To Turn The World
From The Editors
Revolution is at the heart of the biblical story. Scripture tells of the liberating God Yahweh who overturns the power of Egypt to accompany a ragged bunch of disbelieving slaves into a barren desert and work with them to build a new social order rooted in covenant and shalom.
This same God inspires prophets whose visions of justice pour down like a terrible wind through chasms of rock – the relentless hope of Isaiah, springing water in deserts; that lamentation of Jeremiah, weeping for the children of Rachel; the amazing dreams of the praying Daniel; and Ezekiel’s heartrending cry for a faithfulness that reweaves dry bones.
Mary’s song heralding her coming child is a manifesto more encompassing and revolutionary than anything penned by Marx – and more immediate, insisting as it does on present tense. It ushers in a Jesus who talks about the reign of God among us this very moment. His passionate stories and teachings evoke a social order which in mustard-seed fashion erodes the powerful rule of Imperial Caesar.
The institutional church has often worked to mute the revolutionary fervor of that biblical story. Nonetheless, these amazing, seditious images have fired the imaginations of people for centuries, religious and not, and often fed into actual social upheavals that nudged oppressive societies toward justice. Some Christians have felt called to participate directly in the political and sometimes military process of those revolutions.
Yet the track record of human revolutions is sobering – a bloody trail of violence and power games leading to little more than new oppressions. If God’s revolution follows a different script, what does it look like? Can we hide in the cleft of the rock and glimpse the shape of its awesome and transformative power?
Poet Wendell Berry’s famous mad farmer urges us: “So friends, every day, do something / that won’t compute. Love the Lord. / Love the world. Work for nothing. / Take all that you have and be poor.”
This issue of Consp!re focuses on such creativity – small and large actions that work to overturn business as usual and open brilliant windows onto the crazy, grace-filled reign of God. Some of those actions require community; others are individual attempts. You’ll find stories and struggles of living faithfully, and plenty of soul-searching about motives.
Many of you contributed ideas which stressed disciplines of personal lifestyle. This makes sense – these choices are ones over which we tend to have more control. They are also significant because of their raw power to transform: Acts of resistance or relocation cause us to see the world differently and deepen our sense of mercy. Our efforts to live more justly and simply are essential, and, given the global structure of exploitation around us, they are also extremely difficult.
But we should not kid ourselves. No social order gets overturned by our small defections from the middle class, even though it is the most materialistic, consumptive, and entertainment-addicted culture in history. If the clarion call of our revolution is merely “do no harm,” we are in dire trouble. The vision of the prophets and Jesus is deeper and vaster than that. It intends to reshape our earth, our economy, every human heart, and the entire web of human relationships. It means no less than to turn the world.
Yet for our oh-so-human selves, finding our place in God’s holy revolution is fraught with seduction. Our best impulses will confront daunting temptations rooted in our own powerful egos. We navigate a host of spiritual traps: self-righteousness, anger, judgment. The word “revolutionary” itself is cloaked in a kind of ego-stroking grandeur.
Further, as some real-world witnesses in this issue remind us, revolutions are neither grand nor heady. Often they are journeys into loss, pain, and endurance. Our motives must always be recognized as mixed. None of us emerge with entirely clean hands. When we “win,” we often come to mirror the power-holders we fought so valiantly to dislodge. The victors almost inevitably adopt the methods and gods of the vanquished.
Yet whatever the cost, it is critical that we stand somewhere. To do so is our joy. In a battered, violent, and cynical world, this path of love, both individual and collective, is the stream of water which bears life.
For ultimately, this revolution, this turning of the world, does not lie in our hands, though our hands are essential to the revolution and we cannot fully follow the way of Jesus without participating in it. The prophets tell of a relentlessly loving God working to redeem all of creation, a God who will not give up. This God invites us to join that struggle, that deep joy.
We each must discover the shape of our own answer. We shall not get there, though, without leaving our comfort; without scaling the chasms and facing into the winds of the Spirit, bearing down in all their yearning and all their grace. This issue is a gift of honesty we offer one another, as we step from our hearths to set our countenance toward the mountains, lifting our eyes to those hills from which comes our strength.
