2nd man united

2nd man united

2nd man united has two specialties.  The music division provides original, professional tunes for your enjoyment and the education division provides podcasts, book summaries and more for "Confronting Our Christianity."  Receive updates by signing up for the 2nd man united e-mail newsletter or RSS feed in the left sidebar.  You have access to receive all music and podcasts once you become a "partner."  You also may request specific MP3s through e-mail by making a one-time donation of any amount.

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Podcasts:

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Podcast: Resurrecting Church

The next episode of the "Confronting Our Christianity" podcast titled "Resurrecting Church" is now available for listening and download at www.2ndmanunited.com.  It is a summary of Chapters 2 and 3 of "The Irresistible Revolution" by Shaine Claiborne.

Podcast: When Christianity Was Still Safe

I'm going to start doing book summary podcasts that you can follow along with in addition to the regular podcasts.  To receive the MP3s of the podcasts or music, make a donation or become a partnerat www.2ndmanunited.com. 

We're going to start with the Introduction and Ch. 1 of "The Irresistible Revolution" by Shaine Claiborne.  Enjoy and share with your friends!

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Another Way of Doing Life

Follow along as we continue to make our way through the book "The Irresistible Revolution" by Shane Claiborne.  To view the preceding chapters, see "Book Discussions" at 2ndmanunited.com.

Chapter 5:  Another Way of Doing Life

The Kingdom that Jesus speaks of is not just something we hope for after we die, but something we incarnate now. The early Christians not only denounced the empire, but in the same breath said, “And we have another way of living. If you are tired of what the empire has to offer, we invite you into the Way.” Of course, everything was forewarned that in this Kingdom everything is backward and upside-down.

So about thirty of us from Eastern College continued dreaming together about another way of doing life and decided to go ahead and give our vision a shot. We went to the ghetto and narrowed our vision to this: love God, love people, and follow Jesus. And we began calling our little experiment the Simple Way. We had no idea what we were getting into. An average day is full of doing things that actively resist everything that destroys life because we believe in another way of life that stands in opposition to this dark world.

On the practical side, we've created some healthy structures and rhythms for our communal life, at the core being a covenant to love and cherish each other (the hardest and most beautiful thing we do), and each of us shares healthy responsibilities and expectations. Everything revolves around the needs and gifts of our community and is always changing. We now have partner communities and organizations that makes it seem like a movement that is much bigger than the Simple Way. And we are just one little cell within a Body, very full of life but only a small part of the whole. Cells are born and cells die, but the Body lives forever. Our evangelism consists of saying to people “Come and see.” The words of Christians have not been heard because the lives of Christians have been making so much horrible noise.

Being friends with the poor is never as popular as giving to charity. The late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara said, “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. Christendom seems very unprepared for people who take the gospel seriously.

I read a study comparing the health of a society with its economics, and one of the things it revealed is that wealthy countries like ours have the highest rates of depression, suicide, and loneliness. We are the richest and most miserable people in the world. I feel sorry that so many of us have settled for a lonely world of independence and riches when we could all experience the fullness of life in community and interdependence. Once we get past the rebellious or reactive countercultural paradigm and muster up the courage to try living in new ways, most of us find that community is very natural and makes a lot of sense, and that it is not as foreign to most of the world's population as it is to us. Community is what we were created for. But that doesn't mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together.

We are not missionaries to the poor. We have joined with the poor and have become missionaries to the church. We don't need more churches. We need THE church, people who are marked by the renewing of their minds and imaginations, who no longer conform to the pattern that is destroying our world but believe so much in another world that they cannot help but begin enacting it now.

 

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The Irresistible Revolution - When Comfortable Becomes Uncomfortable

Follow as we make our way through the book "The Irresistible Revolution" by Shane Claiborne. 

Chapter 4: When Comfortable Becomes Uncomfortable

Just a few days after I returned from Calcutta, I headed to Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago for a one-year internship. For me, the worlds of poverty and wealth collided. According to Mother Teresa, it is among the wealthy that we can find the most terrible poverty of all – loneliness. So perhaps I was still among the poorest of the poor. Willow Creek started as a bunch of young people disillusioned with the church. Now some thirty years later, they are one of the nation's largest congregations, with over twenty thousand folks coming onto the 150-acre campus each week. I was also finishing my academic work at nearby Wheaton College, which was referred to as the “Harvard of Christian schools.” I was involved at Willow Creek, took a light load of classes at Wheaton, and I would go hang with the homeless every chance I got in downtown Chicago.

The year I was at Wheaton, a popular Christian singer-songwriter named Rich Mullins was there. He was a pretty crazy dude who hitchhiked a lot, went barefoot all the time, and like St. Francis of Assisi (my newfound hero), so I became secretly intrigued. He had come because he was writing a musical inspired by the life of Francis and he was going to audition for a part. The invited me to join the show for a part that required no musical talent (since I don't have any). Rich was a guy that talked straight about the Kingdom of God. If he hadn't died, he probably would've joined the list of notorious blacklisted chapel speakers.

I truly felt that God was alive at Willow Creek, but there seemed to be a chasm between the good folks of the suburbs and the suffering masses in Calcutta. Many people were becoming Christian, but it seemed that not many knew how to BE a Christian. A teaching pastor at Willow Creek was once speaking about the rich young ruler in the New Testament. He said, “Now this doesn't mean you have to go sell your rollerblades and golf clubs,” and he went on to “contextualize” the teaching to show that we just need to be careful not to make idols of our things. I wasn't so sure about that. Jesus doesn't tell the man to be a better steward, or to treat his workers fairly, or not to make money into an idol. He tells him to give up everything and give to the poor. Jesus doesn't run after the man as he walks away saying, “Just give half,” or “Start with 10 percent.” He simply lets the man choose his wealth. In our culture of “seeker sensitivity” and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd. The story is not so much about whether rich folks are welcome as it is about the nature of the Kingdom of God, which has an ethic and economy diametrically opposed to those of the world. Rather than accumulating stuff for oneself, followers of Jesus abandon everything, trusting in God alone for providence.

Our sincere desire for everyone to know God's love has driven us to cheapen the very thing we want folks to experience. It has created a culture in which everyone can be a Christian, but no one knows what a Christian is anymore. Jesus warns people of the cost of discipleship, that it will cost them everything they have ever hoped for and believed in – their biological families, their possessions, even their very lives. He warns them to count the cost before putting their hand to the plow. And Jesus allows people to walk away.

The more I read Scriptures, the more I became unsure about my plans for the future. Folks always asked what I was going to do after college. People always want to define you by what you do. I started saying, “I'm not too concerned about what I'm going to do. I am more interested in who I am becoming.” I had come to see God as lover and provider and to desire a life of singleness and poverty – not very reassuring to my parents, who had sent me (their only child with no cousins) to college to get a top-notch education, meet a wifer-for-lifer, and become something important.

One of the last things I did in Chicago was write my senior thesis in sociology. It was called “The American Jesus.” It was about a concept called “totemism,” or the human tendency to form our conception of God in our own image. We take the values and traditions that we most admire about ourselves and project them onto a totem. Eventually, we stand in awe of that totem and end up worshiping an incarnation of the things we love about ourselves. I decided that one of the best ways to discover the historical Jesus is to deconstruct the American totem, to take him off the totem pole we have nailed him to. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that rich Christians do not know the poor. I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

Sign up for the 2nd man united e-mail newsletter in the left sidebar at www.2ndmanunited.com to get e-mail updates and receive a free MP3 download.  To receive all of 2nd man united's music and podcast MP3s, become a partner for $1/mo, less than the price of CD per year!

The Irresistible Revolution - In Search of a Christian

Follow as we make our way through the book "The Irresistible Revolution" by Shane Claiborne. 

Chapter 3:  In Search of a Christian

Once, a colleague of mine said to me, “I am not a Christian anymore. I gave it up in order to follow Jesus.” From my desk at college, it looked like some time back we had stopped living Christianity and just started studying it. The words of Soren Kierkegaard resonated in my thirsty soul: “The Bible is 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 . . . 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 too close . . .”

So, I went looking for a Christian. My quest led me to write Mother Teresa a letter. When I didn't hear from her in a couple of weeks, I got a hold of a “Superior Nun” in the Bronx and she graciously gave me the phone number, which I called at 2 a.m. at four dollars a minute. She answered and told me to come.

When we got there, we realized we weren't crazy. There were ordinary radicals from all over the world that had come there to join the work and try to figure out how to love better. There were missional evangelicals, curious athiests, simple pilgrims, and wild revolutionaries. One guy was a wealthy businessman in Germany, but he said he read the gospel and it “messed everything up.” He read where Jesus commands the disciples to sell everything they have and give it to the poor (Luke 12:33), and he actually did it. I had finally met a Christian.

The goal of the Home for the Destitute and Dying was not to keep people alive. It was to love them. This place showed me that life is more powerful than death, that light can pierce the darkness. As I looked into the eyes of the dying, I felt like I was meeting God. The reality that God's Spirit dwells in each of us began to sink in. I began to see the Body of Christ, not in some figurative sense, but the flesh and blood of Jesus alive in the world through the Holy Spirit – God's hands, feet, ears. Was it possible that I was becoming a Christian?

I spent the last couple of weeks in India in the leper colony. Oftentimes lepers don't even know the words “thank you” because they have never needed to say them. But this was 150 families that cared for one another and taught one another “thank you.” They also managed to become self-sustainable; growing their own vegetables and animals, as well as making their own shoes, clothes and many other things. I saw Jesus in these people more than the stained-glass window my United Methodist church bought for over $100,000.

One of the verses that has always given me trouble is John 14:12: “Very truly I tell you, all who have faith will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” I don't know about you, but I haven't raised anyone from the dead, turned water into wine, or healed lepers. But, I soon discovered that the “greater things” were not just miracles, but expressions of love. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, but Lazarus died again. He healed the sick, but they got sick again. He fed the five thousand, but they got hungry again. But His love lasts forever. And now it is inside of us. We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet.

The idea of the Kingdom of God was foreign to me in the materialism of my land. But this was like what I saw in the early church: a people on the margins giving birth to another way of living, a new community marked by interdependence and sacrificial love. They had not chosen to live in “intentional community.” Their survival demanded community. No wonder Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”

I had found a Christian in Calcutta. I was now ready to come home because I knew my Calcutta was the United States. Leprosy is a disease of numbness. It occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry; a land haunted by numbness.

Sign up for the 2nd man united e-mail newsletter in the left sidebar at www.2ndmanunited.com to get e-mail updates and receive a free MP3 download.  To receive all of 2nd man united's music and podcast MP3s, become a partner for $1/mo, less than the price of CD per year!