Our children need to join us in this ministry of identification (with the poor). We do them no favor by hiding them from suffering and need. If we imprison them in ghettos of affluence, how can they learn compassion for the broken of the world? So, let us walk hand in hand with our children into pockets of misery and suffering.

-Richard Foster in Freedom of Simplicity

I was reminded on Wednesday night in the midst of a discussion with some friends about the wrath of God about something else Soong-Chan Rah said at CCDA during his talk.  I may not get this verbatim, but it’s close enough.

We often talk about the “greatness” of the United States.  Afterall, when you consider that we are a nation built on free land (which we robbed from the Native America people by killing and displacing them) and free labor (which we secured by enslaving Africans), it is little wonder we have managed to become so “great.”  But one wonders what happens when those sins return to visit us?  Perhaps an economic crisis?!

This quote returned to me as we were thinking through the idea of God punishing families to the third and fourth generation.  It’s the idea that just because you don’t directly reap the consequences of your actions, that doesn’t mean someone, perhaps those who mean the most to you, your family, won’t.

Biblically, it would seem that the wrath of God is precisely what we experience when we turn away from God and God’s ways.  It’s not so much God doing stuff to get even or settle the score.  It’s more like what we are left with when we choose against living in harmony with God’s design for the world.  Afterall, what could be more awful that the gradual (and for some, the eternal) distancing from the Spirit of God who constitutes the image of God in humanity?

… the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Here’s a few gems from Stanley Hauerwas’ interview on his new book, “Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence.

I have argued that Christians’ first political responsibility is to be the church, and by being the church they should understand that their first political loyalty is to God, and the God we worship as Christians, in a manner that understands that we are not first and foremost about making democracy work, but about the truthful worship of the true God.

This is a deep misunderstanding about how Christianity works. Of course we believe that God is God and we are not and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that this is not a set of propositions — but is rather embedded in a community of practices that make those beliefs themselves work and give us a community by which we are shaped. Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance.

HAUERWAS: The difficulty about becoming a public official in America is that the training necessary for being a politician makes you the kind of person that can’t distinguish a lie from the truth anymore.

HOMILETICS: So politicians should not go to law school, they should go through seminary.

HAUERWAS: That would be a really good idea — a way of formation. But then, you see, one of the things that bothers me deeply about the situation we’re in is how seldom preachers tell their congregations the truth! That’s where you’ve got to start in a genuine politics.

Explanations are attempts to domesticate the wildness of God’s Spirit in a cause-and-effect model. You can’t explain God. If you think an explanation is possible, then you think that there’s some principle that is more determinative than God to explain God. One way to put it: People say, “Well how do I know that Jesus was raised from the dead?” I say, “If you need a theory of truth to explain that Jesus was raised from the dead, worship that theory, don’t worship Jesus!”

Read the whole thing here and be sure to check out the book as well.