Preaching Revolution
A new evangelical movement offers lessons for the left
Picture added by Gnostic
Liberation Front
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3061/preaching_revolution/
March 14, 2007
By Zack Exley
Recently, I blogged a series of essays
titled "The Revolution Misses You," in which I called for progressives to revive
the forgotten dream of practical
yet radical change. Friends and colleagues immediately scolded me for using
"extreme" terms such as "revolution" and "radical." "You'll only alienate
people," they said. "This will come back to haunt you."
At first, I was surprised by what felt
like a dramatic overreaction. But I soon realized why I had fallen out of sync
with the progressive mainstream on the use of the "R-words": I had been spending
time listening to and reading evangelical Christians who are preaching
revolution.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., a 36-year-old
evangelical pastor named Rob Bell regularly describes his ministry as
"revolutionary," "radical" and "an insurgency." Far from alienating people with
such language, Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church draws thousands of new worshipers
each year from the mostly conservative and white suburbs of west Michigan. In
one recent sermon, available as a podcast from MarsHill.org, Bell tells his
congregation that the only time Jesus speaks of God directly taking someone's
life is the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-22), a story about a man who
builds bigger barns to store a surplus harvest instead of sharing it with those
in need. He closed the sermon by listing a dozen places around Grand Rapids
where congregants could unload their own surplus wealth.
In his book Irresistible Revolution,
30-year-old author Shane Claiborne, who is currently living in Iraq to "stand in
the way of war," asks evangelicals why their literal reading of the Bible
doesn't lead them to do what Jesus so clearly told wealthy and middle-class
people to do in his day: give up everything to help others.
The popular evangelical Christian
magazine Relevant, launched in 2003 by Cameron Strang, the son of a
Christian publishing magnate, contains a "Revolution" section complete with a
raised red fist for a logo. They've also released The Revolution: A Field
Manual for Changing Your World, a compilation by radical, Christian
social-justice campaigners from around the world.
Bell and Claiborne are two of the
better-known young voices of a broad, explicitly nonviolent, anti-imperialist
and anticapitalist theology that is surging at the heart of white, suburban
Evangelical Christianity. I first saw this movement at a local, conservative,
nondenominational church in North Carolina where the pastor preached a sermon
called "Two Fists in the Face of Empire." Looking further, I found a movement
whose book sales tower over their secular progressive counterparts in Amazon
rankings; whose sermon podcasts reach thousands of listeners each week; and
whose messages, in one form or another, reach millions of churchgoers. Bell
alone preaches to more than 10,000 people every Sunday, with more than 50,000
listening in online.
--------------------------
But this movement is still barely aware
of its own existence, and has not chosen a label for itself. George Barna, who
studies trends among Christians for clients such as the Billy Graham Evangelical
Association and Focus on the Family, calls it simply "The Revolution" and its
adherents "Revolutionaries."
"The media are oblivious to it," Barna
wrote in his 2006 book Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of
the Sanctuary. "Scholars are clueless about it. The government caught a
glimpse of it in the 2004 presidential election but has mostly misinterpreted
its nature and motivations." According to his research, there are more than 20
million Revolutionaries in America, differentiated from mainstream evangelicals
by a greater likelihood of serving their community and the poor and oppressed
within it, a more "intimate, personally stirring worship of God" in daily life,
and a much greater chance of studying the Bible every day.
One indication that this movement is
new, nebulous and spontaneous is that Gregory Boyd, a like-minded mega-church
pastor two states away in St. Paul, Minn., knew nothing of Rob Bell's theology
until recently. He only heard of the pastors' conference after the fact because
his book Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is
Destroying the Church was distributed to conference participants.
"There's definitely something going on,"
says Boyd. "I've only become aware of it as people have responded to my book.
It's not organized -- it's amorphic. It would include the 'emerging church
movement,' but it's bigger than that. It's a vision of the kingdom [of God].
It's a new kind of Christianity."
Heather Zydek, the former "Revolution"
section editor for Relevant magazine and the editor of The Revolution:
A Field Manual for Changing Your World, says, "I definitely don't have a
name for it, but, yes, something is happening. Some people say it's a Generation
X -- or Y -- thing. But baby boomers are in on it too."
Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners
magazine and author of the bestseller God's Politics, says, "'Progressive
evangelicals' was thought to be a misnomer, but now we're a movement." He was as
surprised as anyone when his 2006 book tour for God's Politics began to
develop the feel of a revival tour. At evangelical Christian Bethel University
in St. Paul, Wallis spoke shortly after a rally held by Dr. James Dobson of
Focus on the Family. More people attended Wallis' event. "One of the Dobson
organizers came over and told me, 'If they make us keep focusing on just two
issues [abortion and gay marriage], they're going to lose all of us,'" he says.
Wallis has long been known on the left
as a progressive evangelical voice in the wilderness. But in fact, over the past
decades Wallis has had plenty of company, including Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo,
Ron Sider and N.T. Wright, among others. And while this new generation has been
inspired by many of those teachers, they do not have the same association with
the organized left that some of their predecessors do. Shane Claiborne is one of
the few young voices in this movement who at least knows the history of
cross-pollination between the Left and Christianity, mentioning Catholic
Worker founder Dorothy Day's socialist origins in Irresistible Revolution.
Zydek characterizes the movement this
way: "We want to get back to the roots of Christianity, to the essence of
Christianity, which is about service to those in need, sacrifice, denial of self
for others -- it's about [Jesus saying] 'pick up your cross and follow me.' But
for too long we've spread a gospel of suburbanism, of self-centeredness, of
capitalism, of political conservatism -- but not the gospel: the gospel
that came from Christ."
--------------------------
I had been a regular listener of Rob
Bell's sermon podcasts for a few months when he announced the January 20-21
"Isn't She Beautiful" conference ("She" being the church). The invitation was
open to "Church leaders, pastors, and basically just revolutionaries and
insurgents from all over the world." I signed right up.
I arrived at Mars Hill the evening
before the conference, in a heavy snow, just in time to catch the regular Sunday
night service. The Mars Hill church building is a converted mall. From the
outside it looks just like any other old shopping center -- they've never put up
a sign. So when you walk in and see the teeming, logo-free community inside that
has taken over every inch of this entire mall, you get the feeling that you've
walked into an alternate universe. Imagine walking into a McDonalds to find your
mom's kitchen inside.
The sanctuary is a hollowed-out
department store that used to host RV shows and swap meets -- no decoration,
just exposed aluminum walls, ducts and beams. As I walked in, a volunteer handed
me a Bible. Three thousand people were on their feet, singing powerfully and
worshiping in an explosive expression of collective joy that simply does not
exist in the left of this era. There were certainly some "hipster Christians" in
the crowd (tattoos, goatees, etc.), but overwhelmingly the congregants were
mainstream-looking Michiganders.
Rob Bell finally took to the stage,
sporting plastic-rim, hipster glasses, a white belt and cool shirt. He looks
like a grown-up indie rock star (and used to play in a popular Grand Rapids
band). The son of a Reagan-appointed federal judge, Bell graduated from Wheaton
College, where male and female students live in separate dorms with curfews and
are encouraged to abstain from physical intimacy. After receiving his M.Div from
Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., Bell interned at a
conservative, non-denominational evangelical church in Grand Rapids, from which
he launched Mars Hill as a "church plant" in February 1999. The name Mars Hill
refers to the site where the apostle Paul preached to non-Jews by making the
gospel current and relevant to their own culture.
On this night, Bell barely preached
himself, and instead spent the evening, as he often does, interviewing a member
of the church about how she was living out the gospel. She and her husband had
moved to a broken inner-city neighborhood and begun a tutoring and family
assistance ministry that is now in the process of expanding out of a church
basement to fill an entire renovated warehouse.
If you compare the Mars Hill complex to
progressive community centers or union halls, it has no rival. The entire mall
has been converted. Most of the stores are now classrooms for the different
grades of its enormous Sunday school. One of the large department stores has
been converted into an events and youth meeting space with a stage, and ping
pong and pool tables. The broad, carpeted concourse is now filled with comfy
sofas and chairs for sitting and talking. Though the complex is perfectly clean
and attractive, you get the feeling that the church, in renovating the
facilities, has spent the minimum possible resources to meet functional needs.
More striking than the size of Mars Hill
is the intensity of participation among the membership. The Mars Hill house
church program -- where small numbers of people come together in a home for
Bible study, fellowship, mutual support and as a launching point for outreach
into the community -- involves more than 2,000 members in hundreds of groups,
each with its own leaders. Several hundred volunteer as childcare providers and
Sunday school teachers. And hundreds more serve each Sunday as ushers, parking
helpers and medics. (With 3,500 people in a room, you never know what can
happen.)
Yet Mars Hill is not atypical. According
to the Barna Group, nine percent of Americans attend house churches (up from one
percent 10 years ago). And tens of thousands of churches are de facto community
centers, serving and supporting virtually all aspects of their members' lives,
usually with a significant percentage of members acting as volunteers. In this
way, churches have left progressives in the dust in terms of serving and
engaging people directly. The union hall is the left's nearest equivalent, but
not only is it dying, it rarely attempts to serve anywhere near as many of the
needs -- spiritual and practical -- as churches do.
--------------------------
Could the shift in focus from personal
salvation to the building of the "kingdom of Heaven" be the inevitable result of
the long rise of "back to the Bible" fundamentalism? Tens of millions of
American Christians are not only reading the Bible, but getting together in
groups and studying it -- studying the historical context in which the authors
wrote, the nuances of the original Greek and Hebrew, and the issues raised by
translation and conflicting source texts.
Zydek says, "No matter how you pick and
choose your favorite Bible passages, if you know that Jesus died on the cross
for you, that's going to affect the way you treat other people. If you're a
Bible-believing Christian, maybe you choose to emphasize evangelism or maybe you
emphasize works, but you can't ignore Jesus' example of unconditional love on
the cross."
Wallis agrees. "The religious right is
being replaced by Jesus," he says. "They're just really digging into Jesus, and
what they read in [the Book of] Acts doesn't correspond to their churches. And
so they're changing them or going out and creating new communities."
The Revolutionaries' faith in the Bible
leads them to a gospel of social justice, but it also leads to a morality that
is far out of step with mainstream American culture and the left. Sex outside of
marriage, divorce, "lust," "sexual immorality" and homosexuality are all things
Jesus or other New Testament voices spoke about with varying degrees of
intensity.
According to Wallis, the Revolutionaries
are "breaking away from the Right in droves -- but they will never be captured
by the left. They're going to challenge the left on a lot of things: For these
Christians, sex is covenantal and not recreational. And they oppose abortion and
they are not going to move away from that."
Where Revolutionaries most part ways
with many mainstream evangelical churches' interpretation of the Bible is in
their embrace of women as leaders, elders and preachers. Mars Hill's lead elder
(board chair) is a woman. A similar process of reversal of the restriction on
women in leadership is taking place in many evangelical churches across the
country.
--------------------------
Boyd's Myth of a Christian Nation
is based on a series of six sermons called "The Cross and the Sword" he
delivered at his St. Paul church in the politically-charged atmosphere of the
2004 presidential election, in which Minnesota was a heavily-targeted swing
state. In those sermons, which made national news, he said:
Never in history have we had a
Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our
Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state. ... I am sorry
to tell you, that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the
world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.
He also spoke out against the exclusive
focus on abortion and gay marriage by many evangelical leaders. "Those are the
two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act," he said. "And those
are the two buttons Jesus never pushed."
His not-very subtle rebuke of Republican
electioneering caused around 1,000 members of his congregation to leave. "Close
to 700 left during the six-week 'Cross and the Sword' sermon series," he says.
"Another 300 or so left when I 'didn't have the good sense' to back off the
topic but rather returned to it once again just prior to the election." But
4,000 stayed. And he said he had never received so much positive feedback in his
career: "Some people literally wept with gratitude, saying that they had always
felt like outsiders in the evangelical community for not 'toeing the
conservative party line.'"
Yet the Revolution is not primarily a
reaction to Republican attempts to politicize the church. What sets it apart
from mainstream evangelicalism is not a liberal rejection of Republican
politics, but rather a more radical rejection of conservatism and
liberalism, and anything else that is not the "kingdom of God."
To the Revolutionaries, what seems
righteous or commonsensical to humans does not matter; all that matters is what
God wants. Boyd writes in Myth of a Christian Nation: "To the extent that
an individual or group looks like Jesus -- dying for those who crucified him and
praying for their forgiveness in the process -- to that degree they can be said
to manifest the kingdom of God. To the degree that they do not look like this,
they do not manifest God's kingdom."
And that is where anticapitalism and
anti-imperialism come in. Capitalism doesn't look like Jesus. Empire doesn't
look like Jesus. In their critique of the political and economic institutions of
the "kingdom of the world," the Revolutionaries are following in the tradition
of early Christianity. In Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire,
pastor and theologian Brian J. Walsh and theologian Sylvia C. Keesmaat write:
Just as in the ancient world, the
[Roman imperial] images of peace and prosperity masked the reality of
inequality and violence, so the contemporary images projected by advertising
mask the reality of sweatshops, inequality, and domestic and international
violence created by our lifestyles. And in the face of the ubiquitous
imagery of the empire, Paul proclaims Jesus as the true image of God (Col
1:15) and calls the Colossian Christians to bear the image of Jesus in
shaping an alternative to the empire.
For the Revolutionaries, the new
"temple" -- from which Jesus chased the money changers in the Bible -- is the
shopping mall. They write:
Globalization isn't just an aggressive
stage in the history of capitalism. It is a religious movement of previously
unheard-of proportions. Progress is its underlying myth, unlimited economic
growth its foundational faith, the shopping mall its place of worship,
consumerism its overriding image, 'I'll have a Big Mac and fries' its ritual
of initiation, and global domination its ultimate goal.
In the shopping mall liberated by Mars
Hill, the Colossians Remixed authors -- a married couple who home school
their children -- discussed their work during an all-day forum attended by a
thousand suburban, white, middle-class moms and dads. How many authors from the
anti-globalization left have presented their ideas to a willing mass audience of
middle-class suburbanites?
The thinking and dreaming of this
movement is as utopian as the most far-out sect of antiglobalization anarchists,
yet they are living it right at the heart of mainstream America. And they are
organizing with unbelievable success, attracting thousands of new participants
every week and spawning hundreds of new churches and thousands of new small
groups and house churches every year.
--------------------------
At the "Isn't She Beautiful" conference,
the non-theological sessions were devoted to one of the secrets of this
movement's success: leaders -- identifying them, recruiting them, "loving them"
and letting them lead. The pastors at the conference all seemed to view their
church memberships as seas of under-utilized leaders, and spent as much time as
they could learning from each other and the Mars Hill staff how to be the best
"fishers of men" they believe Jesus called them to be.
This high-density leadership organizing
model stands in stark contrast to anything I've ever seen working in unions,
progressive organizations and Democratic political campaigns. On the left,
recruiting and mobilizing leaders has become devalued work that is typically
left to inexperienced recent college graduates. The pastors at this conference,
however, saw recruiting and inspiring leaders as one of their central callings.
Too often, the left pays lip service to the grassroots, but lacks faith in
grassroots leaders. The result is that too many of our organizations are one
person deep and stretched impossibly thin. At the conference, I tried to imagine
what Kerry campaign field offices (where I spent a lot of time in 2004) would
have looked like if we had recruited leaders instead of "bodies" and expected
them to be "faithful, committed members of a team" (words included in Mars Hill
volunteer job descriptions). Some organizations on the left do include
"leadership development" in their organizing models. But churches seem to assume
that there are already plenty of "developed" leaders in their midst and go
straight to giving them as much responsibility as they can.
Andrew Richards is the "local outreach
pastor" at Mars Hill, charged with driving the Mars Hill house church program to
reach people in need in the greater Grand Rapids community. "We're not only
taking care of the needs of our own community, but we want to respond to the
needs that are in the greater community," he said before a recent Sunday service
while trying to recruit more leaders. He laid out five areas of focus: urban
at-risk youth, refugees, poverty, community development and HIV/AIDS.
Rob Bell and other church leaders seem
to be building up to a big challenge. It is unclear exactly what is in the
works. (Bell does not give interviews.) But he has been preaching more and more
about "systemic oppression," poverty, debt and disease -- not just locally but
globally. And other leaders have indicated to the membership that the current
level of sacrifice for others in the community and the world is not in line with
Jesus' teachings.
On Dec. 10, 2006, Bell kicked off a
series of sermons, titled "Calling all Peacemakers," during which he said:
Never before in history have there
been a group of people as resourced as us. ... Never before has there been a
group of people who could look at the most pressing needs of the world and
think: well, we could do it ... History is like sitting right there, in the
middle of war, and great expenditure, and violence, and the world torn apart
in a thousand directions -- [waiting for] a whole ground swell of people to
say, 'Well, we could, we could, we could do this. We could do what Jesus
said to do.'
But, as of now, the Revolutionaries seem
to be embracing person-to-person, "be the alternative" solutions to the
exclusion of advocating for social policy that is more in line with their vision
of the kingdom. Boyd says, "I never see Jesus trying to resolve any of Caesar's
problems."
Wallis believes this reluctance comes
from the recent experience of being dragged into the mess of partisan politics
on the terms of the Republican party.
"But the prophets [of the Bible] don't
talk about just being an island of hope -- they talk about land, labor, capital,
equity, fairness, wages," says Wallis. "And who are the prophets addressing?
Employers, judges, rulers. On behalf of widows, orphans, workers, farmers,
ordinary people. The gospel is deeply political. It's not partisan politics, but
a prophetic politics. It is what the prophets and Jesus finally call us to."
"Take any big issue we've got: Politics
is failing to deal with it. They see that," Wallis continues. "But I'm saying
that we need to change politics. Social movements change politics -- and the
strongest social movements have spiritual foundations."
I asked Wallis if leaders like Rob Bell
were part of a rebirth of the Liberation Theology movement that took root in
Latin America in the '60s and '70s. "This movement is in a sense liberation
theology in the best sense of the word," he says, "but it's more personally
faith-based, more street-based and finally more community-based. I remember
you'd go to a [liberation theology] event and it would be analysis, analysis,
analysis -- and there would never even be a prayer."
This new generation of Christian
Revolutionaries most definitely places prayer above analysis. But where will
their prayers lead them? Will they forever restrict themselves to
person-to-person, "relational" solutions? Or will they choose to influence
political leaders on issues they share with the left -- poverty, war,
environmental destruction -- with the same force that the Christian Right
exerted around abortion, gay marriage and other areas?
All that's certain is that they will
keep praying for answers with a desperate yearning and remarkable openness -- as
Rob Bell did recently:
God, give us a vision for a new kind of
world. We grieve, we honor, we condemn. But we want to move through that. We
want to have asked the hard, hard questions. But we want to move though that
too. And we want to be people of a dream, which we believe is your dream for
the world. But then, God, we want to move past that. We want to move
to action. ... God, what would this look like? Show us millions of
different ways to bless -- to bless in such a way that it would
literally shake the foundation of the Earth and capture us with this kind of
dream. ... Please, God, open our eyes.
And 10,000 American suburbanites
replied, "Amen."
Zack Exley is a senior
strategist with OMP, a D.C.-based communications and fundraising firm, and
co-founder of the New Organizing Institute. He can be reached at his Web site,
http://www.zackexley.com
Jesus has been, and always will be, a threat to the
established order of things. If we understand his birth as a revolution, then we
may glimpse the revolution that his life will bring.
Instead of being born into a well established and powerful family, Jesus was
born to a couple of teenagers who couldn’t even stay with their family in
Bethlehem, most likely because of the scandal of her pregnancy before their
official marriage.
This is how love invaded our planet. This is how the revolution began. It’s
unlikely, even absurd. But the last thing it should be is boring or predictable
or explainable. This should incite passionate joy or passionate distain. This is
either the greatest thing to ever happen orthe most ridiculous idea ever
suggested. That God should come among us as one of the “least of these.”
Not only did Jesus’ birth turn everything upside down; so did his life and what
he taught. You must die to live. You must lose to gain. Weakness is strength.
Joy exists in the midst of suffering. Power is restraint. Love those who
persecute you. Pray for those who hate you. It is not the strong or the wealthy
who will inherit the earth, but the meek. The kingdom of God won’t be given to
the religious leaders, but to the spiritual idiots (the poor in spirit).
Mourners, peacemakers, the merciful, and the persecuted can all find blessing in
the kingdom of Jesus.
Jesus Christ is the most subversive man to have ever walked the earth.
This is revolution.
If you follow Jesus, you follow the most radical man who ever existed. He
marches into the world with kindness, peace, and love, and offers people a whole
new way of looking at the world and living within it. His is the most radical
message you can preach or live. He turns everything upside down and calls us to
do likewise. Jesus is not vitally committed to our comfort and safety; he is
committed to the advancing of his kingdom revolution in the hearts of people
everywhere.
In talking about what his kingdom is like, Jesus announced, “From the days of
John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing.
And forceful men take hold of it.” In other words, God is doing something so
powerful and dangerous that only those who are willing to embrace it with
forceful intensity may take hold of the movement of God’s kingdom. The
revolution of Jesus isn’t for the faint of heart or the middle-of-the-road. It
isn’t safe. It isn’t comfortable. It costs us a great deal to say yes. We take
hold of the revolution by abandoning ourselves to Jesus and letting go of
everything else.
Will we choose to follow a safe Jesus of suburbia – who exists to provide us
with health, wealth, comfort, and happiness? Or will we press on to find the
Jesus of Nazareth, the most dangerous and radical man to ever walk the face of
the earth? We want the real thing. We don’t want to worship the counterfeits and
settle for less than the revolution Jesus brings. We are moving beyond the
unbiblical idea that the primary work of Jesus is giving us a ticket to heaven,
and now understand that he is asking us for everything, to stand with him
against all that is unloving and untrue in our world.
Together, we are pursuing this revolution of Jesus.
http://www.rockharbor.org/content/contentpage.aspx?pageid=390
The
Second American Revolution :
The Jesus
Revolutionary
http://www.awitness.org/column/revolutionary_jesus.html
A brief discussion of that greatest of
all revolutionary theorists, who it turns out, surprise surprise, was Jesus. The
sun will hide its face in shame, and the moon will no longer give its light at
night, for the entire earth will be as full of the glory of this Jesus as there
are waters covering the surfaces of the seas and oceans.
One thing I have discovered upon
studying that very famous character known as Jesus, is that Jesus was the
greatest revolutionary theorist who ever lived. It turns out that the entire
history of revolutionary struggle since that time has been a great battle to get
back something which was stolen, and which was already in existence. This will
come as a shock to the revolutionaries of the world, and as a huge embarrassment
to churches. So then let revolutionaries be shocked and churches be humiliated.
That Jesus was the greatest
revolutionary will come as a shock to a lot of people who thought that Jesus was
perhaps the biggest prick who ever lived or that Jesus was the most spiritual
man who ever lived, when it turned out that Jesus was the greatest revolutionary
in history, which then explains why you would find Jesus hanging from a cross.
You see it turns out that you cannot have systems of ruthless oppression on a
planet, like that crucifying Roman slave driving system, and have a great
revolutionary like that Jesus at the same time. Someone was going to have to go,
and as you can tell we have had two thousand years of oppression following that
crucifixion, which then indicates to the clear thinking person that we have just
had two thousand years of oppression and two thousand years of no Jesus. We had
oppression and we had church, because as people might be seeing now, if they are
no longer blind, those two things go together, and as the world gets more and
more Jesus and more and more blind eyes are opened it will become clearer and
clearer to people that having church and having Jesus were obviously not the
same thing, for Jesus belonged to the people and the church was married to the
oppressor.
Now if we have just had two thousand
years of no Jesus, this makes you wonder where Jesus might have went, and it
turns out that Jesus went to church. This was a mistake, as you can tell by that
two thousand years of oppression. It is clearly revealed as a mistake when
someone who was robbed of a pearl of great price starts digging with grim
determination to find where those religious right bastards buried that pearl out
in the field. There are two ways to find a buried priceless pearl. You can dig
up the entire field, and that will eventually work, or you can follow a map
where ‘X' marks the spot. Fortunately the church has marked out ‘X' on the spot
where you are not supposed to dig, and has also put signs reading ‘no
trespassing' and ‘no digging allowed', and so this simplifies the matter of
digging up that pearl of great price which was buried in the field as was
predicted would happen to that pearl. Yes, it was predicted that the pearl would
be buried because Jesus was a pragmatic pessimist and he knew beforehand such
things as that his pearl would be buried in the field only to be dug up later or
that he would sow good seed in the garden and some prick would come along and
choke the garden with weeds by sowing weed seeds all of the place in his garden,
and he knew that people would be doing things like going to church instead of
doing what Jesus did, thus putting him on the spot and requiring him to tell
such people to go to hell because they weren't the type of people he wanted to
have anything to do with despite their long list of supposed accomplishments.
Yes, Jesus knew that if you were going
to have a real revolution on this planet, you would have to do it twice, and
therefore Jesus was also a prophet as well as being a revolutionary, since he
had the wisdom to predict the second coming of that buried pearl of great price,
which someone would be digging out of the ground later, and the question then
becomes, why did they bother trying to bury the pearl? What did they accomplish
at the end of it all?
Now it turns out that if you want to get
rid of something once and for all, or at least until it gets dug up out the
grave later, first you kill it by aiming at it with a precision scope on a deer
rifle, and then you bury it, and then you canonize it. Using this strategy you
can get rid of something, but not permanently, but at least during the two
thousand years that its gone no one will be able to do a damn thing about it,
even if they have this constant nagging feeling down inside that some pricks
must have robbed them of a pearl which they can no longer find.
As an example of how to gun something
down with the precision shots fired from a scoped deer rifle, I draw your
attention to what has been called ‘the holy bible' and the ‘sacred scripture',
which are fine examples of how Orwellian systems of oppression give backwards
names to things, for such a document could not have been either ‘sacred' or
‘holy' because when you have such documentation you also have ruthless
oppression at the same time. Therefore it follows that sacred and holy documents
must be crucified and buried and then canonized, since it is by using this
ruthless form of oppression that you can produce documents that don't destroy
systems of oppression but rather become a pillar of support for the system.
We can notice how the scriptural rifle
was locked onto the target of Jesus who had this persistent habit of
deliberately breaking the Sabbath. Now if someone is breaking the Sabbath that
means they were breaking the Sabbath, which means that they were wiping their
backside with the so called law of Moses, since to break the Sabbath is to break
the Ten Commandments. If we are sensible people, are not superstitious people,
then we know that you really would want to break with that so called Law of
Moses, rotten egg that it is, unless you were planning to use religion to create
serial killing sociopaths who then go out robbing houses and acres from the
people they were murdering on a day by day basis. If you accept that Moses went
up some mountain and brought down instructions on how to create Ted Bundy, then
Ted must be ‘sacred' and ‘holy', in which case you must make sure to keep the
Sabbath, and all those other rules and regulations as well, because it was the
order of that ‘god' known as Ted Bundy. Since killing and being a horse thief
are not holy, Ted would have to round out his newly forming religion of ruthless
oppression by including lots of sacraments and various hobbies to be pursued by
priests, rituals, incense, and lots of other stuff, which would then be the
spiritual stuff that could be used to hang like a set of drapes over that system
of oppression in the hopes that maybe by covering the windows with such drapes
no one would look inside because they would be looking at the drapes instead. It
turns out that all oppressive religion requires sacrament and ritual and loads
of spirituality because if the Ted Bundy thing doesn't appeal to some people the
‘spirituality' will distract them and keep them busy so that they won't be found
making trouble for Ted. That way everyone gets something. Ted gets to be a
ruthless oppressor, and get away with it, because its in the bible, and everyone
else gets spirituality, which it turns out is another tool of oppression since
spiritual people do not stop Ted, for they are loving pacifists and fighting
with Ted would be wrong..
Now when someone breaks the Sabbath that
means they were breaking the Sabbath, and that means they were doing away with
the Law of Ted Bundy (aka Moses). This would be stating the obvious. If stating
the obvious is not something you would want to do, then this requires that you
follow the standard procedure employed when getting rid of something (kill,
bury, canonize). So you shoot down the thing on sight and then you try to bury
the damn pearl, and then you canonize the empty field. Therefore we find that
Jesus broke the Sabbath not because he was breaking the Sabbath as a matter of
principle, as though somehow Sabbath breaking itself was a good thing to do, but
rather Jesus had a very good excuse each time, so that each time was an
exceptional circumstance and therefore not the description of a general
principle in action. Jesus was hungry. He and his disciples harvested on the
Sabbath. It was just a one time thing. Something had been going on for forty
years and thus suddenly, it became an emergency and something had to be done
about it on the Sabbath. Jesus was ‘Lord of the Sabbath' which means that he
gets to do whatever the hell he wants on the Sabbath, but you do not, since only
Lords can break laws while expecting others to keep them (‘do as I say, not as I
do').
We know that Jesus went to drinking
parties with prostitutes, and that they were always partying together, so much
so that the reputation of Jesus was that he was ‘a drunkard and a glutton'. We
know that the religious oppressor was furious, since one thing a prick cannot
stand is the idea that humanity might be partying because it keeps them away
from their religious duties. This will require the pointing of the scope of that
deer rifle once again (kill, bury, canonize) and we are told that Jesus was
apparently the Lord of Drinking Parties as well as being the Lord of the
Sabbath. You see they only partied back in those days because Jesus was marrying
his church, and thus he needed to have a wedding party, which was the one time
you could party and get away with it back in those days. But its not a wedding
now because he married the bitch and that would explain why she was cracking
down on that partying, and her new rule was that it couldn't be done anymore.
You see, it was not a general principle, but it was just a one time thing whose
time had come and gone.
We know that Jesus did not keep Lent,
and do all his seasonal fasting and religious mortification, but instead he
partied through Lent, which was provocative. Time for that deer rifle to take
aim once again. You see it turns out that now that Jesus was crucified and
buried, everyone was to damn sad to party anymore and so from now on to show
their holiness they would mourn the loss of their precious savior and show their
mourning by starting to do Lent themselves, now that they were in church. The
fact that Jesus did not do Lent is irrelevant, and therefore people should not
be asking ‘what would Jesus do' because it is obvious that the church did not
want people doing that, but instead people must start asking ‘what would the
church do.' This would then keep people out of trouble, because if you do what
Jesus did, it causes nothing but trouble, and the job of the church therefore
was to make damn sure there wasn't going to be any trouble. You see she was
getting married, but not to Jesus, but rather to Caesar, who was the demented
weirdo who crucified people to kill them, instead of hitting them once with a
bat and just getting it over with. Despite his nasty ways, the church still
found his other better qualities to be attractive enough to make him a suitable
spouse, and since Caesar crucifies Jesus, his wife would have to get out a deer
rifle and gun him down one more time after he was dead, since he seemed to be
haunting the place for quite a while and it was obvious that something was going
to have be done about it.
We know that Jesus was getting his toes
sucked by a prostitute, or was it his feet kissed (as though there were much of
a difference). Now there are obvious reasons to suck a toe or kiss a foot. The
pattern established by the church was clear. Hide the obvious. Therefore we get
the explanation that Jesus was a ruthless tyrant who threatened to place between
the red hot plates of a divine waffle iron anyone he caught sucking toes or
doing other similar things. However, if such people as the prostitutes, to begin
with, and everyone else as well, would get down and grovel before his throne,
and come crawling to him trembling and suck his tyrannical toe, he just might
give them a break. For that they would be eternally grateful. And when someone
is that grateful naturally they would be found groveling and sucking the toe of
a tyrant, and we have seen things like that happen from time to time, such toe
sucking not being unheard of, which would then make this spin doctored version
of the toe sucking controversy quite credible, but only if you believe that
Jesus was a maniacal religious right prick, who hated toe sucking but could live
with ruthless oppression. If you cannot accept the Adolph Hitler explanation for
Jesus, then you are left with only the obvious, and since that really pisses of
the religious right, such things as a sucked toe being just about the only thing
ever pisses off the religious right (they can live with anything, no matter how
cruel) you can see that to explain that particular controversy something a
little more than a deer rifle was required. The big guns were required and so
the religious right brought out the waffle iron for that one, the waffle iron
usually showing up right away when something really pisses of the religious
right, such as a sucked toe.
This pattern repeats itself, over and
over again, throughout that supposed ‘sacred canon'. It turns out that we have a
canon because we don't have Jesus, since the rule seems to be that you cannot
have a canon and have Jesus at the same time, because the canon is a tool of
oppression. It was the religious right who canonized the books of the church
during the fourth century and so it should come as no surprise to anyone that
the end product was the creation of a canonized waffle iron. We know that it was
the religious right that did this task, first because we can see the waffle
iron, which is a dead give away, and also because they burned every other
document and viciously persecuted anyone who tried to stop them, nailing them as
heretics, and then they climbed onto the throne with Caesar. You see before
Caesar would agree to marry the religious right and share a bed with them, the
deal was that she was going to have to get rid of that Jesus once and for all,
and so they did.
The pattern which emerges here is of
Jesus, lined up in the scope of a deer rifle, and being fired on again and again
by the religious right. The problem with gunning down Jesus is that first you
have to get him lined up in your scope so you can hit the target. This then
allows some pearl digger to come along later and throw out that waffle ironed
spin doctoring and just extract Jesus piece by piece, and since he was cut to
pieces at the same time he was being machine gunned, using those bullet ridden
pieces it is still possible to reconstruct the ‘historical Jesus' and find that
buried pearl.
The Jesus Revolutionary I have always
believed that instead of complaining that someone else didn't get a thing done
or nagging at them to get it done, you should just do it yourself. For that
reason I have become a Jesus Revolutionary. It turns out that this is the best
strategy, because then not only does it get done, it is also better than a
sermon, which doesn't seem to accomplish much.
Let me make just a brief sermon however
to explain certain relevant parts of the revolutionary theory of Jesus. All
systems of oppression exist only the mind. People are trained to internalize
systems of oppression. The reason for this is that oppressor only oppress and do
evil because they can get away with it. All systems of oppression are found to
have a delicate set of balls swinging between their legs, the reason for this
being that they are evil systems of oppressions and thus have to walk around
wearing a cup so they can protect their balls. Therefore it is required that you
remove the cup so that you can kick the oppressor right in their tender balls.
You kick an oppressor right in the balls. You do not hug them, and then call
yourself a pacifist because you are a doormat. The correct way to have a
revolution is not with guns, because all systems of oppression exist only in the
mind, and therefore the crucial battles of a revolution are propaganda wars.
When you have won the propaganda war you have already won the revolution, even
if it looks like an oppressor is still on the throne. Therefore you must put all
your effort into winning the propaganda war so that the revolution will be over
and done with, except for the part where the oppressor is then left to entertain
everyone by trying to get away without being arrested by the revolutionary cop.
A Jesus Revolutionary is never found playing the role of the noble victim, but
rather is a revolutionary cop. Once the propaganda war is one, and the oppressor
is all washed up, except for that part where he tries to get away, then the
Jesus Revolutionary will be found saying things like the following : "We have
you surrounded, Washington. Lay down your weapons and put your hands where I can
see them, and come out with your hands up and get cuffed." When the Jesus
Revolutionary is going around demanding the surrender of some Pharaoh of Egypt
or some Caesar, such a person will find that the Kingdom of Heaven is already on
the earth, in fact it is everywhere, and yet people still do not see it right
away, and therefore they dismiss him as a nut, until finally their own chained
mind is set free, in which case they will be found playing the role of a cop as
well. A Jesus Revolution does not require violence, for a violent revolution is
failed revolution, wherein the system of oppression was not destroyed, and
therefore there were still options available to the oppressor. A violent
revolution therefore is an attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of yet one
more defeat. Therefore the justifiable criticism of such revolutionary theories
as Marxism is that they are incomplete and still need some more work to make
them perfect. The Revolutionary strategy of Jesus is that you tie up the strong
man, and then you disarm him, and then, and only then, do you rob his house. If
you try to rob his house while he is armed to the teeth, you will have to shoot
your way into the place. It is also good to catch the oppressor by surprise, by
breaking into his house in the middle of the night when he is least expecting
it. What this means is that you must allow the oppressor to carry on all day
with his bad plans, and then when everything is just perfect, you bust into his
house like a thief in the night. If he saw you coming in the middle of the night
he would be waiting for you and you would never be able to bust into his house.
For this reason you must be sneaky and do such things as buy fields that have
pearls in them without telling anyone about the pearl, or do latenight house
robberies. This strategy always works because an oppressor is a type of walking
turnip, a brain dead vegetable, who is unable to plot a strategy having been
blinded by the blindness caused by arrogant hubris. An oppressor cannot stop
oppressing, for to do so would be to get arrested, and therefore he will carry
on digging a pit, only to fall into the pit later. A good practical example of
this sort of thing would be ruthless oppressor who goes to China, where he can
pay 35 cents an hour, and thus burns his own house down back home, thus
requiring him to bring in Hitler to try to keep a lid on the place, which is
like digging a pit and then falling into the damn thing later. There are many
other things just like that. An oppressor at the end of the road is an oppressor
with no options except bad options. An oppressor can throw revolutionaries into
concentration camps, but that makes the oppressor look like an oppressor, and
since if the human mind is to remain brainwashed and held in a cage, an
oppressor must always look like an angel, this proves to be a mistake. However,
since in Jesus Revolution, where the oppressor is first destroyed by being all
tied up, and then pursued by the Revolutionary cops and arrested later, you
would expect to see oppressors making lots and lots of such mistakes, since when
you are on the lam from the cops you are just making mistakes and are no longer
in power anymore and you are no longer making the decisions anymore.
The strategy of the Jesus Revolutionary
also works very well to destroy religion, for as the Jesus Revolutionary is
going around doing good and saving the world, he will be lined up in the scopes
of that canonized deer rifle, while some Pharisee fires shot after shot of
scriptural bullets trying to gun him down that way and stop him. As well the
Pharisee will be threatening anyone who tries to do good with a grilling in the
canonized waffle iron. Thus both the deer rifle and the waffle iron are exposed
to the public as not holy and not sacred at all. The Pharisee is also exposed as
not holy or sacred, since the only thing ever outrages a Pharisee would be a
sucked toe or a caged hamster that made a break for it and was found running
free in the Garden, while trying to avoid being stomped to death under the boots
of an enraged religious Pharisee.
Visit this web site!
http://www.awitness.org/column/revolutionary_jesus.html
|