Christian ministry on gang turf
By now, many have heard of Father Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries to create opportunities for gang members in Los Angeles to leave their lives of violence and to start doing something life-giving. I blogged about his excellent book Tattoos on the Heart in September and included it as one of my favorite books of the year last week. The work he has done to transform the lives of so many in LA is truly inspiring.
Unfortunately, LA isn't the only place where gangs are rampant, and Father Gregory can't be everywhere at once. The good news is that he apparently has a kindred spirit in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. He's Father Antonio Lopez Tercero, or "Padre Toño", and his parish happens to be one of the most violent neighborhoods in a terribly violent city. While he hasn't quite matched Father Gregory in entrepreneurial terms, it seems that his ministry is one of the few things holding that neighborhood together and pointing young men to a better way.
Al Jazeera English's Witness program featured Father Anthony on this recent episode.
If you're a praying person, please say a prayer for Father Anthony and those he serves in San Salvador. And pray that many more will follow Jesus, the Prince of Peace, into the hard places as instruments of shalom.
[Photo credit: yoni via Photobucket.com]
Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Part 3/3)
In the first part of this series, I introduced Wolterstorff's ideas about world-formative Christianity and the vision of shalom. In part two, we looked at his ideas about how responding to poverty is a matter of rights not generosity, and how unchecked nationalism destroys shalom. Here now are some final thoughts from Until Justice and Peace Embrace.
Shalom in the city
Shalom is about having and enjoying right relationships, and nowhere is the need for this seen more clearly than in our cities. Wolterstorff writes that this extends beyond the considerations we might normally consider:
It is customary to view the city simply as a large collection of buildings in close proximity to one another, each more or less self-contained and possessed of its own degree of architectural distinction. I propose... to break away from that sort of atomistic way of thinking, however, and view the city instead as an integral entity in which the individual buildings are abstracted parts. Adopting the holistic perspective, we see the city as a unit orchestrating paths and partitions to establish gathering places for human beings on a given amount of the earth's surface.
The city both expresses and shapes the lifestyles of its residents, for better or worse. Architecture and aesthetics, in other words, aren't neutral -- not if shalom has to do with delight. "Could it be," he muses, "that living in a city devoid of sensory delight is itself a form of poverty?"
Justice and liturgy
"Amidst its intense activism," Wolterstorff writes, "the Western world is starved for contemplation." He continues:
I want to explore the possibility that a rhythmic alternation of work and worship, labor and liturgy is one of the significant distinguishing features of the Christian's way of being-in-the-world.
Work and worship are connected, he says, and they both spring from grateful hearts, in step with the six-plus-one rhythm set into motion by our Creator:
This rhythm was given to be practiced as a remembrance, as a memorial of the pattern of God's creative activity and of the pattern of Israel's liberating experience: the very rhythm of everyday life was to be a liturgical practice.
Activists of all kinds would do well to practice this kind of liturgy.
Theory & praxis
Wolterstorff concludes, not surprisingly given his original audience, with a challenge to academics and scholars that applies just as well to each of us:
My call here is not for theorizing that emphasizes the theme of justice; it is for theorizing that places itself in the service of the cause of struggling for justice... The goal is not to describe the world but to change it.
Wolterstorff concludes with the book's single most poignant sentence:
By listening to the cries of the oppressed and deprived we are enabled genuinely to hear the word of the prophets -- and of him who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but took the form of a servant, walking the path of humble obedience to the point of accepting execution as a despised criminal: the Prince of Shalom.
Justice and peace, you might say, find their embrace in Jesus.
What do you think of Wolterstorff's ideas of justice and shalom? Does his understanding resonate with yours? Where do you part ways?
Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Part 2/3)
Yesterday, in the first part of this series, I summarized Wolterstorff's appropriation of the world-formative Reformed/neo-Calvinist tradition, how it is both similar to and different from the liberation theologies of Latin America, and how Scripture calls us to shalom -- a world-formative vision related to, but beyond, both. Now for some of shalom's ramifications, again in relatively bite-size chunks.
The rich & the poor
During the colonial era, Wolterstorff writes, it was the norm for Westerners to view poverty in other countries as "a natural condition for certain kinds of people." After World War II, however, there was new-found excitement about the possibilities of development (the field of work, incidentally, to which I belong). Wolterstorff writes of that enthusiasm:
All that was needed was technology and capital; both of these could be painlessly supplied by us. A new self-serving explanation! But development has not occurred as we expected. The poor are with us in greater numbers than ever before. And now we can no longer ignore their existence.
So if not colonial feelings of superiority, nor naive enthusiasm about quick-fix solutions that don't cost anyone anything, what does Wolterstorff propose? Well, first, he echoes the liberation theologians in saying that God has a special concern for the poor. To support this claim, he points to a series of passages from the Gospel of Luke (1:46-53; 4:16-21; 6:20-21; 7:18-23), and concludes with conviction but nuance:
If we consider Jesus to be God incarnate, and these teachings from the book of Luke to be God-authorized, as I certainly do, then we cannot but conclude that God has taken sides with the poor... On the other hand, the poor are not romaticized: they are not praised; they are blessed. And, yes, they can turn aside the blessing. Blessing is pronounced on those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Not all the poor do so.
God-given rights
Scripture teaches that every human being is made in the image of God, and that's what forms the basis for Wolterstorff's insistence on affirming the rights of the poor. "I want to say, as emphatically as I can," he writes, "that our concern with poverty is not an issue of generosity but of rights." Therefore, if we don't care about the poor, "we are violating the God-given rights of the poor person." He goes into more detail about the definition of rights, and the duties that correlate to them, but in the interest of both time and space I won't spell that out in detail here.
Nations & nationalism
If one desires to be an instrument of shalom, one must be concerned about the power of nationalism. Nationalism, Wolterstorff says, is basically "a nation's preoccupation with its own nationhood." A sense of woundedness, of having been wronged, is often at the root of a rise in nationalism. And it's not long before that kind of nationalism becomes, as he puts it, cancerous:
When a nation suffers from nationalism unchecked, the life of its members is twisted and distorted, and the nation becomes a menace among nations because it accepts no standards for international peace and justice. It acts solely in its own self-interest, breaking treaties when it sees fit, waging wars when it finds the advantage, thumbing its nose at international conventions and organizations. National self-assertion is the only goal. All that restrains it is a balance of terror... We in our century have seen, and continue to see, that there is nothing more destructive of shalom than such nationalism.
But for Christians, the alternative is clear -- or it should be:
What unites us as bearers of the image of God is more important than what divides us as members of nations.
I'll have a third and final post in this series, probably next week, taking a look at Wolterstorff's thoughts on what shalom looks like in a city; the relationship between justice and liturgy; and his call for scholars and academics to embrace the world-formative vision.
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