Session Three – Shane Claiborne

Wow, this day has gone fast. It’s been great to connect with some friends here. The speakers have been great. The best part of the day for me hasn’t been the speakers or the people I’ve bumped into, even though that has been great. The best part is that I’ve sensed a groundswell toward embracing a holistic faith. There are lots of hard questions about what this looks like, but it’s real and it’s happening, at least among the crowd that’s here. Some are scared by what used to be called a social gospel. It’s time to move beyond this and to embrace a biblical faith that is concerned not only with personal salvation but with issues of justice. In other words, to embrace a biblical faith. We’re now in the last session with Shane Claiborne of The Simple Way. Some highlights: We are in a world that is starved for imagination. We need a church with imagination. Jesus had great imagination – he never did anything normal. Jesus healed people, so he picks up dirt and spits on it and wipes it on his eyes. He answers a question about taxes by getting coins from a fish’s mouth. He did this in a culture obsessed with cleanliness. As I read the things he says, I think, “What if we really believe he meant it?” Story: a group of women who faced eviction from an abandoned Catholic church. They refused to be nameless and faceless. The media got involved, saying that the church was evicting homeless people. They tried to use excuses, like the fire marshall. The night before, fire fighters showed up against orders to help them get ready for the fire extinguisher. They gave them fire alarms and smoke detectors and help them with exit signs so they met the standards. Eventually they marched to the mayor’s office and said, “You have no idea what it’s like to live as homeless people. We invite you to walk in our shoes.” They left their shoes at the mayor’s office. They were creative. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers were creative. They picked tomatoes that were used by Taco Bell. They protested but used a Statue of Liberty holding a tomato and all kinds of creative ideas to get their message across. Philadelphia passed all kinds of laws against people being on streets, even against giving food to people. We wondered what to do. We decided to throw a party like what Jesus talked about and invite the homeless and poor. We brought drums and worshiped and we had communion. This is definitely breaking the law. The police didn’t arrest us; they decided to have communion. We would sleep out there in the park to bring attention to the laws. One night the police were ordered in to arrest everyone there. We were woken up, put in handcuffs, and jailed. All kinds of lawyers offered to help. We used a homeless lawyer, though. I had a shirt on that said, “Jesus was homeless.” The judge asked to see it. “I didn’t know that,” he said. The judge said that the question isn’t about whether we broke the law; it’s the constitutionality of the law. The prosecutor objected, and the judge found us not guilty of all charges. One of the times I was arrested they took my Bible. I asked why. The guard told me that it’s still a dangerous book. I thought about it, and I realized he’s right. Jesus calls us to holy mischief, to not conform to this world. People in Scripture become radical non-conformists. They all look different, though. Matthew leaves barefoot; Zacchaeus becomes a different kind of tax collector. Whatever we do, we need to ask, “What does it mean to be a different kind of teacher, massage therapist. lawyer…” We don’t have universal health insurance which is crazy. We decided we wouldn’t ask the government to do what the church is supposed to do, so we started pooling our resources to look after each other’s health needs. The group is now up to 20,000 people, and we have met over $400 million dollars in medical bills over the past twenty years. Acts like this embody the gospel. One thing that liberals and conservatives have in common is that they’re starved for imagination. Will we be extremists for hatred or for love? The world is starved to see Christian extremists for love and for grace. One more story: We came across some money from a lawsuit and decided to take the cash, in coins, to Wall Street. We invited people. We blew a shofar and announced the Year of Jubilee: Some of us have worked on Wall Street and some of us have slept on Wall Street. We are a community of struggle. Some of us are rich people trying to escape our loneliness. Some of us are poor folks trying to escape the cold. Some of us are addicted to drugs and others are addicted to money. We are a broken people who need each other and God… for we have come to recognize the mess that we have created of our world and how deeply we suffer from that mess – Now we are working together to give birth to a society within the shell of the old… That vision of Jubilee is what we need. We need to dance to the music of a different world. Q&A We’re afraid of what we don’t know. If every home had a guest room and practiced hospitality, it would go a long way toward ending poverty. A Baptist pastor once told us that he used to think we were missionaries to the neighborhood. He now thinks that we are learning from the gospel from the neighborhood, and are missionaries to the church. As we spend ourselves on behalf of the poor, our healing comes. We pursue the American dream even in our churches and build mega churches with small groups and end up lonely. We drive our SUVS and work out at the gym rather than just riding our bike. I encourage churches to match their capital campaigns with a Jubilee fund to love the neighborhood. “If I’m crazy, it’s because I’ve decided to be different from the way that the world is crazy.”