PACIFIST FIGHT CLUB

We will fight for peace, but we will do no violence.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Finding God in the Poor and Marginalized by Thomas Crisp




In my previous article, I argued that Jesus preached a Kingdom gospel. A gospel which maintained that the long-awaited shalom of the Rule or Kingdom of God, prophesied by Isaiah and other prophets, was breaking into history and could be entered into now by anyone who would take Jesus’s yoke upon him- or herself, learning from him how to live, learning from him how to appropriate the blessings of this Kingdom shalom—the blessings of forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and God’s sweet presence—and minister them to others. To be sure, I suggested, Jesus thought of these blessings as available at present in only a preliminary sort of way. The Kingdom, said Jesus, is like a mustard seed: it starts small.

But don't underestimate the power and goodness of this mustard-seed Kingdom shalom. For though it is now small in our midst, and we enjoy but foretastes of its blessings of forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and God’s sweet presence, the foretastes of these things are good, deeply precious, like a pearl you might find, said Jesus, which is so valuable you'd be willing to sell all that you possess to lay hold of that pearl.


I suggested in that article that a central practice enjoined by Jesus on his followers, a practice whereby they could enter into these blessings of Kingdom shalom and minister them to others, was the practice of familial community—relating to one another as family—and that a central mark of their practice of that family life was economic sharing with the poor and marginalized. In this article, we’ll explore that theme in more detail.


Just what sort of economic sharing was envisioned by the early Jesus movement? What did it look like? What was Jesus’s teaching about sharing one’s personal wealth and possessions with those in poverty and on the margins? And what implications does it have for us today as followers of Jesus? What sort of economic sharing ought we be practicing?


Those are our questions.

Two paradigms

Toward answering them, let me briefly explain two very different paradigms for thinking about money: two very different philosophies of wealth. These two philosophies of wealth before us, we can ask which comes closest to the practices Jesus was endorsing.

Perhaps the best way to get hold of the differences between these philosophies is to start with a question: What sort of moral claim, if any, do the needy have on my excess goods (goods above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work: luxuries)?

 Put differently, what, if any, of my excess wealth do the needy have a right to?

According to the Roman view the answer is “none.” I am not morally obligated to give anything of my excess wealth to those in need. I may decide to give up some of my excess goods in an act of charity, but charity, on this view, is what ethicists call supererogatory: commendable but not morally required.

 So the Roman view of wealth: The poor and needy have no right to my excess wealth; I am not morally obligated to use any of it in care of those who suffer. I may choose to, but that falls into the category of charity: what is good but not obligatory.

The alternative view doesn’t have a widely accepted label; I’ll call it the “rigorist” view.

The rigorist’s answer to the question what, if any, of my excess wealth (wealth above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work) is, well, all of it.

On this view, use of my surplus to care for the poor and needy is not a matter of charity—good but not obligatory—but a matter of justice: it’s what the poor and needy have a right to.1

 An interesting contemporary defense of the rigorist view is found in the writings of the controversial Princeton ethicists Peter Singer. Singer’s argument takes its start from a thought experiment:

On your way to work each day, you pass a small pond. One day, you notice that a child has fallen in and is having trouble staying afloat. You look around and see that you are the only one who can help. You can easily wade in and save the child, but after a moment’s thought, you realize that, if you do, you’ll ruin the rather expensive shoes and slacks you’re wearing and be late for work. You pass by and the child dies.

What would we think of someone, asks Singer, who behaved this way? We’d think such conduct morally abominable.

Compare though to this “case of the shoes”:

In your mailbox is a fundraising letter from the Against Malaria Foundation. After reading it, you realize that, were you to send them a regular portion of your excess income each month toward the purchase of mosquito nets for use in the developing world, you could prevent the deaths of several children who would otherwise die of malaria. But you throw the letter into your trash basket, using the excess money instead for regular and unnecessary shoe purchases.

And here is something puzzling: were someone to do this, we likely wouldn’t think such conduct morally abominable. We’d think: that’s life in America. Most of us do this sort of thing all the time, without thinking twice about it.

The reason this is puzzling is, when you stop to think about it, it is difficult to see what morally relevant difference there could be between the two cases. Put differently, when you stop to think about it, it’s difficult to isolate a feature present in the pond case but absent in the shoes case that explains why it is that, in the former case, one’s conduct is morally abominable, but in the latter, it’s not.

 1 Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on justice gives powerful and eloquent expression to this idea. See, for example, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 62ff.

 Let me give some examples of features some have cited as attempted explanations of the moral differences between these cases:

 A. Physical Distance
Some have suggested that, whereas in the pond case, you are in close physical proximity to the endangered child, in the case of the shoes, you are not, and that’s the explanation of the moral difference between the cases.

Here’s a way of showing, though, that physical distance doesn’t explain the moral difference between the cases: find a case which is morally similar to the pond case (a case in which failure to help someone in need is manifestly morally abhorrent), but in which there is physical distance between the one failing to help and the one in need of help. If we can find such a case, that would show that physical distance doesn't, all by itself, cancel an obligation to help.

 So consider this case of the submarine:
While on the dock preparing your speedboat for a day of boating, you overhear shouting about some children on a school field trip trapped underwater in a submarine quite a long distance off shore. You are in a remote area, and your boat is the only boat fast enough to speed the rescue divers to the submarine’s location. But you were really looking forward to this outing, and you won’t have a chance to go boating again anytime soon. You decide to let someone else figure it out, go on your outing, and the children die.

Here’s a case, then, which is morally similar to the pond case (a case in which failure to help someone in need is manifestly morally abhorrent), but in which there is physical distance between the one failing to help and the ones in need of help. This shows that physical distance doesn't, all by itself, cancel an obligation to help.

 B. Social Distance

Some have suggested that, whereas in the pond case, you are confronted by a child in your social group (he’s a neighbor, a citizen of your city, or your country), in the case of the shoes, we are talking about children who live on the other side of the world and aren’t members of your social groups: they’re not neighbors, fellow-citizens, etc.

Perhaps we don’t have much by way of obligation to such people.

Reply: Consider this second case of the submarine.
While vacationing in a strange and exotic foreign land, you are on the dock preparing your speedboat for a day of boating and overhear shouting about some children on a school field trip trapped underwater in a submarine quite a long distance off shore. You are in a remote area, and your boat is the only boat in the area fast enough to speed the rescue divers to the submarine’s location. But you were really looking forward to this outing, and you won’t have a chance to go boating again anytime soon. You decide to let someone else figure it out, go on your outing, and the children die.

Here’s a case, then, which is morally similar to the pond case (a case in which failure to help someone in need is manifestly morally abhorrent), but in which there is social distance between the one failing to help and the one in need of help: the ones in need of help, in this case, aren’t members of your tribe: they aren’t neighbors, fellow countrymen, etc.

 This shows that social distance doesn't, all by itself, cancel an obligation to help.

C. Perceptual directness

Some have suggested that, whereas in the pond case, you see the child in need, with your own eyes, not so in the case of the shoes: here you merely read about needy children.

 Perhaps that’s the difference; perhaps we don’t have much by way of obligation to those
whose plights we don’t directly see (or otherwise directly know about by use of our perceptual faculties). But both our above submarine cases show this suggestion implausible: in each case, you can’t see the kids in need, and yet, one thinks, you’re obligated to help.

 Singer suggests, and I think he’s right, that there is no morally relevant difference between the cases, no feature present in one case but not the other capable of making the behavior in one case morally different than behavior in the other. But if so, then since one’s behavior is manifestly wrong in the first case, it follows that it is wrong in the second case as well: Spending money on needless items—on luxury and frill—when we could instead be using the money to prevent suffering and death from poverty-related causes is wrong, just as wrong as letting a drowning child die so as to not to dirty one’s fancy shoes and slacks.

 And if that’s right, rigorism is right: The poor and needy have a right to my surplus wealth, all of it. Use of my surplus to care for the poor and needy is not a matter of charity— good but not obligatory—but a matter of justice.

So far, then, Peter Singer’s argument is for the rigorist view of wealth. What is extremely interesting for us as Christians is that, as church historian Justo Gonzales demonstrates in his fascinating Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money, all of the main teachers and writers of the early Church, from the first through fourth centuries of the Christian era, were rigorists. Comments like the following are remarkably commonplace among early and influential Christian writers:

 “…it is monstrous for one to live in luxury, while many are in want.” — Clement of Alexandria

“He who is able to succour one on the point of perishing, if he fails to do so, kills him.” — Lactantius

“What is a miser? One who is not content with what is needful. What is a thief? One who takes what belongs to others. Why do you not consider yourself a miser and a thief when you claim as your own what you received in trust? If one who takes the clothing off another is called a thief, why give any other name to one who can clothe the naked and refused to do so? The bread that you withhold belongs to the poor; the cape that you hide in your chest belongs to the naked; the shoes rotting in your house belong to those who must go unshod.” — Basil

“You strip people naked and dress up your walls. The naked poor cries before your door, and you do not even look at him. It is a naked human being that begs you, and you are considering what marbles to use for paving. The poor begs you for money and gets none. There is a human being seeking bread, and your horses chew gold in their bits. You rejoice in your precious adornments, while others have nothing to eat. A harsh judgment awaits you, oh rich! The people are hungry and you close your granaries. The people cry and you show your jewels. Woe to one who can save so many lives from death, and does not!” — Ambrose

 “I beg you to remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.” — John Chrysostom

 “Not to give to the needy what is superfluous is akin to fraud.” — Augustine

 In many of the most influential writers of the early church, then, we find a Peter Singer style rigorist view of wealth: the poor and needy have a claim on all my surplus wealth (wealth above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work); caring for them out of my excess is not a matter of charity—good but not obligatory work—but a matter of justice: it’s what the poor and needy have a right to.

So which, if any, of these options represents Jesus’s view of the matter?

We get an answer to this question, I think, by reflecting on an ethical principle at the heart of Jesus’s thinking about the rule of God and its inbreaking shalom: the love command.

The Love Command
In each of the synoptic gospels, you find Jesus interacting with the question which is the greatest commandment in the Law. Matthew's version of this goes as follows:

“But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “ ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ ”This is the great and foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF. ’ ”On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." — (Matt 22:34–40)

Note the bit at the end: For a devout first century Jew, the Law and the Prophets sum up the whole of morality: they lay out the basic lineaments of right and wrong. To say, then, that the whole of the Law and the Prophets hang on these commands is to suggest that in these commands, we have the heart of morality—that these commands, in some sense, sum up the whole of morality.

We’ll focus on the second command, the command to neighbor love (henceforth, “the love command”).

What does it mean? What exactly is being enjoining on us here? An answer to this question requires an answer to three preliminary questions.

1. What sort of love is in view in the love command?

2. What work is the expression ‘as yourself’ doing in the command?

3. Who is my neighbor?

The Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on love and justice is helpful here (for example, his Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2009)).


He distinguishes three kinds of love:

Love of attraction: the love you have for something when you are drawn or attracted to it, in its grip, because of some good-making feature you discern in it. Romantic love is a species of this, but there are other varieties: you can be drawn to, in the grip of, someone’s prose styling, some piece of music, a mountain, the smell of a rose, etc.

The love of benevolence: the love you have for something when you seek its good, its well-being, its flourishing. Love as attraction typically carries in its train love as benevolence: we typically seek the good, the well-being, of those things we are drawn or attracted to. Likewise in reverse. We are typically drawn or attracted to those things we seek the good of. But not always: sometimes we pursue the good of people we do not find attractive, people we might even find repulsive.

The love of attachment: the love you have for something when you have bonded with it, become attached to it. Wolterstorff gives the example of a cat: you offer to replace my cat with a better one: fewer allergies, veterinary needs, and so forth. But no thanks, I’ll keep mine.  I’m attached to this cat; this is the one I love. This sort of love typically comes with the love of benevolence: we typically seek the well-being of those things we’re attached to. It may or may not come with the love of attraction: I’m attached to a friend in the throes of heroin addiction, would miss him terribly if he died, but he has become something deeply unattractive to me, even repulsive.

So: Three sorts of love. Which, if any, is in view in the love command?

At least the second, as is clear from its original context in Hebrew Scripture, Leviticus,

Chapter 19, verses 9-18:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God. ”You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another. You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD. “You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD. ”You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.  You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD. "You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” – (Leviticus 19:9–18)

Plausibly, the command to neighbor love at the end of this passage functions as a kind of summing up of what has come before. The Israelites are commanded to leave extra in their fields for the poor, to be truthful with one another, to not oppress the neighbor nor rob him, to pay the poor man’s wages promptly, to care for the disabled, to administer legal justice impartially, to reprove the neighbor so as not incur guilt because of his sin. In sum, they’re to love their neighbors as themselves.


Since leaving extra in one’s fields for the poor and the stranger, paying wages promptly, treating the disabled well, etc., are ways of seeking the neighbor’s good, the love enjoined in the summarizing command—love your neighbor as yourself—is, obviously enough, at least partly a matter of benevolence.

Is it more than that? Does it also enjoin the love of attachment? The love of attraction?

It doesn’t seem so. The Israelites are commanded to leave extra in their fields for the poor and stranger, not to steal from or lie to one another, and not to swear falsely in God’s name. But obedience to these commands has little to do with attachment or attraction. One would presumably never meet many of the poor fed by the surplus in one’s fields. And one could refrain from stealing and lying to the neighbor without much by way of attraction or attachment to him. Obedience to these commands has much to do with seeking the wellbeing of the neighbor, and not much, apparently, with attraction or attachment.

Benevolence love, then, is the sort of love at issue here: seeking the good, well-being, flourishing of the neighbor. At any rate, that’s the sort of love at issue in the command as it occurs in Leviticus. Jesus gave no indication that he understood it differently.

What sort of good at issue here?

It would be nice if we could say a bit more; the notions of human good, well-being and flourishing are notoriously slippery. What sort of well-being am I to pursue for the neighbor? Maximization of his happiness? Make sure he has an iPhone? What?

The material in Leviticus 19 leading up to the love command suggests an answer to these questions. Once again, the Israelites are commanded to:

• leave extra on their fields for the poor and stranger

• not steal from or lie to one another

• not swear falsely in God’s name

• not oppress their neighbors or rob them

• pay their laborers promptly

• not curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before the blind

• do no injustice in juridical matters, showing no partiality to rich or poor

• not slander the neighbor nor take his life

• not hate the neighbor in one’s heart

• reprove the neighbor so as not to share in his sin

• take no vengeance nor bear any grudge against the neighbor

These commands can be classed under three broad headings:

1. Commands concerned with meeting the neighbor’s sustenance needs.

The commands to

• leave extra on their fields for the poor and stranger, and

• pay their laborers promptly


2. Commands concerned with the neighbor’s security against harm.

The commands to

• not steal from or lie to one another

• not swear falsely in God’s name

• not oppress their neighbors or rob them

• not curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before the blind

• do no injustice in juridical matters, showing no partiality to rich or poor

• not slander the neighbor nor take his life, and

• take no vengeance nor bear any grudge against the neighbor


3. Commands concerned with protection of the neighbor’s dignity.

The commands to

• not curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before the blind

• not slander the neighbor

• not hate the neighbor in one’s heart, and

• not bear any grudge against the neighbor


Imagine, now, a community in which the commandments falling under these three headings are adhered to. What sort of community would it be? What sort of community is such that the sustenance needs of all in the community are met, all are safe from harm, and the dignity of all is respected by all? We saw the answer in the previous article: a shalom community. Shalom: the communal state of well-being or wholeness, described throughout the Old Testament, in which there is material sufficiency (the sustenance needs of all are met), security (against violence, attack, enslavement), and the dignity of all is respected by all.


It is this vision of human well-being that unifies the disparate commands of Leviticus 19.

Communities in which practice of these commandments predominates are communities in which there is enough food, for everyone, including the poor and sojourner. The members of such communities don’t lie to, cheat, slander, hate, steal from, take vengeance on one another. Poor laborers in such communities are paid promptly so as not to go to bed hungry; judges judge in accord with justice. Neighbors do not hate one another, but help and care for one another. Such are the ways of shalom. The commandments of Leviticus 19 mark the pathways of shalom.


The summarizing command, love your neighbor as yourself, then, is a command to behave in these ways toward the neighbor, a command to do the things that make for the neighbor’s shalom. It’s akin to Psalm 34’s:

“Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? 13Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek shalom and pursue it.” — (Psalm 34:14)

Says the love command, then: Seek your neighbor’s shalom; pursue it. Or, since shalom is perhaps best thought of as a property of communities in Old Testament thought, maybe a better way of putting it is: seek the neighbor’s inclusion in the shalom community.

What is the force of the “as yourself ” bit of the command?

So we get this answer to our first question, the question what sort of love is at issue in the love command: it’s benevolence love, seeking the neighbor’s good, where the good at issue is shalom. We’re to seek the neighbor’s shalom.

This takes us to our second question, the question what work the “as yourself” part is doing in the command.

Note in this connection just how demanding Leviticus 19’s commands are. Leaving one’s fields partially unharvested in times of scarcity; never stealing or lying; always paying one’s laborer’s promptly; never bending the rules of the legal system; never hating one’s neighbor in one’s heart; never taking vengeance or bearing grudges against the neighbor: living in this way would, no doubt, have been difficult. Serious obedience to these commands would have required putting a high value on the neighbor’s well-being.

Here, I propose, lies the force of the command’s “as yourself” clause. For that is how we pursue our own shalom: with serious resolve and intensity; we put a high value on it.

Leviticus is urging us, I think, to put that same value on pursuit of the neighbor’s shalom, to put pursuit of her shalom on a par with pursuit of one’s own.

So we have this picture forming: The command to neighbor love, as it first occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures, is concerned with the things that make for shalom. The command is to pursue the good of the neighbor, where the good in question is shalom, and we are to put pursuit of the neighbor’s shalom on a par with pursuit of our own.

Who is my neighbor?

Finally, there is the question: Who, from the point of view of the love command, is my neighbor?

Jesus famously takes this question up in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke, chapter 10:

“On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”  In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” —(Luke 10:25–37)

The lawyer’s question, then: who is my neighbor? Who is the neighbor I am enjoined by the love command to love? Jesus’s answer: do what the Samaritan did. It didn’t matter for the Samaritan that the robbed man was a member of a hated, rival ethnic group who had ostracized and oppressed his people. It didn’t matter that he was ritually unclean because covered with blood (which is why the priest and Levite passed him by). He was a human being in need and in reach of the Samaritan man’s love, so the Samaritan helped him. Do what he did, says Jesus. Love anyone in need and in reach of your love.

That’s your neighbor.

Jesus is radicalizing the love command here. For the average first century Jew, the neighbor whom the love command bids me to love is a fellow Jew, or maybe just those in my clan or village. Jesus here blows open the category of neighbor to include anyone in need and in reach of my love: even members of hated, enemy ethnic groups, even those deemed unclean by my culture’s purity code.

In some Gospel passages we’ll discuss later, he further blows it open to include even my enemies: even those who attack my country, occupy it with a hostile military force, burn my cities, crucify my countrymen, and drive my family and I into poverty and degradation by oppressive taxation: these, even these, are my neighbor. These, even these, are to be the object of my love. But more on that in my next article.

Summarizing

Pulling it all together, then, we have this read of the love command: Seek the shalom of the neighbor (anyone in need and in reach of one’s love), putting pursuit of her inclusion in shalom community on a par with pursuit of one’s own.


Such is the fundamental principle of the shalom of the inbreaking Rule of God; such is the basic moral fabric of the Rule of God. When we are living under the Rule of God, drinking in its inbreaking shalom, we will be living in the love command, living in love.

Application of the love command to question whether Roman or rigorist view of wealth

Return, then, to our question: which comes closest to Jesus’s view of wealth: the Roman view, on which the poor have no right to my surplus wealth (wealth above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work), though I might choose to direct charity toward them (morally good but nonobligatory help), or the rigorist view of the early Church fathers, on which the poor have a right to my excess, all of it—on which giving away one’s surplus is not a matter of charity but a matter of justice: it’s what those in need have a right to?

The Love Command suggests an answer: Suppose I know of someone in dire need, someone at risk of suffering or death from lack of food, shelter, or medical care. I can do something to alleviate her plight, but I don’t, because I’m committed instead to the project of living like the rich man in Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus, “dressing in purple and fine linen, joyously living in splendor every day.” Then I am not loving this neighbor as myself: I am not putting pursuit of his inclusion in shalom community on a par with pursuit of my own.

The love command is demanding! I am to put pursuit of the neighbor’s shalom on a par with pursuit of my own. So long as I know of neighbors in reach of my love but without the enough of shalom—enough food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc., and I have the means to help them without thereby sacrificing my inclusion in the shalom community, the love command enjoins me to help. Else I am not putting the needy neighbor’s shalom on a par with my own; I am not loving him as I love myself.

Should I give to a point at which I am sacrificing my inclusion in the shalom community —at which, for example, I or those in my household don't have enough food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc. (the Scriptures recognize special obligations to family and one’s close community)—I will have gone too far; at any rate, I will have gone beyond what the love command requires. (I will, in effect, have put pursuit of neighbor shalom above pursuit of my own rather than on a par with pursuit of my own, which is more than is required by the love command.) But putting pursuit of neighbor shalom on a par with pursuit of my shalom does require a level generosity and sacrifice up to and including the point at which, were I to continue sacrificing, I would be putting the shalom of me and mine at risk—we’d be threatened with not having enough food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc.

The love command is demanding!

If so, if all this is right, then the love command suggests the rigorist, not the Roman, view of wealth. Divesting oneself of surplus wealth in care of the poor is not a matter of charity; it is not a matter of what is good but not morally required. It’s a debt of love owed to those who suffer. To withhold it is to wrong them. Divesting oneself of surplus in care of those in need and in reach of my love is not a matter of charity; it’s a matter of justice.

And this explains, I think, why Jesus said these sorts of things to his followers:

“So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.” - Luke 14:33

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. … ”No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." - Matt 6:19–24

"Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the
heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” - Luke 12:32–34

“How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” - Luke 18:24–25

And why immediately after Jesus’s resurrection, his disciples were living as described in Acts, chapter 4:

“And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them. And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and abundant grace was upon them all. For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds of the sales and lay them at the apostles’ feet, and they would be distributed to each as any had need.” -Acts 4:32ff

Jesus thought of the love command as the heart of the law and the prophets, and the heart of the inbreaking shalom of the Rule of God. To appropriate that inbreaking shalom, experience its blessings, and minister them to others, one must live in love.

And that, he thought, means living in radical simplicity and generosity: divesting oneself of surplus wealth, not storing up extra whilst others are hungry, but giving it away in care of the suffering, to whom it belongs by right anyway—to whom it belongs, as a matter of justice.

In my previous article, I suggested that a central practice enjoined by Jesus on his followers for appropriating the inbreaking shalom of the Rule of God and ministering its blessings to others was familial community with other Jesus followers. Now we’ve another: radical simplicity and generosity.

To lay hold of the inbreaking shalom of the Rule of God and minister its blessings of forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and God’s tender presence to a hurting world us, we must live in loving, familial community with other Jesus followers, and together we must live in radical simplicity and generosity, divesting ourselves of surplus wealth, so that, as Acts 4 puts it, there is no needy person among us.

In closing

As with yesterday’s talk, let me close by imagining with you what this might look like in practice. Imagine with me, then, that you eat together weekly with a group of twenty or so brothers and sisters in the way of Jesus: twenty or so men, women, and children living in the teachings and practices of Jesus. It’s a group of all ages, old and young, a group of differing economic backgrounds—some come from the ranks of the rich, others from the ranks of the poor—and a group of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds, black, white, and brown, men, women, and children living in the teachings and practices of Jesus.

You live near enough to one another that you see each other frequently throughout the week. There is time to talk deeply with each other, to play hard together, laugh hard together. You worship and pray together often, studying the scriptures and great writings of the church together. Your children participate in all of this, and are known well by all the adults in the group.

You practice simplicity together: Not every family needs to own a car, so your community bought a couple cars to share among households. Not every family needs its own set of tools, so you share tools: one centrally-located family keeps the community tools in its garage. Not every household needs a washing machine, so you wash your clothes together at the two or so homes in the neighborhood with washing machines. Not all food needs to be bought, so you share produce from several gardens in your backyards. You forego lavish vacations, camping together regularly instead. You forgo buying new things when quality used things will do. You forgo fancy new clothes when quality used clothes will do.

These and other practices of simplicity free up quite a bit of money in the community, which you pool together to care for the vulnerable: You run a regular grocery ministry at a local motel, where a number of food-insecure families live, families in the ranks of the working poor who work but are unable to save enough for the first- and last-month’s rent required to rent an apartment. Your community shows up there the last week of each month, the time each month their food stamps tend to run out, with a truckload of groceries.

Several folks you’ve met at this motel have moved out of the motel and into spare rooms in several of your homes—“Christ” rooms, as the early church called them, rooms where the poor are received as Christ. They’ll live here until whatever was causing their homelessness is resolved. It might be years. In the meantime, they’ll participate in the warp and woof of your community life, be enfolded into your faith family, and minister to you by helping you to see what real and daily dependence on God, for everything, looks like.

A few business-minded folks in your community have started small businesses to employ those in transition from prison and homelessness. They run a Christmas tree lot, a T-shirt company, and a small restaurant, all of whose employees are either ex-prisoners or ex-homeless, transitioning back into mainstream society. Most of these folks are regulars at your weekly community meal. They do great good in your lives, showing you how to depend on God for everything, every breath, how not worry about the unimportant things in life, how not to get caught up in the very un-Kingdom-like quest for worldly status and power.

Quite a bit of your money goes overseas to the desperately poor, those living on just a few dollars per day, where you send thousands of dollars each year to micro-lending organizations who lend the money at low interest, mostly to poor women, who then use it start businesses to support their families.

The spirit is palpable in your midst: there is a powerful love and a powerful sense of God’s presence that pervades your common meals, your celebrations, and your common work, that can only be attributed to the spirit of God in your midst. Your experiments in caring for the broken of the world come to you as a kind of adventure, and have been, for the most part, deeply fun.

This picture, I want to suggest, is in the vicinity of what Jesus envisioned when he spoke of the inbreaking shalom of the rule of God and urged his followers to enter into it, to lay hold of it, by practicing familial community, not storing up earthly treasures, but giving them away in love, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless.

It’s a main way of drawing near to God, moving into ever-increasing, intimate experience of his sweet and tender presence.

And it’s for us today. It’s doable today. It’s being done by Jesus communities around the world. I’ve tasted it in part, and can report that it’s good, deeply good. I want more.

Next, we’ll further develop the picture by thinking some together about Jesus’s invitation to extend the love of the love command to even our enemies.


-Thomas Crisp

[PODCAST] Following Jesus Into Nonviolence: Keith Giles

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

CHARLIE ROSE INTERVIEWS: GREG BOYD ON THE MYTH OF A CHRISTIAN NATION

Cold Hard Facts by Scott Whaley


 
 

 

Maybe I have just been teaching too long, or maybe it is just the realization that raw emotions have a tendency to let me down.  Whatever the case, and I am sure I will think on it until I figure it out. I am a disciple of logic.  I find comfort in dealing with facts and provable ideas.  I like determining cause and effect.  And I drool over analysis.  I want to know what happened, how it happened, and most importantly why it happened.  It is close to obsessive behavior at times.

I have found in my years as a student and teacher (and dad and husband and employee and employer and taxpayer and good citizen) that the teachings of Christ during His earthly ministry are perhaps the most logical schools of thought I have ever encountered.  And my personal favorites from His everlasting legacy are those known as the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. 

In Matthew 5:6 Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”  That seems illogical on the surface.  We live in a world tainted by the unholiness of injustice.  So it appears that well is fairly dry, or else Jesus is a starry-eyed dreamer putting an idealistic spin on some ludicrous notion of the Common Good.

But take a closer look: Jesus did not say that those who find righteousness will be filled.  He said those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.  To hunger and thirst in this regard means to seek or to search for righteousness.  And it is in the seeking that we are filled!  I know of no one (and I really mean no one) who has pursued justice or compassion or love and not come away filled.  If the pursuit is in earnest, it will be fulfilling.  It cannot NOT be.  The cold, hard facts of Jesus’ statement here is that there is a great deal of internal satisfaction found in service of others, the proverbial warm fuzzy.  But helping others is not a checklist item.  Rather it is a constant journey that brings constant joy.

Sure there will be hardship, but there is hardship in everything.  The hunger and thirst for righteousness will not always lead to the righteous.  But it will certainly lead to being filled.  And that is logic I can understand.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Finding God In Your Brother and Sister by Thomas Crisp


*(The following series is taken from a talk given at Simpson University in April of 2013.)
I’ve been spending time in the gospels the last several years, especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the Jesus I’ve found there has, well, shaken me up: turned my life upside down. He offers some surprising answers to the questions how to draw near to God, how to move into ever-increasing, intimate knowledge of the living God, and I want to talk these next few days about some of them.

But beware: once they get hold of you, they’ll mess you up, turn your life upside down. Jesus is calling us; he’s calling us into something radical, something different, I think, than many of us have been hearing in church. And, to paraphrase Morpheus from that fantastic scene in the 1990’s movie, the Matrix: Once you’ve heard his call, there is no turning back. Dismiss it, ignore it, and the story ends: you go on with your life, believe whatever you want to believe. Accept the offer, become an apprentice of Jesus, a follower of the Way, and you stay in Wonderland, and he shows you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Join me and we’ll explore the rabbit-hole.

Decisionism vs. Discipleship

We start with an all-important distinction between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about the Christian life.

We live in a sector of Christianity (North American evangelicalism) that has a tendency to reduce the Christian life to something I’ll call decisionism (borrowing from the New Testament scholar and Christian activist Ched Myers): the idea that Christianity is fundamentally a matter of, first, having made a decision for Christ, where this is a matter of having decided to believe that a certain view of the atonement is true (the penal substitution view: Christ died to take the punishment due us and that thereby God is able to refrain from visiting on us our due punishment, to forgive, and to welcome us into heaven when we die), and, second, practicing certain works of personal piety aimed at cultivating an inner life of prayerful dependence on God: Bible study, worship, personal devotions.

There is much truth in all this, but you’d be hard pressed to find the Jesus of the gospels teaching it. Jesus did not invite his listeners to decide that a certain theory of the atonement was true (he hardly talked about atonement at all), and he had comparatively little to say about the practice of works of personal piety.

Jesus’s invitation to his listeners was not to decisionism. It was to something else, something quite radical.

To understand his invitation, we must remember that Jesus was a devout first-century Jew, steeped in the writings of the Hebrew prophets. He often quoted from the prophets to explain what he was up to, and the prophet he seems to have been most influenced by, the prophet he quoted from most often, was the prophet Isaiah.

The Book of Isaiah teaches that one day, God will be king–he will rule. (Later commentators on Isaiah, commentators Jesus would have been familiar with, called that future period of God’s rule the Kingdom of God.) And when that day comes, when God’s Rule comes, some deeply good things will happen. In the language of the prophets, when that day comes, shalom will flood the earth. Shalom: a communal state of well-being or wholeness in which:

There is forgiveness: God forgives us of our sins, heals us of its ravaging consequences, restores us to life-giving fellowship with Him and with each other, teaching us to forgive, heal, and restore one another.

In consequence:

There is peace: there is no more war, hatred or violence; people live together in mutual care and love, for each other and for creation.

There is justice: wherein the weak, the lowly, the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized are restored to full participation in the community and its goods.

There is healing: God heals our infirmities, physical and psychological, and wipes away every tear of suffering from our eyes.

There is joy: we delight in the Lord and in each other, in our lives together, in our work, in the glories of creation. And

God is present: we feel his tender, sweet presence with such force and vivacity that doubting that there is a God is as difficult as doubting the existence of the sun in the sky.

These are some of the marks, then, of the Rule of God and its shalom - forgiveness,

peace, justice, healing, joy, God’s tender presence.

One day, says the prophet Isaiah, these will flood the earth.

Go back then to Jesus’s invitation to his hearers. Here is what he said: “Repent, for the rule of God is at hand”. In other words, it’s here! It’s beginning! It’s breaking in! The longawaited age of shalom, with its forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and divine presence is breaking into this world of strife, injustice, brokenness, mourning, hatred, and enmity with God and may be entered into now by anyone who wants it. “Free at last, free at least, thank God almighty we are free at last!” That was the good news of Jesus’ gospel.

But you look around, and ask, Where is it? Where is shalom? Where is the Kingdom of God? Where is the peace, the justice, the healing, the joy, the forgiveness, the presence of God? “I don’t see it,” you say. “I see hatred, injustice, mourning, warfare—the opposite of the Rule of God.”

And here is what Jesus said about that. He said the Rule of God and its shalom, though it is breaking in, it is not breaking in in quite the way people expected. The thought among first-century Jews was that the coming of the rule of God would be a cataclysmic, earthshattering sort of event, in which God, in one fell swoop, would defeat evil and set up a new world order of peace, justice, healing, joy, etc.

But not so, said Jesus; it’s not going to work like that. The rule of God, rather, starts small, like mustard, a weed that sneaks into your garden slowly and quietly, starting off as a tiny little seed, infiltrating little by little. One day, it will bust out and take over everything.

But for now, it’s like an underground weed, subversively infiltrating everything. That’s what the rule of God is like.

But don’t underestimate the power and goodness of the mustard-seed rule of God. For though it is now small in our midst, and we enjoy but foretastes of its shalom, but foretastes of its blessings of peace, justice, healing, joy, forgiveness, and divine presence, the foretastes of these things are good, deeply precious, like a pearl you might find, said Jesus, which is so valuable you’d be willing to sell all that you possess to lay hold of that pearl.

Well, suppose so. Suppose the rule of God, with its shalom, its forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and experience of the divine presence is breaking into the world, may be tasted now by anyone who’d like, and is deeply good, like a pearl of great price. What must we do? How do we lay hold of this pearl of great price?

Here was Jesus’ answer. He said:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

He is employing an image from the agricultural world, where the way you train an animal to work is by yoking it to another who already knows the work. His invitation, then, is to be yoked to him: that is, to walk along side him, doing the things he does, following his teaching and his practice, apprenticing oneself to him. Those who do so, he said, will find rest for their souls, where the rest he speaks of here is the rest that comes from immersion in the presence of God, and the forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, and joy of his Rule. These things are available, said Jesus, to those who would apprentice themselves to him, take on his yoke, following him into his teachings and practices. And they are good, deeply good: worth selling all to lay of hold of.

Such, then, was his invitation. It was not an invitation to decisionism—to believe certain things about the atonement and practice certain works of personal piety. It was an invitation, rather, to a new way of life, to an utterly countercultural and subversive set of values and practices whose effect is to draw us into that shalom prophesied by the Old Testament prophets and teach us to minister it to the world around us.

For the rest of our times together, today and the next two days, I want to explore in some detail three of those practices.

First, the practice of familial community with brothers and sisters in the way of Jesus. I’ll talk about this for the rest of our time this morning.

Second, the practice of solidarity with the poor and marginalized. I’ll talk a bit about that now, and much more later.

And third, the practice of agapic enemy love, which I’ll talk about in the final section.

Familial community

Sociologists distinguish between group-oriented and individualist cultures. We live in a highly individualistic culture. This manifests itself in a variety of ways.

Here are three:

First, in our culture, the good of the individual takes precedence over the good of groups to which he or she belongs. On this way of thinking, all life decisions are made on the basis of calculation about what is best for me as an individual (my career, my fulfillment, my happiness).

Sometimes nuclear family gets into the picture, so that decisions are made on the basis of what’s best for me, my spouse, and our kids, though we’re trending in a direction where that is less and less the case: spouses more frequently now live separately from one another so that each can pursue what is best for his or her own career, fulfillment, and happiness.

Second, in our culture, the individual is the primary locus of decision making. I and no one else makes the important decisions in life: whom to marry, which vocation to pursue, where to live, etc.

And third, in our culture, people are increasingly relationally isolated. Interpersonal connection is shallow and episodic, mediated by technologies like Facebook and occasional face-to-face interaction as work and child-rearing demands permit.

In group-oriented cultures, things go differently.

First, in a group-oriented culture, the good of your group—typically your family or clan—takes precedence over your individual good. In Latino and Asian cultures, both group-oriented cultures, it is not uncommon for family members to emigrate to more prosperous areas and work menial jobs for years and years, forgoing the opportunity to go to college and move into more fulfilling work, sending moneys home so that others in the family can go to college and find their way into fulfilling work. The good of the group comes before the good of the individual.

Second, in group-oriented cultures, decision making is a group affair. Major life decisions about whom to marry, which vocation to pursue, where to live, and so forth, are either made for one by elders in the group—parents, for example—or are made in serious consultation with others in the group.

And third, in group-oriented cultures, there is a high premium placed on relational connection. Large family meals, time on porches, days playing soccer together at the park. Regular and lengthy face-to-face time together and shared life is a priority in group-oriented cultures.

Jesus’s culture was a group-oriented culture. The primary social unit in his culture was clan, or extended family. The good of this group took priority over the individual’s good; decision making was either made by family elders or in serious conversation with family elders; and families prized regular and sustained time together: eating together, working together, playing together, worshiping together.

These are important things to know about Jesus’s culture, because one of the very radical practices he called his followers to was the practice of familial community with one another.

We read in Mark chapter 3:

“Then His mother and His brothers came, and standing outside, they sent word to Him and called Him. A crowd was sitting around Him and told Him, “Look, Your mother, Your brothers, and Your sisters are outside asking for You.” He replied to them, “Who are My mother and My brothers?” And looking about at those who were sitting in a circle around Him, He said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! Whoever  does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.”” — Mark 3:31–35

Jesus’s words here would have utterly scandalized those witnessing them. As oldest male in his family, he would have been expected to defend his family honor and fall into line with his mother’s request, but he declines to do so in a very public way, putting loyalty to a new faith family, “whoever does the will of God” above loyalty to his biological family.

We see the same thing at work in Mark, Chapter 10:

"Peter began to tell Him, “Look, we have left everything and followed You.” “I assure you,” Jesus said, “there is no one who has left house, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children, or fields because of Me and the gospel, who will not receive 100 times more, now at this time— houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and eternal life in the age to come.” — Mark 10:28–30

The suggestion here is that Jesus’s followers would relate to each other as brother, sister, mother, and child: that they would enjoy family-like relationship to one another. Talk of ‘houses’ and ‘fields’ is important here as it suggested that members of these new faith families were engaging in a deep sort of family life, one that moved beyond just emotional closeness but included economic sharing of a sort that would have been common in first century, Mediterranean family life.

Given what we know about family life in the Mediterranean world, and its group orientation, we see that Jesus was calling his followers to a close-knit group life, in which the good of the group is weighed more heavily than individual needs, and in which decision making over important life matters is a shared affair, and in which relational closeness and sustained time together are prized: eating together, working together, playing together, worshiping together, sharing possessions together.

That the early church got Jesus’s message is clear from Luke’s description of their common life in Acts, Chapter 2:

[Here, and throughout this part of my talk, I am indebted to Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church was Family (B&H Publishing, 2009), pp. 55ff.]

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

I said we’d be exploring three practices taught by Jesus for moving into the in-breaking shalom of the rule of God, practices aimed at helping them to appropriate it for their own lives and minister it to others.

Here’s the first: the practice of familial community with other Jesus followers, where this would have been a matter of relating to a group of Jesus follows as to a family: putting the needs of the group above one’s individual needs, submitting oneself to the group, giving them authority to speak into one’s life and decisions, and practicing relational closeness and sustained time together with the group: regularly eating together, worshiping together, studying together, praying together, playing together, laughing together, working together, sharing together.

This kind of shared life doesn’t come easy to us as individualistic Westerners; it might even seem scandalous, weird, extreme. Not to worry: it seemed that way to Jesus’s contemporaries as well. The early Christians were replacing the primary ties of biological familial loyalty with loyalty to the family of faith, and this was deeply scandalous.

But it was a central practice of Jesus’s Kingdom vision, and though we won’t have time to explore it here, there is evidence of its central importance to the early Jesus movement throughout the gospels, Acts, and in Paul’s letters. New Testament Christianity is, at its heart, participation in a familial group.

In the time that remains to me, let me say a bit about, first, why Jesus might have set things up this way: Why is this practice important for entry into the inbreaking shalom of the rule of God?

And secondly, let me say a bit about how Jesus thought such communities would look; what they were to be like.

And thirdly, let me give some practical suggestions about how to move into this sort of life today.

Why this practice?

So why did Jesus teach this to his followers? Why would he have deemed important the practice of familial community with other practitioners of the way?

He didn’t say, so here we must be speculative. But I think it’s like this: The shalom life of the rule of God is a deeply countercultural life. Its values are utterly different from the values of the world.

Success in the world is a matter of attaining fame, status, wealth, luxury, power over others, defeat of your enemies, and friends who’ve done the same.

Success in the shalom life of the rule of God is a matter of being the servant of all and eschewing power over others, of being low in status, surrendering one’s possessions and wealth for the good of others, seeking the good of your enemies, and practicing community with the poor, the broken, the lonely, and the outcast.

All of this is deeply and fundamentally countercultural, contrary to the ordinary way of things. Here, I think, is the reason Jesus teaches his followers the practice of familial community. For we are deeply social beings. We naturally and involuntarily imbibe the values, the habits, and the ways of being of those with whom we live and work. This is why we need familial shalom community: community living by the values of the in-breaking shalom of the rule of God. By immersing ourselves in a close knit community practicing these alternative values, we imbibe these values and are thereby enabled to practice a form of life which is deeply at odds with the dominant culture. By immersing ourselves in a close knit community practicing servant hood, economic simplicity, enemy love, community with the poor and marginalized, and so forth, we are enabled to live in these deeply countercultural ways.

Here’s a second reason Jesus might have enjoined the practice of familial community on his followers.

The way of Jesus, the shalom life, requires practice!! Living in the flow of the in-breaking shalom, appropriating its forgiveness, justice, peace, healing, joy, and divine presence: all of this requires practice. One must practice receiving the forgiveness of God from others and extending it to others. One must practice justice: practice restoring dignity and well-being to the hitherto disenfranchised. One must practice peace: loving instead of hating one’s enemies. One must practice healing: receiving and extending physical and psychological healing from and to others. One must practice joy: receiving it from others; nurturing it in others. One must practice the presence of God: individually and communally.

Living into the in-breaking shalom of the rule of God and appropriating and ministering its blessings to others requires practice. And that’s what familial communities provide one: daily opportunity to practice appropriating and ministering these blessings. These communities are, as we might put it, schools of eternal living, whereby one practices daily the skills of living under the rule of God. One can’t do this well alone; we need brothers and sisters to help us practice these skills.

So that’s a bit on why Jesus may have thought the practice of familial shalom community of crucial importance for life under the rule of God. Let’s look more closely next at what they looked like: what it looked like for the early Jesus communities to do this kind of familial shalom community.


What life in these familial shalom communities looks like:

A key text here is Acts 2:

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

After Jesus’s death and resurrection, his disciples continued in the practice of familial community they’d learned from their master. Note these three main marks of their common life:

First: They ate together, in one another’s homes, frequently. And this wasn’t just a practice of the early Acts community, living in the euphoria of Jesus’s recent resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit. It’s a practice mentioned all throughout the New Testament and the writings of the late first and early second-century church. These people ate together, in one another’s homes, regularly.

Nothing builds familial bonds of love and mutual affection like regular meals together. We now know the neurophysiological basis of this: the same brain chemistry underlying feelings of attachment between mother and child, and lover and beloved, is triggered merely by eating with someone. Eating together, regularly, in one another’s homes, in joyous thankfulness and celebration of God’s goodness, creates bonded community.

Second: They studied together—the apostle’s teaching, and no doubt the Scriptures as well—and they prayed and worshipped together. Studying together, worshipping together, praying together: these are central activities of shalom communities. (As is, by the way, praying apart, praying alone. Jesus was always stealing away for times of extended solitude and prayer, and this must also be a part of the prayer life of a Jesus community.)

If we are to appropriate, to really lay hold of, the forgiveness and healing available to us in the rule of God and its in-breaking shalom, if we are to understand and appropriate the peace and justice of the rule of God and its in-breaking shalom, and if we are be sensitive to the divine presence, we must diligently study together, worship together, and pray together.

Third: They shared wealth and possessions with one another, the rich sharing with the poor and with “any who had need,” so that, as Acts 4:34 puts it, there was no one needy among them.

This is an important theme which will occupy the whole of my talk tomorrow evening.

For now, let me make some brief, preliminary remarks about it.

As I noted a moment ago, a primary element of the eschatological shalom foretold by the prophets of the age to come was that there would be justice, wherein the weak, the lowly, the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized are restored to full participation in the community and its goods.

Jesus taught that this long-awaited justice of the age to come was now breaking into history:

“Now Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and at down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to tell them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read.”

Good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for those who have been oppressed: the justice of the Rule of God is breaking into this present age. The early Jesus communities lived into this idea in two main ways: they practiced radical inclusivity, drawing the poor and marginalized into their familial communities; and they practiced radical sharing with anyone in need.

Their radical inclusivity meant at least three things:

First: Eating together with those not normally thought of as appropriate candidates for table fellowship: Here they were following the teaching and practice of their master:

(Mark 2: 15) “And as he reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.”

(Luke 14: 12) “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

In first century Jewish Palestine, this signaled a powerful solidarity with the poor and marginalized; it was a prophetic act, announcing, in effect, “we are with you and for you; you are our people; you are our family.”

Second: Hospitality to those in need: welcoming the the poor, the homeless, the lonely, the excluded into their homes and caring for them there, as if caring for Christ. This was a main way of following Jesus’s exhortation to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. John Chrysostom, the great Christian orator and bishop of Constantinople, urged his parishioners to set aside rooms in their homes as “Christ rooms”, wherein “the maimed, the beggars, the homeless” could be received into one’s home as Christ.

Among the most beautiful examples of this sort of life in the contemporary scene is the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin the 1930s. These Catholic brothers and sisters live together in familial communities, in voluntary poverty, welcoming the homeless, the dying, and others on the margins to live and eat with them. I have spent much time in the last couple of years at a Catholic Worker House in Southern California in which over 80 homeless women live and literally thousands of homeless men and women are fed each week. There is no furniture on the first floor of this large house, and each night mats are spread out with blankets and sleeping bags for women who need housing and can find it nowhere else. All eat together each morning and evening, in shared family life. No woman in need of shelter is ever turned away. The presence of the Rule of God is palpable in that place; it’s beautiful and powerful.

Inviting the destitute to one’s table and into one’s home to be cared for (in a culture in which destitution was a pervasive problem) was a costly endeavor for the first-century believers (as it is now, for the Catholic Workers). To finance it, early believers practiced:

Economic sharing: selling lands and possessions as there was need, living simply, eschewing luxury. There is record in the early church of churches fasting for several days so that all could have enough to eat.

No doubt all of this occasioned anxiety, but they were emboldened and strengthened by their master’s teaching that they should be unafraid because the blessings of the Rule of God and its inbreaking shalom far outweighed whatever costs it entailed:

(Luke 12:32) “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father is well pleased to give you the kingdom.  Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide yourselves purses that do not wear out—a treasure in heaven that never decreases, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

So: radical inclusivity—eating together, welcoming the needy into their homes—and financing it with radical sharing, selling lands and possessions, fasting if necessary, so that no one in their reach suffered need: these were the marks of early Christian family life.

Let me conclude by summarizing where we have got to and saying a bit about what it might look to live into this vision today.

Jesus’s invitation to his original hearers, I suggested, was not to decisionism: it was not an invitation to decide to believe a certain theory of the atonement so that one goes to heaven when one dies, or to practice certain works of personal piety, or even to have a personal relationship with Jesus. It was an invitation, rather, to live under the rule of God and its in-breaking shalom, long promised by the prophets and now available to those who would follow Jesus and live in his way. Jesus invited his listeners to become his students, his disciples, his apprentices in living under the rule of God and appropriating its shalom, and  a main practice he taught them was to practice familial community; to be family with one another. And that meant doing the the things that families in the group-oriented, first century Mediterranean Jewish world did: eating together regularly in one another’s homes, sharing possessions with one another, studying together, worshipping and praying together, sharing possessions with one another. More, it meant doing all of this in radical solidarity with and inclusivity of the poor and marginalized. Such were the marks of the family life he enjoined on his apprentices.

On living this today, imagine with me, now, what it might be like to live this out today (for many of you, I recognize, this won’t take much imagination: you’re already living it).

It’s Friday at 6, your weekly meeting night, and people begin arriving at John’s apartment. His apartment isn’t large so he’s pushed furniture to the sides of the room.

Ahil and Eshai arrive with kids and toe and two large platters of lasagna. Soon comes Esther and her daughter with the bread; then Jose with an armful of bottles of wine and soda. And so on, until thirty or so are spread around the room in groups of three or four, laughing, catching each other up on the week.

It’s an odd mix: some are old, some are college students, some are very shabbily dressed, looking like they’d been living on the streets not long ago (because they had been living the streets not long ago). It’s a mix of races—black, white, and brown—and a mix of ages, old and young.

When the last person arrives, Ahil calls everyone to crowd toward the kitchen. The laughing and conversation dies down as Ahil holds up a round of bread, and breaking it, says, “Welcome beloved. We meet tonight as the family of God, in the name of Jesus, who gave himself for us that we might learn to give ourselves to one another and to a hurting world.

Thank you, Lord, for each other, for this meal, and for the shalom you are drawing us into. Knit our hearts together, Lord; teach us to love. In Jesus name, Amen.”

After all have got food and found a spot of floor or couch to sit on, attention turns to the children. “Tell us about your game!! How’d it go? Did you score?” someone shouts. As the kids relate the week’s goings on at school, there is alternating laughing, applause, silence, as all listen in rapt attention to the kids. In a lull, John says to Esther’s daughter, a 12-yearold in the community, “Your mom told us how you took care of her when she was down with the flu last week. We’re proud of you and the person you’re becoming. “Thanks Uncle John,” in reply.

Soon someone has the guitar out, and things transition to a time of worship. Then an update on the grocery ministry the community has been running at a local motel, feeding a dozen or so families living week to week, struggling with food insecurity. It’s going well: here are the number of families fed in the last several months; the money left in the common account; etc. Then an hour or so of discussing the Bonhoeffer book they’ve all been reading.

(The kids have mercifully been dismissed to a back room for a movie.)

This transitions into some painful sharing by Mark, who has been struggling with joblessness and consequent depression and financial hardship. He shares how it’s destroying him. Long silence as people listen deeply. Slowly, carefully, people begin to ask questions, share thoughts, offer suggestions. Before long the entire room is standing around Mark, laying hands on him and is praying for healing, help, wholeness. Silent weeping. The group covenants to redirect a portion of their common purse toward helping with his mortgage until he can find a job. Silent tears.

Cindy shares how her job search has been going. She was homeless until she met some of your people at the motel you run your grocery ministry at. Soon thereafter, she moved into a spare room at Esther’s house. The community gives part of their monthly giving to Esther to cover the extra food and utilities. It’s been hard on Esther: she and Cindy don’t get along very well. The group asks how that’s been going. Frank sharing from each about the tensions. More silence, listening, gentle questions, laying on of hands, praying for peace.

More of this sort of thing until it’s one a.m.; several have nodded off, lots of yawning. The kids, by now asleep, are retrieved and all head home. Such are your weekly shared meals.

You live near enough to one another that you see each other frequently throughout the week. There is time during the week to sit together on porches, have a beer and laugh at the day’s events, to share deeply, to play together. You support each other when life is difficult, when tragedy strikes. Cooking for each other, watching each other’s kids, doing one another’s laundry. You weep together at life’s tragedies, laugh together at life’s comedies, exhort one another, rebuke one another when necessary, bear with one another’s weaknesses and foibles. Together you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.

The spirit is palpable in your midst: there is a powerful love and a powerful sense of God’s presence that pervades your common meals, your celebrations, and your common work, that can only be attributed to the spirit of God in your midst. In consequence, you are finding yourselves a city on a hill, a light in a world of darkness: your common life is magnetic; people are drawn to you, and to Jesus as a result.

This, I want to suggest, is in the vicinity of what Jesus envisioned when he spoke of the in-breaking shalom of the rule of God and urged his followers to enter into it, to lay hold of it, by practicing familial community.

It’s a main way of drawing near to God, moving into ever-increasing, intimate experience of his sweet and tender presence.

And it’s for us today. It’s doable today. It’s being done by Jesus communities around the world. It doesn’t take many people: Jesus said, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst.” Two or three can live in this practice of familial shalom community: eating together, worshiping and praying together, practicing radical sharing with and hospitality to those in need.

In my next talk we’ll explore the latter practices—radical sharing and hospitality—in more depth.

May he bless and keep you until then.
Dr. Thomas Crisp