You're my sweet charade

p 48. back at college, i had asked one of my bible teachers if he still believed in miracles, like when jesus fed thousands of people with a couple of fishes and a handful of loaves. and i wondered if god was still into that stuff. i wanted miracles to be normal again. he told me that we have insulated ourselves from miracles. we no longer live with such reckless faith that we need them. there is rarely room for the transcendent in our lives. if we get sick, we go to a doctor. if we need food, we go to a store and buy it. we have eliminated the need for miracles. if we had enough faith to depend on god like the lilies and the sparrows do, we would see miracles. for is it not a miracle that the birds find enough worms each day? he was right. on the streets of philly, we experienced miracles. we would wake up sometimes with a blanket on us or a meal beside us that wasnt there when we went to sleep. other moments were so mystical im scared to try to crystallize them on paper lest you think im nuts... or even worse, that im a saint or televangelist. its enough to say i just wanted to be safe for god to trust with those little secrets that god seems to reserve for the weak and the destitute.

p 123. we preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her voilent slumber. sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. we are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. we give people fish. we teach them to fish. we tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. and we figure out who polluted it.
we fight terrorism- the terrorism within each of us, the terrorism of corporate greed, of american consumerism, of war. we are not pacifist hippies but passionate lovers who abhor passivity and violence. we spend our lives actively resisting everything that destroys life, whether that be terrorism of the war on terrorism. we try to make the world safe, knowing that the world will never be safe as long as millions live in poverty so the fewcan live as they wish. we believe in another way of life-the kingdom of god-which stands in opposition to the prinicpalities, powers, and rulers of this dark world.

p 134. once we get past the rebellious or reactive countercultural paradigm and muster up the courage to try living in new ways, most of us find that community if very natural and makes a lot of sense, and that it is not as foregin to most of the world as it is to us. community is what we are created for. we are made in the image of god who is community, a plurality of oneness. when the first human was made, thiings were not good until there was two, helping one another.
but that doesnt mean community is easy. for everything in this world tries to push 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. one of the things i think jesus is doing is setting us free from the heavy yoke of an oppresive 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, but we carry it together, and it is good and leads us to rest, espeically for the weariest traveler.
in fact, if our lives are easy, we must be doing something wrong. momma t used to say "following jesus is simple, but not easy. love until it hurts, and then love more." my friend brooke, with whom i went to india and later started the Simple Way, used to have the words "simple ubt not easy" painted on her wall. dorthy day of the catholic worker movement understood this as well. she said "love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but it is the only answer. this love is not sentimental but heartwrenching, the most difficult and the most beautiful thing in the world.

p 198. this burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy that liberals and progressive christians would have done much better to acknowledge. september 11th shattered the self-sufficent, autonomous individual, and we saw a community= for the people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. people did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. but what happened after september 11th broke my heart. conservative christians rallied around the drums of war. liberal christians took to the streets. the cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. the church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of american patriotism. people were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. a people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. they have always fallen short of the glory of god.

p 203. violence is always rooted in a myopic sense of community, whether it be nationalism or gangs. we long for people to fight with, mourn with, and celebrate with.martin luther king sense this myopia both in the ghettos and in the vietnam war and longed for our vision to be broader than our fam or our country. as king said, we are bound by alliegences and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism.... this call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond ones tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all. the tradgedy of the churchs reaction to september 11th is not that we rallied around the familes in new york and dc but that our love simply reflected the borders and alliegences of the world. we mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the abu ghriab incident. we got farther and farther away from jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and tghe boundaries we have established.

p 207. essentialy i went to iraq because i believe in a god of scandelous grace. i have pledged alliegence to a king who loved evil doers so much he died for them, teaching us there is something worth dying for but not worth killing for. i went to iraq in the footsteps of an executed and risen god. the jesus of the margins suffered and imperial execution by an oppressive regime of wealthy and pious elites. and now he dares me and woos me to come and follow, to take up my cross, to lose my life to find it, with the promises that life is more powerful than death and that it is more corageous to love our enemies than to kill them.

p 221. rebirth means that we have a new pardigm of "us" and "them." our central identity is no longer biological. and our central allegiance is no longer national. our pronouns change. our new "us" as jesus teaches, is the church, and the people of god doing the will of the father. certainly, there are times when america is that. and there are times when america is not. when we hear that "we" were attacked, do we think "we" the church, or "we" as americans? what is our primary identity? when the bush administration said that a way of life was being attacked, it was true, but it was not the gospel that was being attacked. it is no coincedence that what was attacked wasnt the world council of churches but the symbols of the corporate global economy and the arms that would protect it. more than ever, we must be asking what will create a safer, more sustainable world. and i believe god has given us a vision for that, a vision that looks very different from the dream of america. one soldier i met returned from iraq deeply disturbed. he said "i just risked my life for the american dream, and i am not even sure i believe in it anymore. and i am pretty sure that the world cannot afford it." no wonder jesus began to weep as he overlooked jerusalem, crying out, "if you had only known what would bring you peace." (luke 19:42)

p 225. i had a college professor who said "all around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. but dear children, do not tiptoe. run, hop, skip, or dance, just dont tiptoe." in my youth group days i had seen all too many wild would be jesus radicals fall by the wayside because they had never been trusted with the adventure of revolutionary living. when i was a youth leader, one of the high school kids who had given his life to jesus got busted only a few weeks later from having acid in school. i remember asking in dissapointment what happened.. he just shrugged his shoulders and said he got bored. bored? god forgive us for all those we have lost because we made the gospel boring. i am convinced that if we lose kids to teh culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, its because we dont dare them, not because we dont entertain them. its because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. kids want to do somethign heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. but what are they to do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive at death safely?