Jarrod McKenna’s Wednesday’s with Gandhi:

“Jesus was the most active resister know perhaps to history. His was nonviolence par excellence.”

-Gandhi -Vol.84, June 26, 1946

I too hold that Jesus is not less than, as Gandhi put it elsewhere, “the greatest practitioner of nonviolence in history.” And while we could whine and moan in long self righteous diatribes about the extent of the distortion of Christianity today that often merely provides a ‘spirituality’ to accompany the satanic destruction of God’s good creation and the oppression of the poorest of poor all in nice sanitised suburban packaging that has somehow separated the nonviolent ‘Way of Jesus’ from ‘Jesus being the Way’ making a mockery of the cross with it’s pro-power, pro-war, pro-greed stance, …that’s a little to easy 😉 and all gets a bit tiresome.

So instead like to suggest some Australians who might also seem odd at first when considering people to help us gain an imagination for one aspect of Jesus’ controversial and crucifixion inducing nonviolence that is often overlooked. His provocative, disarming, larrikin-like humour. I want to make the case that nonviolence, Jesus’ nonviolence that Gandhi considered “par excellence”, is what we were created for, as St. Irenaeus put it “The glory of God is a human fully alive” and to be fully alive is to be creative, fun and often funny! In considering this God given creativity to reflect the “disarm[ing of the] the powers and authorities, making a spectacle of them” APEC comes to mind and the actions of… The Chaser boys!

For those that missed it here’s a link to the BBC’s coverage on youtube (click here) 

In all honesty sometimes I hear nonviolence, (or love, or justice) being talked about… and it’s so bloody boring!  Asked to think of creative ways to get back at our enemies our imaginations run wild yet invited to imagine blessing our enemies in transformative ways that speak truth to power and we often go blank.

We’ve been sold the lie that loving our enemies is just for saints or super humans not recovering sinners like me.  As if those words where abstract philosophies to be written about in big books that gather dust instead of those words being evocative of our experience of the God revealed in Jesus.  Nonviolence (or love, or justice, or beauty) sadly become words that no longer open us to what God wills the world to be ultimately, (that we have seen start in Jesus) but instead stagnant principles that don’t challenge the empires we are living through.

One of the most humbling shout-outs EPYC has received has come from that mega-phone of amazing grace, Shane Claiborne author of The Irresistible Revolution who said reflecting on his time in Iraq,

“One of the doctors I met in Iraq said (with tears in his eyes), ‘This violence is for people who have lost thier imagination.’ Jarrod McKenna and the good people of EPYC are prophets of imagination. They are on a mission to create new heroes and sheroes and to reclaim God’s dream for this world. And as they help young folks to learn not to hurt each other, hopefully the nations will take some lessons.” day of the outlaw download

I believe the Holy Spirit empowers us all to become prophets of imagination.  Prophets of Jesus’ creative  way out of the cycles of violence and retaliation. Then we’ll be able to resist the temptations to have our understandings of ‘nonviolence’ (or love, or justice) be made sanitised, safe, nice and all a bit Fat-Cat-Humphy-Bear-Barney’s-Worldish. 

Jesus’ nonviolence provocatively and prophetically turns over tables in the temple while much we often consider ‘nonviolence’ is cowardly concern for owns own innocence rather than confronting injustice. This is only compounded when our understanding of Jesus gets separated from the earthy and engaging Jesus of the New Testament. (evangelicals are not exempt from when they treat the Scriptures like a context free collection of memory verses!) I’m not sure if it’s been in the interest of keeping Jesus ‘holy’ that we’ve often lost his earthiness, playfulness, creativity, anger, edginess, and humour. We’ve taken an amazing human and in the interest of saying he’s also ‘fully God’ made him less than ‘fully human’ (which is as heretical as saying Jesus isn’t the full revelation of God). We’ve made Jesus a bit 2-D. A bit plastic toyish. A bit weird and other worldish. A bit not as human as us. Comic bookesk. A bit cardboard cut out. A bit hard to call ‘brother’. And ultimately a bit boring!

I think the opposite is true. I think the more we witnesses to the fully humaness of Jesus the more the sandal of the incarnation comes to light. I think the New Testament witnesses to a fully alive, larrikin Jesus. As N.T. Wright puts it “the humility of God and the nobility of humanity.” Or as St. Ephrem the Syrian put it in the fourth century contemplating the Christ who reveals God to be a love that does no harm,

“it is so right that humans should acknowledge your divinity,

It is so right for heavenly beings to worship your humanity.”

Let’s pray we’ll have the imagination to follow the larrikin Jesus, the miraculous Patch Adams of Palestine, in his way of disarming humour.  We’ll hear the call to be practical jokers of the peaceable kingdom that pull the pants down on our suicidal society bent on unsustainabllity and self destruction. We’ll walk the narrow road of the sacred silliness of love in a world of satanic serious which spends each fourteen times the amount of money we need to end absolute poverty around the world on weapons whose sole purpose is to take life.

May we come to see a messiah, God’s idea of a real king, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, fulfils prophecy in such a surprising and disarming way that it makes an ass out of the Roman military war horses and the Jewish expectations of a violent messiah in an inspired and moving act of holy clowning that’s as ridiculous as the expected liberating leader arriving on a tricycle when everyone is expecting tanks. Maybe the Chasers boys can help give us eyes to see.

Ok, we’ve looked at Ghandi, but what about these guys.

This article is about to be used in the next Forge National Newsletter and is re-printed with permission from GIA. It was originally published in their Resonate magazine – a great journal for the young adults in your church wanting to think more deeply about mission. GIA are the Baptist mission crew and I have to say that in my opinion they are probably the most impressive mission agency I have come across. Their tagline is “helping communities find their own distinctive ways of following Jesus” and this story is about one of those communities.

Read on…

God is using dreams and conversations with unassuming Australians to make Jesus known to Buddhist monks in Asia. These monks are now discovering how to develop their own distinctive ways of following Jesus within the context of a Buddhist temple. Towards the end of last year, two Buddhist monks fell in love. It was against their religion and completely counter-cultural. They both fell in love with Jesus.

The two twentysomethings – Tee & Zom – had previously moved into the city from rural Southeast Asia to join a Buddhist temple. They shaved their heads, donned their custom-made burnt orange robes and committed to service. It was while studying at university that they met a Global Interaction team member and part-time English teacher. For security reasons, let’s call him Habakkuk. Hab intrigued the monks: they hadn’t met a follower of Jesus before. He listened to their thoughts on Buddhism and then he talked about Jesus, giving them both Bible story books. A week later, Hab was driving past some temples when he felt drawn to one in particular, not realising that was where the two monks lived. They came running out, thanking Hab for the book: they had read it several times, soaking in the stories about Jesus. But God had also been breaking into their lives through dreams.

Tee was jumping out of his skin saying, “I had a dream you were going to come to this temple today!” Zom shared his dream: he was at a magnificent mountain and somehow knew that he was there to worship Jesus. He bowed down and Jesus said, “I have something for you.” Then he woke up. Hab was able to share what it was Jesus had to offer.

A few days later both said, “We love Jesus and want to follow him.” They were bubbling with joy. After reading the entire New Testament in a week, Tee wrote 10 pages on what it means to walk with Jesus. This demonstrated a genuine commitment. But a lifetime of living and breathing Buddhism meant they still had a lot of questions.

In Asia, Buddhist monks are given the highest respect. Every boy knows that he can only truly become a man by becoming a monk. Upon turning 20 and by simply answering 10 questions they can be a fullyfledged monk. These questions include: “Are you human? Are you running from the police? Do you have a contagious disease? Are you willing to follow the 227 rules?”

Ah yes, the rules. If you thought following the Ten Commandments took stamina, spare a thought for these guys. Not only do they need to remember 227 rules, they have to actually follow them. The rules include pretty much everything – no sport, no singing and no tickling. Hab reckons most monks find the ‘no lying’ rule the hardest.

It can be quite a lonely existence: most of the community don’t relate to the monks, other than giving them food. They have few possessions, although some monks use mobile phones and i-pods. So why do they do it? Food, accommodation and a university education are all taken care of. But it’s also about ‘making merit’, which is kind of like karma. It’s about escaping suffering by eliminating desires and therefore reaching enlightenment. The frustrating thing is they never really know how much merit

they’ve got or need. So they keep trying.

Hab worked hard to create common ground between Buddhism and Christianity and to bridge the gap. “There is a tension point because they [Buddhists] try to escape life and its suffering, whereas followers of Jesus can deal with life’s problems through His presence and a peace beyond understanding. They have a great respect for Jesus’ teaching, but the church doesn’t help.” This is because the Asian church is very Western. Locals see that if you become a Christian, you need to give up your ‘Asian-ness’ – that you can’t be both Asian and Christian. That’s why the two new believers will remain living in the temple, training to become teachers and in a few years will return to their communities.

“They have an obligation to their community to remain monks until they finish their studies,” Hab explains. “Buddha said that he could only take someone so far because it’s all human reasoning. But these monks now see that Jesus has given them divine revelation and helped them take the next step on their journey towards true enlightenment.”

This is where the story gets really interesting, trying to grapple with what it looks for these monks to develop their own distinctive ways of following Jesus in a Buddhist temple. “True Buddhism is a philosophy and a cultural identification, not a religion,” Hab notes. “That’s why these young men can stay in the temple.”

For instance, there are certain Buddhist ceremonies where the new believers are learning to step back and look at ways to change a certain saying that will honour Jesus instead. When praying for someone, they don’t need to say it aloud, so they can be praying to Jesus. During the deep breathing meditation exercises, they learn to breathe out their worries and breathe in God’s love. Instead of meditating on the Buddhist scriptures every morning, the monks read the Bible and then the two believers pray together.

Hab continues to go into the temples to connect and pray with the new believers. He leaves them with Bible stories that they then

share with others. “They have more effect on the other monks than I could ever have because I am a foreigner. I need to get out of the way, which is good for my ego! We are here so God can use us to help them work through this expression. We are not about building a Western style church.

We want new believers to remain in their community so they can be more effective in their witness.” “So now we are at the end of one chapter with these guys and the opening of another. It’s been very powerful to see how God has touched them and it’s even more exciting to think of where God will take them in the future.”

So what do you reckon?

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