The Irresistible Revolution - Claiborne

I’ve been challenged immensely by Shane Claiborne’s book, "The Irresistible Revolution." (Zondervan, 2006) Now you can too. Here are a few of the words I underlined and am wrestling with. Let’s wrestle together.

I wondered what it would look like if we decided to really follow Jesus. . . The hilarious words of nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard resonated in my thirsty soul:
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament. (71-72)

We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor. (113)

I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end. (114)

For everything tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together. The simple way is not the easy way. No one every promised us that community or Christian discipleship would be easy. There’s a commonly mistranslated verse where Jesus tells the disciples, “Come to me, all you are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me . . . For my yoke is good and my burden is light.” People take that to mean that if we come to Jesus, everything will be easy. (The word good is often mistranslated as “easy”). Ha, that’s funny. My life was pretty easy before I met Jesus. In one sense, the load is lighter because we carry the burdens of the world together. But he is still telling us to pick up a yoke. Yoke had a lot of different meanings. It was the tool used for harnessing animals for farming. It was the word used for taking on a rabbi’s teaching (as Jesus seems to use it here). Yoke was also the word used for the brutal weight of slavery and oppression that the prophets call us to break (Isaiah 58, among other passages). One of the things I think Jesus is doing is setting us free from the heavy yoke of an oppressive way of life. I know plenty of people, both rich and poor, who are suffocating from the weight of the American dream, who find themselves heavily burdened by the lifeless toil and consumption we put upon ourselves. This is the yoke we are being set free from. The new yoke is still not easy (it’s a cross, for heaven’s sake), but we carry it together, and it is good and leads us to rest, especially for the weariest traveler. (135-136)

But conversion means to change, to alter, after which something looks
different than it did before – like conversion vans or converted currency. We need converts in the best sense of the word, people who are marked by the renewing of their minds and imaginations, who no longer conform to the pattern that is destroying our world. Otherwise, we have only believers, and believers are a dime-a-dozen nowadays. What the world needs is people who believe so much in another world that they cannot help but begin enacting it now. . .

There is a kind of conversion that happens to people not because of how we talk but because of how we live. And our little experiments in truth become schools for conversion, where folks can learn what it means for the old life to be gone and the new life to be upon us, no longer taking the broad path that leads to destruction. Conversion is not an event but a process of slowly tearing ourselves from the clutches of the culture. (149-150)

Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.” (153)

When we talk of materialism and simplicity, we must always begin with
love for God and neighbor, otherwise we’re operating out of little more
than legalistic, guilt-ridden self-righteousness. Our simplicity is not an
ascetic denunciation of material things to attain personal piety, for if we
sell all that we have and give it to the poor, but have not love, it is
meaningless (I Cor. 13:3). And there are many progressive liberals who
have taught me that we can live lives of disciplined simplicity and still
be distant from the poor. We can eat organic, have a common pool of
money, and still be enslaved to Mammon (the personification of the
money god that Jesus named in the Gospels). Rather than being bound
up by how much stuff we need to buy, we can get enslaved to how
simply we must live.

Simplicity is meaningful only inasmuch as it is grounded in love, authentic
relationships, and interdependence. (162-163)

Generosity is a virtue not just for those with a special spiritual gifting
or an admirable philanthropic passion. It is at the very heart of our
rebirth. Popular culture has taught us to believe that charity is a virtue.
But for Christians, it is only what is expected. True generosity is
measured not by how much we give away but by how much we have
left, especially when we look at the needs of our neighbors. We have
no right not to be charitable. The early Christians taught that charity
is merely returning what we have stolen. In the seventeenth century,
St. Vincent de Paul said that when he gives bread to the beggars, he
gets on his knees and asks forgiveness from them. (164)

Gandhi: There is enough for everyone’s need, but there is not enough
for everyone’s greed. (170)

I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and
materialism, of violence and war, it’s because we don’t dare them,
not because we don’t entertain them. It’s because we make the
gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to
do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video
games or join the army. But what are they to do with a church that
teaches them to tiptoe through life so that can arrive safely at death?
(226)

Soren Kirkegaard puts it well: “To want to admire, instead of follow,
Christ is not an invention of bad people; no it is more an invention
of those who spinelessly want to keep themselves detached at a safe
distance from Jesus." (226)

The church is a place where we can stand up and say we are wretched,
and everyone will nod and agree and remind us that we are also
beautiful. (245)