“Another Soldier Who Said ‘Enough’”

(This is from the book I am currently reading, Jesus for President by Chris Haw and Shane Claiborne, pg. 217-18 Every time I read this story I cry and rejoice at the same time. Enjoy.)

Jesse arrived for boot camp at Fort Benning not sure what to expect. He was handed a gun and joined all the recruits marching in formation. As he marched, he internalized what he was training for, and the gun got heavier and heavier. Jesse felt a mysterious but clear whisper from God that God did not want him to kill or to carry a gun. The discomfort became more than he could bear, and he tried quietly to break formation to talk with the sergeant. Not so quick. “What the f*** are you doing, soldier?” the sergeant blasted.

Jesse said gently, “I need to talk with you. I have a problem.”

“What the f***’s your problem, soldier?” he shouted in front of all the others.

With all hope for a quite private conversation squelched, Jesse told his sergeant, “As we were marching, I felt like God didn’t want me to carry a weapon. I felt like I should love my enemies, and that means not killing them.”

The sergeant fumed. “Get on your knees, soldier,” he said. And he had the other soldiers march in a circle around Jesse. “Soldiers, do you want to see what a piece of s*** looks like? … Left, right, left … This is a piece of s***. Left, right …”

On his knees, Jesse thought of how kneeling is a posture for prayer. He felt like insults and principalities and powers were swarming him. Humiliated and hurt, he could feel Jesus so near. The soldiers tore the cross from his neck. They ripped the flag from his uniform, insisting that he was unworthy to wear the red, white, and blue. He was handcuffed and taken into custody, branded as a deserter. In the holding area, his handcuffs were removed, and he was free to move about. Somehow he still had his cell phone. (Hmm.)

He decided to call for a cab and leave the rest in God’s hands. Taxis move freely on and off the base, transporting soldiers, careful, of course, not to violate security. So Jesse left the area and hid in the bushes to wait for the cab. After what felt like hours, he saw it pull into the long drive.

When he hopped into the taxi, he was greeted by a lovely old Southern woman. “Hey there, soldier,” she said. “Where you headed?”

“To the Greyhound station,” Jesse said.

She saw where the patches had been torn from his uniform, and she said, “I ain’t accusin’ you of anything, but I’d better say that we’re not allowed to transport no AWOL soldiers. I’m not sayin’ you’re AWOL. But if you are, you should know that I ain’t allowed to take you anywhere. And you should also know that soldiers are stationed to check for AWOL soldiers at the bus station.”

Silence, and Jesse felt a moment of hopelessness, but then she continued. “So just in case you were AWOL, you would want me to take you by the Wal-Mart so you can get a change of clothes.” And she smirked.

Jesse smiled. “Uhh, come to think of it, can we make a pit stop before the bus station? I need to swing by Wal-Mart.”

They laughed as she pulled up to the Wal-Mart superstore, which to Jesse had never looked so appealing. With soldiers in uniform all around him, he ran into the store, knowing that he could be spotted easily and all would be ruined. He grabbed the first clothes he could find, darted to the checkout counter to buy them, and ran back to the getaway car outside. In the taxi, he squeezed into his new outfit, which was nowhere near the right size. He gave his new friend a hefty tip, made it safely onto his bus and headed home. To Jesse it seemed like God did not want him to carry a gun and was able to make a way when there seemed to be no way out.*

*This is a true story. Shortly after arriving in his small hometown in Illinois, Jesse found his face on wanted posters plastered around town. In a lovely act of revolutionary subordination, he turned himself in and was eventually legally discharged along with many other soldiers. Soon after that, he came to visit us here at the Simple Way.

A Letter to Non-Believers by Shane Claiborne

(I found this today while doing random googling and waiting for something else to load. I was touched and I hope you will be, too. Believer or not.)

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn’s Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, “God is not a monster.” Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, “I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ.” A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That’s the ugly stuff. And that’s why I begin by saying that I’m sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it’s that you can have great answers and still be mean… and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it… it was because “God so loved the world.” That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven… but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our “Gospel” is the message that Jesus came “not [for] the healthy… but the sick.” And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God’s Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” On earth.

One of Jesus’ most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan… you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I’m sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine… but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David… at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: “The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you.” And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about “dirty theology” — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man’s eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay “out there” but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, “Nothing good could come.” It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors… a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, “I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.” If those of us who believe in God do not believe God’s grace is big enough to save the whole world… well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

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