Here's some good news that dares my heart to hope. Listen to Will and Lisa Samson, authors of Justice in the Burbs: Being the hands of Jesus wherever you live—We both grew up in good Christian homes. ... We figure, between the two of us, that we've heard about 4,000 sermons. ... We went to Christian schools, Christian college, Christian camps. We were involved in Scripture memory programs. And when did we memorize a verse about God's concern for the poor? [...]
And so one day we began to read Scripture with an open lens. One day we began to read Scripture for what was [really] there...
Oooh-hooo, that causes trouble. Watch them tell it:
Justice in the Burbs
Ah, the mercy of God! Day after day, I see American Christians awakening from a long sleep, suddenly aware that their Bibles tell of a Jesus whose incredible passion for justice shouts from every page, and they have not known it.
Many of us—I speak of myself—have not well followed this Jesus. We've followed instead the less troublesome, personal-salvation-obsessed, who's-our-enemy-now religion deduced from evangelical dogma and 20th-century eschatological novelties—and so startlingly absent from the Gospels. And now we scarcely know what to do when we look afresh at the breathtaking things Jesus says and does.
But something's up. There's a change in the air, I think. And I don't know that I've sensed anything quite like it before. These things are subjective; I certainly could be wrong.
But dare we wonder if it might be so, or what it means?
Tags: Will+Samson, Lisa+Samson, evangelicalism, religious+right, emergent+church, Christian conservatives, social+justice, Justice+in+the+Burbs, Christianity+justice, Christianity+poverty, Bible+poverty, Bible+justice, Monte Asbury
