The Irresistible Revolution

Lately, I have been reading a book called “The irresistible Revolution, Living as an Ordinary Radical” by Shane Claiborne. The book is a mandatory summer read before I start at IWU this fall. It has a wonderful message and has been very thought provoking. I agree with the heart and motive of this book (caring for, living among, and sharing with the poor) but often wonder if Claiborne’s philosophy of “living in community with the poor” and living a lifestyle of a community untouched by the world is slightly unobtainable here on earth and [dare I say] communistic? Community money pools, rejecting all foreign made clothing, bartering hours of work instead of money, rejecting government help…. It is all a little bit far out and perhaps unnecessary. I don’t mean to sound as though I am “slamming” Claiborne’s book. His heart for the poor and Jesus is beautiful, passionate, and genuine. His insights and experiences are testimony to the works God is doing all around the world. I am learning a lot from this book, both through the typed words and through thinking beyond the pages.

I decided to share a few of my favorite quotes so far from this book. Some are sad truths, some are very wisely worded. Ponder them. There will be more to come, I am sure.

Rich [Mullins] stood up in chapel and said, “You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too… [and he paused in the awkward silence.] But I guess that’s why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.”

In our culture of “seeker sensitivity” and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd. With the most sincere hearts, we do not want to see anyone walk away from Jesus because of the discomfort of his cross, so we clip the claws on the Lion a little, we clean up a bit the bloody Passion we are called to follow.

…everyone can be a Christian but no one knows what a Christian is anymore.

“God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.”

I learned a powerful lesson: 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.

We are just one little cell within the body, very full of life but only a small part of the whole. Cells are born and cells die, but the body lives forever.

Gerd Theissen calls the two groups the “wandering charismatics” and the local sympathizers.” The wanderers were traveling apostles and relied on the support of the sympathizers. Both shaped the early church. They did not look down on each other. They sympathizers did not write the wanderers off as radicals or freaks, and the wanderers did not judge the sympathizers as sellouts. They loved and supported one another.

There are Matthews who encounter Jesus and sell everything. But then there are also the Zacchaeuses who meet Jesus and redefine their careers. So not everyone responds in the same way, but we must respond. We must seek our vocation listening to the voice of God and the voices of our suffering neighbors.

We need converts in the best sense of the word, people 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.