from Pixabay. by Robson Machado. Click image for original.
On Kodiak Island Alaska there is a story told of an Aleutian boy who lived with his grandmother. The two were trying to stretch out their meager supply of dried seal meat to get them through what was a very rough winter. The grandson became tired of eating the same thing day after day and each day he complained to his grandmother to let him go out and hunt for something more to break up the monotony of dried seal. Finally, after the grandmother had heard just too much complaining from the grandson, she allowed him to go hunt, but she gave him these words of instruction, “after you make your first kill, bring it home to share, and we will be satisfied.”
With harpoon, knife and net in hand, the next morning the boy eagerly set out to find something better to eat than dried seal. The winter was severe and there was little game stirring so the boy had to wander quite a way from his village. Out on the horizon he saw something darting about. It was a mouse, and a small one at that, but the boy set out to hunt and kill the mouse. Although he remembered his grandmother’s words, “after you make your first kill, bring it home to share, and we will be satisfied,” he thought to himself, “I have already spent too much energy hunting this small mouse, even if I ate the whole mouse myself, I would not have the energy to get back home.” So the boy ate the mouse and continued on his hunting journey.
Next, the boy came to a stream where he was able to catch a small fish. The fish was so small he was able to swallow it with one large gulp, completely forgetting his grandmother’s words. He followed the stream to find a lone salmon waiting to die. By this time he was famished, since the mouse and the fish were so small. He caught the salmon and immediately began eating the best parts of the fish. When he had almost finished the entirety of the salmon he remembered his grandmother’s words once again, but it was too late. The boy had started a pattern and a pace that would grow as large as the appetite he was developing.
Next, he netted a ptarmigan. Then he speared a seal and ate the whole thing. As he continued to go farther into areas he had never seen before, the boy hunted a walrus and consumed it completely. One animal after the other, and his appetite just kept growing. Finally, after being gone for what seemed like months, his appetite was almost insatiable, so he found a beached whale and he began to eat it, bite after bite, until there was nothing left. By this time the boy had noticed that he had grown so large in size that he no longer looked like himself. He was almost as big as his grandmother’s house. Now this made the boy very sad. What had he become?
Suddenly, he remembered his grandmother’s words, “after you make your first kill, bring it home to share, and we will be satisfied.” The boy began to understand, nothing he ate would satisfy his great hunger. Thinking of his poor grandmother back home eating dried seal, or by this time, perhaps starved to death, made the boy very sad. Feeling hopeless, he cried for hours and then he made a decision to find his way home again.
As the boy walked, his belly was so full that it swished and swashed with each step he took. After many days he finally spotted his village and then made it to his grandmother’s home. There he sat, outside the door, crying because he realized he could no longer fit through the door. His grandmother heard the boy outside and immediately told him what to do. “Grandson, she said. “Climb on the roof and come down the smoke hole.” Although he knew he would never fit through the small smoke hole in the roof he, nonetheless, obeyed his grandmother. The she said, “put your feet in the hole and drop down.” As the boy put his feet in the smoke hole, the grandmother lifted up a bone needle she had made and the boy miraculously passed through the eye of it to become himself once again.
On his way down all the animals and fish he had consumed came out of his mouth, spewing up through the smoke hole and landed in front of his grandmother’s home. They gathered up the whale, and the walrus, and the seal, and the ptarmigan, and the salmon, and the small fish and the mouse and everything else the boy had consumed while he was away. When they had gathered it all up they prepared a feast for the whole village, made up of all those fine foods. But the boy was satisfied just to eat dried seal.
The story of the boy and his grandmother was likely a traditional story modified after the Aleutian people heard the Bible story in Luke 18:25 when Jesus said, “For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (RSV) or else, it is an uncanny coincidence. Whether adapted or original, the story is illustrative of many of the values of Indigenous North Americans when it comes to understanding poverty.
Wealth, in traditional North American Indigenous cultures, was most often measured by food supply and the conditions of the homeland from which it was supplied. The normal expectation was to be satisfied with whatever one had, and one’s primary responsibility was to share it with others. The seminal Indigenous value of generosity was based on abundance as the norm, and scarcity as the exception. In the story, the exponential increase of food for oneself and the parallel change in the boy becoming less of himself by not sharing what he had, creates something grotesquely less than a simple human being. In a sense, the boy became a monster through his own greed. Indeed, the cure for his dilemma was
- Listening to his elderly grandmother, who was the repository of wisdom
- Returning home, to his own land and his community of support
- Sharing what food he had, with his community. (Note: the way he shared it was regurgitation, which is supposed to add humor to the story).
Many of the values concerning poverty and wealth among traditional Native North Americans are based on these shalom principles. The boy’s survival depended on listening to his elder, understanding the primacy of his own homeland but his actual wealth came from sharing his food among his community. Perhaps the most important aspect of shalom, though there are many, is generosity that is focused on equity, (everyone has something and equality (everyone has equal opportunity).
In a capitalistic and individualistic society such as ours, we must find ways to share. And, that sharing must be directed towards hospitality and empowering those who are marginalized and disenfranchised. Economies based on the “trickle-down” approach never work. Like the grandson, we must remember to share ourselves, our homes, our food, our financial and other resources if we want to live into the shalom teachings of Jesus and other harmony way traditions. If that means sometimes just being happy eating dried seal, I think we will be ok.
This post is part of the October theme Living Into the Shalom of God.
From Pixabay. by Woong Hoe. Click picture for original.
I thought I might give a little definition to the book for those who have not read it. The book is narrative oriented but still, I know many people who would like terms defined, so in an effort to meet some folks in their own context, I offer these somewhat theological definitions.
Shalom:
Shalom is a Hebrew construct concretizing practical love to be expressed through structures and systems. The structured order or government of God’s love, is shalom. God’s love is a mass, including peace, mercy, justice, righteousness, restitution, and a whole plethora of characteristics and expressions for the individual and the common good. Shalom is the ethic Jesus preached and the action he lived as he confronted systems of broken shalom. Jesus’ constant reference to the “kingdom” was that of a shalom kingdom. Shalom is not amorphous nor is it utopian in nature. Shalom can be clearly identified.
Shalom seeks the communal good and it benefits the whole community in tangible ways. One path to shalom includes engaging in hospitality, even to one’s enemies. Hospitality leads to understanding. Understanding leads to acceptance of both commonality and difference. Acceptance leads to community actions creating systems for the well-being of the community, based in equity and equality. These systems and structures provide for shalom living. Indigenous Peoples have a shalom construct I call the Harmony Way.
Community of Creation:
All things created are rooted in a symbiotic relationship to each other and to Creator. Like Creator, we are never alone. The whole life system, and each part, whether it be the eco-system, the solar system or the multiverse, serves a purpose in the community of creation. Understanding the relationships of all things to each other is helpful in understanding our human purpose within the whole.
The danger of the system occurs when we study the specific parts of creation and we forget the context of the whole and our interdependent relationship to the whole community of creation. The whole community of creation includes both unity and diversity from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the human body to the multiverse. Homogeneity is not a permanent ontological state of being but diversity with unity is both a fluctuating state and is the essence of ontological permanence. The foundation of all life is found both in unity and diversity. The foundation for living according to the ways of the Community of Creator must include the recognition and appreciation of both unity and diversity.
Indigenous Vision (Theological):
North American Indigenous Theology, done correctly, is in itself a contradiction. The difference between Western, Post-Enlightenment theologies and Indigenous North American theologies divides at the level of worldview. Western worldviews tend to concern themselves with tight definitions and extrinsic categorization. Traditional North American Indigenous peoples, and it is from this particular worldview that North American Indigenous theology must be done in order to be bone fide, are cautious to leave room for mystery when speaking of Creator. In fact, in some Native American tribes it is considered taboo to speak too much when trying to define Creator. Also, North American Indigenous theologians speak to Creator more than they do about Creator. They see Creator in everything and in everyone.
Belief is really about doing rather than knowing. Given these, and other differences in worldview, the best North American Indigenous theology can do is to attempt to be a bridge between theological understandings in their cultures without crossing sacred boundaries.
AND A BONUS DEFINITION:
Community of Creator:
The Trinitarian model of God is by its nature, a Community. This communal nature reflects the divine sense of community in all creation, in other words, there is something of Creator in all creation because community is innate to, and created by, the Community of Creator. I understand Jesus, whose actions and teachings surrounding human community, as being a direct result of a shalom community ethic, based primarily through a harmonious, communal lens. Jesus’ understanding of God’s “kingdom” is a community of egalitarianism, where peace reigns and the most marginalized of society are secure. Jesus spent his life forming inclusive community. Jesus included the outcast and the marginalized like, women, shepherds, lepers, tax-gatherers, gentiles, the disabled and others. Jesus’ teachings exemplified by parables such as those found in Luke 15 point directly to God’s deepest desires for creation is the realization of community.
Other New Testament writings expound on the value of unity and diversity and egalitarian community as the norm of the church (I Corinthians chapter 11; chapter 12; I Peter 4:8-11). The image of God as community and as a model of community, I would argue, goes far deeper in our souls than that of the imago dei. If we must talk of God in ontological terms, a mystery beyond any of our comprehension, then perhaps the image of the Community of the Creator, existing eternally in shalom relationality may lead us beyond much of the former dialogue that has centered itself in ontological substance, and towards a better understanding of our own communal ontology.
This post is part of the October theme Living Into the Shalom of God.
“Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.” Isaiah 40:4
from Pixabay. By Claudio Bianchi. Click image for original.
The fellowship of the early Church were socialists, if not communists, and for some reason the modern Church finds this shocking or even scandalous. But community, sharing, making the playing field level has always been at the heart of any genuine living out of the Christian faith. Jesus told us to love God, despise money and to store up our treasure in heaven rather than on earth. He counselled the rich young ruler to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor. Jesus was, we cannot deny, pretty radical when it came to money.
There is something about being poor that is deeply of God. Perhaps when we align ourselves with the lowest of the low and with the powerless, we are emulating what Christ did when he “made himself nothing” in becoming human, and “humbled himself” (Philippians 2) in dying for his creation. God chose Mary, an unknown young woman from a backwater, to bear the Christ child. And still the song she sings showing her understanding of true justice and God’s upside-down kingdom echoes through the ages:
“He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.” Luke 1:52-53
Poverty is not just a lack of money of course, but of power and of access to power. On the UN’s website (www.un.org), Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon explains that poverty “..is manifested in restricted access to health, education and other essential services and, too often, by the denial or abuse of other fundamental human rights..” Poverty is not only being poor, but often being stuck in that world of doing without, becoming poorer, sicker, less and less able to do anything about your situation. Even in the west, where most have enough to eat and access to clean water, there is still a huge amount of poverty. And it is here too, a horrible vicious circle of credit and debt and being uninsured, unsafe, unprotected. To be poor is to be vulnerable and to have no way out.
My husband has been out of work for two years now since a breakdown exacerbated his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to a place of serious disability. With both of us unable to work, it has been a long, difficult time of form-filling, red-tape twisting and hurdle jumping that would have made Kafka weep. Whilst grateful there are benefit systems in place, we’ve also had to rely on family for some things, and on the goodness of God to a degree that has crushed my husband’s faith and tested mine. Our case is nevertheless mild compared to those of many people. I have every sympathy with those having to use foodbanks and rely on aid, whichever country they live in. Rare are the people who choose poverty, like St Francis notably did. Most of us have it thrust upon us, and even in a developed country, it is not fun.
But God has been there for us and with us many times. In a former period of hardship, a friend’s unexpected help to clear debt is a powerful case in point. This friend (whom I have never met) told me that it was God’s money and it made no difference who was using it. That is the Christian faith, right there. That is a holy attitude to money that took my breath away, and a lot of my worries with it. I know I need to mature a lot more before I am capable of such wisdom. What a different world it would be, if we could all live with such generous and biblical understanding of what it means to be there for one another. It’s not about counting the cost, it’s not about tithing, it is about acting when there is a need, even pre-empting that need.
We all know that there is enough bounty on the earth to feed us all. There is enough land, enough water. One reason Jesus told us not to stockpile it was for the good of everyone. Sharing isn’t something we should just teach our children to do with their toys, this is something the Church needs to model at every possible level.
Supposing this was an attitude that then broke out into our communities, our governments, our aid packages, our planning for infrastructure and trade agreements? Then perhaps, we might be helping to teach society the way forward into God’s holy plan to level out the land so that everyone is spared the pain, suffering, humiliation and distress that poverty brings. And maybe we need to do that from a place of choosing to come alongside the poor, and working for true justice, till it rolls down in rivers.
This post is part of the October theme Living Into the Shalom of God.
“Never again!” God had touched her heart and mind to move toward radical-shalom action. A year earlier a young man had died of exposure on the streets of our community, and this local pastor couldn’t stand to see it happen even one more time. That was the beginning of the Hood River Warming Shelter.
Six years ago, Pastor Linda Presley convened a gathering of other pastors and city leaders to work toward opening a winter warming shelter. She didn’t draft a plan all on her own. Instead she called this team together to imagine, to share our experiences, and to plan. Remarkably, in three short months we opened a shelter! Over the past six years, with the input of shelter guests, volunteers, and other community members, the vision of Hood River Warming Shelter has grown to encompass not just wholeness for the individuals experiencing homelessness but also to begin to address the issues behind homelessness in our community and our inward attitudes toward those living outside. Together, we’re working toward an attitude of shalom.
As I spoke of in my last post, the fullness of shalom must be both an inward and outward journey. It is both personal and corporate. It would be tempting to separate these two aspects into the personal-inward journey and corporate-outward journey, as if one can exist in isolation of the other. That would be a mistake. There is only one journey and the inward-outward, personal-corporate parts of that journey are so tightly wound together we do injustice to God’s radical shalom by trying to untangle them.
My front yard hospitality garden is an example of a different approach than Pastor Linda used. As God compelled me to think about how my front yard could become an invitation to hospitality and I began to design what that might look like, God was working on some of my internal and personal issues and helping me to move forward. I’ve written about it. But guess what? Although that was a great inspiration motivated by a desire to cultivate community, I didn’t intentionally invite my neighbors to help envision what it would look like. To be sure, God’s shalom was at work, but I had divided the outward and corporate aspects of shalom from the personal work God was doing in me. I invited my neighbors into what I had already created by myself. While God has still used this feeble attempt, I know that God’s shalom might have been more fully released in community, in a corporate approach to design.
Last week I explored the inward journey of shalom. The inward journey, although very personal — dealing with my attitudes and my issues — is also very corporate and outward. These internal hang ups impact others by putting obstacles in their pathway to shalom. They also hamstringing my ability to live God’s radical shalom with others more fully into the world around me.
Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death. — Philippians 2:5-8 The Message
The outward journey of shalom requires the inward journey of shalom and the inward journey of shalom requires the outward journey of shalom. It is a dance of obedience and action, personal transformation and community transformation, and we see it expressed beautifully in the incarnation of Jesus.
Living into the radical shalom of God may look quite different from one community to another. Just as God works individually on our hearts, revealing what needs to be healed and changed at the appropriate time, I believe God similarly reveals brokenness within communities in a way that gradually leads in the direction of the fullness of God’s shalom. That is a journey you must engage in on a local level.
But there is an even grander scale to God’s shalom. While we may think events outside our community or life experience don’t involve us, movements arise in other communities that require us all to speak out on behalf of God’s shalom.
- When injustices threaten lands, cultures, and health — such as the current protests by Indigenous people in North Dakota — this is a shalom issue.
- When Black, Brown, and Native people are systematically targeted and jailed at rates much higher than their white brothers and sisters and shot at even higher rates, this is a shalom issue.
- When refugees are denied help and perpetual wars continue to kill, maim, and drive people from their homes, this is a shalom issue.
- When children go hungry, this is a shalom issue.
- When those living outside are ignored and worse, this is a shalom issue.
The list goes on and on, but the message of Jesus is clear: together we are to be the hands and feet of God’s shalom in the world. When we pray as Jesus taught us, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, we are essentially praying that we will live faithfully into Jesus’ message of healing, hope, and restoration for the whole world. That becomes even more clear when we reach the part that says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”.
- How is your journey going?
- Who are you walking with?
- How are you discerning together the way of shalom in your community and within your own heart and mind?
This is not a solo pilgrimage. Shalom is the pathway of community faithfully living together the full expression of salvation through Christ into the world.
This post is part of our October Living Into the Shalom of God series.
by Gil George
photo by Ksar El Kebir from pixabay.com
There “They” are, walking down the street in my neighborhood. Who do “They” think “They” are? Coming into my place as if “They” belonged here, coming into my faith, my country, my neighborhood, my screen, my mind! Why can’t “They” go somewhere else, be someone else, or be more normal like me? Why do “They” persist in believing, behaving, and thinking so strangely? Why do “They” have to be so strange? Why can’t “They” just accept that “They” are wrong?
I call the above sentiments the voice of anti-shalom in my head, the voice of division and wholesale devaluing of the image of God that is borne in “the stranger.” One of the key pieces of Christian theology is that every human being bears the image of God, that there is no person that does not, in some way, reflect the divine image. In other words, when I allow myself to fear the strangeness of the stranger I miss out on the way that person can uniquely usher me into the presence of God.
So, who are “They?” Really, who are those others who we find the most difficulty in seeing the divine image? I suspect that for some of you, I am part of that “They,” or maybe you are part of my “They.” For some reason, we humans feel the need to place people into categories and define them by others we have encountered or heard about in that category. We have many names for this behavior that end in “ism”, and it has become more and more convicting to me that Jesus sees something very different when he looks at this person or group for whom I feel disdain or fear.
In 2001 I began to be convicted to practice a new spiritual discipline to start building the Shalom of God in my heart. This discipline radically changed me and has been painful at times, but it has enabled me to obtain some of the peace that passes understanding. After the September 11th attacks the Holy Spirit began convicting me to pray for those involved. I wrote down a few names like Osama bin Laden and al-Queda and began to pray for God’s image to be visible to me in them. This earned me some very strange looks and the opportunity to practice the discipline a little closer to home, but I felt a sense of peace I hadn’t before.
The love of God began to drive out the fear of those “scary” others, and opportunities opened for friendships and relationships that weren’t thinkable to me before the Shalom of God’s love began to be welcomed into my heart. I would love to tell you that the work of Shalom is finished in my heart, but since I am still breathing there is quite a bit of work left to do. Now though, when I read, hear, or feel that command to welcome the stranger I think “The stranger the better. Let’s do this.”
I would love to invite you to practice this discipline with me and share how it impacts you.
- Take some time to pray and ask God to help you discern and write down the name of someone or group that is strange to you or that you have a reflexive distaste for.
- Now that you have this person or group in mind take some time to pray and ask God to reveal exactly how the divine image is revealed in that person or group.
- Put a piece of paper or sticky note with the names or group somewhere you will see it every day, and whenever you do ask God to help you see how the divine image is present in those whose name or group identity you have written.
- Whenever you encounter someone in that group or that person ask God to help you see that person or group through the lens of divine love.
I pray that this will be as transforming for you as it has been for me.
This post is part of our October theme Living Into the Shalom of God.
We’ve heard from you and have compiled your list of favorite books on/about God’s shalom.
Here they are:
- The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right – Lisa Sharon Harper
- Drinking from the Wells of New Creation: The Holy Spirit and the Imagination in Reconciliation – Kerry Dearborn
- Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism – Allan Boesak and Curtis Paul DeYoung
- Why We Can’t Wait – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- God’s Shalom Project: An engaging look at the Bible’s sweeping story – Bernhard Ott
- Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom – C. René Padilla
- Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church – N.T Wright
- From Saigon to Shalom: The Pilgrimage of a Missionary in Search of a More Authentic Mission – James E. Metzler
- Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life – Henri J.M. Nouwen and Donald P. Mcneill
- Justice: Rights and Wrongs Paperback – Nicholas Wolterstorff
- Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom – Walter Brueggemann and Charles McCollough
And Our Original List:
- Embrace, Leroy Barber
- Prophetic Lament, Sooong-Chan Rah
- Roadmap to Reconciliation 2.0, Brenda Salter-McNeil
- Shalom and the Community of Creation, Randy Woodley
- Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Bruggemann
- A New Heaven and a New Earth, Richard Middleton
- Ambassadors of Reconciliation: Volume 1, Volume 2, Ched Myers & Elaine Enns
- Reconciling All Things, Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice
- Friendship at the Margins, Christopher Heuertz & Christine Pohl
- The Book of Forgiving, Desmond Tutu & Mpho Tutu
by Christine Sine
Do we really choose between the world and Christ as between two conflicting realities absolutely opposed? Or do we choose Christ by choosing the world as it really is in him, and encountered in the ground of our own personal freedom and of our love? Do we really renounce ourselves and the world in order to find Christ, or do we renounce our alienated and false selves in order to choose our own deepest truth in choosing both the world and Christ at the same time? If the deepest ground of my being is love, then in that very love itself and nowhere else will I find myself, and the world, and my brother, and Christ. It is not a question of either-or but of all-in-one… of wholeness, wholeheartedness and unity… which finds the same ground of love in everything. Thomas Merton Contemplation in a World of Action. 155-156
Often when I talk about the concept of shalom and our need to work for the wholeness of others and of our world, people often ask me What about personal faith in Christ? Isn’t that more important? I love this quote because it sums up exactly what I feel. Becoming a disciple of Christ is not just about personal salvation, it is about reorienting our love towards God’s dream of shalom – of wholeness, and unity.
Salvation is about renouncing our false self – the self that is oriented towards self satisfaction and self centred living and grabbing hold of a dream for a world transformed by love. Theologian NT Wright sums this up well in his important book Surprised by Hope:
Love is not a duty; it is our destiny. It is the language that Jesus spoke and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food that they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire a taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing and we are called to learn it and practice it now.
Words without actions are nothing. Worship should not end when we leave the church building. It should be the driving force that energizes us for action out into God’s world. Unfortunately, this doesn’t often happen because we lack God’s shalom vision for our world and our lives. As Oswald Chambers said: It is easier to serve God without a vision, easier to work for God without a call, because then you are not bothered by what God requires; common sense is your guide, veneered over with Christian sentiment. Perhaps part of the reason that people are not influenced by our evangelism is because we are not acting as representatives of God’s shalom kingdom. And perhaps part of the reason they are not attracted to the church is because our lives are virtually the same as those of non believers.
It grieves me that so many people who call themselves followers of Christ live in exactly the same way as their non Christian friends. It grieves me even more that the United States, a country in which most people consider themselves Christians, has the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation and the second highest poverty rate. (Only Mexico has higher ) If we truly lived transformed lives like those early disciples who gave up homes, jobs and sometimes family, maybe our world would be a very different place. And if we truly lived as citizens of God’s kingdom, speaking the language of love maybe we would see our world transformed in the ways that we say we want it to be.
What is your response?
- Immerse yourself in the New Testament vision of wholeness
- Read Luke 4: 16 – 21, and/or Revelation 21:1-4 then sit in silence for 5 minutes reflecting on this beautiful imagery of God’s eternal shalom world revealed in Christ.
- What part of this imagery of shalom most inspires you?
- How has this changed your view of Jesus’ purposes on earth?
- What is one change you would like to make in your life to move closer to God’s shalom purposes?
- Read Luke 4: 16 – 21, and/or Revelation 21:1-4 then sit in silence for 5 minutes reflecting on this beautiful imagery of God’s eternal shalom world revealed in Christ.
This post is part of our October theme Living Into The Shalom of God.
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