Quotes from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Mother Theresa always said, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles.
This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear.
But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God.
...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“There are some things to die for but none to kill for. ”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time wit the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. 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 of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the po0r rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “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 living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“So if the world hates us, we take courage that it hated Jesus first. If you're wondering whether you'll be safe, just look at what they did to Jesus and those who followed him. There are safer ways to live than by being a Christian.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“I'm just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“To refer to the Church as a building is to call people 2 x 4's.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Dance until they kill you, and then we'll dance some more.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Maybe we are a little crazy. After all, we believe in things we don't see. The Scriptures say that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). We believe poverty can end even though it is all around us. We believe in peace even though we hear only rumours of wars. And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn't fit together. As I read Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“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 rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: "Don't call us saints; we don't want to be dismissed that easily”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“If you have the gift of frustration and the deep sense that the world is a mess, thank God for that; not everyone has that gift of vision. It also means that you have a responsibility to lead us in new ways.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“The true atheist is the one who refuses to see God's image in the face of their neighbour.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“While most activists could use a good dose of gentleness, I think most believers could use a good dose of holy anger.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“There is a beautiful moment in the bible when the prophet Elijah feels God’s resence. The Scriptures say that a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but God was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. It was the whisper of God. Today we can hear the whisper where we least expect it; in a baby refugee and in a homeless rabbi, in crack addicts and displaced children, in a groaning creation.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“When i ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, i can feel the Spirit whisper to me, ‘you tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“We have not shown the world another way of doing life. Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“That stuff Jesus warned us to beware of, the yeast of the Pharisees, is so infectious today in the camps of both liberals and conservatives. Conservatives stand up and thank God that they are not like the homosexuals, the Muslims, the liberals. Liberals stand up and thank God that they are not like the war makers, the yuppies, the conservatives. It is a similar self-righteousness, just with different definitions of evildoing. It can paralyze us in judgment and guilt and rob us of life. Rather than separating ourselves from everyone we consider impure, maybe we are better off just beating our chests and praying that God would be merciful enough to save us from this present ugliness and to make our lives so beautiful that people cannot resist that mercy.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“People always want to define you by what you do. I started saying: ‘i am not too concerned with what i’m going to do. I am more interested in who i am becoming. I want to be a lover of God and people.”
― Shane Claiborne, quote from The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

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