Mr. Shane Claiborne–Living Like Jesus Meant What He Said

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Overview

Mr. Shane Claiborne, best-selling author, speaker and activist, joined the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast today. Shane worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and founded The Simple Way in Philadelphia.  He heads up Red Letter Christians, a movement of folks who are committed to living “as if Jesus meant the things he said.” Shane is a champion for grace which has led him to jail advocating for the homeless, and to places like Iraq and Afghanistan to stand against war. Now grace fuels his passion to end the death penalty and help stop gun violence.

Shane has written many books, which we’ll link to in the show notes, but his most recent book is Beating Guns. In today’s conversation, we talk about what it means to live as if Jesus meant the things he said. Shane also shares his perspective on politics and gives some ways he believes Christians can engage in the political arena and offers advice for how we can maintain friendships when we encounter people who think differently than we do. We also talk about ways to love our neighbor and his work with The Simple Way.

Let’s listen!

*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.

Mr. Shane Claiborne, Author. Speaker. Activist.

Shane Claiborne is a prominent speaker, activist, and best-selling author.  Shane worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and founded The Simple Way in Philadelphia.  He heads up Red Letter Christians, a movement of folks who are committed to living “as if Jesus meant the things he said.” Shane is a champion for grace which has led him to jail advocating for the homeless, and to places like Iraq and Afghanistan to stand against war. Now grace fuels his passion to end the death penalty and help stop gun violence.

Shane’s books include Jesus for President, Red Letter Revolution, Common Prayer, Follow Me to Freedom, Jesus, Bombs and Ice Cream, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, Executing Grace, his classic The Irresistible Revolution, and his newest book, Beating Guns. He has been featured in a number of films including “Another World Is Possible” and “Ordinary Radicals.” His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Shane speaks over one hundred times a year, nationally and internationally. His work has appeared in Esquire, SPIN, Christianity Today, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal, and he has been on everything from Fox News and Al Jazeera to CNN and NPR. He’s given academic lectures at Harvard, Princeton, Liberty, Duke, and Notre Dame. 

Shane speaks regularly at denominational gatherings, festivals, and conferences around the globe.

Heidi Wilcox, host of the Thrive Podcast

Writer, podcaster, and social media manager, Heidi Wilcox shares stories of truth, justice, healing and hope. She is best known as the host of Spotlight, (especially her blooper reel) highlighting news, events, culturally relevant topics and stories of the ways alumni, current students and faculty are attempting something big for God. If you can’t find her, she’s probably cheering on her Kentucky Wildcats, enjoying a cup of coffee, reading or spending time with her husband, Wes.

Transcript

Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast, where we bring you conversations with authors, thought leaders, and people just like you who are looking to connect where your passion meets the world’s deep need.

Heidi Wilcox:
Today, I talk to Mr. Shane Claiborne, speaker, activist, and bestselling author. Shane worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and founded The Simple Way in Philadelphia. He heads up Red Letter Christians, a movement of folks who are committed to living as if Jesus meant the things He said. Shane is a champion for grace, which has led him to jail advocating for the homeless and to places like Iraq and Afghanistan to stand against war. Now grace fuels his passion to end the death penalty and help stop gun violence. Shane has written many books, which we’ll link to in the show notes. His most recent book is Beating Guns.

Heidi Wilcox:
In today’s conversation, Shane and I talk about what it means to live as if Jesus meant the things He said. Shane also shares his perspective on politics and gives some ways he believes Christians can engage in the political arena and offers advice for how we can maintain friendships when we encounter people who think differently than we do. We also talk about ways to love our neighbor and his work with The Simple Way. Let’s listen.

Heidi Wilcox:
As I was preparing for our interview today, I was thinking about, I believe you spoke at Asbury University, I don’t even remember when, but I was a student there. One of my friends remembers it even more vividly than I do, because she said you walked out on stage, did a backflip, and then preached your sermon, and that changed her life. She’s since gone on to work in India, do some mission trips in Africa. But I was just curious, is a back flip normally part of your entrance?

Shane Claiborne:
I can’t recall if that is true or not. I can neither confirm nor deny that that happened. I thought you were going to say she went on to become a gymnast or something.

Heidi Wilcox:
No.

Shane Claiborne:
I will say this, Heidi. I was the Tennessee state champion in gymnastics a very, very long time ago. At, what am I, 45 years old, I can still do a backflip, but you better not ask me to do it in chapel tomorrow, okay?

Heidi Wilcox:
That’s awesome. That is so cool.

Shane Claiborne:
After 40, I have to stretch for like an hour before I’m ready to pull that off these days.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, I get that. I didn’t do gymnastics when I was younger, but I always wanted to. I started doing gymnastics as an adult, so early 30s, and let me tell you, I don’t know what it’s like in your younger years, but I was just like, “I hurt all over,” so I finally gave it up.

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. You’ve got to get the young people’s attention somehow, so a backflip and then preach the Word, that’s kind of how I roll. I’m also a fire-breather, Heidi, so I can bust that out sometimes, too, the fire-eating and-

Heidi Wilcox:
Are you really?

Shane Claiborne:
… fire-breathing. Yeah. I went to circus school. I am a little rusty on some of my circus skills, my juggling and unicycling, but my fire-breathing is in pretty good shape. I’ve done that. I’ve kept that intact. It comes in handy a lot of places.

Heidi Wilcox:
I would imagine. That gets people’s attention for sure.

Shane Claiborne:
The world needs a little more circus, especially right now, I think.

Heidi Wilcox:
Well, you could also argue that we’re in a circus, but we need a fun circus.

Shane Claiborne:
One could argue. We’ve got our own clowns going on right now, yep.

Heidi Wilcox:
We do, on both sides. But after you do your backflip or breathe fire, you’re known for talking about what it means to live as if Jesus meant what He said, so what does that mean to you?

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah, so for me, I shared a little bit this morning in the chapel in the seminary, but I grew up in Tennessee, fell in love with Jesus, and then it became very clear to me that the church is better at making believers than forming disciples. By that, I mean sometimes we worship Jesus, but we don’t always do the things He said, because Jesus said sell what you have and give it to the poor. He said live like the lilies and the sparrows. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t stockpile. I don’t know what that means for our 401(k) plan, but I have a hunch. This idea that we’re to hold our possessions with open hands, we’re to love our enemies, the call to nonviolence, to enemy love, these things really began to challenge me.

Shane Claiborne:
I also saw the contradictions in the church. It wasn’t that long ago that the Barna Research Group went to every state in the U.S. and they asked young non-Christians, what do you think of when you hear the word Christian? What they found is just heartbreaking. The number one answer of what young non-Christians said was anti-gay, anti-homosexual. Number two was judgmental, and number three was hypocritical. I’ll stop there because the list is not very good.

Shane Claiborne:
What it showed me, too, is that we have often not been known for the very thing that Jesus said they will know that we are Christians by, which is love. I think there’s a lot of us that see that one of the biggest obstacles to Christ is Christians, who have a whole lot to say with our mouths, but we don’t always show God’s love very well in our communal lives and in our own lives. I’ve been working at the… I’m not here to judge everybody else. I’m working at the log in my own eye, as Jesus said. But I wanted to live with less and less contradictions. I wanted to try to follow Jesus and not just believe in Him, and really see this our faith as not just a way of believing, but a way of living in the world.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Once you started coming to this realization, how did that go on and change your life?

Shane Claiborne:
Well, so as I leaned into Jesus, I felt like I wanted to find some people who could point me in the right direction. There were a lot of great saints all through history. I loved Saint Francis and Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero and Dr. King. There’s all these great folks, but they’ve all passed on to the other side. Yet Mother Teresa was still alive when I was in college, and so a group of my college friends and I wrote her a letter and we ended up going over to work with her in India. She’s one of those people that put flesh on things for me. When you say, “Who’s someone that has lived out the Gospel?” She is one of those that gave it a pretty good go.

Shane Claiborne:
So I worked with her. I went over a couple times to India. I’ve come to really believe that the Gospel spreads not by force, but by fascination, that we’re to love people in ways that fascinate people with the goodness of God. She’s certainly one of the people that did that. After being in India, ironically… One of the things that Mother Teresa would say is, “Calcuttas are everywhere, if we’ll only have eyes to see, so find your Calcutta. You don’t have to go across the world to follow Jesus.” So we came back to Philadelphia, and that’s when we started our community. We’ve been at it for 25 years now.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow. I didn’t realize it was that long.

Shane Claiborne:
That I’m that old. Is that what you’re saying, Heidi?

Heidi Wilcox:
No. I just meant I didn’t realize it had been going on for that many years. Tell us about The Simple Way and how that got started.

Shane Claiborne:
Well, when I was in college, right in the middle of our undergraduate work, there was a group of homeless mothers and children, homeless families that didn’t have anywhere to go. They found an old, abandoned Catholic cathedral on the north side of Philadelphia, and they moved into this abandoned church. We heard about it in the news, and actually the headline article said, “Church Resurrected.” It talked about how this old Catholic building had been abandoned for years, and these families had brought it back to life. They were actually holding worship services. They were living in there. They were trying to figure out what was next for them.

Shane Claiborne:
Sadly, the Catholic archdiocese that owned the building said that they were trespassing and that they would be arrested if they didn’t get out of there. So the families hung a banner on the front of it that said, “How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” That really sparked the student movement of solidarity. I don’t know how big Asbury is, but our college at Eastern University was just, at the time, about 1,000 students on campus. Almost 100 of us ended up getting involved with these families, some of us almost moving into the cathedral in solidarity with the families, risking arrest, really trying to encourage the Catholic church to make a different decision, and that ended up happening. They stayed there for months and months, and many of them got housing.

Shane Claiborne:
Out of that little student movement, we started The Simple Way. We read about the early church in the Book of Acts, and we were inspired to try to hold our possessions in common, to live simply. That’s where our name came from, this idea that we’re to live simply so that others can simply live. We committed ourselves to try to live and also to see our faith not just as something that is a worship service on Sunday morning, but something we’re to live out all the other days of the week. We often say that the Gospel is lived out of dinner tables and living rooms. It’s lived in the streets. It’s lived outside of our church buildings as much as inside.

Shane Claiborne:
Over the last 25 years, we’ve been forming this little village, and so now we have a cluster of houses, about a dozen different properties, community gardens, murals, all kinds of stuff going on in the neighborhood. Even in the pandemic, we’ve been trying to love our neighbors.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the pandemic. I feel like it’s ever present these days. How has that affected your work with The Simple Way?

Shane Claiborne:
Well, like everywhere, it’s been an interesting season. Our prayer is that we would be both courageous and cautious, that we would be careful, but also that we wouldn’t let fear stop us from loving our neighbors, especially those who are really vulnerable. We’ve got tons of friends who live on the street, so the stay-at-home orders are not really possible if you don’t have a home. There’s a lot of folks that home is not a safe place if they’re in domestic violence. We’re trying to be really attentive to those that are especially vulnerable.

Shane Claiborne:
I think the pandemic has also surfaced some of the already existing inequalities, the way that it’s disproportionately affecting folks that are African-American, people of color, folks that are in poverty that don’t have healthcare. It’s been said that when America catches a cold, African-Americans catch pneumonia. I think that’s kind of what we see in many of our vulnerable communities. I’ve got a lot of friends that are in prison, so I’m thinking of them, trying to write them letters, because many of them can’t have any visitors right now. The pandemic is bad enough, but if you imagine living in a little six-foot, eight-foot jail cell and can’t see your kids or family for months and months and months, it’s its own kind of horror as well.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I feel like it’s been hard on everybody, but it’s been especially hard on those who are already on the margins and overlooked on a regular basis anyway.

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. One of the cool things, though, is it’s brought a lot of us together. My neighbors are the heroes in this. They’re the ones that… I’ve been away from Philly visiting some family down here for a bit. But at times during the pandemic, we’ve been feeding, with a coalition of folks in Philly, 500 or 600 people a day. It’s brought a lot of people together delivering food bags to seniors. We’ve got Clif Bars, those granola bar things. They gave us 10,000 Clif Bars.

Heidi Wilcox:
No way.

Shane Claiborne:
Those come in handy when kids don’t have school lunches. We’ve just been doing what we can, and I’m really pumped to see… As someone said, “In the darkest nights, you see the brightest stars.” We see a lot of really courageous, beautiful acts of compassion and love, even in the midst of the darkness of this pandemic.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. You said many things in your chapel service that we’ll link to in the show notes, but one of the things that stood out to me goes along with what we’re talking about, loving our neighbor. You quoted Mother Teresa when you said, “The circle we put around our family is just too small.” As we think about that, what does it mean to love our neighbors just right where we are in our own Calcuttas?

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. When Jesus says we’re to love beyond our family, He actually says even the people of the world love their own friends and family; we’re to love bigger than that. He’s challenging us to extend the circle of who’s family. When His own family comes, He says, “Who are my mother and my brothers, but those who are doing the will of God?” He’s really extending how we think of family.

Shane Claiborne:
I think that’s one of the challenges when we think of patriotism or nationalism. It’s just confining our love to the people of our own country. So much of the language of America First, it’s just too shortsighted. I think God is calling us to love big, beyond biological family. That’s part of what it means to be born again, God’s love calling us to love beyond nationality. Love for our own people is a good thing, but God’s love doesn’t stop at borders. God is bigger than that.

Shane Claiborne:
Mother Teresa was an example of that. When I was in India, I met young people who were raised by her. One of them was like 25 years old, 30 years old, and he said, “You know why we call her Mother, right?” I said, “Well, tell me.” He said, “She’s our mom.” He said, “She raised me.” He started showing me things that she had given him growing up, just like a mom would.

Shane Claiborne:
Many of the folks in the orphanage she found abandoned in train stations as children, folks that she brought off the street, and she took in as her own big family. She ended up sort of like the woman in the shoe that had so many kids she didn’t know what to do. That’s why people called her Mother.

Shane Claiborne:
It does, I think, invite us to think beyond those small circles we put around our family, so taking in foster kids, taking someone off the streets. I have a friend that’s a social worker that was taking care of this older woman with Alzheimer’s. They were going to move her into an old folks’ home, and they found a little note that she had written that said, “Dear God, please don’t let me die alone in an old folks’ home.” They were like, “Whoa,” and so they ended up taking her in. It wasn’t easy. Her mind continued to deteriorate, but they loved her well. Even until she died, they were sitting around her bed, and so she didn’t die alone. She died with all of them around her.

Shane Claiborne:
I think some of us, we just need to be invited into thinking about how our lives can be hospitable, how we can extend that love that we’ve got for our own kids and our own mom and dad, extend that to folks that we’re not related to, folks that may even look different from us because of the color of our skin or something.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. As we think about culture and Christianity, and sometimes the culture gets so wrapped up within Christianity that it’s hard to tell the difference, or it can be hard to tell the difference. One of the things that you have said is we need to learn to give Christianity the sniff test. I really like that phrase. How can we learn to do that? What does that look like?

Shane Claiborne:
Well, the word Christian means Christlike. That’s really important that we remember that because there’s a lot of things that claim to be Christian, but they don’t pass that sniff test. They don’t smell like Jesus. They don’t feel like love. We know what love is like. Scripture tells us what love is like. We know the fruits of the Spirit, kindness, goodness, gentleness, that’s what God is like. That’s why when we hear versions of Christianity that don’t feel like and sound like and smell like love, let’s not call them Christian.

Shane Claiborne:
It was Gandhi that said… They asked him about Christianity, and he said, “I love Jesus. I just wish the Christians acted more like Him.” Too often, we Christians look very unlike our Christ. That’s really, at the end of the day, who we’re called to follow and to emulate.

Shane Claiborne:
It’s where our name Red Letter Christians came from. There was this guy that was… Catch this. It was in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a radio DJ interviewing a friend of mine, and he said, “I’ve read a lot of the Bible.” The DJ didn’t really seem to have too much to do with Christianity. He said “I’ve read the Bible, there’s parts of it that I love, there’s parts of it that I find really confusing, frankly, but I’ve always liked the stuff in red.” He said, “You guys seem to like the stuff in red. You should call yourselves Red Letter Christians.” He was talking about the old Bibles that have the words of Jesus highlighted in red.

Shane Claiborne:
It occurs to me that that’s what we want, is a Christianity that looks like Jesus again, that loves like Jesus again, and so that name stuck for us. I think that for a lot of people, they love Jesus; they just aren’t crazy about Christians or they’ve not had good experiences with the church. I think the best corrective to what’s wrong is the practice of something better. As Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world. We also need to take up the invitation to be the change that we want to see in the church.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I like that. I think part of my question is, how do we know what is true? Because it seems like today there is so many versions of the truth. I find your answer really helpful to figure out what is true when, like I said, there are so many versions of it, it seems. They’re not all true versions, but you know what I mean.

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” This is what I think is beautiful about Jesus, is that we don’t just have words on paper; we have the Word become flesh. Here is God with skin on. This is love in the flesh. That’s who we’re really called to follow.

Shane Claiborne:
Jesus really becomes the lens through which we’re reading and interpreting Scripture, and Jesus becomes the lens through which we’re understanding how to live in the world. Even when Scriptures are pitted against each other, Jesus becomes the referee. In the end, Jesus is who God is. That’s the meaning of this idea of incarnation, God concarnate, God with meat, with skin on. That’s what we have in Jesus.

Shane Claiborne:
It becomes really difficult, for instance, to justify any form of violence with the Prince of Peace. I think sometimes what we do is we end up interpreting Jesus in light of the Hebrews Scriptures or something Paul wrote rather than interpreting Paul and the Hebrews Scriptures through the lens of Jesus. This really Christ-centered Christianity is so important.

Shane Claiborne:
That’s why I think so many of the big political issues like the death penalty have come from bad theology, Christians that have twisted different Scriptures to justify something that seems unbelievably contradictory of everything Jesus lived and died for. Actually, Americans were polled, I think it was by Pew. They asked them, “Would Jesus be for the death penalty?” And 95% of Americans said, ‘”No, Jesus wouldn’t be for the death penalty. We just have to convince the Christians of that.”

Shane Claiborne:
The fact is that the death penalty has survived in America because of Christians. 85% of executions are in the Bible Belt. That’s very troubling. That’s why I got involved in the death penalty. It’s bigger than just one issue, but the theology, the holes in it that are there.

Shane Claiborne:
One of the most well-known Bible verses in the world is “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” It was this ancient way of understanding justice. One way of thinking about it was that you could do reciprocal harm. You could harm someone as much as they had hurt you. But it was really intended not to be a license for revenge, but to put a limit on how much you could hurt someone who had hurt you. We might think of it as an eye for an eye, no more. If someone poked your eye out, you could poke their eye out, but not both of their eyes. If someone broke your arm, you could break their arm, but you couldn’t break both their arms and burn down their mom’s house or whatever. It put a limit on that.

Shane Claiborne:
In light of that, it makes total sense that Jesus, as He was not coming to contradict the law but to fulfill it, and so now He says, “You’ve heard it say, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ but I tell you this.” Jesus is going to fulfill that by saying, “You may have a right to hurt someone back, but that doesn’t mean you should.” We don’t have to mirror the harm that was done to us. Then He’s going to invite us to think deeper, to love even those who have hurt us, to transcend their violence without emulating it. You just step back a little bit and you go, “Makes total sense.”

Shane Claiborne:
Heidi, bless your heart, if you broke my arm, I wouldn’t actually break your arm. If you poked my eye out, we wouldn’t… We don’t rape people who rape to show that rape is wrong. We know deep down that we don’t name evil by mirroring the evil, except still in the death penalty we hold out this idea that we’re going to kill people to show that killing is wrong.

Shane Claiborne:
I think that we just need to do some better theology. The answer to this bad, twisted theology is not no theology. It’s not to throw the Bible out, but actually to do better theology, I think, and really to do a Christ-centered theology as we’re thinking about God. If we want to see God, we look at Jesus. That’s exactly why God came in the form of Jesus, so we could know God more deeply.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I really appreciate your answer. It’s given me a lot to think about. Yeah, I just appreciate that a lot, so thank you.

Heidi Wilcox:
You mentioned while you were talking your work with Red Letter Christians, and I want to go there for just a minute because I think it’s important that people know about that as well. If you could, tell us a little bit about what Red Letter Christians is and is up to right now.

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. We’re all about this movement of spreading a Christianity that looks like Jesus again. It’s very clear to me that some of the-

Heidi Wilcox:
Which I love.

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. Some of the loudest voices, the most public voices haven’t always been the most beautiful voices. They haven’t always been the ones that are the most faithful. One of the ways that we change the narrative is by changing the narrators. We want to amplify all kinds of voices of folks that love Jesus and care about things like racism and the environment and poverty and the death penalty, these kinds of things. We sometimes say that we’re a web of subversive friends.

Heidi Wilcox:
I love that.

Shane Claiborne:
It’s a really diverse group, because I think what we’ve seen is that there’s a version of white Evangelicalism that has colonized the narrative of what Christians care about and limit that sometimes to one or two issues. We really want to have a better Christ-centered movement that holds Jesus and justice together like sides of scissors, that they go together.

Shane Claiborne:
We also sometimes say that we’re all about harmonizing but not homogenizing. We’re as wise as we are diverse. There’s a whole bunch of speakers and leaders. There’s a whole musicians initiative that we’ve started now, Praise and Protest, folks that are worshiping God and are in the streets trying to make change happen. We’ve got revivals that we’ve had around the country. Some of them are virtual during the pandemic.

Shane Claiborne:
Folks can check it out at redletterchristians.org. There’s a way to sign up. We have daily devotionals. We’ve got all kinds of things that are happening. It’s become a home for a lot of people.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, we’ll be sure to link that in the show notes as well. I want to jump forward. We’re recording your podcast on October 22nd, and it releases on October 27th, so we are right in the midst of election season. It’s not just Election Day this year; it is a whole season of absentee voting, early voting, Election Day voting. There’s a lot of feelings, a lot of thoughts, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of fear, a lot of things that I haven’t even mentioned. As we think about voting as Christians, or as we think about this season, how can we put our Christianity into action during this time? What is the role of a Christian?

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah, so I think that-

Heidi Wilcox:
It’s a tough question, huh?

Shane Claiborne:
It’s such an important question, because I think that a lot of people immediately go, “Well, Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics.” I think that loving our neighbor requires caring about policies that affect their lives. There is the heart work, but there’s also this social transformation that we want to see.

Shane Claiborne:
Think about the civil rights movement. No law could change a racist heart. We needed God to change hearts. Dr. King said, “No law can make you love me, but it can make it harder for you to kill me.” We needed laws to change so that Black folks could vote, so people could go to the same schools and swim in the same swimming pools, and be treated equally and fairly.

Shane Claiborne:
I think in our country some of these issues are not just political issues; they are also spiritual issues, for instance, welcoming the immigrant. This should not be a partisan issue. This is a Jesus issue. Jesus said, “When you welcome the stranger, you welcome me.” Scripture says that when we take in the foreigner, we might be entertaining angels unaware. This is very holy work. In fact, Jesus is going to say that whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto Him. That matters in this election.

Shane Claiborne:
There are a whole host of issues I think we need to think about as faith issues. I grew up talking about being pro-life, but I only thought of that in terms of abortion. I think that abortion does matter. It’s one of those issues we should care about. I’m leading a town hall conversation with my friend Lisa Sharon Harper this weekend on abortion. But I began to see that the irony is that in America, you can say that you’re pro-life and still be pro-death penalty, pro-guns, pro-military, anti-environment. You can be against life in a lot of other forms, but still be against abortion.

Shane Claiborne:
I think we need a more robust ethic of life that says every human being is made in the image of God, and it matters to God when lives are cut short. 100 lives are lost to gun violence every single day in our country. When we think of the death penalty, when we think of having bombs that are 50 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, should we even have that? Again, this is not just a partisan thing. Both candidates are wanting to raise the military budget. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers. They are the children of God,” that matters. It should affect how we think about these things.

Shane Claiborne:
I’m not partisan, but I find that… I wrote a book called Jesus for President because I think when we put all of our chips in with Jesus, what that means is that we have a different political imagination. It doesn’t mean that I’m not engaged, but it just means that Jesus is my framework for thinking about immigration, for thinking about war, for thinking about everything.

Shane Claiborne:
I do think that we’re at a particular crossroads in our country. It’s been said that Donald Trump did not change America; he revealed America. I think the same is true of much of our Christianity. Donald Trump didn’t change evangelicalism, but he’s revealed it. I’m very concerned because we know who Donald Trump is. The last few years have shown us that. He himself has said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose support. I’m concerned about his rhetoric and his policies. It’s my love for Jesus that causes me to be so deeply concerned about that.

Shane Claiborne:
A tree is known by its fruit, Jesus said. “From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” And I’m very concerned about Donald Trump. I think he needs Jesus. My friend Sarah Bessey’s kids said, “We’ve got to remember, God loves Donald Trump too, but that doesn’t mean God wants him to be president.” Yeah, we could say God loves Donald Trump, Donald Trump needs Jesus, but we also need to rethink the priorities of what’s happening in our country.

Shane Claiborne:
When I think of voting this year, I think this election is not about who Donald Trump is; it’s about who we are and who we want to be as a country. I think of the issue of immigration and so many of these other things. As I said in chapel this morning, I want to vote for the people that Jesus blessed. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the merciful.” As you look at that list, that is a list of people that are currently being crushed by so many of our policies.

Shane Claiborne:
I’m really concerned about our country, and I think there’s a lot at stake. I think this is a referendum, and I also think that there’s a racial divide in all of this. As we see, 80% of white Evangelicals have been supportive of Trump, but as you look outside of that, non-white Evangelicals and Christians, 80% are not supporting Trump. We’ve got this massive racial divide, and that becomes really important. All that to say, we’ve got to stay centered on Jesus, because when we take our eyes off Jesus, we end up focusing on things Jesus didn’t talk a whole lot about, and we don’t focus on things that Jesus talked a whole lot about.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, because I feel like sometimes we can wrap our hope in the Democratic Party or in the Republican Party or in whatever party we find ourselves most aligning with, and lose the hope that can be found in Jesus. How can we make sure that our hope is steadfast in Jesus, even as we engage in the culture around us?

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. One of the radical things about the early Christians is that every time they were saying Jesus is Lord, they were saying Caesar is not. It was about where they put their hope. We sang that beautiful song this morning in chapel, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.” Our hope is not in the donkey of the Democrats or the elephant of the GOP, but it’s in the Lamb of God. It’s in Jesus. That becomes so important.

Shane Claiborne:
As we think about what it means to follow Jesus right now, it changes the way that we think about an election. When I think about voting, I’m not looking for a savior. I’ve found my savior. I’m looking to do damage control. As the Scripture says, this is a battle of principalities and powers, and there are principalities and powers, like racism, that are hurting so many people right now. We’ve got a chance to do some damage control and harm reduction. Some would say that’s cynical, but I think that’s a little bit more faithful posture when it comes to politics for us.

Shane Claiborne:
I do think we’ve got a chance on Election Day to vote with those who are suffering. We can vote for love over hatred. We can vote for faith over fear. We can think of the immigrant families at the border, and we can think of those who don’t have healthcare. We can think of Breonna Taylor and the victims of violence as we vote, and say, I really believe these are the people that Jesus says ‘blessed are’ in the Beatitudes, and that’s who I want to be aligned with.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. During this time, it can be easy… I think it happens a lot on social media. I try to stay out of that area. But we struggle to maintain relationships, especially during this time when we differ. Do you have any thoughts, when we do differ politically or something like that, how we can still maintain a conversation and maintain even family relationships right now?

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah. Somebody was telling me this morning they were reading a book. I think the title was I Don’t Agree With You, But I’m Still Listening. I was thinking, “What a wonderful thing.”

Shane Claiborne:
I think for starters, I learn as much from people I disagree with as people who say, “Amen,” to everything I say. I think that’s iron sharpening iron. We also see through a glass dimly, so we need to listen well right now.

Shane Claiborne:
I think self-righteousness is toxic, and it’s also nonpartisan. Self-righteousness has a lot of different forms that it takes. There’s a conservative version of that and there’s a liberal version of that.

Shane Claiborne:
I love the story Jesus tells where the one guy goes to pray and very pompously stands up and says, “Thank you that I’m not like these people,” and the Pharisee says, “Thank you that I’m so faithful.” Then there’s another guy, a tax collector, that just beats his chest and says, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Shane Claiborne:
That’s the posture that we’re invited to take, this idea that we want to work on our own contradictions and struggles, we want to see our own blind spots. What often happens is we take the best of ourselves and we compare it with the worst of others, and you end up with this really toxic environment.

Shane Claiborne:
Having said that, I do think that these are really important things, and it’s okay to be passionate. There’s a lot of lives at stake. We’ve got 500 kids that have been separated from their families, and they can’t find the parents. I believe that when we do that unto them, we do it to Jesus, so I’m very concerned about these things. At the same time, I think we can be passionate and still be kind. I think we can be folks that are trying to hear other people’s perspective.

Shane Claiborne:
Dr. King, he talked about the difference between God’s peace and the devil’s peace. There’s a version of peace that is just the absence of conflict, and that’s what he named as the counterfeit peace, the devil’s peace, but that true peace is the presence of justice. It’s not just the absence of conflict, but it’s really making sure that justice happens. I do think that we need some good trouble and some holy mischief, that we need to disrupt the status quo right now, because there is so much at stake.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. This is going back to what we talked about earlier, but we keep circling around the issues of race and caring for people who don’t look like us, may have different color skin. How can we do that?

Shane Claiborne:
Well, so one of the things that we’ve got to recognize, I think, is there’s a whole history of this, 400 years of history of racism, of what we’ve done to Black and brown and indigenous folks as white folks. Our country is built on stolen land with stolen labor. There’s no way that we could’ve done that without forcefully doing it.

Shane Claiborne:
Now you think about the battle over the Confederate monuments. When you look at history in other countries, like Germany, you don’t see monuments to the Nazis. You see monuments to the lives that were crushed by them. After 9/11, we didn’t set up monuments to the folks that blew up the Towers. We set up memorials to the lives that were lost. Yet when it comes to our racial history, we’ve often memorialized the victimizers rather than the victims, the folks that were on the wrong side of history. In my home state of Tennessee, we still have a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the KKK. It’s still in the Capitol. This is bigger than statues, but they are important because they remind us that we can’t get our future right until we get our history right.

Shane Claiborne:
We’ve got to do some hard work on that, and that still has residue, that 400 years of history where we’ve sold people on corners as property, where we’ve, in the Dred Scott case and so many others like it, we’ve said Black folks don’t have any rights that white folks have to acknowledge. Now we have brothers and sisters that are crying out in the street, “I can’t breathe,” and they’re saying, “Say with us that our lives matter.” I think that we can’t really say all lives matter until we can emphatically say Black lives matter because it helps to heal some of those wounds of history.

Shane Claiborne:
For white folks, I think we’ve got to really listen to the cry of our brothers and sisters right now. It’s not that racism got worse; it got recorded, and it went viral on social media. We have tools today that we didn’t use to have. When you watch George Floyd have the life crushed out of him for eight minutes and 46 seconds, people’s hearts are broken, and they should be. I would be worried if we weren’t out in the streets outraged about that. But you also go, what are all of the other stories of the George Floyds that didn’t get recorded? I think that’s what we’re being faced with, is that in many ways Black folks and white folks are experiencing a very different America.

Shane Claiborne:
When people say things like Make America Great Again, if we can have the humility to step back as white folks and go, “How do I hear that as a person of color?” Let’s imagine an African-American going, “What era of American history would I like to revisit?” Is it the 1920s? Is it the 1950s? Is it the 1800s? When many people are saying Make America Great Again, let there be no mistake, they mean Make America White Again.

Shane Claiborne:
This comes on the back of the changing demographics of America, the first Black president, the Black Lives Matter movement. There is a sort of white fear and fragility and anxiety. We see it expressed in many different ways, in folks carrying guns on the capital and different language and rhetoric that’s used even at the highest places of power in our country, the inability to call out white supremacy.

Shane Claiborne:
I think those things, this is massive. This is a really, really important time to be alive. One of my older mentors said, “If you’re wondering what you would’ve been doing in the 1960s with Dr. King, just look at what you’re doing now.” What you’re doing now is what you would’ve been doing then. Dr. King wrote an entire sermon, Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution. I think this time we’ve got to make sure that we’re awake.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. If people listening want to take the first step toward starting to live as if Jesus meant what He said, what would you tell them to do?

Shane Claiborne:
Wow. I’m a big fan of just going back to the Sermon on the Mount and reading Matthew 5-7, and genuinely trying to… Jesus said, “Do we have ears to hear and eyes to see?” Just reading it fresh, looking at the Gospels and seeing how radical they are, and what does it look like to love our enemies, to live like the lilies and the sparrows? What does it mean that Jesus Himself said, “I didn’t come for the healthy, but for the sick? I didn’t come for the righteous, but for the sinners”? Where are our lives? That’s I think what we’re being asked is, what does it mean to follow Jesus?

Shane Claiborne:
For me, the entire gravity of the Gospel pulls us towards the suffering of the world, and it’s very countercultural because everything in the world is pulling us away from the pain, away from the suffering. But the entire story of Jesus is about a God who is moving near to the pain, a God who was born a brown-skinned Palestinian Jewish refugee, who came from a town that people said nothing good could come, who went so far as to suffer the most tortuous humiliation, naked, exposed, humiliated, and hung on a cross, to show us what love looks like and to heal the wounds of sin and violence in the world. I think that we’ve got to really center Jesus again and say, “What does it mean to follow the executed and risen Savior, the one who lived His whole life on the margins?”

Heidi Wilcox:
How can we organize… I’m thinking of myself as I ask this question. My husband and I just bought a house this spring, and we have two cars so that we can go two different places at the same time, because we need to do that sometimes. I guess I’m thinking other people listening, we probably fit into pretty much similar categories for some people. How do we organize our households in the Christian economy to start living as Jesus lived?

Shane Claiborne:
Wow. One of the things I love when I look at the early church is that when the Holy Spirit fell on them at Pentecost, we often focus on the speaking in tongues and the fire of the Spirit, but what also happened is they started sharing everything. It says that none of them claimed any of their possessions were their own. It even says that they took the offerings and put the offerings at the apostles’ feet, and they were distributed to folks who had need. That radical sharing was a part of what the Spirit did.

Shane Claiborne:
Yet we’ve created this idolatry out of individualism and independence. The Gospel is all about interdependence. It’s about community. It’s about living together. Jesus models that with us. He sends the disciples out in pairs. He says, “Where two or three of you are gathered, I’m with you.” I think we’ve got to figure out ways that we can share again.

Shane Claiborne:
I was in a suburban community where they said not everybody needs a washer and dryer, not everybody needs a lawn mower, so they had created this co-op. They had a couple washers and dryers that they all shared as a neighborhood. They had a tool share with a weed eater and lawn mower that they all shared. Then before long, they were running summer camps and things like that. This is all before the pandemic. There’s just longing for community that’s in us.

Shane Claiborne:
Right now, the average American consumes the same amount as 500 people in parts of Africa. This idea that we want to love our global neighbor as ourselves, I think it really demands that we find a new, simpler way of living because the world can’t sustain the American dream as we have it now. The Jesus dream is different. It’s that every person would have this day our daily bread. So how can we live a different lifestyle that assures that everybody has the things they need?

Shane Claiborne:
I think there’s a lot of different ways it can look. But in community in Philly, we’ve got cars that we’ve shared with each other. We’ve got some of our own property, but we’ve also got buildings that we share together and community gardens that we share and tools that we share. We’ve got to start thinking outside of the me and thinking more about the we, and how can I live into this bigger sense of community?

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, that’s awesome. We have one question that we ask everybody who’s on the show, but before we do that, is there anything else you want to talk about that we haven’t already?

Shane Claiborne:
That’s so nice. I was just thinking about all the folks that get in debt while they’re in school. You end up going, “Oh, I’ve got to go get a job so I can pay off that debt.” I think one of the things that I might invite people to think about is, rather than asking the question, “How do I earn more?” we can ask the question, “How can I live off of less? How can I cut my living expenses down?” By living in co-housing or sharing stuff, we can really find more sustainable ways to live.

Shane Claiborne:
The other thing I want to say is that I believe in life and joy, and I’m having fun at what I’m doing. I don’t believe that guilt or shame are very constructive things. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life to the fullest,” not guilt to the fullest. I think that Jesus is inviting us into a richer, more beautiful way of living. It’s good news to the poor, but it’s also good news to folks who aren’t. Sometimes our possessions begin to possess us. We hide behind our stuff, and we end up robbing ourselves of the very thing we’re made for, which is to love and be loved.

Shane Claiborne:
The last thing I would say is that I think when we really connect… Frederick Niedner said, “We’ve got to connect our passions to the world’s pain.” When we connect our gifts and our skills to the suffering of the world, then that’s where the magic happens. That’s where we discover our vocation. The things that we’re made for, the things that we’re wired to do well, they are used for a purpose bigger than just paying the bills. They serve this idea that we’re seeking first the kingdom of God.

Shane Claiborne:
I think we should all think of our lives missionally. It doesn’t matter whether we’re a schoolteacher or a doctor or lawyer. The question is, what kind of schoolteacher or doctor or lawyer are we going to be? How can we use our gifts to alleviate the suffering, to contribute to the redemptive story of what God is doing in the world?

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I love that. I always love hearing more about how we can think about our calling in the world, more than just “What am I going to do?” but “How am I going to do it?” I love that.

Shane Claiborne:
Yeah, that’s it.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. The last question that we ask everybody, because the show is called the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast, what is one practice that is helping you thrive in your life right now?

Shane Claiborne:
Well, I’m going to tell you this. I think people need to do more circus stuff. Learn to juggle. Learn to unicycle, stilt-walk. Just think of how much joy it would bring to the world.

Shane Claiborne:
My mentor said, “If we can’t laugh, then the devil has already won.” I think we need to keep our joy alive, that old song, “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me, and the world can’t take it away.” I’d say do something that makes people smile. Do something that shakes it up. Go to class on a pogo stick or something. Mix it up a little bit.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, I love that. Well, Shane, I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed this conversation, and just really appreciate you taking the time.

Shane Claiborne:
You too, Heidi. Thanks so much. I can’t wait to come back to Asbury. Thank you all.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, thank you.

Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation with Shane Claiborne. Just so grateful for him and for his time, and for talking to us about what it means to live as if Jesus meant what He said and what that can look like in the 21st century. We talked about a lot of things in today’s conversation. Whether you agreed or disagreed, I hope this conversation gave you reason to think.

Heidi Wilcox:
Thank you so much for listening. As always, you can follow us in all the places, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, at @asburyseminary. Until next time, go do something that helps you thrive.