Violence is something that a lot of people claim to understand; there are many anthropological and sociological studies about its causes. But, the truth of the matter is that violence is a mystery that comes with being human. I can’t say that I actually understand how violence works. What I can say, is that I am in search of a better understanding of violence in order to also understand peacemaking and conflict resolution. In most of the communities where we work, violence is a constant. What is interesting to me is the result of the violence I see: Internal violence usually ends in suicide and external violence usually ends in murder.

One sunny afternoon in 2005, my friend Brady (who is from Knoxville, TN) and I were hanging out with Clemente, Kevin, and other kids from a slum in zone 3, Guatemala City. Most of them teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 years old, with the exception of five-year-old Rigo and his seven-year-old brother. Rigo and his brother were playing with marbles on the floor. Chepe and I were talking with the kids, cracking some jokes and having a good time laughing at the “gringo” with the funny accent. For some reason, one of the two brothers lost his marbles and wanted the other one to give him his. I assume Rigo was the one who had the marbles, but I do not know that for sure. Out of nowhere the atmosphere filled with violence and the next thing I saw was a fight between the two little kids.

I have seen kids fighting for toys before, but this time it was just vicious. Rigo’s brother was on top, with his fists closed, beating Rigo down. I do not even know if I have the words to describe the scene, but the fight was brutal. The guys we were hanging out with were fueling the fight, cheering and yelling “Come on! Come on! Harder! Harder!” Brady and I could not intervene. We did not know what to do. I was really afraid the little kids were going to hurt themselves for real. I did not know how to react and stop the fight. Somehow, Rigo made it out of the beat-down and saw his mom walking down the street. Dropping his marbles on the floor he ran as fast as he could to embrace his mom’s legs. He was looking for protection. For a moment I thought, thank God she just showed up, now I do not have to stop the fight! Amazingly, when Rigo hugged his mom’s legs, instead of finding care, security, and love he found a kick right into his belly and an angry voice yelling, “Don’t be such a pussy! Go fight your brother like a man! That is how you learn dumb ass!” I could not believe what my eyes were witnessing. It felt like being right in the middle of an intense Flannery O’Connor story.

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As a kid I ran from brokenness. Whenever a fight broke out at school while some excitedly gravitated toward it I’d subtely turn tail and literally walk away in the opposite direction. I remember doing this often. Whenever I found myself in proximity to deep hurt, sickness, or wreckage my sensitive psyche wanted nothing to do with it so in my fear I’d flee.

I find that I have so much in common with those who are searching for Bigfoot, Mermaids, and Extra-Terrestrials. (I should end the post right there…) After my wife and I get the boys tucked in bed we occasionally peruse the channels for some high quality television. Recently, my favorite show has been Finding Bigfoot. After an episode, I’ve tried my best to incorporate my new found passion for Sasquatch into recent conversations with friends, none of whom seem to share a similar level of intrigue. Last week, Angie was caught up in an Animal Planet documentary about the newly discovered evidence for mermaids. I’m pretty sure the enthusiastic eye-witness accounts were compelling enough to convert her into a believer.

Lovers of these mysteries seem convinced that something more is out there and we need to act on our suspicions. The vast expanse of outer space, our oceans, or untamed forests are calling us to search for these elusive beings. Something or someone must be out there, right?! The enthusiasts who are desperately searching for something in the wilds out there are not altogether unlike the mystics throughout history who quietly search for Christ in the wilderness within. Really, who knows? Perhaps there is more out there. I am convinced, however, that there is more in here. The individual soul contains more mystery and unexplored territory than the deepest depths or farthest reaches of outer space. In 2013 my hope is to listen closer and dive deeper into the inner space which is said to be home to the very image of God. May we all experience more close encounters with our inner Squatch throughout this new year!

One of the defining experiences of our Street Psalms community is a series of theological conversations that we call “intensives,” in which we consider how big ideas impact the way we live, lead and serve on the margins of our cities. During one of those intensives, called City of Joy, we sometimes explore the ambiguity in which God’s beloved city, Jerusalem, represents in scripture both the heights and depths of the human experience. One of the passages that we sometimes consider is Psalm 48, in which the city itself – its walls, buildings, and towers – become an urban temple and sanctuary for an encounter with God.

In order to lean into this Psalm, I recently paraphrased and personalized this song of scripture to my own city, Denver. This was a good experience for me, and I would invite you to do the same for your own city.

¹The Lord is magnificent and marvelous, deserving of praise like none other!

Scripture points us toward Jerusalem– Mount Zion – as the matchless place where humans encounter God and lift their praise. My home is in another city:Denver,Colorado, at the foot of theRocky Mountains. Even here, our highest praise is reserved for God.

² Speaking of our city, isn’t Denver itself magnificent? Just to mentionDenver conjures images of a gleaming metropolis nestled against spectacular snow-covered peaks. How blessed we are to live here!

Like other great cities “set upon a hill” (well, okay – Denver itself is a flat place, but it borrows glory from the nearby mountains), the Mile High City sparks imagination, inspires music, and draws people from around the world to visit, to seek their fortune, or even to relocate, trading the harsher rhythms of places like Chicago or L.A. for that laid-back Denver groove.

³ God is present in this city. Never forget that it is God who has gifted this place and these people with such an abundance of beauty and resource.

⁴ There have been difficult times forDenver: Flood and fire nearly wiped it from the face of the earth before it could even get started. Cycles of boom and bust have been devastating at times – especially to the poor, taking everything from families and communities at the bottom and margins of society. Xenophobia and racism have found footholds in Denver: we remember with shame the Sand Creek Massacre, the anti-Chinese riots, the KKK’s influence in local government in the 1920’s, and the persistent patterns of segregation and neglect that marginalize communities in so many cities.

⁵ Yet somehow, thanks be to God, we Denverites manage to transcend that legacy, coming together to imagine and build a great city.

⁶ Dr. King observed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We have lived that truth inDenver. The purveyors of ignorance and exclusion have their day, from time to time, focusing their wrath on scapegoats drawn so often from vulnerable communities. Fear is their only song.

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Recently Street Psalms Press announced  the arrival of our first book, Geography of Grace – Doing Theology From Below by Kris Rocke and Joel Van Dyke.

This project has been several years in the making. It has gone through five major edits, countless rewrites and a change in publishers. We are eager and a bit nervous to see it finally hit the streets. We have no illusions that this will be a New York Times best seller, but as a community, we hope it is a useful tool for those who are hungry to see God at work in hard places.

Authors and leaders like Bob Ekblad, Richard Rohr, Shane Claiborne, Phyllis Trible, Ray Bakke and others have given the book a warm reception. To see what these and other leaders are saying about Geography of Grace go click on the book highlight to the right of this page or go  here.

Fair warning:

We did not set out to write a controversial book, but this book is not without some controversy. We wrote it to honor those who work in the context of poverty and violence, which often pushes leaders to the edge of their faith, and ours as well, if we are honest. As a result, we have taken the “road less traveled,” in our book. Such a road is fraught with danger and all manner of ways to get lost, but as Robert Frost noted, taking the road less travelled “has made all the difference.” We hope it will make a difference with our readers and the communities we serve.

Several who have reviewed the book have recognized and appreciated the risky nature of our journey. One such review comes from Stephan de Beer in Pretoria, South Africa, who writes,

Grace is shared abundantly in the poetic beauty of this book: a grace located in the deepest trenches of human suffering and global urban fractures; a disarming grace, meeting you on every page, robed in profanity, steeped in the incarnation, erupting in surprising, awe-inspiring transformations.

This book offers all of us who sense an invitation to be on the urban margins, some superb handles for the journey – it is not your typical travel guide, but one written for the connoisseur of urban and human marginality, and, if we read carefully enough, a guide book for opening us up to the poetry and profanity of God’s beautiful grace, a grace more than able to make us over, and also the cities in which we live.

 Stephan de Beer, CEO, Tshwane Leadership Foundation, Pretoria, South Africa

To purchase Geography of Grace: Doing Theology From Below in either paperback or e-book format, go here. (Amazon will have the print version of the book available within the next month or so, but for now the paperback edition is available directly from Street Psalms Press in an equally safe and secure process that actually provides more income for our work.)  

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I talk to many pastors whose people are so consumed in their own individualistic poverties of financial, sexual, marriage, work, identity issues that all they can do is laugh when I invite them to engage the marginalized poor who are stuck to our streets.

I get that. After a decade of experience I continue to stumble awkwardly through marriage and parenting, the bills keep hounding me, and I’m continually fighting and failing at my own pursuits of holiness. And this mess actually makes me the perfect candidate for joining God on the Missio Deo.

The scriptures seem to say that when we are nothing, that’s when we’re in a perfect position to receive everything. Moses was a desolate murderer on the run when he became compelled to turn and look at the blazing shrub.

If you look closely at that story in Exodus chapter 3 you’ll notice an interesting emphasis in verse 3 and 4 on Moses “turning aside” to see God’s presence. (The KJV is actually more accurate here.) God is always inviting us, even as messy criminals, to participate in the Missio Dei. But like Moses, life requires that we humbly turn to see the strange forms of invitation.

God’s love doesn’t make sense. It seldom works in tandem with our moral behavior status. Moses was a murderer. So was Paul. And Joseph was a prisoner on trial for rape when he was called to liberate the poor.

God’s presence doesn’t make sense. A shrub on fire that doesn’t burn up? I’ve actually sensed it most strongly when “wasting time” with drunk and mentally ill people.

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This week I’ve been at Mt. Angel Abbey in Oregon, which is a place for work and prayer. Following the rule of St. Benedict (480-547 A.D.) that “all are to be welcomed as Christ,” I have been welcomed into the daily prayerful rhythm of this place as I take a working retreat. The monastery is on a hilltop flanked by giant sequoia trees, overlooking fruit orchards in the Willamette Valley. Most mornings, heavy fog hangs among the trees and buildings. Yesterday it burned off for a view of snow-capped Mt. Hood against the blue sky. Needless to say it’s hardly a rough place to work, and I’m thankful for friends who provided the opportunity.

The primary work of the Benedictine monks at the abbey is prayer. Six times a day, summoned by the loudest bell I have ever heard, they scurry to the abbey church for the liturgy of the hours, which are prayers sung beautifully in unison (Gregorian chant style). Their prayers consist primarily of the psalms and other portions of scripture, as well as theologically-rich ancient hymns. A few are in for a temporary period (simple vows), but most are lifers (solemn vows). Table-talk among visitors inevitably surfaces the question, “what if your son or daughter decided to make a life of this?” I suspect that’s quite a dim possibility for my own kids, but it does make you consider whether “the work of prayer” is something worth devoting an entire human life to.

We applaud people who devote their daily lives to brilliance as violin players or baseball pitchers or countless other pursuits, but prayer? Is the world a better place because a very few hold it in prayer with singular devotion through the hours of each day? Are such lives well-lived?

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When I took up the cross, I recognized its meaning….  The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on… And that’s the way I’ve decided to go.                          

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. May 22, 1967, Penn Community Center, Frogmore, South Carolina

Happy New Year!

I’d like to share a slightly irreverent and indelicate quote from Leo Bebb who is the main character in Frederick Buechner’s delightful series of novels called the Book of Bebb.

Leo Bebb is a “plump and implausible man” with a distinctive fluttering eye. He is the ex-con pastor of a very odd church called the Church of Holy Love Inc. Bebb is something between charlatan and a spiritual genius. Bebb runs what appears to be an entirely fraudulent degree-granting mill that offers mail-order ordinations to all who want one. And yet Bebb’s enthusiasm for God and Bible is completely infectious and real. In spite of himself (or perhaps because), people connected to Bebb undergo grace at profound levels. Beuchner surrounds Bebb with a colorful cast of misfits, whose quirky lives leave the reader feeling strangely comforted. One of those misfits is Brownie.

Brownie is Bebb’s main disciple and right-hand man. Brownie is as odd as Bebb, only in a different direction. They are like Mutt and Jeff…Ying and Yang. There is great love between them, but great tension too. Apparently, Bebb once raised Brownie from the dead in Knoxville, Tennessee after being struck by lightening many years ago. Bebb has a bigger than life spirit of adventure. He does not mince words and does not care for subtleties. Brownie is undersized and is cut from a different cloth, which irritates Bebb to no end. Whereas Bebb’s dives into life head-first and has a knack for making the smooth places of Scripture rough, Brownie holds back and has a knack of “making the rough places of Scripture smooth.” Brownie’s timid spirit frustrates Bebb’s come-what-may approach to life.

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Christ the Redeemer/Cristo Redentor - Brazil

In the preface to his book “Exclusion and Embrace, A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation,” theologian Miraslov Volf shares an encounter where he was asked by Jurgen Moltmann, “Can you embrace a Chetnik?”

The Chetniks were Serbian fighters who in the early 90’s had been devastating Volf’s homeland of Croatia, destroying cities, throwing people into concentration camps, raping women, and burning down churches.  Immediately prior to Moltmann’s question, Volf had been lecturing about the need to embrace ones enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. So, how serious was he willing to take this line of reasoning when it got really personal? Moltmann figured it all sounded good in theory but could Volf bring it home to the point where he would be able to embrace a Chetnik — the ultimate OTHER?

Volf replied, “No I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”

In the past weeks and months, there have been several ministries and individuals in the missional communities of grassroots leaders we serve in Central America who have found themselves up against their own Central American “Chetnik” groups. These groups of people have been sowing destruction and preying on the neighborhoods our friends love and in the very places where they are laying down their lives.

What does it mean to follow Jesus when he tells us we are to “love our enemies?” It is one thing to consider this as an objective “concept” or “principle,” but quite another when your life and that of your children are being threatened by “Chetniks” in Croatia or San Salvador. This is the reality that several of our friends in Central America have encountered in the past few months.  Volf shares his personal internal battle on the subject with gut wrenching honesty when he writes, “I felt that my very faith was at odds with itself, divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator.”

A call to embrace the perpetrator? Can that really be a call? How in the world am I supposed to embrace someone who is threatening to take my life and hurt and kill the people I love most in this world?

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