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My friend asked this in a previous post of mine. My answer? Well, Jesus didn’t live in a democracy, so that wasn’t a real option for him. I don’t think we can argue about voting in the abstract — is voting always a good thing or a bad thing? We need to ask what voting is doing in a particular context, whether voting is liberating or oppressing for those who live in that particular context. We will need to reason from the way of life Jesus lived in Palestine.

Jesus was about creating a community of the outcasts and marginalized and giving them a voice — transforming them from objects of God’s wrath to subjects in God’s kingdom. The ‘rule of Paul’ as some call it, was the idea that everyone got a voice when Christians got together. They didn’t know who the Holy Spirit might speak through, so, even those who were considered less important, had a voice at the gathering.

We need to ask, for a particular context and time, is voting a liberating or an oppressive activity? Was voting a Jesus-like activity in South Africa when blacks voted for the first time in 1994? I would say it was. Is voting a Jesus-like thing when a one-party government has 99% support? Probably not — voting would reinforce the illusion of support that those in power hold. 

So, the question must be asked — is this a time to vote, is it a liberating activity for those in our country or or not? Does this election offer a means by which those who have been shut out and lack a real role in the political process receive their voice?  I think for many in the country, voting in this election represents a turning of the tide. I believe we have, in this election, an opportunity to elect a person who represents voices that have rarely been heard, at this level, in the political process. Giving a voice to the voiceless is something Christians need to rally around. And back up with a vote. Today.

I don’t consider myself a liberal, or a conservative, or even a middle of the road type of person. Although others may categorize me as white, evangelical, and male, I am first and foremost (I hope) a follower of Jesus. When I make big decisions, I try to root my decisions in how I understand Jesus to have lived. I don’t believe in the divisions that create some issues to be moral or personal or ethical or secular. I believe all of life is to be lived spiritually, and life is most fruitful if we look to Jesus in all things — not just ‘religious things’ . Basing my decisions on him may put me in different camps, depending on the time and context in which I live. In the past, I’ve voted Republican, I’ve voted Democrat, and I’ve not voted out of Christian convictions. I’ve considered these three options for this election as well. For the following reasons, I decided to vote for Obama on Tuesday:

1) The poor will be better off with Obama. I believe this to be the first question we must ask of a candidate. Jesus promised a jubilee to his followers. He created a community that shared generously with one another. For a Christian to support a candidate, that candidate must look to create a system that resembles this community of sharing. I don’t call it “socialism” — I call it gospel…

2) Blessed are the peacemakers — we must support people who strive for peace. And Jesus was not saying use the sword to achieve peace — it was ‘use the means of peace to achieve the ends of peace’ (why would he say ‘love your enemies in the same Sermon?). I believe Obama seeks to end the war. I’ve been concerned by the strong military talk by both candidates. However, I think Obama is taking a more direct route to peace. We must support the peacemakers to align ourselves with the Sermon on the Mount.

3) I believe Obama will begin to repair the damage done in our relationships with other countries. I believe he will look to bring reconciliation where there are divisions. In Christian baptism, the two peoples, Jews and Gentiles, become one. The body of Christ, made up of many members from many races, is to be one. It is at the heart of our faith that we overcome our divisions while celebrating our differences. For a candidate to receive the Christian vote, he or she must seek to do likewise. In the United States, I believe that Obama will be a force in healing the racial divide in our country. It is a huge task, and we might not get very far, but I think he will move us in the right direction.

4) I believe Obama will bring other voices to the table. Jesus spent time with the outcasts and sinners shut out from the main halls of power. I believe a candidate, to get the Christian vote, must create a space to hear other voices. I believe Obama himself is one of these other voices. In addition, we need to talk to those who hate us, and we need to know why. I believe Obama will do this in foreign policy — and I believe he will do it here in the US.

5) We are to be better stewards of creation. Right now, it appears we’ve damaged the way the earth is to function through driving our cars and consuming so much of our natural resources. We need to move in the direction of better stewardship of creation as we honor God’s gifts to us. I believe Obama has a better plan to move to alternative fuels and energy than does John McCain. I believe, after 9-11, we should have pushed for energy independence for many of our families through tax breaks for solar panels on houses.

For these five reasons, I’m casting my vote for Obama on Tuesday…

In this part 2 of a mashup involving a read of Taking on the System by Markos Zuniga and the life of Jesus, we look at how to interact with gatekeepers. For Zuniga, social change process focuses on changing the conventional wisdom of a particular culture. If you shift conventional wisdom, then change will occur. From part 1, we saw that gatekeepers are those in the media and politics to whom we need to get approval in order to have a voice, to influence the conventional wisdom. Without approval of the gatekeeper, it is normally thought, social change cannot occur.

Who were the gatekeepers in Jesus time? It was those in religious/political leadership in Jerusalem. They guarded access to the temple, and they were able to declare who were legitimate members of the people of God and who were not. Jesus spent time with those who were considered outcasts, rebels, and sinners. These were those who were excluded from the promises of God.

So, what are our options regarding the gatekeepers today? Kos says we can bypass them, crush them, or influence them. Bypassers are those who self-publish their work, either in print media, music, or film. These artists let the media giants know they can do it without them. This scares the media gatekeepers and in many instances they quickly change their tune. Crushers are those that create an alternative to the media source and thus destroy the gatekeeper’s popularity or significance. Influencers are those who threaten the media outlet with irrelevancy. The media outlet must change or lose its market share. These three approaches in engaging the gatekeeper are similar and overlap a bit — they vary in the directness of their approach. What they share is pushing at the media gatekeeper’s fear of becoming redundant.

In a similar way, Jesus utilized these approaches in Palestine. He bypassed the gatekeepers — there were those who were sanctioned to offer forgiveness, to say who was “in” and who was “out”. By granting forgiveness to the outcasts on the periphery of society, who lived outside the religious establishment, Jesus rendered the temple irrelevant. By redrawing these social boundaries, political control passed from the religious establishment to Jesus. Jesus also crushed the gatekeepers — he turned over the tables in the temple as a direct action against the gatekeepers. He exposed, to all who were there, what the temple had become. He offered, in his person, another way. He also influenced the gatekeepers, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. For the most part, however, when we look at the social/political/religious movement of Jesus, the gatekeepers were bypassed. Jesus created a community that no longer required the blessing of those who held religious and political power.

To perform the mashup we must add another element to the puzzle. In Jesus’ day, religion and politics were one. The political leaders were the religious leaders and vice-versa. Today, they are separate. In order to envision what missional engagement for communities connected through social media might look like, we must engage the religious gatekeepers as well. With that in mind, here is a try at a mashup:

Jesus-following bloggers must change the conventional wisdom of the church and the media through creating an alternative message to the status quo of church and culture. As they connect online, they facilitate conversations that threaten to bypass the gatekeepers of traditional church structures. They also create their own media, i.e. writings, music, video, thereby threatening to bypass the media conglomerates as well. In addition, they push the culture to reconsider the practices that do not mesh with the dreams of God for humanity (what Jesus called the kingdom of God) – e.g the activities in society that disenfranchise people. In the end, these bloggers do not have the power on their own to be the “church”, to be the source of all their own media, or to create acts of justice. However, they can push both the church and the culture to listen to what they have to say and move the conversation and practices into more inclusive, just, participatory, and egalitarian directions. In turn, this will transform the conventional wisdom on what it means to follow Jesus.

More to come…

I’ve recently been reading Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era,  and I’ve been impressed by Zuniga’s astute observations regarding political change and how it occurs. Zuniga (or Kos, an abbreviated form of his first name,  Markos) is the founder of the very influential political blog, DailyKos. Writing from the liberal perspective, his book would help anyone who seeks political change, regardless if they identify with his politics.

As I’ve written previously here and here, the primary task of my classes at Fuller Seminary is to help students imagine what Jesus-like social change might look like in contemporary culture.

So, I thought I would create a mashup of these two conversation partners, looking to Jesus for the primary agenda of social change (the kingdom of God) while looking to Kos for the means of change, knowing full well that I need to hold both of these ends in loosely to create opportunities for synergy.

I imagine creating a number of posts, one or more posts per chapter of Taking on the System.

Chapter One (part one)

Kos writes that today we need the media for significant social change. We can protest in the streets, but unless it is covered by the media, it is not really an event. Change happens through changing the flow of information, and if you can’t change the flow, you can’t change hearts and minds. In the 1930s, Gandhi used news reels to broadcast his protests at the salt mines. In the 1960s, protestors used network TV to broadcast their message. Today, it will be social media that transforms the landscape. It will be the bloggers.

What were the political dynamics surrounding Jesus? In first century northern Palestine, word of the Jesus movement spread through Jesus’ teaching, preaching and healing. He taught with a different kind of authority than the religious leaders, and so he garnered support. To the people, he appeared like a revolutionary zealot, as a prophet on the fringes of society. People followed him in the countryside. It was a bit of a backwater in northern Palestine, yet thousands came to hear him speak. He offered them a different understanding of reality than was given by the religious leaders — a new way to be the people of God. This put pressure on the leaders, both Jewish and Roman, to respond in some way. Unknown to the powerful — it was the powerless of society that knew who he was. It wasn’t until Jesus came to Jerusalem during passion week where his public role grew dramatically.

Kos writes that the ultimate goal of activism is dislodging conventional wisdom. HIs advice is particularly relevant for social change in democracies, but one could argue that changing public perceptions is valid in more oppressive systems as well — but you may not see the results as quickly, if at all. Jesus changed the conventional wisdom of the masses through storytelling. I’ll talk about that more in a later post.

For Kos, changing conventional wisdom takes place through changing the perception of what is true as understood by the public, the gatekeepers, and those in politics. Whoever frames what is considered to be true controls the nature of the debate. Kos cites the Daou Triangle, an article written by Peter Daou on Salon in September 2005. Daou put blogs (or netroots) on one corner of the triangle, the media on a second corner, and the political establishment on the third. At this point in history, blogs cannot effect change in conventional wisdom on their own, but they can put pressure on the media and politicians to change the conversation. Bloggers can put pressure on the media or the politicians, or both.

What does a Jesus and Kos mashup look like here? What is the takeaway for churches today? In sum, Jesus-like communities will become an online social movement challenging both the media and political power. Strongly connected to each other, they will live out, as a social community, what they preach to others. From the outside, they will seek to challenge and influence the common understandings of reality as put forth by the media and the politicians. And they will be bloggers.

More to come…Part II — Moving Past the Gatekeepers

Possible transcript of a debate that took place many years ago — more details at the end of the transcript…

Moderator of the Debate (sitting near the stage, away from the two prominent podiums on stage):
Good evening from Herod’s Palace in downtown Jerusalem. I’m Joseph Solomon and I welcome you to the first of the AD33 political debates between the Sadducee, Simon Joseph and the Pharisee nominee, David Benjamin. The commission on political debates is the sponsor of the event this evening. Tonight’s debate will focus on the our relationship to the Romans and on different views of how we are to be the people of God. Each participant will have two minutes to present their position and then the moderator may follow up after they answer their lead question. They questions were chosen by me, and I have not shared these with anyone. Gentlemen, with that in mind, here is the first lead question. Where do you stand on the Roman issue?

Pharisee (standing behind one podium, dressed in nice suit)
Thank you very much Joseph and thanks to Herod’s Palace for hosting the event. I can’t think of a better time and place in which to discuss our future. We are at a critical point in discussing how we are to be God’s people!

Unlike my friend across the aisle, we are not the party of the rich, but of the average, hard-working Jew in Jerusalem. Our key task as the people of God is not to get tainted by the ways of the world. We are to strictly obey God’s laws. If we obey God’s laws, everything will work out just fine for us. The problem is that we have tax collectors, sinners, and outcasts in the land. These people need to repent and turn back to God, and then God will return to us once again.

Moderator
– excuse me, but you didn’t answer my question, what about Rome?

Pharisee
To a certain extent we can ignore Rome – we will cooperate if we have to, as long as it does not affect our spiritual lives. But the key is our keeping the Law — and I mean the whole law (the written and oral tradition, unlike my counterpart over there).  We need to keep ourselves pure and clean before God and away from the sinners. It is not about politics; it is about our spiritual life with God – that is what God is concerned with. If we can become clean, God will return and set things straight.

Sadducee (standing behind other podium, also dressed in a nice suit)
Hey, may I interrupt? The book of Moses is our authority – the written books of the Law. Our job, as the people of God, is to preserve and conserve what we know from the past – not listen to these authorities [points at Pharisee] that continue to add to our understanding of scripture.

I don’t like the tone of my debate partner. He does not seem to understand that the Romans have been very good to us. We have a Jewish king, we are able to practice our faith freely here in Jerusalem. That kind of talk just alienates the Romans! They could  take everything we’ve gained away — and I don’t think that is a very good idea. We’ve been conquered by many empires over the years – the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and now the Romans. It could be worse.
Let’s not rock the boat – they are not occupying us – they are spreading Roman freedom to us!

Anyway, we’re not starving – we’re all doing pretty well here in Jerusalem. If we have to allow a pagan temple here or there, what is the harm? Sure, Rome taxes us a lot – but if we need cash ourselves, we just increase the tax on the poor and charge extra fees for temple worship.

And what is wrong with wealth? Isn’t it a good thing that the most powerful people in the country are God’s people? Would you rather have the pagan Romans in these positions? I’m sure that goodness will come when God’s people are ruling in Israel. We are the evidence of that!

Moderator
We are now going to break to talk with Ruth Isaacson, she has reactions from some in the crowd tonight.

Announcer (at Side of the Convention Hall)
Thanks Joseph, I have a Judas Iscariot here – he has some strong reactions to the speeches so far. Judas, what do you think?

Judas the Zealot (dressed in revolutionary garb, a la Che Guevara)
I think we need to throw all the bums out – the whole lot of them. Tweedle dee and tweedle dum, that is who they are. They are singing out of the same psalm book! (pointing to the candidates up front)

The rich Sadducees suck up to the Romans – our sworn enemies [points to Sadducee]. The Romans oppress our people, and our supposed leaders do anything the Romans ask them to do. Build a pagan temple, sure! Sacrifice a pig in the temple, no problem! It is disgusting.

The Pharisee [points] up there is not much better – he is a useless leader. What challenge do they present to Rome? They talk a good talk about God’s law, but in the end, they are just as bad as the Sadducees – nothing gets done.

Have you heard of the middle class? Well, we have none here – 5% rich, 95% poor. It is intolerable. We are undergoing a brutal occupation, and any of our leaders that speak truth to power is killed. And it is not only the Romans that brutalize our people – it is our own Jewish leaders — they do not want to lose favor from Rome!

So, we need to throw these bums out, but more importantly, we need arms to overthrow the Romans so we can be our own people on our own land again. It is does not matter the cost, or the amount of blood spilled – we need to usher in the kingdom of God.

Announcer
Well, yes, thank you for that very honest report. We have word that Elizabeth Rosen has a passerby in the desert with her opinion.

Field Reporter (in the desert)
Yes, Ruth, I’m talking with “desert flower”, an Essene living out in the desert.
What is your take on the current political happenings?

Essene (dressed in a combination 60s hippie of a briar patch)
Yeah, we have a commune out in the desert – it’s pretty cool…
We live on locusts, honey, whatever we can find [picks a grasshopper off of her and eats it]

Field Reporter
How is that outfit – comfortable??

Essene
No, it really hurts – especially the sand gets in some inopportune places – really irritating really. But everything that irritates us gets us closer to God, so its’ all good.

Field Reporter
So, why are you out in the desert?

Essene
We are waiting for God to return. We have a good community, we love God, we love to pray, and things are good. and now, we’re waiting. And waiting, and waiting….

Field Reporter
Thank you,
Well, back to you, Ruth.

Announcer (in another part of the auditorium, talking to a small crowd)
We’re now going to speak to a group of members in the audience, some who say there is another king in town! Don’t know if our leaders are going to like that very much!

Testimony 1
Hi – yes, I met this man who kept talking about the kingdom of God, but it was very different than the kingdom we know about. It is a kingdom where the poor take part, and the outcasts and sinners are the insiders!

Testimony 2
It is about debts being forgiven and each person having enough!

Testimony 3
…and the sick being healed!

Testimony 4
He talked about Satan as our enemy – not Rome. He said we are no longer to have any enemies – that we were to love our enemies and serve them. He said it was a revolution, not of weapons, but of love of neighbor.

Testimony 5
His name is Jesus – and he created a community that acts like a family, but the members are not related! Every economic level is represented there, and they all share with one another! And women are not property in this kingdom – they get an equal say! In fact, everyone gets a voice!

Testimony 6
He says that this is what it means to be the light to the Gentiles – this is the way we are to be the people of God!

Announcer
Well, Joe, this sounds like a revolutionary character, this Jesus.
He refused to cave in to power, like the Sadducees; he refused to turn holiness into a formula, like the Pharisees. He is a lot like the zealots, but he refuses violence altogether and loves his enemies. And, finally he is definitely in the midst of things – can’t see this guy waiting in the desert for something to happen, like the Essenes.
I think we need to hear more about this Jesus, Joe.
And that is my report…

Moderator
If I hear you right, Ruth, this Jesus is quite a radical.
He refuses the way of conservative social responsibility; he refuses the way of rule-oriented compartmental social change; he refuses the way of violence; he refuses the way of quietism and retreat.
He advocates the kingdom of God, a whole new social order.

If he doesn’t watch out – talking like that might get him crucified…

And now, back to the debate…

THE END

This was the script I wrote for my church community — we performed it yesterday. We had three to four generations performing — everyone really got into it. It took about 12 minutes to perform, and it served as the ‘word’ section of our service.

During the week before, we invited people to make political signs — some of the options: “Sadducees”, or “Pharisees”, “Zealots”, “Essenes”, or “Jesus”. Some ad-libbed with “Down with the Romans” etc. During the debate, if a person’s candidate or party was mentioned, the person in the congregation would raise their sign up and down, cheer for the candidate or jeer against the others. In addition, we had a ballot box where they could vote — the two listed were Sadducee and Pharisee, but there was also a space for ‘write-in’ where they could write Essene, Zealot, or Jesus.They voted on the way to communion…Jesus was the surprise write-in upset (58). The Sadducees received two votes, and Obama one vote (don’t know what that was about!). We received really good feedback on the event. I’ll post pictures when I get them.

I wrote a short post to stir the pot on our class political blog. The blog is starting to get going — it should have about 20 posts a week through the end of November.

In my interviews with churches in the West, those that highly engage culture, I’ve noticed that none or very few were of the just-war perspective when it came to issues of war and peace. If they were not outright pacifists, they leaned that way, and much of their talk reflected that nonviolence was consistent with their overall set of Christian practices. Some critics dismiss emerging churches’ disposition towards nonviolence as simply part of an unthinking liberal agenda of some sort. I disagree. I think the emerging churches move towards peacemaking is rooted in something much deeper than than any sort of knee-jerk political reaction.

Looking back In Christian history, there have been two primary positions towards war, the just-war position rooted in Augustine’s thought, and the position of non-violence rooted in the life of Jesus and the early church. Just-war advocates appeal to Old Testament kingdom understandings or to a church and state synthesis that began in the West in the early fourth century and continued until the middle of the twentieth century. Pacifism or nonviolence was the standard position of Jesus, Paul, and the countercultural church of the first two to three centuries. It has existed as a minority view within the period of Christendom.

Many Western churches operate today as if Christendom still existed. They fulfill their ever-diminishing role as spiritual chaplain to the society, baptizing the goals of the nation as a whole and by encouraging people to play nice. Those churches that are not a direct benefactor of Christendom, those minority faith traditions in the West and those outside the West, lived much differently — simply to survive. They couldn’t baptize the nation’s goals because they weren’t part of those goals. They needed a different set of narratives to give shape to their lives. Instead of the Christendom story, they chose the scriptural stories of God’s people who were not in power. The very existence of their community served as a prophetic witness to the nation as a whole, both in Scripture, and today. Sometimes the witness was overt, such as with Dr. Martin Luther King, sometimes it was unspoken, simply by embodying a different way of life.

The Emerging Church movement is one of the first truly post-Christendom movements in the West. Emerging churches do not lament Christendom’s demise nor do they desire its return. They do not seek a favored place in their nation’s capitol, although they live highly political lives. They do not draw lines in the culture war, but they live the Jesus-life within all of culture. They do not look to historic Christendom positions on war or any other issue as their referents, as they have little relevance for a Christ follower in a post-Christendom world. The primary narrative of emerging churches is the Jesus story, continued today. Not a ’spiritualized’ Jesus who only lives in the heart or in ecstatic experience, but a Jesus who served by example, who confronted the powers, in community, through a countercultural way of life that demonstrated hospitality to the outcast. To be a gospel-like church in post-Christendom, i.e. to be a Christ-following community at the margins that prophetically embodies and engages all of life, is to be a community of peacemakers, regardless of how that plays out in any particular nation’s political landscape.

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, Enemy-love, Jesus, Martin Luther King, peace

Miroslav Volf recently wrote in Christian Century (thanks Carlos Stouffer for this) that neither religious left nor religious right maintain a gospel-like Jesus in their discussions of faith. The religious left reconstructs Jesus as a propagator of their pet social causes while the Jesus on the right does the same. Both groups abandon the gospel in advocacy of their politics. The irony is that if either of these groups embraced the life described in the gospels, Jesus would exceed the left’s demand for social justice and the right’s demands for ‘right’ living. What encourages me is that I have seen a move to an embodied, gospel-like Jesus in the churches I have studied, granting me a hope that we can overcome these dualisms that cripple American Christianity.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, politics, Miroslav_Volf

I’ve been alarmed by the immediate dismissal of Christians who offer a prophetic witness to society, accusing these believers of simply parroting Republican or Democratic party lines. Are our words simply a thin veneer tightly bonded to partisan politics, or do we Christians have something much deeper and more helpful to say? On its best days, the church serves as a prophetic voice to society — as a people who (hopefully) model a different way to live, who point to another reality at work. Christians who have an insight into working of the powers (be it political, economic, the media, or organizations, or…) must be allowed to speak. It has been an important role for the church in history (before the existence of Democrats and Republicans) to call institutions to be more Christlike, all the while knowing that efforts by these institutions will always be partial and incomplete. Those Christians who do offer these assessments must not be dismissed simply as liberals or conservatives. To truly follow Jesus, Christians must speak to all those in power, standing with Jesus on the side of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the outcast, and extending hospitality and generosity without restraint. Those powers that constrain these practices at any level are always worthy of exhortation.

I say the following to myself as well as to others: If a fellow Christian stands with Jesus and rebukes the powers, do not stop her or him. Christians, if you have something to say, please say it — don’t let partisan politics inhibit the expression of your primary identity as Christ-followers.

Technorati Tags: politics, prophetic speech

A worried student asked me the above question –

That student elaborated by asking — can I be politically conservative, economically pro-capitalist, theological conservative and still be postmodern, i.e. emerging?

My initial response to the latter question was, well, yes — and no.

I would give the same answer to one who is politically liberal, economically a Marxist, and theologically liberal: ‘yes — and no’.

No, because from a postmodern vantage point, both conservative and liberal are modern positions. They hold up single ways to view things while excluding other perspectives.

Yes, because a person cannot leave his/her own culture. Modernists have a whole way of life built  around their beliefs and it is not like they can leave those practices behind. However, they may be able to hold them more lightly and recognize the other side of things, especially in regard to the gospel.

The gospel critiques modernity (conservative and liberal) and postmodernity, as it does all cultures. Because of this, all of our positions we must hold tentatively as God’s ways hold ultimate priority. Therefore, taking my cue from many emerging churches, I hold the Sermon on the Mount as my primary ‘constitution’ or authority if you will (as it was for the first few centuries) and believe it trumps all other allegiances including governmental ones (all across the political spectrum).

These were my initial thoughts on my students question…

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, politics