thoughts on "Irresistible Revolution"

This book is amazing, but summarizing the whole thing would take too long, so I'm just going to highlight the things that God has made stand out to me especially, the things that I feel He's calling me to change...

The biggest thing that has caused the most dramatic change in the way I think is summed up in this quote: "I began to understand what it meant when the curtain of the temple was torn open as Jesus died on the cross. Not only was God redeeming that which was profane, but God was setting all that was sacred free." (emphasis mine) Shane goes on to explain what this implies: "I knew that I had not just looked into the eyes of some pitiful leper in Calcutta but that I had gazed in to the eyes of Jesus, and that he had not seen just some rich, do-gooder white kid from American but that he had seen the image of God in me. That is nuts. What would the world look like if we truly believed, as the apostle Paul figured out, that we no longer live, but only Jesus lives in us?" Back on campus after break, I tried to see Jesus in everyone I interacted with or made eye contact with, and not just those people who I knew to be Christ-followers, but everyone. And it breathed a whole new meaning into "whatever you did to the least of these, my brothers, you did unto me." I have to admit, it's not a conscious thought now all the time anymore, but it still affects the way that I interact with people - I treat them with more value, for sure.

The second thing that I've come to realize through this book is that I need to be doing something about poverty in the world...and my community, Greenville, is the very best place for me to start. I've read Shane's debunking of the excuse "the poor will always be among you" and run across so many examples of how we as Christ-followers are supposed to treat the poor. Like I already said, "whatever you did..." means so much more to me now. And I think the most arresting quote that I have read about poverty so far is, "Ask the poor. They will tell you who the Christians are." ~Gandhi ....Ouch. What am I doing to end poverty in my community, to bring the Kingdom of God "on earth, as it is in heaven"?

And ending poverty isn't the only aspect of bringing the Kingdom of God to earth - which is the mission that we join with God in accomplishing when we start to follow the Way of Christ...war is another biggie. I had never given serious thought to that issue until I read the chapter Shane titles "Pledging Allegiance When Kingdoms Collide". He points out how much patriotism and the American flag area part of the church, and questions if that is a good thing. After reading what he has to say about it, I think it's not a good thing. Patriotism has already been getting on my nerves for some time now, ever since I heard Derek Webb's song "A King and a Kingdom", the chorus of which goes My first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man/my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood/it's to a King and a Kingdom. My question became why should I take pride in and pledge allegiance to a nation-state that God can bring down a whole lot faster than He raised it up, when my true allegiance should lie with a Kingdom that will never fade away, a Kingdom ruled by a perfect Savior-King? Shane's bigger point about how tragic it is that the American church puts so much emphasis on being American is that it blinds us to our bigger family around the world and pits us as enemies to our nation's enemies. And this is so tragic because we have been reborn into a new system where we should love our enemies and seek peace with every man through Christ, and that's almost opposite of the way the American church lives and operates.

Shane goes on to question redemptive violence, something which I am still questioning, but I haven't quite been able to reconcile a completely pacifist stance with the God who annihilated so many thousands of people through war in the Old Testament...but I do know that I agree with this statement of Shane's: "I have pledged allegiance to a King who loved evildoers so much he died for them, teaching us that there is something worth dying for but nothing worth killing for." And here is a quote by an Iraqi woman about the war in Iraq that should really cause us to rethink our traditional, conservative, Western Christian take on the "War on Terror": "Your country is declaring war in the name of God and asking God's blessing, and that is the same thing my country is doing. What kind of God is this? What has happened to the God of love, to the Prince of Peace?"