The Irresistible Revolution - chapters 3-6

I wrote this last night when I stopped reading part of the way through Chapter 6. Yes, it was a little emotional - you know me. This is the kind of stuff that keeps my up at night. At least it was PG-rated (the written version, anyway).


I can’t live like this any longer. Although I’m not sure how or what to change. It’s easier to say things (or write them) than actually do something.

What I’m reading in the Irresistible Revolution is not new to me. It’s the very stuff I’ve been wrestling with since late 2008, when I read Greg Paul’s “Twenty Piece Shuffle.” That’s also a recommended read.

I have been wondering if I ever really knew Christ. Or if I do yet. Sure, I said the sinner’s prayer and “believe” all the right things. But when I read the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25) and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), I can’t help but notice, I’m on the wrong side in both of those parables. I’m a goat. And I’m the rich man. It’s so obvious. And in both parables, I lose...bad...really bad.

I had kind of been hoping that someone would come along and tell me I’m overreacting - that Jesus didn’t really mean what He said. But that hasn’t happened. And now I don’t want it to happen - because I wouldn’t believe it. Jesus meant what He said. And that’s where the Irresistible Revolution hits me - Shane also thinks Jesus meant what He said - and believes there are some serious implications for those who want to follow Christ. Jesus said some wild things. Things that are especially wild if you’re an upper-middle class, North American, comfort-addicted, hoarding, polluting, spoiled brat like me. I guess I’m throwing a fit because the party’s over. I’m kidding myself to think that I can live a normal, acceptable life here and actually walk with Christ.

I've realized why we prioritize our fights about doctrine and church practices and homosexuality...because it doesn't cost us anything - in time, money, or otherwise. These fights are the perfect distractions.

However, knowing me, I’ll find an excuse. I’ll find a distraction that keeps me from making any real change in my life - and any real connection with Jesus. I’m good at that.

Hopefully that doesn’t scare you away from reading this book. That’d be a shame. I’m not overcome with guilt, per se. I’m not looking for a new hamster-wheel to jump on to earn God’s favour. It’s not like that. It’s more a defeated feeling - where I’m starting to realize that things can’t continue as they are - and I don’t have a clue what to do about it. Unless I just forget about all this...


Here are some quotes from chapters 3-6:

Andy told me his story. He used to be a wealthy businessman in Germany, and then he read the gospel and it “messed everything up.” He read the part where Jesus commands the disciples to sell everything they have and give it to the poor (Luke 12:33), and he actually did it. I have met some fundamentalists before, but only “selective fundamentalists,” not folks who took things like that literally. He sold everything he owned and moved to Calcutta, where for over ten years he spent his life with the poorest of the poor. He told me that in a few years he might go back and visit his beloved mom for a bit, and then he would come back to be with the dying and destitute, his new family.

I was ready to come home. I knew my Calcutta was the United States, for I knew that we could not end poverty until we took a careful look at wealth. I was to battle the beast from within the belly. I learned from the lepers that leprosy is a disease of numbness. The contagion numbs the skin, and the nerves can no longer feel as the body wastes away... To treat it, we would dig out the scarred tissue until the person could feel again. As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness.

Rich [Mullins] stood up in chapel and said, “You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too...[And he paused in the awkward silence.] But I guess that’s why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.”

Jesus doesn’t exclude rich people; he just lets them know that rebirth will cost them everything they have. The story is not so much about whether rich folks are welcome as it is about the nature of the kingdom of God, which has an ethic and economy diametrically opposed to those of the world. Rather than accumulating stuff for oneself, followers of Jesus abandon everything, trusting in God alone for providence.

I asked participants [in the survey] who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80% said yes... I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2% said they did. I learned a powerful lesson. We can admire Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care for the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

I truly believe that when poor meet the rich, riches have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

Once we are actually friends with those in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. [In] the words of the late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, the called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed...People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world.

Believers are a dime-a-dozen now. What the world needs is people who believe so much in another world that they cannot help but begin enacting it now.

When you see so many of your friends waste away in drug addiction, you start to ask where the drugs come from, and it’s not from the kids on the corner. When we are staring in the face of the largest prison buildup in the history of civilization... and one in every three black men under judicial constraint, we start to wonder what good the Thirteenth Amendment is if slavery is illegal unless a person is convicted of a crime. When we are trying to teach kids not to hit each other and they see a government use violence to bring about change, we start to consider what it means to give witness to a peace that is not like the world gives (John 14:27). When we live in the wreckage of an old industrial neighborhood that has lost over 200,000 jobs and now has 700 abandoned factories, we start to ask questions about the global economy, especially when we see the same companies abuse other “neighbors” overseas.

Tithes, tax-exempt donations, and short-term missions trips, while they accomplish some good, can also function as outlets that allow us to appease our consciences and still remain a safe distance from the poor.

It is much more comfortable to depersonalize the poor so we don’t feel responsible for the catastrophic human failure that results in someone sleeping on the street while people have spare bedrooms in their homes. We can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing through organizations and never have to open up our homes, our beds, our dinner tables.

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ... Jesus did not set up a program but modelled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God, a community in which people are reconciled and our debts are forgiven just as we forgive our debtors (all economic words). That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread like disease - through touch, through breath, through life. It spread through people infected by love.