So last Thursday night, before going to the Dallas Arts Museum with Laurie, we stopped by the bookstore and I took the opportunity to grab “Jesus for President” off the bookshelf. I’m loving it. Seems I’m picking it up any time I have more than 5 minutes of downtime. I’m about halfway through it and it’s challenging me. Challenging my thoughts about Rome, America, empires in general and what it means to be “Holy and set apart” and it even stretches my idea of allegiance and communal living.
The book is written by Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw. Both whom I know very little about. The book is also artfully illustrated throughout by Holly and Ryan Sharp. Love it. Funny thing – my mom was skimming through the book last Friday before we went to lunch together and she thought I had already marked the entire book up. I almost told her yes – but its part of the illustrations in the book to emphasis various ideas, quotes and points. Makes reading it a lot more fun.
The book starts off with a familiar story:
You grew up in a good family; hardworking dad and a mom who was there when you needed her. They taught you and your little brother to share and showed you how to pray every night before bed. In Sunday school you learned about Jesus and sang all the songs with the rest of the kids. There was Noah and his ark, Moses and the Ten Commandments, and a little baby Jesus asleep on the hay. You learned about the blessing that was America and were grateful to live in a country led by good Christian leaders. With a hand over your heart or above your brow you pledged allegiance to God and Country, for the Lord was at work in this holy nation. But lately you are beginning to wonder if this is really how God intended things to be. And you question if God is really working through places of power. Maybe, you wonder, God had a totally different idea in mind…
Claiborne doesn’t pull any punches from the beginning:
…we’re hardly able to distinguish between what’s American and what’s Christian… Rather than placing our hope in a transnational church that embodies God’s kingdom, we assume America is God’s hope for the world, even when it doesn’t look like Christ.
In Chp 1 he offers a great definition of idolatry:
Idolatry begins when our seeing a reflection of God in something beautiful leads to our thinking that the beautiful image bearer is worthy of worship.
He explores the history of the Jews (and Christianity) and explores God’s desire for the Jews to be totally separate, to be apart, to be different from their neighbors. That’s why God is reluctant to give the Israelites a king. If they have a king, if they build a temple, if they worship idols – there’s nothing different between them and their neighbors. Even after the exile from Egypt, the Israelites begin to get nostalgic and whine about going back to Egypt where they had been beaten and enslaved.
It may take only a few days to get out of the empire, but it takes an entire lifetime to get the empire out of us.
And yet even after the Israelites have their own country, and their own kings, and they run into problem after problem, God could have said, “Nope. You wanted a king instead of me. You dug your hole, now live in it.” He could have said that, but of course, with God… Grace always triumphs over judgment.
And through Israel’s history, Claiborne continues to point to the fact that God choses the weakest, most unlikely characters to be the heroes of the liberation story.
And I love how Claiborne takes the Leviticus law and paints a picture that these are not only things to help the Israelites remain healthy and strong, they are things that completely set them apart from the empires that surround them.
…these laws were intended to create a new culture free of the unhealthy patterns and branding of the empire. If we imagine putting those laws in contemporary terms, we can see the subtle critique of culture implicit in them: “Thou shall not have in they home the electric box with the talking screen,” or, “Thou shalt not wear clothing marked with a swoosh or any other image that requires the blood of sweatshop children.” … Many of the Israelites’ laws were after all, a direct confrontation with those of the world they knew. They were ways of driving a wedge into the wheels of injustice and interrupting cycles of oppression… There were laws for welcoming strangers and illegal immigrants and practices like gleaning, which allowed the poor to take leftovers from the fields.
Sure, we Americans like to think we’re strong and we must defend our borders, but if we’re a “Christian nation” as many like to point out – shouldn’t we be set apart and living differently than those around us. Shouldn’t we be loving the stranger — even the illegal aliens?
And so it was in Chapter 1 ;-).
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