I’ve been torn lately. I’m struggling with how to look at things that are happening to people around the world. I brought this up in the car on the ride home with Rachel and Darryl last night and I’m still not satisfied.

Jesus message makes no sense. Let’s just say that straight up and get it out of the way. When we think about violence, most of us think that it’s ok or necessary to fight violence with violence. Jesus way though, is to fight violence with non-violence and because we are uncreative we justify using violence. When we think about careers, Jesus tells his followers to drop their nets, their careers and start to follow him, most of us just stay where we are and don’t even think that far into following Jesus. When we think about getting something stolen, all we can think about is to get it back and punish the person that did it, Jesus just tells us to give the person something else of ours too. It makes no sense.

So we have the stories in the bible about what Jesus way looks like. It’s selfless, it’s courageous and it’s crazy. Now though we are facing new questions. What does Jesus say to do when 1/3 of the world doesn’t have water and millions more are dying of Aids? What does Jesus say to do in the face of corrupt corporations using sweatshops to provide us with a great product? What does all this mean to us?

So here is my question. When I look at, for instance, AIDS, I want to help not just the people that have AIDS but help prevent more people from getting it. It’s like the story that Mike Todd talks about from Brian McLaren about mercy injustice (you can read it here). I’m not just interested in administering mercy to people and loving them as they become victims of the system. Instead I want to change the system that is screwing them. But as soon as I say that, “I want to change the system,” people get afraid, scared and usually disagree. It sounds like politics and they just want to love people. That is ok, totally ok, but I don’t think we are called to stop there, I think we are called to be administers of change; the change of the system that creates all these victims.

It scares me to say that, because does that mean I’m going to end up running for MP and sitting in conference rooms and just talking all my life? How do I follow Jesus, and still help change the system and not just take care of the systems rejects? Or is that not our job? Maybe our job is to take care of those that the system hurts. Maybe, but I don’t think so. How do we as Christians become so revolutionary that our voice is heard, but not from a political booth, but from within the body of Christ that is working.

I’m starting to see that following Jesus maybe, for me, doesn’t mean to run for government and try to make Sarnia, Ontario or Canada a better place that creates less victims. Maybe following Jesus more looks like discipling one person at a time to think the way of the kingdom and slowly, like Jesus did it, a revolution of kingdom minded people will begin to rise up through the cracks and in the margins and start to have more impact on nations and hurting people than governments have and it would never be motivated out of power and only out of love.

While this happens, it still hurts so much to see how our money system keeps people in poverty. How our social system keeps people insecure. How our value system keeps the poor away from the rich. It hurts to see that, and I groan along with the Spirit and creation while Jesus slowly seeps through the cracks of the system and starts a new system. Thank-God we live in this new system now as Christians and may we learn to live the way of the Kingdom system more and more each day.

In talking about the poor we automatically assume we are talking about a certain class of people. As soon as we envision “poor people” we would most likely have a neighbourhood in mind which would be classified as poor. Or maybe we have a person in mind, or a street corner where a lot of homeless people seem to hang out. The first thing we should all notice is that whenever we think of poor we think of lack of money. We think of bad housing, crappy jobs, kids with old clothing, sleeping on cement and welfare; all benefactors of not having enough money. What if though, the poor that the Bible speaks of isn’t a money thing? I think that our culture has a serious problem in that we make all our judgements and rating systems about money and infiltrate everything we do by a dollar value.

Why is it that those that are discredited and spat on in our society are those with no money? It’s because money has become a god all around us, and when we think of helping the poor we actually think that means giving people with lack of money more money. Money is so ingrained into our thinking that the word poor means absolutely nothing to us unless money is what we are talking about.

It’s difficult for us to separate the term money from the term poor because money is easy. It’s easy to look at someone and know they are poor. It’s also easy (so we think) to fix them, we just throw money at them. After all, I think it was George Barna that said that the evangelical church has spent over a trillion dollars into its ministry work in the past twenty years or so. We as the church are great at throwing money at people. Since we are supposed to be giving to the poor you would think much of this trillion dollars would have helped. Unfortunately, the stat also continues by George Bara that there has been no significant growth in the church in the past twenty years either. Money is easy to use and spend but I have a feeling that throwing money around because we think that’s all people need is just as ineffective as it is easy.

If we stopped using money as our judgement system I think we would have a lot different of a definition of what poor was around us. Just because someone has lots of money, doesn’t mean they are not poor, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t in need spiritually. Just because someone has no money, and may live in conditions we wouldn’t wish for our pets doesn’t mean that they are poor and want our money. If we could actually train ourselves to not think in terms of poor and rich but in terms of Christ’s value upon them I think we would start to see progress. The kingdom seems to be about levelling the playing field, and that doesn’t happen by constantly pointing at a group of people and saying that they are poor and that you (being rich) are there to help them. This is probably why Christ told the rich to get rid of everything and give it to the poor and in the same lifetime commended the poor widow for getting rid of everything also. He was taking money out of the equation. After the poor widow gave her two pennies and if the rich young ruler ever sold all his stuff, they would be equal, the would be where Christ wanted them, unable to achieve status through which we are inclined to try to, through money.

What if in the kingdom, poor wasn’t about money at all? What if in the kingdom money wasn’t our currency for goods, love, power and security but it was something else? Jesus ministry didn’t just consist of the poor, it also consisted of the rich, money swindling tax collectors also. Obviously Jesus saw some sort of ‘poor’ characteristic in these rich tax collectors. Maybe our definition of poor needs to change. But what would it even change too? Obviously poor neighbourhoods, cities, countries and continents need our help, and for some reason my only instinct is to have lots of money and give it to them.

God direct our passions and our good intentions and help us help people get better and not worse.

Over the last little while I have been around people/organizations that have a deep rooted desire to help the poor and dedicate their lives doing so. I live with the family in Hamilton that was committed into moving into the downtown area to be where they were ministering, which is next door to the third poorest neighborhood in Canada. I just went to New Orleans where we saw people working to get many that were poor (and rich) off their feet and back into their lives. Oddly, the more I have been reading lately the more I’m realizing how much the poor is central to the gospel message.

Now that I am beginning to look for my own place to live back in the city where we are planting theStory I am left with a choice. The decision is deeper than simply choosing a great house which is the best for my money and the best investment. The decision is whether I’m more concerned with my reputation/security/”success” than I am with moving into an area where I could potentially put all those things at risk. So here I am left with this choice of where I want to live, and when I mention the different area’s here in Sarnia where I want to live I get the oddest of looks. Why would you want to move there? But the best house turnovers for your money are in this area. Do you trust the area and the people?

I am starting to realize that society’s norm is so completely opposite of what the kingdom looks like that we have completely created an entire new set of beliefs to comfort us in knowing that whatever we choose is all right. Before maybe someone would choose to live in a “lesser” neighborhood because they wanted to save some money, or maybe it was because they had friends there or they liked the community aspect of it. But now we’ve actually convinced ourselves that we are unsafe and stupid to move into certain areas, thus creating a cloud of judgment for all those that already live there. Now we think that anyone who lives elsewhere in the “nicer” of neighborhoods is better off and we all need to reach to attain where they are.

With all that said, I’m starting to think that the kingdom doesn’t really care what neighborhood we live in. That maybe, whatever neighborhood we find ourselves in we learn to be content where we are and create an environment around us of contentment and purpose, not failure and the need to go one step further. Imagine someone moving into the poorest neighborhood in town that financially didn’t fit where they were, and imagine they were content being there. Now imagine how everyone around them would feel. No longer does their neighborhood become just a step to where they are “supposed” to be but now becomes where they want to be. Our poor neighborhoods are transformed without a cent being tossed at it. Afterall, technically our poor neighborhoods are a hundred times better off than how people used to live hundreds to thousands of years ago. Our poor neighborhoods are very subjective in that we compare them to what our rich neighborhoods look like.

Living as a kingdom person, we are now able to be content when the world around us is striving for more. This means that we can live in what in our world is considered poor and still live as if we were rich, or better. Living as a kingdom person means transcending the ideals that society throws at us saying that we are a certain type of person because we live a certain type of way and receives all its value from Christ. So no matter where we live, rich or poor, dirty or clean, on a beach house or with a flooded basement let us remember that we are always living rich and we can actually be content (not faking it) without all the things that the world tells us we need.

Tonight Rachel and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore. It was a documentary sort of film with most of the footage being taken at a presentation he was doing in front of a large group of people.  The amount of charts and visuals that he provided were endless and they really helped make his point. At the end of the video we are left realizing that we humans have really messed ourselves over and that we need to start taking responsibility for our actions and work to bring about a better future for ourselves. The entire film was on global warming and within the next fifty years or so, if we don’t start to cut down on our waste and energy use we are going to see a lot of devastation as coastlines all over the world start to flood.  This is a point that I think we all need to take quite seriously and would recommend for everyone to see this movie at one time or another and you’ll probably walk away feeling at the very least more educated and at the most wanting to run for mayor to help try to stop it.

Through the movie he talked about scientists and how that when they stumble across information like this (that global warming is in fact happening) that they all through history have been pressured a lot to keep quiet.  He talked about the oppression that scientists would go through to reveal this inconvenient truth to the world.

As a Christian, I began to realize that Al Gore’s message about global warming goes a lot deeper than just global warming.  It reaches to the heart of the gospel and living it out. The entire Kingdom of God is an inconvenient truth.  Christians throughout all of history have traded the inconvenient truth for something easy, bearable and comfortable.  For instance…

It’s interesting how we can take everything that is encompassed in the gospel and naturally, because we are human we edit it and change it until it makes sense and is comfortable to us. We manage to do it with almost everything and we don’t even know it. Jesus’ message is very inconvenient. Especially within the culture that we find ourselves in. Jesus’ message is completely counter to everything that is normal or comfortable to us. Jesus’ message is inconvenient to the way that a lot of us thought his message was saying. Soren Kierkegaard sums up my thoughts so beautifully in this quote that I’ve posted before, but I think it fits. So I’ll end with that.

The matter is simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world.
Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian Scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming to close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
-Soren Kierkegaard-

The deeper I get into indulging into kingdom talk and understanding what the kingdom of God is all about, the more I feel like I’m going back to being a little kid living in the realm of opposite day. I’m sure we all remember what that was like; when our yes meant no and we wore our pants backwards. The kingdom seems to be everything opposite from what most people say, from what the newspapers say and a lot of times from what I default to.

One way I notice this in regards to leadership. Normally, what we are used to is the loud people being in leadership; the people that can command and tell us what to do. The captain of our sports teams are the ones that portray confidence and can delegate well. The King of Israel was there because the nation of Israel wanted a visible leader, they wanted someone to make decisions for them and they wanted a representative for them for God. The newer breeds of denominations have senior pastors; someone who in many ways stands above the rest of the congregation and leads them on a journey with everyone, including the board and deacons, following close behind. Armies want a general who knows what he wants when he wants it and can tell people what to do. People look up to the president of the United States as if he is the end all and be all of any decision, and the president takes advantage of this too. If you watch a classroom discussion unfold you will quickly notice who takes charge of the conversation. There are examples everywhere of leadership. However, Jesus seems to set a new standard for what it takes to be a leader.

Jesus flips everything on its head. He says that whoever wants to be first must be last. Whoever wants to be first must become the servant of all. In our way of thinking, this makes absolutely no sense. Our idea of first is to be on top of everyone; leading everyone. We think that when people look up to us in leadership that we are first. Some of us demand that we get called by our proper title like pastor, reverend or doctor, as if that title somehow makes us greater than the person calling us it. It amazes me when people want to be on leadership as if it’s the end of the world. Or when people think they deserve to be on leadership. I’m still convinced that some of the best leaders are unknown because no one knows about them and they are secretly leading the kingdom of God forward while doing everything for God and not man. It’s funny because while Jesus tells us that the first shall be last, I don’t think we really believe him. We constantly gloat when we are lifted up in praise above others. We love the feeling of being recognized as accomplished something or being the first to do something special. We love being first, especially when that means that others are second and third and so on. If what Jesus really said was true, then all we are doing is feeling proud of being last in the Kingdom. We gain our security by being first here, but last in the Kingdom. Who ever heard of someone rejoicing because they got last? Unless we aren’t doing a very good job of actually living in the Kingdom?

Imagine if we didn’t care if people saw us or not. I wonder what we would still accomplish if we only did things in secret. I wonder how much of what I do is for recognition and because I want to be noticed or is actually for the kingdom. Sometimes I wonder how much of a leader I really am in the kingdom sense of the word. I constantly fool myself by thinking that the people I know, the knowledge I know and the things I do actually somehow make me who I am and make me a better person. If we find ourselves constantly desiring to be in front of people, or to be seen as a leader, then I would question quickly if we should be in leadership at all. The best leaders are not the self-promoted ones but the leaders who are put there by the very people that they are leading.

I pray that we all learn the art of servant hood and becoming last, because I feel that not many of us are comfortable being somewhere that only rewards us now with a participation ribbon. I think that if we all intentionally tried to do good without doing it in front of people like a show, or that if we all intentionally started putting people’s needs in front of our own desires to be seen and heard, or if we all stopped caring who is the greatest and just started becoming a servant of all then we’d actually start to see more and more of the Kingdom of God taking over all of the areas that have been infiltrated by culture and our own desires to be someone that we aren’t.