the sagely blog

A snippet from Eugene Peterson's The Jesus Way:

"This sacrificial-suffering-servant way of dealing with what is wrong in people, with what is wrong in the world, is so different from the ways to which our culture accustoms us. The standard operating procedures practiced outside the orbit of Scripture and Jesus attempt to get rid of, or at least minimize, whatever is wrong with the world primarily by means of teaching and making: teach people what is right, or make them do what is right. The professor and the policeman represent these two ways, education and law enforcement. We send people to school to teach them to live rightly and responsibly; if that doesn't work we make them do it through a system of rewards and punishments, even if it means locking them up in a cell.

"Neither way seems to make much difference. The way of teaching as given form in schools and universities is not flourishingly successful. Scoundrels and betrayers, thieves and cheats, suicides and abusers, flourish in the best of professions and businesses. As literacy abounds, sin does more abound. Neither does the way of coercion as given form in jails and prisons seem to make much difference. We remove a small percentage of wrongdoers from the streets for a time, but even then our prison population seems at times to rival our school attendance. We distribute guns and bombs to any and all who will agree to use them to serve 'God and country' and proceed to threaten or kill any who 'disturb the peace' whether at home or abroad. None of it seems to make much of a dent in diminishing the sheer quantity of wrong.

"Isaiah 53 is the final nail in the coffin that buries all the false expectations, all the devil's seductions, all the pious revisions of the biblical story that make Jesus and his followers into American success stories.

"Meanwhile that Golgotha pulpit still centers history. And that Preacher still speaks the only word that will save the world."

The Jesus Way, 180.

I still want to know your prophets, the voices you hear calling Christians to follow Jesus more faithfully. Who are you reading? Who are you holding conversations with? What are they saying?