These are the elements of “voting everyday” that we talk about in Jesus for President. Such voting is intimately related to calling Jesus a Christ. For in pledging allegiance to a different Lord, we are subsumed into an entirely different perspective on reality. We trust in the small acts of love to better the world. It’s not that “big” things cannot or should not happen, but that a devious illusion blurs our logic: we think that the Powers can do more than they do, and we assume that the millions of tiny actions going on daily don’t do much. But a beach is made of millions of tiny grains of sand.

We live in a society in which it is easier to call Jesus your Lord and Savior than to cut down on using so many plastic bags; I think it was meant to be deeper than that. We must seek to dig into the political and cultural meaning of what it means to look to Jesus for an alternate perspective and identity in the world. To call his hanging on the cross “triumphant” makes a mockery of those who sit on a throne. To call an executed homeless Jew the Lord of the Universe is to relativize all things relevant. To see what began in Abraham and Sarah as a project of blessing and redemption is to ready oneself for a revolution of the heart, mind, and daily habits. It is time for we, the church, to begin finding our peculiarity, our contrast, with society — not so that we can simply be different, but that we can bless the world with something good.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Explore some of the dominant power structures in our culture today. What are they and how do they oppose God’s gracious desires for humanity and the world?

2. How has the church implicitly complied with or adopted these power structures in the last 100 years?

3. Read 1 Samuel 8:1-7. What was so appealing to the Israelites about the idea of a king? In what ways do Christians today follow the example of the Israelites?

4. How do you resolve the tension between the conquest narratives in the Old Testament and Jesus’ teaching about loving our enemies and turning the other cheek?

5. Chris Haw describes the Amish as doing “acts of integrity” that do not appear to make a noticeable difference in the world. Does this seem idealistic to you? What acts of integrity should you undertake in your life that are “irrelevant” to the culture?

6. Wendell Berry stated that the church is “going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world.” What workable answers should the church prioritize in our society?

END NOTES

1 For example, contrasting older life patterns with the new (agriculture), Jared Diamond writes, “Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses” (“The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May [1987]: 64-66).

2 Consider here the biblical bias against Cain and his agricultural lifestyle. God did not reject his sacrifice because it was vegetarian — as, indeed, this is the commanded diet until the compromise with Noah. Rather, the Genesis writer may be calling to mind the historically violent tension between the landless, nomadic herdsman and the land owning/using farmers (a tension alive, for example, in the Rwandan massacres). In places where the interests of nomadic herdsman and agronomists clash, the claim that “the earth is the Lord’s” is not a “religious” claim — in the modern privatized rendition of that word — but a real political and economic argument against the Mesopotamian economic patterns that the Abrahamic people considered hoarding.

3 Richard Horsely, Jesus and Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 171. Cf. Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981).

4 Does God Need the Church? (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 55. Cf. Helmut Engle , Hans-Winfried Jungling, Philip J. King, and Norbert Lohfink in Katholisches Bibelwerk (Catholic Biblical Association) 38 (1993). See also Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, trans by John Bowden, 2 vols (London: S.C.M., and Lousiville: Westminster/John Know, 1994), 1:40-103.

5 The Original Revolution (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1971), 99.

6 Ched Myers, “Cultural/Linguistic Diversity and Deep Social Ecology (Genesis 11:1-9)” The Witness, http://thewitness.org/agw/myers.032802.a.html. See also Ched Myers, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, “Anarcho-Primitivism and The Bible”.

7 It is not only a group of Hebrews that made exodus from Egypt and formed the “twelve tribes” (Lohfink 58), but many others, apparently with their own aversion to the Egyptian Dynasty, joined in.

8 The Jewish Christian Schism Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 71.

9 Even the hopeful and triumphant acquisition of the promised land is also held off in the Torah with eschatological hope and distance.

10 Indeed, much criticism of history and philosophy for the last few decades has focused on how all history and philosophy is laden with values, agendas, and presuppositions. There is no such thing as “neutral” or “objective” history, as all of it is written from the perspective of a subject. This is inescapable and not even problematic, as long as the writers write with virtue and the reader can trust the agenda of the authors.

11 Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church?: Toward a Theology of the People of God (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 1999), 128.

12 For a Gentile to refer to a “Christ” is also to talk about not just Jesus but Israel. For this is a word of Israeli governance. Why do Gentiles care about declaring who they think is Israel’s ruler? To become a Christian is to, in some way, subsume one’s political citizenship into the alternate identity of Israel.

13 Yoder, Jewish Christian Schism Revisited, 169.

14 I propose a question to ask ourselves daily around each act we do: does this make no difference or a small difference? I think these are often our only two options — and we are blessed to find ways to live out the latter.

15 A worthy caution here, however, is how the marketers and mavens of capitalism have managed to acquire and sell weirdness. But while Urban Outfitters et al. strive to find the next coolest undercurrent of eccentricity and fashion, the market cannot sell the peculiar virtues of thrift, sales-resistance, courage, and creativity.

16 Genesis 6 and Revelation 13:16-17. (We can’t get into the economic symbolism of Revelation here. For more on that, I highly recommend West Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther’s Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999].)

17 Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 99f.

18 Surely, biking, in this political sense is somewhat negative or neutral: it is taking action to reduce one’s own bad effect on the world. But this is indeed so important and necessary! Before considering how to “stop” or “fight” the problems in the world, it is absolutely essential that we begin by asking how we are contributing to them and begin the difficult process of rehabituating ourselves to another way.

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