My friend Rachel Held Evans wrote a post about “Beckianity” last week that stirred up all sort of mess in her comment section. It seems some people like the idea of us as a Christian Nation ^TM, and can’t wait to defend it. If you are convinced The United States is a Holy Nation that has veered from her Christian Roots, I suggest you read Rachel’s post. You may also be interested in this post I wrote a few weeks ago: A Christian Nation? I Don’t Think So, Glenn Beck

In a fascinating (and long) article in Touchstone, the famous (infamous, in some circles) Anglican apologist N. T. Wright gives his take on another infamous Anglican apologist, C. S. Lewis. In the article, Wright dissects Lewis’ best known book, Mere Christianity.  I agree with all of his praise and most of his criticisms. I have always maintained that the Evangelicals that praise Lewis  clearly do not understand just what it is he is saying.

Thursday, I was on stage with Shane Claiborne and Johnathan Wilson-Hartgrove at Big Tent Christianity. Several folks have asked if I would post my speech – here is the manuscript – it is probably 95% accurate, as I often edit while speaking.

I will have commentary later – but I wanted to get this up for my friends. I hope to have audio files later. As soon as I have access to them, I will point you in the right direction. The topic I was supposed to speak on was Big Tent Justice.

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According to Jesus, loving your neighbor is half of the greatest commandment. Pretty much everyone agrees that, if taken seriously, it’s a radical idea that could change the world. And yet it seems nearly impossible for American Christians, liberal or conservative, to agree on what it looks like.

Let me make a modest proposal.

Loving your neighbor begins by being in a relationship with your neighbor.

I love Johnny Cash. I have the entire Cash Discography – all the way back to the 1950′s. Love me some Johnny Cash.

Or do I?

Because I also love my wife, and I am here to tell you that while I feel consistently good toward Johnny Cash, how I feel toward my wife depends on what day it is, how our finances are doing, if I have indigestion, whether I had a good day at work… But I always feel ecstatic toward Johnny Cash.

Because I don’t really know Johny Cash. I love my impression of Johnny Cash. It is fair to say I am a fan, or that I very much like his music, or that I love the idea of Johnny Cash. I submit there can be no love outside of relationship.

By that standard, most Christians don’t really love their neighbor. They love the idea of their neighbor. We vote for this candidate or that candidate, whoever promises to provide the sort of help we think people need. We outsource our compassion to the soup kitchens, to the clothing closets, to the homeless shelters. On Thanksgiving day, we load the youth group up in the van, to go feed the “less fortunate”, so the kids can be “exposed” to poverty, while never giving thought to wonder what they do for food the other 364 days of the year. And if that thought come up, we quickly suppress that thought and write a check. We outsource it.

Loving your neighbor presupposes a relationship. It means knowing your neighbor is going through a divorce, that the lady who cleans your office has a mother that is dying, that the man at the end of the street holding a cardboard sign has been outside for three years now, and his name is Brian. In the story we call the Good Samaritan, it meant getting in the ditch to bind the man’s wounds yourself.

When the average person in the pews can tell you the names of all the Judges on American Idol, or can name all the Glee cast members, but does not know a soul that makes 1/4th their income, I think it is fair to say we have lost our sense of mission as co-creators of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus told us the poor would always be with us – but we don’t really want the poor among us – we want someone else to handle that.

Last year in the US, some 17 million kids went to bed hungry. 17 million. In a nation where we throw away 40% of all the food we buy, where 1 in three of us is obese, and yet children are laying in bed, hungry. How can this happen?

Because none of those kids know you.

Because if you knew a kid who was hungry, you would move heaven and hell to get that kid some food. But because those 17 million kids don’t know you, they laid in bed last night, hungry.

Here in Wake County, the official statistics say there are approximately 1200 homeless people. And many hundreds of Christian congregations. You cannot tell me that out of the many thousands of Christian homes represented by those churches, there are not 1200 empty beds somewhere. Of course there are. But we save those beds for people we actually know.

The justice of Jesus is brought about by sacrifice, love and suffering. And to the extent that we do not exercise sacrificial love, suffering and proclaim the Reign of God, we are far from the way of Jesus.

Jesus calls us to serve, not lead. The way is not about political solutions – in fact, Jesus said political power would be used against us as we sought to bring about God’s justice. The way does not involve courting those in power – the Apostle Paul told us Jesus made a spectacle of the powers of this world.

There are any number of passages in both the Hebrew scriptures as well as the New Testament that speak of God’s love for the victims of injustice and our responsibility to work to bring that justice into fruition. The one I am thinking about right now, however, is Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter that …”I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it”.

I am not the first person to note that Jesus refers to the gates as a defense measure. Those gates are there to keep us out. Just what does Jesus expect of us?

Jesus expects us to storm down those gates and invade Hell itself. Jesus is telling us to go to Hell to be with the drug addict and the alcoholic. Go to Hell to be with the victims of abuse, and with the abusers. Go to hell and liberate the adulterer, the homeless man, the pornographer. In hell is where we will find the single mother and the embezzler, the pimps and the pimped, the hungry, the broken, the forgotten. We, you and I together, should be wading into hell itself and proclaiming that there is a new way to live and a new way to love, and that new way is bringing about the justice of God.

The justice of Jesus is a personal justice. It involves sacrificial, relational love. It involves dying to ourselves, our ambitions, our preconceived notions of how things work. The way of Jesus invites us to be the means by which God’s justice comes into being. It invites us to go to Hell, for the sake of those imprisoned there.

Today, in this Big Tent, my most fervent prayer for the church is simply this: I pray I will see you in hell. They need us there.

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If you would like to find out about having Hugh speak to your organization, click here to get that conversation started.

Thanks to Brandon Mouser for making me look good in the photo.

photo © 2010 Gage Skidmore | more info (via: Wylio)
Recently, there has been quite a bit of buzz as Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and others have called for Americans to “take their country back” and return to our Christian roots.  Lots of folks got upset a while back when President Obama famously said that “America is not a Christian nation”. Quite frankly, I am a bit confused by why they ever thought that it was a Christian Nation.  Just when has the United States ever represented the ideals, the teachings or the example of Jesus of Nazareth?

Maybe it was actually before the actual founding of the United States of America, at the dawn of the European invasion of the American continent. You know, when Europeans ‘discovered’ land that people had been living on for centuries and took it from them at the point of the sword and later, the gun. Was it Christian charity when the European settlers waged a virtual genocide on the native peoples and reneged on countless treaties?^#

Perhaps it was during the Constitutional Conventions, when the founding fathers had the chance to make slavery illegal, but chose not to because of financial interests. Was it when the countless ships flowed into the ports of the United States, bringing millions of African in chains to be sold in our town squares as so much chattel?

The Christian founders these people talk about – which president was that? The ones who owned slaves (at least twelve of them)¹, the one who fathered children with them (Jefferson) or the ones who just lived in the house built by slaves (that would be all of them after Washington)²? Of the first five people to hold the office of President of the United States, four of them actually owned slaves while they were in office³.

When the nation finally decided to rid itself of the horror of human bondage, it resorted to war, with brother killing brother and families divided. In fact, the Civil War resulted in the death of more Americans than any other US war. Was this the result of following the teachings of Jesus to love our enemies and to resist not the evildoer? If it was not this war, which one was acceptable and pleasing to God?

When we forcibly removed thousands of Cherokee and other Native Americans from their ancestral homeland and forcibly moved them to reservations during the Trail of Tears – which part of Holy Scripture were we listening to then? Surely not the admonition to care for the stranger, or to love our neighbor as ourselves. ⁴

Was it between 1932 and 1972, when the US Public Health Service injected African American males with syphilis without their knowledge, in order to see what would happen?⁵ Was it when we killed several hundred thousand civilians by bombing with nuclear weapons a people who had already proposed surrender?⁶

Or was it during the era of Jim Crow, when separate but equal was the law of the land. Was this what St. Paul meant by his admonition that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”?⁷ Or was that verse our guide prior to 1919, when women were denied the right to vote for the politicians who would tax them and send their children off to war?

Was the Holy One most pleased with us when the Governor of Alabama, a Baptist, stood where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as President of the Confederacy and told us his policy was “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”⁸?

When was this Holy period in our history? When did the United States of America represent the unconditional love we see in Jesus to the world, or even to all our own residents? Is our understanding of the unmerited Grace we receive from God demonstrated by the over 1200 people the US has killed in the last 34 years to demonstrate that killing is wrong?⁹

I could go on and on. Vietnam. Watergate. Our lack of intervention in the Holocaust. Our toppling countless democratically elected officials in sovereign nations. Iraq. Haliburton. Ad Infinitum, Ad Nauseaum.

America is not a Christian Nation®. America is a political body, worse than some, better than others. As my friend Karen has eloquently said, God does not love America. God does, however, love Americans. Just like God loves Iraqis and Afghans and Osama Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein. And you.

{finis}

Notes:

#: Wikipedia places the high and low numbers of Native Americans killed by the European presence on the continent at between 2 million and 10 million.

1: The history of slavery and the Presidency is chillingly told by this graph from the University of Dayton Law School

2. See this article from CBS regarding the slave labor that went into the building of the White House

3. See #1, above

4. The Cherokee were but one tribe of many that was moved from their ancestral homeland as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (an action originally proposed by George Washington). Over 4,000 Cherokee died as a direct result of the forced relocation.

5. Disgusting

6:”The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.“  Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. (source)

7:  Galatians 3: 28

8: George Wallace was a piece of work. But his most inflammatory remarks were made after leaving the Baptist faith and becoming “Born-Again”.

9: Here ya go. And don’t even get me started on how arbitrary it is.