A collection of excerpts from Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution:
The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C., but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and father from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives lost on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C.
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Rebirth means that we have a new paradigm of "us" and "them." Our central identity is no longer biological. And our central allegiance is no longer national. Our pronouns change. Our new "us," as Jesus teaches, is the church, the people of God doing the will of the Father. [...] When we hear that "we" were attacked, do we think "we" the church or "we" as Americans? What is our primary identity? When the Bush administration said that a way of life was being attacked, it was true, but it was not the gospel that was being attacked. It is no coincidence that what was attacked wasn't the World Council of Churches but the symbols of the corporate global economy and the arms that would protect it.
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Too often we just do what makes sense to us and ask God to bless it. In the Beatitudes, Jesus tells us what God blesses -- the poor, the peacemakers, the hungry, those who mourn, those who show mercy -- so we should not ask God's blessing on a declaration that we will have no mercy on evildoers. We know all too well that we have a God who shows mercy on evildoers, for if he didn't, we'd all be in big trouble, and for that, this evildoer is very glad.
