Fattened Your Hearts in a Day of Slaughter...

Here is one of those Bible passages you don't hear often at "prosperity gospel" churches:

James 5. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.

Bibles, Crossway (2011-02-09). The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (p. 1013). Crossway.

Jubilee on Wall Street

Watch as Christian activist Shane Claiborne and members The Simple Way give away money on Wall Street.

“Some of us have worked on Wall Street, and some of us have slept on Wall Street. We are a community of struggle. Some of us are rich people trying to escape our loneliness. Some of us are poor folks trying to escape the cold. Some of us are addicted to drugs, and others are addicted to money. We are a broken people who need each other and God, for we have come to recognize the mess that we have created of our world and how deeply we suffer from that mess. Now we are working together to give birth to a new society within the shell of the old. Another world is possible. Another world is necessary. Another world is already here,” Claiborne says announcing the Jubilee celebration.

You can read his article recounting the event at Red Letter Christians.

A Paradoxical Power

In the current issue of UU World (The Us stand for Unitarian Universalist) Wendy Fitting discusses how the story of Jesus inspires her as a Unitarian. I understand from her article that she does not believe in Jesus as a personal savior, but she is nevertheless inspired by the powerful story of the resurrection. Jesus, she writes, is a symbol of the "paradoxical power" found in the people the world deems powerless.

The resurrection represents the living presence of Jesus, an ongoing and unsealed revelation of God’s compelling love. He is risen indeed, not to a sedentary throne in heaven, but into my life and alive everywhere that evil is persistently resisted and everywhere that a revolution for goodness is thoughtfully engaged. According to biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, Jesus was a peasant, a revolutionary whose message was one of radical inclusiveness....

The explicit sense of accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and savior does not apply to me. But I am compelled by his paradoxical power. Paradoxical because that power is revealed, now as in the first century, in people the world despises, in people the world deems weak. It is revealed to confound the wise. It is revealed in the possibility of loving people the world has taught us to fear. In that power exclusiveness is revealed as impoverishment. As a Unitarian Universalist I respond wholeheartedly to Jesus’ stated mission:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to preach release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free. (Luke 4:18)