk show host, acknowledges that

“in Nigeria not only is gay marriage a crime punishable by a fourteen year jail term but any person who registers, operates or participates in gay organizations faces a decade in jail.” Then she adds, “Alright [sic], but they’re not killing them, are they?” [Uh — dear Janet, yes they are, in some places.]

Then there’s someone named Paul Stanley writing on Christian Post:

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday put the Obama administration clearly on the opposite side of Christians seeking religious freedom in the debate over human sexuality.” The headline, admittedly perhaps not composed by this “reporter,” says “Clinton Says Obama Wants Gay Rights Over Religious Freedom in Key Speech.”

Finally, for now (sadly, I could go on and on), there’s this headline from World Net Daily: “Obama offers plan for U.S. to be global LGBT sex cop/Wants to import homosexuals with special asylum privileges.” That’s atop an article bylined Bob Unruh. Sigh.

After having the inevitable and frustrating conversation with my Granny about the riots - the one where she says,“it wasn’t like this in the 1930s, children did what their parents said”, “why do you want to live in Hackney?” etc, and I can’t argue because she’s my Gran – I needed to write something…
 
According to my Gran, there used to be lines of starving, emaciated men waiting in queues patiently to find work. Nowadays, the young don’t even want to work. In the old days you would never have gone out if your parents told you to stay in, nowadays kids have no respect. They’re not starving, they’ve got loads of stuff – they’re just greedy, lazy and selfish.
 
So why the change, what has happened to make us (and she does still include in me in ‘the youth’!) so disrespectful and selfish? And, depending on which media you read/watch, are these rioters disrespectful, selfish thugs who’ve never had it so good? Or are they victims of a era of austerity cuts, unemployment and a Tory government?
 
My own view is that, yes, they are disrespectful and selfish and do have it good in some ways – they have ’stuff’ and possibilities of choosing differently – but I can’t conceive of that in isolation from a much wider political and economic context. The Tory government of today, cutting back services that have quietly helped to build a stronger sense of community, and the financial turmoil leading to unemployment are not mutual exclusive from greedy youngsters. All are an inevitable consequence of a society based on liberal capitalism. I’m not saying that people don’t always have a choice in how to behave, what I am saying is that it is impossible for everyone to feel a valued part of society when that society is based on some getting richer at the expense of many more others.
 
Since my Gran was a youngster, consumerism and a culture of instant gratification have come to dominate our society. We all want more than we’ve got (even if we’re good activists and it might only be for a moment), we all want to have. Some have an awful lot – they get good jobs (at the expense of others), push themselves to the top of their company (at the expense of others), can buy whatever they like and send their kids to university (also sometimes at the expense of others). Society works for them. But others don’t get the jobs, don’t get the promotion, get pushed out of higher education because there would be no worth in it if everyone got in and passed. It doesn’t excuse violence and looting but points towards a motive, voiced by the teenagers involved.
 
But its not any individuals fault, or just a class thing. Our whole economic system perpetuates (let’s call it what it is) greed and ownership at the expense of others. It made me really angry to see my neighbourhood all smashed up. My local electrical shop was looted in the riots for nothing other than greed. As awful as it is, they’ll get back on their feet. But if a Curry’s and PC World moved in up the road, they’d die a slow death and never recover. Shareholders getting richer at the expense of others, for nothing other than greed. And how may local convenience stores have died a death at the hands of Tesco? And its not simply individuals who suffer. The pursuit of profit inherent in our economy has seen mass pull-out of investment for whole countries when stock market gambling is stacked against them.
 
And then there’s the violence. State sanctioned violence (i.e. the police) protects the property of the haves. Does that subconsciously mean people think it’s OK to perpetuate violence in order to ‘have’? I don’t know, I hate violence in all it’s forms. Whether it’s looting, looters getting beaten, police getting beaten, armies ‘protecting’ our country… It all simply create further problems.
 
As the rioters themselves have said, it’s about an expression of agency, or power. For the section of society that functions reasonably, or very well, in our current economic and political set up, we express power day to day and when it is taken away we write, call meetings, march, sit-in and all manner of things. So when those that don’t experience this day-to-day begin to feel a sense of their own agency through extreme ‘fun’, grabbing consumables in a violent and illegal way, it might be an immature adolescent response that isn’t very well analysed but it is an expression of power nonetheless.
 
A society that is based on accumulation of wealth (greed) and protection of that wealth, or property (power/violence), is going to see ugly manifestations of both at either end of the spectrum. What is needed is not just more investment in deprived communities from the taxes grudgingly paid by the haves, or teaching criminals a lesson – but a whole new way of knitting people together in a social solidarity, that does not base status on productivity or financial remuneration. You all value friends and family over your stuff, right? Same thing, we just have to take that extra leap to put more people before our stuff.
 
The most obvious, often romanticised yet a reality for some people I know, example is subsistence farming – everyone is necessary and plays a vital role. You live off what you grow and make and share extra with others. There is no point hoarding produce that will go off so sharing becomes easier and greed becomes ridiculous. You’re physically tired at the end of the day and satisfied you’ve played a part. Small farming communities tend to create their own entertainment, another way of valuing members, rather than hyping up ‘better’ people.
 
So what about the city? Let’s imagine! With no government blue prints, no big economic systems, just small local groups starting to figure it out for themselves. But this isn’t pipe dream, it’s already happening – especially in places like Hackney where gardening projects, lunch clubs, meals, youth arts projects, co-operative cafes, free shops and all sorts promote a sense of investment and pride. There’s still a lot to do (obviously) but if our national focus was not economic growth perhaps we’d see the local community become more of a priority and the sense of solidarity rather then economic gain flourish.
 
Further Reading

These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting, The Guardian, 10 August, 2011

Last year was not my best year. Looking back I understand much of my dissatisfaction, but I would be lying if I said I have it all figured out, and I never expect to fully understand it. The biggest thing I came to realize last year was that I felt stagnant, in relationships, in my studies, with God. Wrapped up in my routine and my self-pity and my selfishness, toward the middle of first semester, I realized that I needed to do something really different from my usual activity for the summer.  I wanted to immerse myself in a different community and a different lifestyle.  I wanted people who would challenge my faith and the comfortable life I live. And I wanted to serve, to completely break off from my normal routine and just focus on serving others and looking for the face of God in those around me. I was lucky enough to get all of this and more. I came away from my SIP experience teeming with the love, knowledge of injustice, and will for justice that abounds in the community I found, but I also came away with the faces of our friends from the street imprinted in my mind and with the heartbreak of less than three months’ time living among Atlanta’s disinherited. The only other time I had more than passed through Atlanta in my life was in 2003 when I spent a week there for the Mennonite youth convention. The theme of that year’s convention was “God’s table-ya’ll come.” Now, 8 years later and after my second stay in Atlanta, I think I have finally learned what that phrase really means.

I spent my summer living at the Open Door Community at 910 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia. The Open Door is an intentional community that, for the past 30 years, has housed between 15 and 30 people, with that number depending on the comings and goings of those who volunteer long-term or are taken in to the community because they are in need of a home. The mission of the community is to “stand in solidarity with the disinherited.” The house offers a soup kitchen twice a week, showers and a change of clothes three times a week, a medical clinic and foot clinic once a week, as well as a women’s clinic twice a month, worship and a community meal every Sunday, and transportation to a state prison a couple hours from Atlanta once a month for families to visit their sons, brothers, fathers, nephews, grandsons, and cousins, and these are just the formal services the community offers. Over the years, members of the community have taken on side projects, such as authoring books, visiting death row inmates and their families, corresponding with those in prison, putting their bodies in the way of violence, sleeping on the street, accompanying the deserted to court, instigating protests, being imprisoned for civil disobedience, and more. Each time the state of Georgia carries out an execution, the community gathers, along with others opposed to the death penalty, on the steps of the State Capital to hold a vigil beginning half an hour before the execution is scheduled to take place and ending half an hour after the lethal injection began to seep into the veins of that brother. Silence overcomes those steps as the community stops to acknowledge the life and death of person and the continuation of state murder, committed in the name of Georgians statewide-an especially troubling fact for those who are residents of this community that attempts to propagate love and sustain life and thereby citizens of this same Georgia.

The Open Door is a sanctuary for the marginalized-for the poor, the homeless, those oppressed because of race or ethnicity, for women, and for anyone else who may wander into the front yard or the dining room. I learned firsthand what a safe haven it is for women. One morning I was running. My route was coming to a close, and just a few feet before I reached the yard I passed a couple of men who I recognized from our soup kitchen. I nodded to them and said hello as I ran past, as is my custom with anyone, and the greeting I received in return was, “Hey baby, looking good,” coupled with a very unwelcomed lingering stare, just one example of the blatant objectification and the masked misogyny mostly likely taught to these men at a young age at their finest. I did not stop to say anything to the man who apparently mistook me for his “baby.” Instead, I took my last few steps, and as I climbed the steps off of the sidewalk into the yard I turned and stared directly into that man’s eyes. As soon as he saw where I was headed, he burst into a frantic and lengthy apology, trying to swallow up the words he had let slip without a second thought. He knew how to treat women in that yard and in that house. I just gave him a knowing look, waved, and continued into the house.

This summer, I was surrounded by people who relentlessly prayed and acted and lived for justice and a better tomorrow for the poor and the mentally ill and the homeless and the person of color, and I couldn’t help but catch their fervor. The changes began after I had only been in the house for a few days, and I noticed myself constantly scanning the streets of Atlanta for any of our homeless friends so that I could wave or save “Hi” because they were just that-they were becoming my friends, not anonymous recipients of my sympathy or my money or my embarrassment about the great societal and economic divides that I help perpetuate. I learned to live in an inter-generational, inter-denominational, inter-racial, inter-class background household.  I also had my fair share of education in less significant skills, such as driving without power steering, playing acey-duecy backgammon, and making ham, mustard, and mayonnaise sandwiches at an alarmingly rapid rate.

It was not just the servanthood and the community that I found rejuvenating. I had time to lie down in the park, bake bread, read for fun, make falafel, and walk or run (or both) every day-things I am not always so good about making time for at school. I was reminded what living a balanced, intentional life feels like.

I learned to host showers, dip soup with just the right wrist action, cross city streets without any hesitation, live in a house without desserts, buy 60 loaves of bread in one fell swoop at Kroger without feeling the least bit strange, spend time alone, mutter “Amen” or “Praise the Lord” or “Glory be” without feeling the least bit bashful or out of place, to prepare a meal for 40 people in under two hours, how to pluck at a banjo, the evolution of the prison system and its intertwining with the legacy of slavery in Georgia, to run on hills in the midst of rush hour exhaust without passing out, to live not knowing who would eat or sleep in our house on any given day but to instead rely on the stability of Jesus Christ and the power of God to keep the community a-turning, to understand the dichotomy of the domination system-the American Empire-and the Beloved Community of Christ-the peaceful world that the community spoke of each time we sang the words “I have another world in view.” I learned just how dehumanizing our prison system really is, hearing my housemates talk about the hard lesson of learning “throw the food into the back of their throat” (as the guards put it) in the three minutes they were allowed to eat each meal under the threat of going to the hole if they did not finish in time. I understand that prison is not supposed to be a pleasant place-I hardly think anyone is under the impression that it is-but I absolutely do not understand how we can continue to claim that rehabilitation is in any way a goal of our prisons, and I do not understand a world in which we stand idly by and let our brothers and sisters continue to suffer under this abuse. When someone is given three minutes to eat moldy food-no talking, no sharing, no nutrition, no welcome table-there is no healing and certainly no reflection on what landed them in that situation. There will only be more anger, more fuel to use again, more confusion as to what they could have possibly done in their lives to get shoved to the bottom again and again. This mistreatment leads to a continued cycle of violence. Those at the bottom of society-those in the yard of the Open Door-carry this weight of rage with them, and it is sometimes unleashed at our home. They cannot get to those at the top who have made their lives so hard-the wealthy employer, the policymaker, the police person, the apathetic middle class citizen-so part of our work is to help absorb the weight of this rage, to face it when it boils over, to treat people with humanity when it does, to put our bodies at the mercy of violence and receive whatever comes with nonviolence. We discussed this idea of vertical violence in our reflection time after soup kitchen one day when Nelia, my housemate and pastoral friend, had been spat on and almost punched by a man who was very upset in the yard. Co-founder Ed Loring responded by laying out this idea of vertical violence that creates an even greater distance between those at the top and those at the bottom. He called us to “reduce the distance,” and part of reducing that distance is putting ourselves in places where we can break cycles of injustice and practice nonviolence even though there is not a widespread revolution happening right now.

I learned, as Ed puts it, to “live with a broken heart” and to feel the true weight of the devastation in the immediate Open Door Community and the community that includes our friends from the street. When I explained these feelings to my housemate Quiana, her response was, “Welcome to the Open Door.” It broke my heart when my housemate Michael disappeared without a trace except for the three police officers that came to the door looking for him the next day. It broke my heart to learn that it is illegal to feed people in public places in not only Atlanta but in many cities in the U.S. When I shared similar sentiments with Nelia, she told me that it is these feelings that make living at the Open Door both so beautiful and so trying, that one cannot have the full experience of the community-the alternative lifestyle-without that heartbreak, and this is true.

Community life is centered on “the circle.” the circle serves as a physical representation of the Welcome Table in the Beloved Community of Christ. We formed the circle before meals, soup kitchens, showers, send-offs for prisons trips and vigils, around the Eucharist during Sunday afternoon worship, around those receiving blessings for surgery, around those who were still in the first fresh hours of mourning the death of a loved one. The circle served to physically and spiritually re-center the community. It brought us out of our business and reminded us of why we did the work we did. Guests and strangers were welcomed into the circle each day, and as we joined hands, announcements and prayer requests passed around the circle. We then moved into prayer-a real heartfelt prayers, the kind you need to sustain a community-and finished with a song of liberation, giving our prayer a final push toward God’s ear.

After one such circle on Thursday June 23, with the tune of “down by the riverside” and the words “Gonna stop that Georgia killing machine, ain’t gonna study death no more”, the community made the short trip from our home to the Georgia state capitol building in downtown Atlanta to hold vigil while Roy Willard Blankenship was put to death at 7:00 p.m. each time there is an execution, the Open Door Community, along with others from the Atlanta area, gather on the steps of the capitol building, donning anti-death penalty shirts and signs, to protest the continuation of state murder in Georgia and other places around the united states and to stand as witnesses for the life-the humanity-of the person dying at the hands of the state. The vigil begins half an hour before the lethal injection is given. Words and song and prayer are shared among those gathered, and at 7:00 p.m., the bell of Central Presbyterian Church, across the street, tolls and five minutes of silence follow.

I have opposed the death penalty for as long as I have known that it exists, but I have never had much more of a connection to it than that-just opposition. At the Open Door, a day did not pass that we did not pray for Roy and for the abolition of the death penalty. Everything in the community stopped to observe his execution. And when his lifeless body was removed from the gurney at Jackson state prison, it was sent to jubilee partners in comer, Georgia where we followed two days later to bury our brother Roy as one of our own among some of those who have passed from the Open Door, Jubilee (a sister community to the Open Door), and from the row. That beautiful, sunny Saturday afternoon, Murphy Davis of the Open Door, an amazing woman who has been doing prison ministry in Georgia from the last few decades, led a memorial service in which those who knew Roy, including Murphy, shared of their many visit with him during his 34 years on the row and of his amazing journey to God. They recalled the fervor with which he tried to make sure that anyone he came into contact with was saved by Jesus Christ; he never even gave up on the warden of the prison. If that kind of faith and will to preach on death row is not a mustard see, I don’t know what is. Murphy and her husband Ed had visited with Roy one last time on the morning of his execution, and at the memorial service, she shared that the first thing Roy insisted on doing when they arrived was praying for Murphy who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Roy didn’t need the prayer to be focused around him because he was ready. He had faith and did not fear death because of that faith. Roy Blankenship was executed for murder. Roy Blankenship did not commit a murder. He walked in on a murder and did not stop it-his biggest regret in life. He was offered a life sentence three different times during his years on the row, but declined each time because he refused to plead guilty to the murder he did not commit. Even death could not stop the “Roy Joy” as Quiana dubbed it, and we all felt the power of his witness and the joy in his life-and in his death-that day and in the days to come.

I helped cover Roy’s gray casket with red dirt that afternoon. After the service, Roy’s body was lowered into the earth and 20 sets of loving hands secured his place in the cemetery in silence. During my time at the Open Door, I learned more about the acts of mercy, especially about the call to bury the dead. Burying the dead might seem like a given to us, but the origins of burial as an issue come from the time of the Black Plague. Thousands of people were left to rot in streets and fields because their family and friends has already died and there was no one left to care for their remains or because those that did survive around them wanted nothing to do with their contaminated bodies for fear of succumbing to the illness themselves. Are the bodies of those executed by the state so different? Are they any less deserted? Are they treated as though they are any less contaminated? I do not know about the rest of the world, but at least in Georgia, these bodies are buried with love and care-with mercy.

The first time I helped with soup kitchen at the Open Door, I was assigned to the official position of “bag lady.” Posted outside the door of the dining room, I helped people bag up the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they had made at the table. As I bagged sandwiches, Horace Tribble handed out vitamins just a few feet away. When the traffic slowed for a minute, I asked Horace if he always gave out the vitamins. He said he did, and as I searched for a response-words were not coming easily that day and the littlest thing seemed to have to power to fluster me-all I could come up with was, “Well, you must be a real professional then.” Immediately after I blurted out this profound insight, the volunteer working the medical cart quickly leaned over and corrected me, saying, “Now do you mean professional or expert? Because to be a professional just means you get paid to do something; you don’t have to know anything about it. It is an expert that really knows about something but may receive no payment at all.” “Great,” I thought, “a whole 36 hours into my stay here and I have already made a fool of myself with my middle-class bourgeois language. Lucky no one judged me too much for the slip-up, but from that point on, I was on constant guard when it came to my use of language. As my time came to a close at the Open Door, so did me fear of speaking, speaking incorrectly to be more specific. I found my voice at 910, and a large part of that discovery was learning the vocabulary to articulate why I live the way I live. I finally gained the rhetoric for the beliefs and values upon which I have tried to base my decisions and actions since I first realized that my life affects the lives of others, and I will carry that valuable gift of language with me-and hopefully continue to build upon it-for the remainder of my years in this world. Perhaps it is no coincidence that my first Sunday in Atlanta, Murphy Davis preached on the importance of language in our Christian faith, sharing about the ways in which “our language expresses out values.”

My discovery happened through a combination of discussion, somewhat forced and adjustment to the circumstances in which I found myself, and a natural transformation. I am no longer hesitant to strike up a conversation about a rockier topic, to sit down and have a chat with a complete stranger, or to let language barriers or different accents stand in the way of understanding what someone it trying to say. I began my summer in fear, taken aback at my first soup kitchen when a small issue arose among some of the volunteers and it was brought to the table as everyone was eating together after the house had closed for the morning. Ed’s immediate response to the issue was “name it”-name the specific issue and the specific people involved-to everyone. Confrontation. My first day. Right in front of me. I was so uncomfortable and dreaded the day someone would bring up an issue with me for all to hear. I ended my summer in confidence-confidence that it is in fact both helpful and necessary to “name” issues when they come up in my life and confidence that it will be more fruitful in transforming relationships, lead to more personal growth, and nip more issues in the bud if I just address them as they are when they come up. This confidence came from both personal reflection on past experiences, both at the Open Door and in my life before the Open Door, and one particular conversation with ed. he spoke of the “responsible self” and the idea that self-hood is found in one’s ability to respond to a situation, and because of that we, as individuals, owe it to ourselves, to those around us, and to our Creator to respond to-to engage with-the issues that face us in our journey, to be informed about what is going on in our world and the world of our neighbors near and far, to point to the elephant in vast room of society and ask, “Okay, so why is this here, and what are we going to do about it?,” and to be open to facing our own mistakes. He discussed this as a parallel to the idea of action-reflection-transformation, a practice born of liberation theology and now used as the model in Open Door daily life and conflict resolution.

Now in no way am I saying that I enjoyed every minute of my time at the Open Door or was able to get a good conversation out of every struggle I came up against. There were days I felt exhausted for no reason, days I just wanted to cry, long days when basement clean up at the end of the night just about pushed me over the edge. Over time, certain habits and quirks of other community members got on my nerves a little bit, and sometimes my patience wore thin. Even something I knew to be as vital as the Monday night community meeting would put me in a sour mood from time to time as the meeting sometimes dragged past the two hour mark. Community is hard. Living in this community was really hard. There was give and take, and sometimes it feels like a lot more give, but the rewards came in due time and often in subtle ways. As soon as I left the Open Door, I realized just how accustomed I had become to being buoyed by love and care of a supportive community, and it suddenly seemed impossible to imagine going the rest of my life without that kind of mutual flotation device. The challenges of community can be life-giving when faced with an open heart and an open mind. It takes the work of all to build up the Beloved Community.

Community also leaves something to be desired for everyone. There will always be changes that each member of any community sees as both necessary and obvious, but the changes I ventured to dream of often ended up seeming unimportant to me when I looked at all the Open Door has done over the years and continues to do. I often wondered who I was to question anything about this place that had survived 30 years when community seems so fragile. I have no doubt the next decade will test the Open Door. As the leadership continues to age, they will have to decide when and how to give up their position at the wheel and whom to give it up to. As a new generation of leaders trickles into the house, there may well be a call for comprise and change when it comes to the crux of the ideology put into practice by the community; new leaders may see new issues and new ways to go about dealing with them and talking about them. If the house is going to continue to serve in some capacity, there is no option but to pass on decision making to people who never took part in the Civil Rights Movement, people who learned about Jim Crow from History textbooks not from personal experience (at least not the blatant segregation present in the United States until the last few decades), so they may want to take some of the focus off of the activists and sentiments of the 1950s and 1960s simply because they will never know that frustration and that passion and that moment in time like the Open Door’s current leaders do. But they will have passion. They will have direction. And they will create change, it may just look different-and perhaps a bit scary-to those who nurtured the Open Door from the ground up. However, I also stand with full conviction that the Open Door of today and yesterday is too precious to just let die away. The youth of today may not know the face of Civil Rights like their parents and grandparents do, but that does not make the lesson that those people and that time have to teach of any less value, and it does not make racism-though better hidden today-any less real.

I will never be the same because of the alternative lifestyle I was welcomed in to this summer. When I see the letters “P.O.,” I now think parole officer, not post office; I have become accustomed to a 10 minute circle as a precursor to nearly all of my daily activities; I have learned to never expect a short answer-about anything; I have been introduced to violence and instability and rage and love and reconciliation and mercy and determination and hope. I will forever be followed by-and seek out-the now familiar smell of homelessness, not only the actual smell of stale urine and feces, days or weeks of sweat, body odor, and often cigarettes or alcohol, but also the stink of the entire political system-the hate, the ignorance, and the weight-that surrounds the institution of homelessness. I still struggle each day to implement-and even to fully understand or articulate-what I learned this summer. It will probably take me a lifetime to process everything I witnessed, but I am okay with that because it will allow me to continue to grow-to fight the stagnation of middle-class America and mainstream Christianity-and to be vigilant for the hatred and injustice in my own actions and the actions of those around me, but more than recognizing hate, it will allow me to have an even deeper appreciation for the endless love of God and the amazing amount of love that exists in a world that so often seems to breeds hate.

Perhaps there is no “Movement” among young people today, but people ARE moving and I intend to do all that I can-with the help and guidance of God-to add to that inertia until we tumble right on in to the Beloved Community.

Being back gone is hard. Maybe the hardest thing I have ever done. What does that say about my life? When people ask me how my summer was, what am I supposed to say? “It was good.” This summer while I lived, two men—one innocent, one guilty, both made in the image of God—were killed by the state of Georgia. While I ate and slept in a home, my sis on the street woke up drenched in her own urine morning after morning because she had no place to use the bathroom before she went to sleep. While I went to Ben and Jerry’s for one small escape in my limited free time, my housemates spent their “breaks” with their parole officers or waiting hours upon hours for care at the only public hospital in Atlanta. Ya, my summer was “good.” I went to the margins to learn that my privilege will follow me a lot of places in this world. And now I am back, and what do I have to show for it? How much do people want to know? How do I impart the knowledge I have gained without becoming jaded or frustrated or too eager to share, keeping my mind open to what others have to share and detecting their transformation in the face of preoccupation with my own?

I miss belonging. I miss the simplicity of life and the weight of sharing problems. I miss Jason’s companionship. I miss laughing with Quiana. I miss daily conversations with Emma that inevitably ended in the conclusion that we were both going to lose our minds if we didn’t get out soon. Well, soon came for me. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t ready to move on to the next new and exciting thing. I don’t know how to function wanting to go back to something. I am a forward thinker. I mark off days as they pass. I am present. I don’t dwell on the past. Not until now.

Maybe it won’t take that long for me to readjust, to stop feeling so disoriented, to feel like I have purpose and balance again. Maybe it won’t happen at all. This uncertainty makes me nervous, but I think there is huge potential for growth if I just come to terms with being here for now, if I just give myself this time to marinate, trusting that God is okay with this—maybe even wants this for me—and that it is important for the future.

When I decided to go to Atlanta for the summer, Mary and Jessie told me I had to promise to come back. I laughed and promised I would, knowing that I am always ready to move on. I think I even fooled myself into thinking I was ready on the Friday afternoon that I flew from Atlanta to Indianapolis to meet my sister. It is only now that I find myself frantically backpedaling, grasping for that world again. I kept my promise in a way; I came back, but only most of me. I couldn’t quite tear away that last part.

While, I haven’t been a part of this movement, I’ve been observing them from the edges.  And, when I heard about the eviction, I was anxious.  I saw the UC Davis footage, I read stories about violent evictions in other cities—I was worried about Occupy Philadelphia.

The Interfaith Clergy group called on Philadelphia pastors to go to City Hall on Sunday night, to stand as a witness and reminder that we are called to the way of peace.  So, my colleague and I headed downtown.

It was obvious that we were clergy—some people would walk by us, and thank us for coming, but mostly we were relegated to the edges of the event.  We were marginalized, and that was ok.  We were observers, not participants.

When the Eagles football game let out, we saw more movement around the Occupy Philadelphia encampment.  Disappointed sports fans were coming up from the subway, and streaming into the square.  Many were intoxicated.  A few were very angry with the Occupiers.

One group of young men concerned me right away.  I heard them making plans to pick a fight with the protestors, to get themselves on the news.  They were convinced that they would be hometown heroes.

I watched them scheme, and as I did, I stood up, and looked directly at them.  As they moved towards the Occupiers, I continued to try to catch their eyes.

And then, distracted by activity at the other side of the square, and I lost track of them.

I found the young men again, because they approached me.  They were large, muscular, intoxicated guys—and I’ll be honest—I was scared of them.  I forgot my own role until one of the men extended his hand to me and said, “Sister, I don’t need forgiveness or absolution.  I just need you to know that I’m about to do something you aren’t going to like.  You can’t change my mind.  But I’m probably going to say and do some things you don’t want me to do.”

I stuttered and stumbled over my words.  “Uh.  Ok.   Please be safe.  Please be safe.”

And then, they disappeared into the crowd again.

Several minutes later, the young men returned.  “We blame you for this, Sister.  We couldn’t go through with it, because you were standing there…watching.”

These men weren’t much different than the protesters.  These men had all been unemployed at some point during the recession.  Dave, an experienced electrician, said if the Occupy movement started last year when he was out of work, he may have been out there with them.

What confused and angered these men—and what made them want to hurt people—was that there was no leader and no clear message in the movement.  They believed that the movement made poor, unemployed people looks lazy.  “All these people sitting around—what’s the point?”

My colleague and I listened, laughed and shared stories with these new friends, there on the steps of city hall, between the Occupy Philadelphia movement and the police on the street.  The in-between place was not a comfortable one, and if I knew what I would encounter that night, perhaps I would not have gone.  We stood where no one else wanted to stand— at the place where opposing sides meet to argue, fight and plan revenge.  But, the in-between place is exactly where the church needs to stand, as a guidepost to our better humanity, as a reminder of our common status of children of God, as listeners, story-sharers, and reconcilers.

This month Malcom Gladwell had an article in the New Yorker looking at the legacy of Steve Jobs. His central thesis is that Jobs’ gift was not originality, but rather tweaking: the ability to take the inventions of others and refine and improve them dramatically. Gladwell points out that the iPod came out 5 years after the first digital music players and the iPhone more than a decade after the first smart phones hit the market.

Gladwell is building on the work of economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr who used this lens to look at the industrial revolution in Britain. For example, they point out the importance of the many engineers who improved on Samuel Crompton’s original invention of the spinning mule. These “tweakers” dramatically improving its productivity through minor changes.

Likewise, Gladwell says, “Jobs’ sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.” Gladwell makes his point with many episodes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs. Job’s particular way of tweaking made him very difficult to get along with, even as he was dying of cancer:

At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated… Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.

Many of the other stories in the article highlight this prideful and brittle tendencies that seem inseparable from Jobs’ gift for tweaking and editing.

Getting to the Point

So now you may be wondering: what’s happened to Tim? What in the world can Mennonites learn from this ultra-wealthy baron of consumer electronics? This man whose sweatshops in China drove eighteen workers to suicide in 14 days. Whose embrace of planned obsolescence has clogged our landfills with billions of gadgets and toxic batteries. Whose walled garden threatens the commons of the internet? Not to mention the hubristic embrace of technological progress that undergirds this all.

In short, I think there are two lessons to learn, one positive and one negative:

1. We can learn from Jobs the value of tweaks and innovations of the original Anabaptist innovations.
2. We can learn from Jobs how not to force others into our box the way Apple has.

Mennonites are proud of being the first ones on the block (at least in Europe) to pull off adult baptism, pacifism and the other Anabaptist distinctives, sometimes too proud. This summer I co-led a seminar with Mark Van Steenwyk at the Mennonite convention in Pittsburgh. He shared the experience of his community in joining Mennonite Chruch USA. While recognizing the richness of the Mennonite tradition, he was frustrated by the pressure he felt to assimilate into “Mennonite-dom”. He challenged Mennonites to “hold our Anabaptist story with open hands as we network, work with, and learn from others who have their own Anabaptist stories.”

Unfortunately, when Mennonites see innovators outside our community we often label them “Anabaptist camp followers” and judge them by their ability to assimilate into our institutions and Mennonite sub-culture, what we’ll call Mennonitedom. Like Jobs we offer them our way or the highway.

Vincent Harding

The best way to understand this pattern is to look at one example in more depth. Vincent Harding is an innovator who took Anabaptist principles in new directions that Mennonites were not prepared for. In From Fort Peachtree to Atlanta: The Mennonite Story Sarah Kehrberg describes how Harding, already a Mennonite pastor, and his wife Rosemary were invited by Mennonite Central Committee to move to Atlanta, George in October 1961 to organize “Mennonite House” an experiment in integration and reconciliation. Mennonite voluntary service director Edgar Stoesz compared the civil rights struggle to World War II, in which Mennonites didn’t participate, but showed up afterwards to clean up. Mennonites “decline to participate in the interracial conflict but seek rather to bring reconciliation and goodwill.”

Kehrberg quotes Harding’s significant tweak to this tradition:

Early on he wrote,”We need somehow to move away from the passivity suggested by our dependence on the phrase ‘nonresistance,’ to a new sense of involvement and participation implied in the term ‘peacemakers.’” He recognized that this meant risk and the danger of “finding ourselves with strange bedfellows (perhaps on a prison floor), or of making common cause with those whose ultimate convictions are not exactly the same as our own.”

In his article, Moving Beyond Charisma in Civil Rights Scholarship:Vincent Harding’s Sojourn with the Mennonites, 1958-1966, Tobin Miller Shearer poignantly describes the Harding’s struggle to be heard through the veil of Mennonite passive-aggressiveness in a meeting with the General Conference Board of Christian Service in December 4, 1963:

Harding pled with his fellow Mennonites to speak to him directly, to even get “angry as hell” with him. He admitted to being angry that Mennonites played “games with this issue so often.” That anger then turned into biting critique as he lamented that God had to bring about change through the Supreme Court, the Communist Manifesto and the NAACP rather than the church. In the depth of his lament, he asked his cobelievers to become the “front light” to the world rather than the “rear light.”

By 1966, Harding had given up on Mennonites, but fortunately his vision of active, prophetic Christian challenge to racism was welcome elsewhere. In 1967, Martin Luther King turned to Harding to write the draft of his pivotal sermon to Riverside church in which he took a strong public stand against the Vietname war. 44 years later, the words of the speech are still a lodestone for the movement for peace and justice in the US:

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Today, Harding continues to challenge Christians around the world to become involved in the struggle for nonviolent social change to build the beloved community. Last summer I saw him speak at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. His authority, wisdom and warmth are remarkable.

Widening the Circle: Experiments in Christian Discipleship* tells the story of Harding and Van Steenwyk and many other tweakers who have interacted with Mennonites and the Anabaptist tradition over the last five decades. I hope that we can humbly listen to and learn from these voices over the next half century.

*Full Disclosure: I have a chapter about Christian Peacemaker Teams in the book.

Photo by Tim Nafziger

If you’re on Facebook, you can sign up here. At the event Regina Shands Stoltzfus, professor at Goshen College, will give input about her chapter which explores issues of racial diversity and Mennonite identity. Andre Gingerich Stoner, staff with Mennonite Church USA, will share about his experience at the Sojourners community in DC in the 80s and how that has continued to shape his vocation. James Nelson Gingerich, medical doctor in Goshen, will share about the founding and ongoing work of Maple City Health Care Center as the organization has chosen to be mission driven rather than survival driven. And Tim Nafziger will share about the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams and their ongoing journey toward justice and liberation.

Other topics the book engages include: the history of Reba Place Fellowship, the work of Christian Peacemaker Teams, Mennonite Voluntary Service through the lens of the Jubilee House in Elkhart, environmental justice, solidarity with recent immigrants and work of Vincent and Rosemarie Harding.

What experiments have you been a part of? What experiments do you observe happening around us in northern Indiana? Come and join this lively discussion followed by a book signing!

Light refreshments will be provided.

If you have questions about the event, please be in touch with Joanna Shenk at joannas@mennoniteusa.org

(Revised November 2011)

The Sermon on the Mount is defined as the 40+ sayings of Jesus found in Matthew 5, 6 and 7. About half of those sayings are considered by scholars to be non-authentic (meaning they were likely created by the early church rather than originating with Jesus). Non-authentic sayings are not included here. Most Sermon sayings have parallels in other gospels (Mark, Luke & Thomas). Sometimes the parallels are in simpler form, and thus probably closer to what Jesus actually said. Listed below are 21 of the most authentic Sermon sayings, along with Torah passages that Jesus probably had in mind when formulating them. Similar sayings from other traditions are offered as well.

We are marginal because no self-respecting Mennonite organization would have us. (Not that we care about no stinkin’ respect anyway.)

We reject all creeds, doctrines, dogmas and rituals, because they’re man-made and were created for the purpose of excluding people. Their primary function is to determine who’s in (those who accept the creeds) and who’s out (those who don’t). The earliest anabaptists were also non-creedal.

We are inclusive. There are no dues or fees for membership. The only requirement is the desire to identify oneself as a Marginal Mennonite. We have no protocol for exclusion.

We are universalists. We believe every person who’s ever lived gets a seat at the celestial banquet table. No questions asked! Mystic-humanist (and anabaptist) Hans Denck was quoted saying that “even demons in the end will be saved.”

We reject missionary activity. Christian mission, historically, goes hand-in-hand with cultural extermination. We love human diversity and seek to preserve it. Thus, we oppose evangelistic campaigns and mission boards, no matter how innocuous or charitable they claim to be.

We like Jesus. A lot. The real Jesus, not the supernatural one. We like the one who was 100% human, who moved around in space and time. The one who enjoyed the company of women and was obsessed with the kingdom of God. The one who said “Become passersby!” (Gospel of Thomas 42), which we interpret as an anti-automobile sentiment.

We endorse the Sermon on the Mount. Or at least the sayings within that can be identified by modern biblical scholarship as authentic. The sayings emphasizing love, mercy, compassion, nonviolence, and non-attachment to material things. We recall that the earliest anabaptists were known as “Sermon-on-the-Mount people.”

We recognize that focusing on “authentic sayings” might say as much about us as it does about the historical Jesus. There are many Jesuses around these days. We choose to hang with the merciful and inclusive Jesus of the Sermon, as opposed to the judgmental and exclusive Jesus of the church.

We are unapologetic humanists. We believe in art, evolution, relativity, paradox, synchronicity, quantum mechanics, string cheese theory, and putty tats. We value irreverence, outrageousness, and a strong cup of tea. We aim to help raise the collective consciousness, as well as the awareness we are all One.

We strive to animate the spirits of Jalaluddin Rumi (d.1273), Hans Denck (d.1527), George Fox (d.1691), Leo Tolstoy (d.1910) and Dorothy Day (d.1980), among others.

We are weirdly drawn to the example of 12 anabaptists who ran through the streets of Amsterdam in the nude in 1535.

We believe God has a funny bone as big as the cosmos, and wants us all to lighten up.

Our favorite color is lavender. Our favorite flavor is rainbow.

Visit the “Marginal Mennonite Society” Facebook page, and “like” us.

(The MMS was created in February 2011.)

Manifesto last revised: November 2011.

Email: carlosnycity@gmail.com

Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled

It’s been a month since I wrote a piece on Young Anabaptist Radicals about my experience of visiting Occupy Chicago. It was three days after they had started camping in front of the Federal Reserve of Chicago and 10 days after Occupy Wall Street (OWS) kicked off in New York. At the time, I wrote with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. The visit gave me a glimpse into the sense of possibility that I remember from watching the Seattle protests but also a dose of skepticism bordering on cynicism. What could such a small group of people really do?

A month later, the answer seems clear: plenty. It still seems miraculous in many ways. While announcing the death of apathy and despair in the United States (as Michael Moore did at Occupy Oakland on Friday) is probably premature, the OWS movement has gone a long way towards tearing down the barriers that prevent so many of us from working together for change.

I’d like to share a few observations building on the framework that Steve Kryss developed in his article for the Mennonite Weekly Review. He named these parallels between the OWS movement and the Anabaptist movement that sprung up across cities in Europe nearly 500 years ago:

The Anabaptist movement emerged largely among the young. It moved through the urban contexts of educated Europeans without clarity but with a clear bent toward justice for the poor.

It emerged in and around the Peasant Revolts, which threatened established governments and religious perspectives. The radical Anabaptists were sympathetic to those whose lives were controlled by overlords.

Early Anabaptism was a movement of conversing, addressing powers and protesting. It was met with ridicule and with sympathy. There were dialogues and diatribes.

I notice three other parallels with early Anabaptism that inspire me:

Everyone is a leader/no leaders

The focus of the Occupy movement is on everyone as leaders. It doesn’t sound too far from the emphasis that the Anabaptists places on everyone reading scripture for themselves. We look back on Anabaptists and pick out leaders like Menno Simons, but it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t on the scene at all until 1535, more than 10 years into the movement. It was hardly a leaderless movement, but compared to the contemporary hierarchies of princes and bishops, it was radically egalitarian and grass-roots.

I can’t help but contrast the OWS movement to the Obama campaign which rode the hope and change into the ground as a branding and marketing slogan. As one stood blissfully in Grant Park on the night of the election, I woke up the next morning to find that we’d swapped one president for another while the empire remained. For Obama, the “audacity of hope” meant one leader and 13 million people on an email list. For OWS, there’s an opportunity to be more than a follower. More on this in the section on process below

Persistence and growth in the face of persecution

In the last week, there’s been a series of police crackdowns across the country on Occupy camps, the most visible of which has been the attack on Occupy Oakland by police with tear gas, flash bang grenades and rubber bullets. Scott Olsen was badly hurt. But police harassment began more than a month ago with Anthony Bologna’s mace attacks on protesters. The following weekend, on Oct. 1, more than 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Like many nonviolent movements, these incidences have mostly served to bolster and grow the movement. But this growth is not without the blood, sweat and tears of those who have spent weeks sleeping in tents or less. On Saturday evening I saw Joe, one of the young men that I photographed on my first visit to Occupy Chicago. He told me a little about what it was like to have been there for 30 days and to deal with all the ins and outs. It’s not easy.

On Saturday evening, I walked and talked with Barb, a 60 year old woman who had fallen behind the rest of the marchers through downtown. She told me that she’s been waiting for decades for people to stand up against corporate greed. She talked about watching the news when she was in seventh grade and hearing that president Kennedy was assassinated. And then Martin Luther King. And then Bobby Kennedy. For her, the message was clear:If you stand up for what is right, you’ll get killed. But the courage of Joe and the Occupy Chicago movement to stand up for justice had brought her downtown on a cold October evening to march through the loop with her sign.

Focus on Process

In our interview last week, one of the lines that struck me most was from Robert Smith, a young man who had just been at Occupy Wall Street over a weekend. He said, "It’s clear that it’s more important to have everyone’s voice and everyone involved than to move forward." This was a line that he could have said cynically, but he delivered it with a real sense of wonder and joy.

Two days after talking with Robert, I went down to Occupy Chicago and sat in on my first General Assembly (GA), the daily decision-making body for the movement. This is the space where proposals are made, discussed and voted on (they need a nine-tenth majority to pass). Working committees also report back from their work and share announcements on upcoming events. For me, these meetings are the never center of the body of Occupy Chicago. It’s here where everyone can (and does) have a voice, but also where a remarkable culture around the rules of good process (stay on topic, keep it short) has developed. It’s a hard thing to describe in words. If you have the chance, I highly recommend a visit for yourself.

Along with its surface-level decision-making function, the GA also plays an important role in building ownership of decisions (and the OWS movement as a whole). When people are part of making a decision, it has much more meaning to them. It’s the means justifying the ends more than the other way around.

It is this commitment to process that takes the idea of everyone as leaders and finds a way to put it into practice. I believe it is also what created a sense of unity and cohesion through arrests and persecution. Like Anabaptists who met in caves, each Occupy city movement is developing a stronger self-identity each hour they spend deliberating on how to maintain their nonviolent discipline in the face of police brutality.

There’s still a part of me, as there was a month ago, that wonders if this movement will flame out and die. But little by little, the persistence and the process focus of this movement is drawing me in. And as I invest myself more and more in Occupy Chicago, I find the flame of real, authentic hope growing.

Last night I returned from New York State via Amtrak, following a weekend of faith-based social justice fellowship with the Word and World mentoring program. I heard three young men relate their weekend experience of Occupy Wall Street in New York City. Computer speakers played Colbert’s speech at the White House Press Dinner. Elderly voices discussed political debates in Iowa, “Those politicians are all liars” … “Well that should not attract votes the way they argue.”

Tim spotted the chance for a window into the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement from its source in New York City. We invited the activists to the café car for an interview. Eli Fender (23), from Seattle joined the camp for two weeks. Robert Smith (20) and Riley O’Neil (20) both originally from Rogers Park in Chicago (small world) both visited the camp over the weekend.

Charletta: Tell us about the movement’s shape. What are some of the tools that are important at OWS?

Eli: There’s the people’s microphone, which a lot of people know about. There’s also working groups such as the facilitation working group who guides the General assembly. In democracy you worry about where power starts welling up. So I joined the facilitation group meeting.

We don’t have leaders and we don’t have one agenda. You look at the civil rights movement and they ended because Martin Luther King got shot. They had no successor. That’s what having a leader can do to you. So if you have a movement where everyone is a leader, there’s no way your cause can be threatened. Because we don’t have an agenda, there’s no way to get us out of there. They can’t just buy us off or act like they solved it.

So the greater agenda is: the first inspiring people to protest Wall Street. You’ve got to get the 99%. The thing about true democracy is that you’ve got to be engaged and informed. So even people who don’t agree are coming down to find out and they get sucked in.

The second thing on the greater agenda is the distribution of wealth. You can’t just have the government and private sector in bed together. The fact that corporations have so much power and can buy thousands of votes means it’s no longer democracy.

Look at people who have 20 billion dollars. Nobody can possibly use that money for their needs. Some of them are in it for the power, but they don’t have compassion

We know that there isn’t a perfect form of government, but we’re trying to explore ways to do better than what we’ve got. OWS has some of the same problems that governments do, like trying to work with money. It’s challenging to approve all expenditures in the general assembly.

It’s social evolution in action. If something doesn’t work, it’s our job to get rid of it before it becomes a problem. As a community.

Some people are talking about adopting a spokes council model, where working groups send a spokesperson to a decision-making circle. The spokesperson would rotate in the working group to spread the power.

Charletta: What most concerns you in how power shows up in the movement and how do you avoid abuses of power?

In decision-making, we use temperature checks, wiggling fingers to indicate support. You can block a decision is if you think something violates the safety of the operation or your ethics. There have been 42 blocks since it started. Only one woman and one person of color blocked. The rest were white men. It seems like an entitlement thing. White men act like a leader all the time and expect to be treated that way. The whole thing is an ego check.

Another way to address power is the progressive stack. People raise hands to ask questions and get in line. But if you are in a marginalized group you get to go first, moving people of color or women or transgendered people into the center.

Tim: What does it mean that proposals are a living document?

Anything we try to establish at a higher level for the movement, which is very important given that we don’t know what we want to do yet.

The Democratic Party was trying to back us for a while. We made a statement saying that we don’t want to be a political party. We are about solidarity. Right now the OWS movement has more support than any government worldwide. We don’t want to be a campaign sticker. We don’t want to be absorbed into a party. Look at how the Republican Party absorbed the Tea Party.

Tim: Have you had experience with protests before this?

Eli: I went to some marches against Bush and against the war, but I didn’t really feel like they made a difference. Since the 70s, apathy has been the norm. There have been some really effective actions, but there’s a lot of apathy. This movement inspired me. It’s different.

One person can’t change the world, but you can change hearts. If you get enough people on board, you can change. If 99% of the world doesn’t acknowledge them, leaders lose power.

Tim: How has your experience changed the way you view the world?

Eli: I have been upset by the Democratic-Republican dichotomy. In the age of internet, why don’t people really try to do democracy seriously? General assembly sparked my imagination about how this could be done better. It wasn’t about being trained what to think, but about how to think. I’m becoming open.

Charletta: What about the role of technology?

Eli: In some ways technology is really absent. You’re sleeping outside in tents. You have a cell phone, and nowhere to easily charge it. During working groups people tell me to read the minutes online, but I’m sleeping in a park. You organize online because that’s how you reach the 99%. But you have to be there in person. It’s so interpersonal. You can’t get behind it until you hear what dozens of people have to think.

Tim: Can you say more about the interpersonal aspect?

Eli: I’m motivated to get involved in things I normally wouldn’t. I spent a day at a table petitioning to get the FDA to label food with genetically modified organisms in it. It’s empowering.

Neither of my parents voted in the last election, the one to vote in (regardless of the outcome). There’s so much apathy in the world. It’s not that people don’t want it to be different, but they feel ineffective. I want people to be empowered. Being out there and changing hearts, I feel I can make a difference.

At the same time, it is rough camping. You need breaks. Sometimes I went to Central Park by myself or with friends to climb trees, play, and be carefree for a moment. Being the symbol that it is, you are shouldering the weight of the world.

People can feel ineffective. For example, Paul was in charge of getting Occupy people to the Pete Seeger concert. He was getting frustrated, afraid no one would come. I started calling people, “Come hear one of the most famous singer activists, get your butt over here!” Paul was encouraged, with a big smile on his face. You have to have each other’s backs. As a result, we got to march with 94-year-old Pete Seeger as he sang and walked from 96^th Street and Broadway down to Columbus Circle.

Some are scared of police contact and how they might respond. We ask, “Do I have it in me to not retaliate and be nonviolent?” But with community, I know it’s not just me. If I get angry, there are others around me who will help me know how to respond. You need a dedicated community so that there is room to make a mistake and have people back you up.

Tim: How will that sense of community affect you beyond this? How does it interact with individualistic culture?

Eli: [Eli spent some time living in Japan]. Collectivist culture isn’t perfect either. Shame is a hugely powerful emotion in collectivist Japan. It’s still got a lot of problems there. You don’t want to stir the pot; going against the government is harder in a collectivist culture.

I think of OWS as a hybrid, having our individual voices and still being together. Anybody can make a proposal that could forever change the community, but if it doesn’t represent the community, it’s not going to happen. In order for a proposal to be adopted, the whole general assembly has to agree with it.

Tim: How has changing people’s minds affected you?

Eli: I’ve always been outspoken. I don’t really want to lead the class project, but I will if no one else is doing it. I have confidence in the movement and my ability to be a part of it. I know the movement has what it takes as long as everyone gives 100% and more and more people get involved.

Tim: What do you see happening over the coming months as it gets colder?

Eli: There are some really skilled people, like veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They have training for shelter building to survive cold weather. They are training and sharing skills. One guy was talking about building igloos once there is more than a foot of snow.

At this point in the interview, Robert and Riley joined us. The two of them were in high school together and traveled from Chicago to New York for the weekend.

Tim: What brought you to Occupy Wall Street? What inspired you?

Riley: I’m a business student in St. Louis and this directly affects me. I missed five classes and have the worst academic week of my life coming up, but everything I learned and benefitted from this week was so worth it. I hope this movement really does change things.

Robert: I’ve known about corruption, and if you know, it’s your duty to do something about it. I dropped out of college after one year because I wasn’t sure my degree would be worth it. If this is the revolution, then I have to be there.

Tim: Have you been at a protest before?

Robert: This is my first protest. I never thought I’d see something this size. It’s awesome. I have a lot of friends back home who would have loved to make it. I’m going to Occupy Chicago when I get back.

Tim: You talked about how the progressive stack looks at people who are marginalized. How did you experience the gathering as a space for people on the edges?

Eli: There is so much compassion in that space, whatever color you are. Some people down there don’t speak English. There is so much translation going on. It’s the most international community I’ve ever been a part of.

Tim: You also talked about a sense of entitlement?

Eli: It’s something we’re trained to do without realizing, but now I’m seeing it in myself, and am scared of it. I’m trying to check it. One guy said to us, “There is no person who has no racism in their heart.” If you’re going to facilitate, be as aware of it as you can, and work against it.

Robert: You hit it on it exactly. We’re from Rogers Park where it’s really diverse and it felt like that a little bit. There were signs in Chinese and Arabic.

Eli: There’s an info desk in Spanish. Someone from there is at every meeting.

Riley: There is nothing at OWS that isn’t being used. We just came over Friday, our first time ever in New York City. People gave us a spot, and food. It felt like a comfortable hotel. There, in the middle of the city you feel safer than ever.

Tim: What will you two take with you?

Riley: I was just on the phone, and it’s so hard to explain to someone what it’s like. You really have to see it yourself, do your own research. It is building. There were more people there on Sunday than on Friday. We were peddling on bikes to charge phones and there was a guy planting beans for the winter.

Robert: I’m definitely going out to Occupy Chicago and I’m going to bring friends. I have 1000 pictures and videos on my camera. I don’t know what else I could do but preach.

Eli: You have to share a lot. And one person isn’t enough most of the time. Don’t force anything on anyone.

Tim: What about those that are isolated, or far from a movement? How can they connect?

Eli: Go to the website for meeting minutes; see how it’s moving day to day. Get info from the source. Check out www.occupycafe.org

Riley: Through social media, this is exploding.

Eli: Without any social media, it wouldn’t be so big, but you still have to experience it directly.

Charletta: Tell us about the economics on the ground?

Riley: Where’s the food coming from?

Eli: Did you get hungry? No. Then it’s working!

Robert: When I woke up this morning, I had a box of pizza in my face.

Eli: All you really need is a sleeping bag.

Riley: And open ears.

Eli: Everything is donation-based. There’s someone who collects food donations for those with gluten allergies. It’s a gift economy; people are being thoughtful. And you don’t just give to the carnivores. And I’m doing my part by eating pepperoni!

Riley: We got back to camp at midnight one night. Someone had puked near where we wanted to sleep. An unemployed man has been living at OWS. He cleaned the puke, and didn’t even care. He told us stories about when Mayor Bloomberg was going to kick out OWS because it wasn’t clean enough, and everyone ran out, got buckets, and started scrubbing out the park. The next day it rained, as if nature were helping out.

Things are moving, not going backwards. They may pause, but we work it out in a civilized way.

Eli: The whole world is watching New York. The park is a tiny little park, about 3 train cars wide and 7 train cars long with more than 500 people sleeping there.

Tim: Cleveland had their first arrests over the weekend.

Eli: That’s good, they’ll start to grow. This movement doesn’t have a predecessor because it’s capturing so much attention.

Riley: I can now go to other occupy camps and I can tell them about what I saw at OWS and that will give me some credibility.

Eli: Don’t forget that OWS New York isn’t doing everything right.

Tim: When you have a democratic and egalitarian system, you ask, what is the authority you are drawing on when you speak? Does it matter who has been camping longest? You mentioned progressive stacks as one idea. What are some of the ways you saw this?

Eli: The system is open, but also complex. It means those who have no idea and aren’t invested don’t have as much influence. You still have a voice of course, but you have to learn.

Robert: You have to get involved. They had a $1000 weekly budget for the library. One man blocked the proposal. I thought he seemed like a jerk, but once he explained it I realized he had a point. He proposed that they make proposals of what they need and what they want. It’s clear that it’s more important to have everyone’s voice and everyone involved than to only move forward.

Eli: The highest moral authority is process. The only time you’re really wrong is if you violate process.

Riley: Everyone is very patient.

Eli: Process becomes really important if you want true democracy. Because if you get off track you’ll never get anything done.

Eli: Go down and find out yourself! Go anywhere and tell anyone you can.

They always break out of their cage either during lunch or dinner to protest the lack of food I am giving them and run around barking. So, I need to interrupt my meal and catch them. Now the strange thing happens. While sometimes they’ll run away, when I catch them, they always just lie numb on the ground and stretch their feet out towards me. They don’t try to bite me, they’re just lying there. I try to convince them by telling them it is my duty to lock them up and I’m sorry I can’t give them more food, but I can only give them as much food as possible.
No reaction.
Next, I pet them and promise them I’ll try to get extra food though I know there isn’t any.
No reaction.
On a lucky day I will actually have some extra food and they will follow me to the cage thereby getting on of their main demands: food, but giving up the other (freedom).
But most days the escalation goes on: I grab their necks and try to walk with them, but they remain numb and so it’s really hard. In the end I need to carry them to their cage and find out where they escaped and repair it, before they break out again.
All in the dark, of course, since it’s getting dark at half past five.

A little later, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two days, they will break out again, using the same method. Little by little, they wear me down. One evening they actually escaped three times by removing a six pounds heavy stone and pushing themselves through a resulting hole at the bottom of the fence. That night, I left them outside and only re-incarcerated them the next morning.

At some point I realized the dogs are using nonviolent civil disobedience against me. Or canine disobedience.

They refuse to give up their freedom, but know that violence won’t get them anywhere. If they bit me, I’d get really aggressive and had a justification to treat them worse. But now sometimes the other volunteers reproach me for putting them in the cage.

I have identified four different methods of nonviolent resistance in the dogs behaviour:

1. Sit-In (or Lie-in)
2. Noncooperation
3. Crossing fences (escape from the cage, entering the volunteers’ area
4. Boycott (one of the dogs refuses to eat the extra-food I give him to allure him into the cage)

One of the working definitions of nonviolent resistance I have often heard is: Nonviolent resistance is used by or on behalf of the oppressed, serves to end their oppressions and challenges the humanity of the oppressor to stop oppressing.

So in synthesis there’s two parties: Oppressed and Opressors. And nonviolence is the “weapon” of the oppressed.

Logically that means that if the dogs are using nonviolence, they are the oppressed.

But wait a minute! That makes me the oppressor!

But I’m not an oppressor! I’m just doing my job! The dogs have to be in the cage, else the poo everywhere, bring up litter from the enormous pile of junk right in front of our farm, and scare the tourists! You wouldn’t want to have to be scared of dogs when you come and visit me, would you?! And I’m even nice to the dogs! Some of my best friends are dogs! (like the one dog we don’t cage in, because he’s so cute and fluffy).

All these statements are the arguments oppressors worldwide use - especially those in service of the state protecting the status quo. In my current context I think of the Israeli soldiers who are my age and whom I meet whenever I leave the farm. They are the pawns of the occupation. Many of them hate standing at a checkpoint all day making Palestinians wait the whole day. But it’s their job and they are legally obligated to serve in the military. (In Israel there is a universal draft. Men have to serve three years, women two. It’s one of the very few countries in the world that drafts women)
They get these guns and are told to keep those terrorists from getting stupid ideas.
It’s like Yehuda Shaoul from Breaking the Silence said during my CPT delegation: “I’ll give you a gun and you can try to control a thousand people who are waiting at the checkpoint. It only works with fear. So you count them and harass every 10th Palestinian. It’s as simple as that.”

I realize that the dogs have worn me down through their nonviolent canine disobedience. I also realize that I started to escalate the conflict. To keep them from breaking out there are now bigger stones around the fence. Maybe next time they escape I will throw them into the cage, because if I open the door the other dogs already incarcerated will escape. I have less motivation giving them food, or to spray them against lice.

The fence is strong enough now, but they grow stronger every day and it’s time to seperate them in big cages on the corners of the farm so they can be watchdogs and each has more space. More space, but also solitary confinement.

I spoke of the one side of me that is getting more aggressive towards the dogs. The other side one wants to join them, lie around the whole day, howl at the moon at night and eat food scraps.

But I’ve signed a contract and the work on the farm is meaningful and important.

Once again I use the justification of cops who beat up protesters, and soldiers on the whole world.

“The BMC”, as it is commonly called, is short for The Brethren Council on Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Interests. I know the name is long and very forgettable but the people who are part of the BMC definitely aren’t . This year the BMC celebrated 35 years of fierceness and fabulousness. That’s nine years longer than I’ve been alive. Some of the people I met this weekend were advocating for LGBT inclusion before I knew I was gay and even before I was born. For over three decades these people’s voices have been silenced by both Mennonite and Brethren denominations and yet they keep working, keep advocating, and most surprisingly they keep laughing.

The laughing part is what most surprised me; these people have some painful stories to tell but they also have some absolutely hysterical ones. Everyone had stories to tell and so many of these stories resulted in hearty laughter. Whether it’s an awkward coming out story or taking a family picture in plain drag, these queer folk have some amazing stories.

The weekend started off with the basic meet and greet and then went into hearing a little about the organization for us newcomers. Saturday morning we had workshops on some of the issues that affect LGBT folk. Saturday afternoon we had a great time just hanging out and getting to know each other. I was able to meet so many amazing people and there were many women and men there that a young person just coming out could learn from. I know this is a common observation but I was struck by how normal and typical some of the couples were. Couples who met at church or church retreats, a couple who had been together for decades and had 5 kids! I know these things should not surprise me but it has taken me awhile to reorient my thinking of what it means to be queer having grown up in a conservative home and struggling for so long to reconcile my identity with my faith.

But the best part came Saturday evening when we had story time followed by more story time around a camp fire. Wow! Fantastic endless laughter- I couldn’t begin to relate these stories in any way that would do justice to them so just know if you’ve never hung out with queer anabaptists and heard their stories, well, you haven’t lived. As hard as it is for me to know that we are excluded from so many anabaptist congregations I realized this weekend it’s the people who are doing the excluding that are really missing out.

On Sunday morning we had a good old-fashioned hymn sing (with plenty of tenors and altos), a sermon and communion. We meditated on the parable of the the salt and light and lit candles for those who had gone before us, both queer and straight-ally anabaptists, who started the work of making our denominations and churches more welcoming places. I’ve realized how fortunate I am to be a gay anabaptist today and how much I owe to thos who have been working for inclusion these past three decades. I know I am a crazy optimist but I’m sure that I will see the work of those anabaptists come to fruition soon and I’m so thankful for the work they’ve done to make many of our churches more welcoming places.

Of all the stories this group of people has to tell I believe the most compelling one is to be filled with joy in the face of adversity and to keep telling your story over and over to anyone who will listen. I’m reminded of the story in Romans about the Jerusalem council when the in crowd of Jewish christians was trying to keep the gentile christians out of their congregations. Finally after a long debate Peter told stories of the work the Holy Spirit had been doing among the gentiles and the in crowd fell silent.

So I will keep telling stories of the work the holy spirit is doing in my life and the lives of my queer sisters and brothers, praying that one day the in crowd will fall silent and together we can come out and be the kind of queer church we were meant to be.

What’s more, I was lucky enough not to live at arms length from those who were poor. Our family and the work of my parents had us building relationships with those who were poor. I got to listen to, had friendships with, and walked side-by-side with those who were struggling with poverty. These experiences and relationships have changed my life. Now, being formed by these relationships, I find myself continuing to walk with those who are poor. This has led me to work in prisons, homeless shelters, and in communities in South Africa where my hope is that I can be in solidarity with those whose lives are spent struggling against that which systemically causes, creates, or keeps people in poverty. This is, after all, a struggle for justice.

One reality, however, that continues to cause confusion, especially among Christians, is the question of whether the gospel message deals with economic or material realities. One verse that has caused much confusion is Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

This verse begins one of the most powerful and revolutionary “sermons” or teachings ever articulated. The Sermon on the Mount, as it has become known, flipped many assumptions, expectations, and understandings of the day upside down. In fact it continues to do so. It articulates a seeming foolishness that we are called to trust, follow, and embody. In our world it seems to make no sense to love our enemies, go the second mile for those who are willing to exploit, forgive and pray for those who persecute us. Yet this is the upside down logic Jesus provides.

This sermon’s revolutionary nature is noteworthy. When we moved to Bolivia in 1980, the dictator Garcia Mesa had just come to office. Mesa made a list of books that were banned to Bolivian people. Included in this list were Matthew chapters 5-7! Why would a ruler ban these chapters? Because he recognized the danger they posed to his power, authority, and rulership. Mesa recognized that if his citizens were actually to practice what is taught in these three chapters, he would have a difficult time achieving his political goals. These chapters are revolutionary!

Unfortunately, we often interpret these passages (and even Jesus’ life and teachings in general) in ways that dilute its revolutionary character. We mold and interpret these passages in ways that are easier and safer to grasp, both politically and economically, so that, if we are in a position of power, we don’t have to feel too threatened by its message. We alter its good-news message so that it does not have to affect our positions of power and status.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” is one such example. Sometimes it seems that North Americans gravitate towards Matthew’s rendition of the Sermon on the Mount as opposed to Luke’s version, perhaps in part because Matthew seems to “spiritualize” the situation—“Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew) as opposed to “Blessed are the poor” (Luke). Surely, it is thought, the good news is not just for the poor. For this reason we tend to understand that those who are spiritually poor are also somehow blessed. Surely, one might say, the gospel message isn’t making an economic statement. Matthew’s rendition provides more ambiguity than Luke’s, making its message easier to swallow, especially if we are not in a position of poverty.

Matthew 5:3 has been variously interpreted, with the hope that its ambiguity can be clarified. Several elements in this verse affect how it is interpreted. Let me identify some of these:

• Some translations include the verb “to know”: “Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor…” (Good News Bible). The Greek text does not include the verb meaning “to know”.
• Matthew’s version, as opposed to Luke’s, includes “in spirit.” The Good News Bible states, “spiritually poor”. These versions seem to reduce poverty to a form of spiritual poverty.
• In the Greek text, “spirit” is a noun not an adjective. The noun appears with a definite article “the”. The impact of this article is not present in many translations. In English this changes the meaning drastically. Instead of “Blessed are the poor in the spirit” (the poor who walk in the spirit), it is “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (those who have a poor spirit or who are spiritually poor). If the sustantive character is maintained, it points to a spirit that exists within poverty that is also foundational to the character of the kingdom of God. In other words, there is a particular spirit that the poor possess that is blessed. Author R. J. Suderman in Calloused Hands, Courageous Souls: Holistic Spirituality of Development and Mission states “…The poor recognize their dependence on others, understand human interdependence, see the evil of oppression, comprehend that their situation is unjust and struggle for the change they deserve. In other words, the spirit of the poor is a blessed spirituality.”
• The Greek text could also be translated: “Blessed are the poor through the spirit.” This translation puts the poor in a favored position. The word “with” could also be an option (“Blessed are the poor with the spirit”).
• “Blessed” is often used in a passive tense. In We Belong to this Land author and scholar Elias Chacour suggests that Jesus used the word ashray from the verb yashar. Both very active words that mean to act, move, turn around, repent or put oneself on the road.

These elements provide a potentially different way of translating this verse. If we were to incorporate these insights, it could read:

“May the poor get up, move, walk, and act in-with-through the spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Put this way, the phrase sounds familiar and is in line with other teachings of Jesus:

• It affirms that the Spirit is with the poor.
• It suggests that the Spirit of the poor fits very well within the coming kingdom of God.
• It encourages the poor to move in the direction of the kingdom that has arrived.
• It suggests that as the poor move toward the kingdom, the kingdom will also be revealed in the world.

The situation of the poor will change with the presence of the kingdom. The poor are both the principle subject of the inauguration of the new kingdom and the necessary objects of its benefits. It is the poor and their situation that will be drastically transformed with the coming of the kingdom. R. J. Suderman writes, “Their situation will be transformed because the lack of equality, the oppression and the hunger and mistreatment that we understand as part of the situation of the poor in our world do not coincide with the character of this kingdom.”

R.J. Suderman suggests that this highlights the preferential option of the poor in God’s plan: “God opposes the oppressors, the wealthy and the powerful, who struggle to keep the situation as it is.” What’s more is that the spirituality found in poverty aligns with the spirituality required by God to enter the kingdom. Suderman continues, “To recognize the injustice that surrounds us, to discern the roots of oppression, to depend on the direction of the Holy Spirit, to share what little one has with the needy, to open oneself to new revelations of God and to recognize one’s dependence on God and our human interdependence are only some of the characteristics already present in the world of the poor and in the purpose of the kingdom of God.”

Such an alternative understanding moves us away from the ambiguous translation that somehow blesses a poor spirit. Poverty itself is not blessed. This understanding does not advocate that those who are poor should remain poor. This verse does not speak about poverty: it speaks about the poor. This alternate reading highlights that the spirit that the poor possess aligns better with what the kingdom of God is about, and with the economic, political, and social realities that are associated with the kingdom.

Blessed indeed is the spirit that the poor possess for it is a revolutionary spirit that challenges the political and economic assumptions that do not match with God’s alternative kingdom.

This article leans heavily on Calloused Hands, Courageous Souls: Holistic Spirituality of Development and Mission (R.J. Suderman, Monrovia, California: MARC books, 1998).

(Andrew Suderman is a Mennonite Church Canada worker in South Africa and is the Director of the Anabaptist Network in South Africa. Check out this and other columns in their Alternative News.)

The anniversary of this war marks the years of my journey doing feminist anti-war organizing (with WAND, Mennonites, and others). It is a formation that began in the early days of this war in 2001 when, as a senior at a Mennonite high school, I became pen pals with a young woman who lived in Nazareth. She spoke Arabic and English. I spoke English and Spanish. We didn’t know anything else about each others’ realities. Through English-language letters over the next year, we began to paint a picture of daily life across the world for one another.

I never imagined that 10 years later there would still be a U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
I never imagined that 10 years later I would live in Jerusalem, not far from Nazareth.

These two events are connected. My life and worldview are forever changed by them. I haven’t met my pen pal yet, but I’ve met many young women who live bravely in similarly difficult situations of second-class citizenship. It is women like them and prophetic women such as Malalai Joya in Afghanistan that inspire me to implement daily and faith-inspired ways to resist my contribution to the war and live alternatively.

This requires a significant amount of my time and creative energy. However, I can’t think of anything I enjoy doing more! It is a big part of why I am in the Holy Land now, working with MCC SALT, learning more about Jesus and the place that formed him. I want to learn from people here about the way they seek to resist injustice, and the patience, faith, and strategy required to do so throughout a lifetime.

Because it is both culturally more appropriate, and because I was a Comparative Women’s Studies major in university, I seek out women of all generations to hear their stories on this subject. I listen closely when a young girl describes her day to me; I sit close to the elders at the lunch table. In all their stories I look for clues as to what the bigger picture of life is like, and what forms resistance takes. In many ways, for most of the Palestinians I’ve met, just surviving another day under occupation is a method of resistance. Some women I met feel pushed to their “physical, psychological, and spiritual limits.” This constant push to the limits exhausts them. It can drive women apart from one another; I’ve seen that here already. Yet it can also bring them together, as others have testified. This was certainly the case in Liberia, after many years of civil war. Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian community organizer and one of the Nobel Peace Prize winners this week wrote in her book:

The women of Liberia had been taken to our physical, psychological and spiritual limits. But…we had discovered a new source of power and strength: each other. We’d been pushed to the wall and had only two options: give up or join up to fight back. Giving up wasn’t an option. Peace was the only way we could survive. We would fight to bring it…

And they did. Their efforts helped to end the war. Women from Christian, Muslim, and various traditional West African religions came together to pray, organize, and act for change. Gbowee writes that Psalms, prayers and songs were a big part of her sustenance during the most difficult times of the struggle. Gbowee received some of her training in preparation for anti-war work from Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

Each week, Christian individuals and groups affiliated with the World Council of Churches pray for specific churches and regions. Within a year, the collective prayer will circle the globe. These prayers are included in the weekly Wave of Prayer written by Sabeel, an Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center located in East Jerusalem. Last week (week 41), coincidentally, the prayer was for Afghanistan and the surrounding nation-states. I’m sure countless pleas for peace wafted up to God. Will God be moved to bring peace?

I’m not sure. I can only trust. But I do know that there are many women on the move for peace, in Palestine, Afghanistan, Liberia and in other places. In addition to Leymah Gbowee, the Nobel Peace Prize acknowledged the important life-work of current president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. And for the first time in the history of the prize, an Arab woman received it also. Her name is Tawakkul Karman, from Yemen. She got news about the Prize during a nonviolent rally! These women represent the efforts of many women, who understand intimately the impact of war and injustice, and ultimately the relentless persistence needed to organize and bring forth another reality.

Building a pen-pal friendship was a good first step to learning the joys and struggles of my sisters around the world. I look forward to learning much more as the year continues, especially about many women’s efforts to end the occupation here.

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