Now this made me sit up and take notice! How amazing (and, I would venture to suggest, how Christlike?) that regular
Greenbelt speaker and author
Shane Claiborne has this hard hitting article in the mainstream blokey magazine '
Esquire'? It starts with a challenging apology:
To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.
Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.
As we accelerate towards Christmas it pains me to sing some of the choral stuff we do, gorgeous tunes and harmonies, yet words that bear no resemblance to the real thing. Shane doesn't miss making this point either:
It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.
Go read the
full article!
