Leaving Behind a Trail of God's Love
I see all kinds of signs of hope. I see hope as I’ve traveled to probably a dozen countries this year, meeting folks who are trying to embody the good news in who they are. We got to travel all over the county this past year. We had a little campaign called Jesus for President, and we traveled eleven thousand miles by vegetable oil (it’s a cheap ride). We would pull up to the Arby’s, get our vegetable oil, and run our bus off of it.
While we were traveling around, we got to gather stories. We went to a community right along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, where there were Christians who had created sanctuary houses along the border. Then they said, “We don’t just need to be doing this in our own houses-—we need to be bringing it to the streets as a prophetic witness to the world.” So they organized worship services across the border, where Mexican Christians would walk to the wall, met there by U.S. Christians who also went to the wall, and they would worship together, and serve each other communion by flinging it over the wall. Yes! That’s the promise that the gates will not prevail.
There’s a little community out in Ohio that started out as a couple hundred poor folks who were pretty distraught at the situation of medical care: that forty seven million people don’t have proper medical care. These folks did something really courageous. They came to a point, maybe out of desperation, where they said, “We can’t wait for politicians in D.C. to solve all the problems! We can begin to try to embody this good news and bear each other’s burdens.” They began to pool their money together, and they said, “Every month we’ll put out a newsletter of who’s in the hospital, and we’ll pray for each other, and then we’ll put our money together and cover each other’s medical bills.” What started with four hundred people was so contagious that it just continued to spread, and now there’s twenty thousand of us. I’m one of those folks. Every month, we get of newsletter of who’s in the hospital, we put our money together, and we meet each other’s medical bills. Right now we’ve covered five hundred million dollars of medical bills.
It certainly doesn’t answer the problem for fortyseven million. There’s responsibilities that we all have. But I think what’s so exciting are some of the things that have been going on the longest. We’ve got to see our new wine skins and old wine skins come together. I remember when I was in South Africa this year, one of the communities that I was able to visit was a community of black South Africans and white South Africans who said, in the middle of the apartheid, “We want to be a witness of God’s reconciliation,” and they brought a bunch of land and started living together. Their lives were threatened, they were threatened with jail, and yet they continued to live together. Now they’ve raised their kids together. When I was at dinner, there were about a hundred people at the family dinners every night. You look at that and you say, “My goodness, what a beautiful witness in our world.”
I was in Ireland this year, and there are young Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, that are starting communities where they live together, Catholics and Protestants. Maybe that’s a part of the embodiment that we can do—just learn to live together. I think that one of the most radical things we do in our community, The Simple Way, is that I live with people who I disagree with on the gay issue, yet we’re able to live in community and learn from each other. I think that one of our best witnesses to the rest of the world is our ability to disagree well. Maybe, even more than just creating a statement that we can all adhere to, it’s our ability to wrestle together with issues that we may not resolve. If there’s something that I’ve learned from being with both progressive and conservative folks, it’s that you can have all of the right answers and still be mean. And if you’re mean, nobody really wants your answers anyway. Maybe the new camps for our generation are not just left and right, but nice and mean. I want to be with people who can laugh together and can work through things together without trivializing truth and the importance of the struggle. We can go together and say, “We’re going to continue to be one, and it’s Jesus’ prayer that we would be one as God is one.” We want to work towards that.
I was in Sweden this year, and there are groups of young people from all the different major denominations who said, “We believe that it is Jesus’ dream that we would be one, as God is one, and so we think that we can do more together than we can divided.” Of course, they immediately met all kinds of obstacles from the older people. But before long, young people had led a movement in Sweden. I was there for the climax of it, when there were thousands of thousands from every denomination that signed a covenant that, within the next five years, they would merge together as one body in Sweden. These are incredible signs of hope.
It’s not just the big stuff—the ways that we begin are very small, aren’t they? I remember when someone asked Mother Teresa, “How did you manage to lift fifty thousand people off the streets?” She said, “I started with one. That worked pretty good.” I think for a lot of us it’s easy to be in love with big ideas, but it’s harder to love the people right next to us. I went to one community where they had printed T-shirts that said, “Everyone wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.” We can tear each other apart in meetings where we dream about a better world, if we’re not very keenly aware that the seeds of that world are right beside us. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The person who’s just involved with their vision for community will destroy community, but the person who’s in love with the people all around them will create community everywhere they go.”
I want to leave you with one last image—kind of an east Tennessee image. My grandfather was a farmer, so we always used to bale hay growing up. I remember this one time when my grandfather had gotten a brand new truck and trailer. He told everybody, “Alright, we’re going to break this thing in today.” So they start stacking hay bales as high as you can possibly get them, into a giant tower of hay. When you couldn’t get anymore on it, he’s like, “Alright, that’ll do.” They hit the highway, and they’re driving along—my uncle’s driving and my grandfather’s in the passenger seat. What they didn’t notice was that there was so much hay that it was resting on the tires. As it got hotter and hotter, they had a little problem—a thing called friction. The hay caught fire, and it spread. They’re driving along, just listening to their country music; folks are waving their arms, and my uncle’s nodding back. Eventually they end up looking in the mirror, and my uncle says, “Oh, God.”
They pull the car off the road. When they stop, the problem is that all the fire that’s been going behind them is now going straight up, and it starts melting the back of the truck. My grandfather is over on the passenger’s side, and he’s got his shirt out, and he’s in the glove compartment, and my uncle asks, “What are you doing?” and he says, “I don’t want all of this to burn—I’ve got my bluegrass tapes in there.” He’s scraping it all out, and then my uncle looks at him dead in the eye and says, “No, no, no. It’s not going to burn. I’ve got an idea. Get back in the car.” My grandfather says, “Alright,” and they jump back in.
Now the idea was that they would go back on the highway and try to shake the fire off the truck. So they’re driving along, a blazing inferno going down the highway, and they’re rocking it back and forth, and these hay bales are falling off, and they’re lighting fields on fire behind them, being followed by fire trucks from all the neighboring counties, trying to put these fires out. Eventually they got them all out. My grandfather says to me that week, after he got out of jail—no, I’m just kidding—he said, “Shane, we caught half of east Tennessee on fire this week.” My first thought was, “Who is this man?” But my second thought, as I was going to bed that night, was, “What a great image of God’s kingdom and reign coming on Earth.” Not that we should be pyromaniacs, but that we should have something behind us that leaves a trail of God’s love. As Mother Teresa says, “We should be the fragrance of Christ.” As we come through the world as a community, we should remind people of the goodness of God by who we are together. Certainly not so that people will praise the things that we do, but so that they can’t help but recognize how good is our God.
One great pastor I heard said it so well. He said, “Sometimes a lot of us get to doing this work in the world, and we start to think that we’re doing something good. It might be kind of like the donkey that rode Jesus into Passover. This donkey was riding Jesus into Passover, and all these acclamations are happening, and the donkey might have started to think a little something about himself. That donkey might have been walking along and seeing the palm branches and hearing the Hosannas, and been like, ‘That’s not my name, but . . .’ Riding along, we’ve got to remember, it’s not about the donkey, it’s about the one who road the donkey, we’re just the asses that get to bring Jesus in.” We’re just the asses. But what a beautiful thing it is, to get to carry the precious cargo, and that the spirit of God wants to move through us, and that we have a God that doesn’t want to change the world without us. I’m so convinced that a generation from now, when people hear the word “Christian,” that their first responses will not be “Anti-gay, judgmental, and hypocritical,” but that they will say things like “Grace, love, justice, and peace.” May it be so.
Shane ClayborneWith tears and laughter, Shane Claiborne unveils the tragic messes we’ve made of our world and the tangible hope that another world is possible. Shane writes and travels extensively speaking about peacemaking, social justice, and Jesus. He is featured in the DVD series “Another World Is Possible” and is the author of several books including The Irresistible Revolution, Jesus for President, and Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers (all available from QuakerBooks of FGC). This article is excerpted from the plenary talk Shane gave at the 2009 FGC Gathering in Blacksburg, Virginia. Audio CDs or downloadable mp3s of Shane's full talk can be purchased from www.quakerbooks.org. FGC would like to thank Friends Journal for the transcription they provided and note that the full address will appear in the February, 2010 issue of Friends Journal.
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