Spending time with Shane Claiborne: Part 2 of 2

Shane Claiborne, an ordinary radical who lives in community and spends most of his time with the poor and homeless, is author of The Irresistible Revolution, and co-author of Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers and Jesus for President. In part two of my talk with him, Claiborne clarifies a few things about being a follower of Christ.

AS: Is it possible to live like Christ without embracing simplicity? Do you literally have to give up everything you own to be like Christ?

SC: It’s a really interesting question because I think it was a question that the early Christians never really questioned in the same way. The reality for the early Christians, the haunting reality of what it means to be born again, necessarily meant that you redefined your possessions. How radical it was for this early community that saw that we are brothers and sisters in Christ. That meant they shared everything they had, no one claimed any of their possessions and there were no needy persons among them. Redistribution of our resources is just what happens when you’re born again, you know? It’s what happens when you catch a vision that this is my brother or my sister. And the radical ethics of the early church go so far to say that if someone has two coats, they’ve stolen one. If someone in our world starves while the Christian has the capacity to feed them, that death is on our hands. It’s a radical, radical ethic and a radical way of thinking about possessions. God has not created one person poor and another rich.

As St. Vincent de Paul said, when I go and I feed the hungry, I get on my knees and I ask for forgiveness because I have let my neighbor go hungry while I had more food than I needed. So incredible! I would say that’s really the beginning point: not with our possessions, but with our neighbor. Who is our neighbor? And when we can answer that question, the redistribution is secondary. I love the saying “when we really discover how to love our neighbor as our self, capitalism as we know it will be impossible and Marxism won’t be necessary.” This is just part of what it means to be born again. It’s not an -ism. It’s not a socialism or a communism that can be forcefully put on people. As Scripture says, you can sell everything you have and give it to the poor, but if you don’t have love, it’s empty and meaningless. It has to be driven by a love of our neighbor and a love of God.

AS: In what ways has living as an ordinary radical -- living simply, sharing everything and loving recklessly -- blessed your life?

SC: It’s freed us to fill our lives with things that are meaningful. Like, for instance, we’ve tried to squeeze out the things in our life that were perhaps not the most fruitful. Like television. We made a decision 10 years ago that we’re not going to watch television in our house. It was a pretty big step when we first made it but now, this is incredible. We play games together, we make clothes together, we do things together where we can talk. And kids come to our house precisely because we don’t watch TV. They come to our house because you can paint on the walls and make messes in the kitchen cooking. If they want to watch a box, they can go anywhere else. Part of what we’ve seen is that it frees us up too to not necessarily be entrenched in meaningless work just to pay the bills. We are able to live very sustainably off of $150 per person, per month. We can make that juggling on the street corner, you know? That frees us up to do work that we don’t get paid to do, like gardening on our block, or helping kids with homework. And it assures that we don’t need our donations to meet any of our bills. But we use (donated) money to do the work in our neighborhood. It’s an incredible sort of multiplication that happens. Many hands make for light work, many wallets make for cheap bills.

AS: Sometimes, we feel like we're crazy. Do you ever need the reminder that we're sane in a crazy world?

SC: Oh yeah, for sure. What is so exciting about the time that we’re living in is that there are so many people who are questioning the patterns of our world. Patterns like the average CEO making $1,500 per hour. There is a sense of "that is crazy". Like what’s happened on Wall Street is actually crazy, and what has been happening in Iraq is actually crazy. That (awareness) is what’s going to lead us to peace. When Jesus says I give you peace, not like the world gives it, we start to know what that means. We’ve seen militarism and what that does, we’ve seen how fragile an economy is (that says) blessed are the strong, blessed are the rich. We have a moment right now where people are asking questions like can the world afford the American dream? Does God’s dream look like Wall Street? And those sorts of questions are exactly where Jesus was speaking into, and he’s not talking about a faith that is about what happens after we die but it’s rather about how we live right now. He talks about wages and debt and widows and orphans and juries and judges. We should be talking about how our faith affects the very broken world that we’re living in (and) how we live on the planet, as lovers of the creator.

AS: Are there a few words of wisdom that you might give to someone who is headed toward living as an ordinary radical?

SC: I would throw out there that what we’re doing and the way that we’re living is not really that spectacular. The fact that it looks radical is really only indicative of the goofiness of the world we’re living in. I think what we’re doing was not very radical in the early church. The only reason it looks radical is because of how far (the world has) come from the real heart of Christianity and of Christ, and how much our world strayed from the values at the core of God’s kingdom. And what makes it even trickier is that money says in God we trust, almost every politician says God bless America. And so it gets so cluttered in our culture that it is difficult to distinguish what is American and what is Christian.

You can say in God we trust, but the economy looks very much like the seven deadly sins. It looks like the antithesis of the beatitudes. For us as Christians, the litmus test for everything should be does it look like Christ? Does it look like the things we see and hear in Christ? There are a whole bunch of us who have started calling ourselves red letter Christians because we want to allow the words of Jesus, which are often in red in the Bible, just to form who we are and how we live in the world. I think that the good news of Jesus was good news to the poor, and if it’s not good news to the poor, it’s not the good news of Jesus. That good news shines so brightly right now because of how terribly dark much of our world is with the disparity of the poor, the violence that’s erupting and things like that. It’s a fun time to be alive, you know.

Click here to visit Claiborne's community online.