I serve as part-time chaplain to people who are in jail. Twice a week I make my way through five thick steel doors into the dreary center of Skagit County’s high security facility. Guards let men who are interested in my Spanish Bible study out of their cells and pods, escorting them into the jail library and multipurpose room, where I await them.
Most of the Mexican and Chicano men I read the Bible with are in crisis. They are charged with various crimes. They are locked in small cells 18 hours a day for the months it often takes to go through the courts.
Many inmates feel completely cut off: Nobody will accept their collect calls and often nobody visits them during their limited visiting hours. Parents and girl friends often want nothing more to do with them after they’ve abused relationships by crazy drug and alcohol-induced behaviors. Some face years of prison time. Many face deportation by the Border Patrol.
When I have a new group or individual I have not met I often ask them:
“Do any of you sense that God is with you in any way? Do you hear God’s voice to you here in the jail?”
People look down. Some are shaking their heads back and forth. “Nada,” they often say. “No, I don’t see or feel God.”
I tell them that I believe that God is with them. I sympathize with the great difficulty involved in perceiving this invisible God. We read together that Sunday’s reading:
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”
You must be one of Jesus’ sheep to hear his voice, says Jesus in today’s Gospel. What does this mean? How do we become a sheep? This sounds even harder than being born again. I tell the men that there are ways to begin hearing God’s voice right there in the jail.
“While you are here in this jail, it is my hope that you will come to see for yourself that God is with you, that God is for you,” I tell them. “While this is not all up to you, it helps to learn to see and hear.
How might you hear this voice? In the same way that you are not a sheep, this may not be an actual voice. It may be something you feel or perceive deep inside. You may feel respected or cared for like never before. You may experience peace, or healing, or an exciting challenge. Following leads to more hearing as you come to know God, who is actively leading you.
Since God is leading, you might hear God’s voice anywhere. You are more likely to be listening though when you are in a place of need, or brokenness.
I often get collect calls from people who I met in my jail Bible studies who are now in prison. Manny, a 24 year old guy has been calling me lately. He is in solitary confinement in Walla Walla State Penitentiary. When he calls I happen to be reading the beginning of Genesis:
“In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”
Manny tells me he’s really been depressed lately. He’s felt submerged in darkness. I read him what I’ve just been reading, and point out that God is present in the darkness. God is creating.
“Do you feel God’s Presence there with you Manny?” I ask.
“Yea man, I do,” said Manny.
“What’s it like?” I ask. “When do you feel it?”
“Well like today man. Today I felt it.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, “That is if you want to.”
Manny told me how he and Pookie, another guy I know who happens to be in the solitary confinement cell on the floor directly above him, have been talking. He told me how they discovered that if they flush their toilets at the same time, emptying the water between them, they can talk through the toilet bowls.
He tells me that just that morning he had read a Psalm to Pookie.
“I read him the twenty-third Psalm. That’s my favorite,” said Manny. “It really touched him, man,” continued Manny. “And it really touched me that it touched my brother.”
I nearly drop the phone, as I too am hearing the voice of God as Manny spoke. The Greek word for voice, by the way is “phone.”
“That is amazing,” I tell him. “Do you know that in Genesis 1:2-3, the story continues: “The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters… and then God said: Let there be light.”
“The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters of your toilet bowls!” I say, “and look, God spoke.” Manny is blown away and I am too.
I try to imagine the good news that they were hearing their in their narrow cells, alone.
Try to imagine yourself right now in a solitary confinement cell of a big prison. Envision yourself hearing this Psalm through your toilet. What good news would you be hearing?
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff — they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long (Psalm 23).
“My sheep hear my voice,” says Jesus. These sheep include Manny, Pookie, you, me – even when we are straying or in dark places and finding faith impossible.
“I know them, and they follow me,” continues Jesus. “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”
Manny and Pookie, you and me are safe in God’s tender but firm grip. And God is so humble that he speaks even through the soiled mouth of toilet bowls.

I exercise my ministry as executive director of Tierra Nueva in part through my role as chaplain to inmates in a county jail and pastor to immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. I also lead retreats and teach seminars to leaders who work with people on the margins in different parts of the world. As a Bible scholar and pastor in my particular ministry contexts it is almost impossible to not be politically engaged (though not necessarily in a partisan way). The effects of my context on my own research and the nature of my engagement will become evident as I lead you through the following Bible study on Matthew 27.

I am amazed by how the Holy Spirit is at work actualizing Jesus’ work of breaking down the “barrier of the dividing wall” (Eph 1:14) through the gift of prophesy. Prophetic words bridge divides between God and humans, the past and present, believers and unbelievers, people of diverse ethnicities, nationalities, theological traditions, political ideologies, bringing reconciliation amidst every imaginable difference. God is at work reconciling the world to himself, gathering his children into a united family in Christ.

And why should I be surprised? Early in John’s Gospel it is written that those who receive Jesus and believe in his name are given authority to become God’s children who are “born of God” (1:12-13). Intimacy with God is a lifelong process that grows as we learn to hear the Father’s voice, see what God is doing, become transformed by his compassion and engage in Jesus-like actions. Jesus says:

Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself, unless it is something he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows him all things that he himself is doing; and greater works than these will he show him, that you may marvel (John 5:19-20). (See also Jn 5:30; 8:28; 12:49).
As we become more aware of our identity as God’s beloved sons and daughters, the Father will inevitably seek to reconcile us with estranged siblings. Friendship with God will also lead us into friendship with God’s many friends, including sinners, bringing us across every imaginable wall of separation as the Father makes us one as Jesus (John 17). Intimacy with God is an invitation into Jesus’ way of discerning his ministry of reconciliation.

For most of my Christian life I was estranged from the body of Christ charismatic. Years of ministry among the poor in war-torn Central America and among undocumented immigrants and inmates in labor camps and a jail in the United States put me at odds with my government and with many evangelicals and charismatic Christians who supported its wars and laws. I was inspired by Jesus’ life and teachings in the Gospels, the desert fathers, liberation theology and people like Dorothy Day, Archbishop Romero, Jean Vanier, and Mother Theresa. I pursued academic study of Scripture, contemplative spiritual practices and sought to combat the roots of poverty and oppression through contextual Bible study, sustainable development and human rights advocacy.

Week after week over a ten-year period I counseled inmates and immigrants in crisis and led bilingual bible studies in our local jail and storefront at Tierra Nueva in Washington State. I saw firsthand how harsh laws and immigration policies, poverty, drugs and alcohol destroy people’s lives. I became increasingly discontented with the gospel I was sharing, and longed to see more of God’s power to bring transformation. My desperation for breakthrough in ministry became so great that I ventured across the line into an ecumenism broader than I’d ever considered– attending a pastors’ and leaders’ conference at the infamous Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship.

I was struck from the start how much the Holy Spirit was moving during a session on the importance of forgiveness. As the speaker taught and prayed vivid memories came to mind of offenses and judgments held against people in my distant past who I felt compelled to forgive. After another stirring session on Jesus’ ministry announcing the Kingdom of God I lined up to receive prayer with hundreds of others for greater fruitfulness in ministry, and soon had my turn before a young man from the UK on the ministry team. His words opened me up as he spoke what only God could have shown him:

“I see you in a circle of men in red uniforms, I think they are prisoners,” he started out, getting my rapt attention. “The Father is saying ‘I am delighted how you love my prisoners and I’m going to give you deeper revelation from the Bible that will make their hearts burn,’ he continued, moving me with this reference to my favorite picture from the Emmaus road story in Luke 24:13ff before a final unexpected clincher. “He is releasing an anointing for healing on you so your words will be confirmed with the signs that follow.” I fell to the ground overcome by the Spirit, my hands burning. I continued to be touched more and more by the Holy Spirit at that conference in ways that transformed my life and ministry.

Since that time God has used me to invite many others from diverse camps in the body of Christ across lines of division to receive from each other. Over the past six years I have learned to identify the Spirit’s promptings to pray for people in ways that show me Jesus’ longing to reconcile people. Once after a Bible study on Jesus’ healing of the bent-over woman in Luke 13:10ff a Chicano gangster named Santos asked if I would pray for him for lifelong nervous tick that caused his face to dramatically flinch several times a minute. Upon praying I got an impression that he had been beaten in the head by his father as a child. When I asked him he nodded and began to weep. After leading him through prayers of forgiveness of his father his humiliating tick went away and he gave his life fully to Jesus. A Chinese woman in London was healed of chronic back pain and insomnia last April after she forgave her father for beating her, her siblings and mother after the Holy Spirit revealed this prophetically. While I have seen God heal hundreds of people over these years in many nations and subcultures, what most touches people is the recognition that God personally knows, loves and welcomes them into his family and offers the Holy Spirit to bear witness that they are indeed his children (Rom 8:15-17).

The Spirit that came on Jesus at his baptism, which his followers received at Pentecost inducts us into filial intimacy and membership in God’s borderless family. The tongues of fire that rested on each one gathered ignited their tongues to proclaim the mighty deeds across the boundaries of language and culture. Peter’s use of Joel 2 to interpret the coming of the Spirit re-enforces this notion of the prophetic as barrier removing: sons and daughters, young and old, female and male slaves all will prophesy (Acts 3:17-18). An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, directing him to go to the road to Gaza where he met an Ethiopian eunuch who came to faith and carried the gospel into Africa (Acts 8:26ff). Peter received prophetic revelation in the form of a vision that opened him to minister to Gentile Cornelius (Acts 10). As we grow in intimate communion with God we will find ourselves bringing Good News across borders that show that in fact the dividing wall of hostility is down and “[we] are no longer strangers and aliens, but [we] are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God’s household” (Eph 2:19).

For over 28 years I have pursued a Gospel that has potency to change lives and mobilize people as agents of transformation. I long to see transformation from below, and regularly anticipate seeing this happen among peasants in rural Honduras, Mexican immigrant farm workers in migrant labor camps in Washington State and with inmates in Skagit County Jail or in other countries. I find that men and women entrapped in addictions, violence, penal systems and poverty are often desperate enough to be open themselves to help from God. However negative images of God and self often sabotage the conversion process.

Transformation begins when we find ourselves in some way met by a God who reveals himself as one who knows and respects us just as we are. Facilitating this transformation involves identifying and breaking agreement with imaginary images of God and self that demobilize us from becoming freer subjects. The process of conversion involves progressive differentiation of images of God and self from false notions of otherness and identity to increasingly truer perceptions. This happens through deliberate confrontation of negative theology and most importantly, through experiences of the authentic Other in Christ. This frees humans to be the subject of their desire.

Confronting negative images of God

Many people on the margins of society have images of God that are mostly negative in ways that hold them back from any positive benefit or any spiritual attraction whatsoever. For many the “other”(the disempowering god) has already been defined by core experiences of human father who abandoned or rejected them, punished or abused them, was impossible to please and controlling or permissive and negligent.

In contrast to these negative images of God, New Testament writers depict Jesus as God’s most total self-revelation. In Jesus, God becomes flesh in ways that make room for humans to emerge as subjects.

In these last days God has spoken to us in his Son, … and he is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature. (Heb 1:2-3)

For he delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of this beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And he is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation (Col 1:13-15).

In the Gospel of John there is a clear articulation of God’s unexpected otherness revealed in Jesus. In the prologue the logos is identified as present with God at the beginning and as actually being God. To avoid any confusion the writer emphasizes that this logos-God created all things, is the life and light shining on people and cannot be overcome by darkness. The writer of John emphasizes that this word/life/light enlightens every human (1:9),

Yet in a surprising twist the prologue states that the world does not recognize the word who becomes flesh, nor do his own people receive him! This is because a God “full of grace and truth” is completely different than the familiar, dominant images of God as an all-powerful, imposing, aggressive and conquering Sovereign. This word/life/light God represents an Other who is powerful. Yet at the same time there is an Alterite to this kind of power, and it can go unperceived. It can be resisted.

Receiving/believing in this very different God leads to being born of God— a filial event called adoption. When this one is received and believed people share in God’s “other” power, which is called exousia, “authority.”

But a many as received him, who believe in his name, to them he gave the authority to become children of God (Jn 1:12)

Does being born of God according to John shift people away from the limitations of their human identities as addicted, bound, imprisoned, unemployed, and oppressed? People on the margins are interested in knowing what sort of authority might be available to them over familiar kinds of powers that oppress. They want to know what it means to become a child of God.

John’s Gospel describes with great subtlety the process of becoming such an empowered child of God—and it all has to do with communion with Jesus. Human witnesses point to this Other God, who is described quite clearly as Jesus in John 1:18 “No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known.”

John the Baptist articulates the role of the announcer of this Only One (true Alterite) as the “voice crying in the wilderness, ‘make straight the way of the Lord’ (Jn 1:23). He points people to Jesus, who himself invites potential disciples to come and see where he stays. His team grows as he exercises his prophetic gifting: naming Simon “Cephas/Peter”, seeing Nathaniel where only God could see him and affirming his true identity “behold an Israelite in whom is no guile!” (1:47).

Often my colleagues and I find ourselves sharing spontaneous impressions that people recognize as bringing to light details that only God could know. Recently while praying for a Mexican farm worker in his late thirties a faint picture flashed across my mind of an adult throwing rocks at young boy who was shepherded animals. I asked him if his father ever lost his temper and threw rocks at him when he was a boy, causing him to run away terrified. He began to cry and grabbed his leg where he had been hit. That day he forgave his father for this offence, which was one of many others that contributed to this man’s fear of displeasing employers and others in authority.

The Apostle Paul writes that the one who prophesies “speaks to people for their strengthening, encouragement, and consolation” (1 Cor 14:3) and makes God real to a person who do not yet believe “when the secrets of his heart are disclosed” (1 Cor 14:25).

A close look at Jesus’ prophetic ministry as depicted in the Gospels overturns alienating traditional images of God. Jesus’ revelation to the astounded Samaritan woman that she had had five husbands as he offered her living water in John 4 is one of many examples that subverts contemporary readers assumption. Jesus’ witness regularly challenges common beliefs that God favors the righteous over sinners, law-abiding people over criminals, the rich over the poor, the beautiful over the ugly, the intelligent over the ignorant, offering flashes of a very different sort of God.

People assume that God is like a rigorous admissions officer at an exclusive University or a demanding, scrupulous employer examining resumes— choosing only the most deserving into his ranks—especially if they are to be ministry workers or any kind of leader.

I recently led a Bible study on 1 Corinthians 1:26-2:5 to a group of 12-14 bedraggled Caucasian and Hispanic inmates in the jail. Most of the men were in their 20s and 30s were addicted to drugs and alcohol, had not completed high school and would be hard pressed to qualify for anything but low-wage jobs. Before reading the text I asked the men what sort of people they think God would chose to be pastors or missionaries.

“People from higher social classes,” said one man. “People who were smart and educated, who had their shit together,” he continued.

“I think he’d chose people who’d been through lots of big troubles,” said an older man. “He’d want people who could relate to ordinary people like us.”

“Do you think they’d have to be educated, able to explain things well, be good public speakers and all?” I asked.

I could see that the men were unsure how to answer, divided between the what they assumed to be the conventional answer that God chooses strong, smart, righteous people and the wisdom of the older man that included them. I invited someone to read the texts and watch people’s eyes brighten as the words witnessed to an Other unlike normal human authorities.

Consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that he might nullify the things that are… (1 Cor 1:26-28).

A God who purposely chooses those not mighty, noble, brilliant but rather those who are despised and nothing is a God that gives them hope. What kinds of God reveals through being crucified, through speaking through the weak and nobodies? The next reading brought even more hope to the inarticulate ones there in the circle.

Brothers I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God… And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words f wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God (1 Cor 2:-5).

I often invite people to read the account of Jesus’ calling of the fishermen in Matthew 4:18-22, asking questions like “where were Jesus’ first recruits and what were they looking for when Jesus called them? Inmates are sometimes visibly afraid to state the obvious as the “correct” answer as it do directly counters the dominant theology. “At the sea looking for fish” is contextualized to “at work looking for money” and people are invited to include their actual places of work—even if they are drug houses, bars, factories or fields.

When I ask people what Jesus’ call of the disciples in Matthew tells us about God people begin to perceive the refreshing otherness revealed in Jesus. God comes to where we are, wherever we are. God calls people who are not visibly seeking God, righteous or religious in any way to join him. Luke 15:1’s description that “all the tax-collectors and sinners drew near to Jesus to listen to him” confounds people expecting God to be a law-enforcement agent type. There must have been something about Jesus that attracted the bad guys. What was it?

I often invite people to look at the immediate aftermath of the first disciples’ following of Jesus. In response to the question “where did they go and what did they do?” The text offers a compelling picture of an adventurous life that positively impacts hurting people that is far more attractive than minimum-wage jobs, drugs and alcohol or a life of crime.

And Jesus was going about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people… and they brought to him all who were ill, taken with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and he healed them. (Matt 4:23-24)

In our weekly jail Bible studies, visits to migrant camps and rural villages in Central America and everywhere we go we regularly pray for suffering people and witness God’s power to heal. Healing often happens before people come to faith, undermining the dominant image of God that sees healing or any sort of benefit as a reward for good behavior.

Once I offered to pray for a man suffering from shoulder and lower back pain after the police had violently pulled his arms behind his back nearly dislocating his shoulders to handcuff him. They had thrown him in the back of the police car and the handcuffs had dug into his back. Before praying for him I asked if he felt he needed to forgive the police for their excessive use of force.

“No,” he said. “I was drunk and resisting arrest. I’m a big dude and was pretty out of control They were just doing their job.”

I prayed that Jesus would undo the damage done by the police and show the man how much he loved him regardless of his violence. I stepped away and asked him if he felt any improvement. He said he felt the pain leave his lower back but said he was sure that if he drew his arms back behind his back the pain would be intolerable. He began to gingerly move his arms behind his back and amazement came over his face. “I’ll grant it to you. I’ll grant it to you. The pain is completely gone,” he said, dropping to his chair and crying with his head in his hands. Like in the Gospel accounts we regularly see God’s healing presence overturn people’s negative expectations as the one full of grace and truth makes himself known concretely.

Last year I traveled to Guatemala to train pastors working with gang members. We visited one of Central America’s most infamous prisons to visit the gang member inmates of perhaps the most notorious street gang in the Western Hemisphere. A week before leaving for Guatemala City I dreamed of a heavily-tattooed man with a hole in his right side. I met this man in the second prison– a big intimidating guy with tattoos and a myriad of scars from stab wounds and bullets all over his body—including a big indentation on his right side from a near-death shootout with the police.

This man, a gang leader serving a 135-year sentence, ended up taking me back into the heart of the prison to find a bathroom, and then inviting me into his cell. I shared with him my dream and he was visibly moved, welcoming my offer to pray for him. He told me about his worries about his son and shared his longing for God’s peace and love in his heart. I prayed for him and anointed him with oil.

He led me back into the yard where we succeeded in gathering many inmates for a Bible study on Jesus’ call of Matthew the tax collector. I described how Matthew was a tax-collector—a member of a notorious class of people that nearly everyone hated.

“Who might fit the description of tax-collectors today?” I asked.

Gangs in Guatemala force businesses in their territories to pay “protection taxes” [from themselves] and taxi drivers to pay “circulation taxes”- and the men smiled and looked at each other, acknowledging that they fit the description.

“So what was Matthew doing when Jesus called him?” I ask.

The men look surprised when they note that he wasn’t following any rules, seeking God or doing anything religious, but practicing his despised trade when Jesus showed up on the street and chose him.

“So let’s see if Jesus made Matthew leave his gang to be a Christian,” I suggest, and people look closely at the next verse.

There Jesus is eating at Matthew’s house with other tax-collectors and sinners and the disciples.

“So who followed whom?” I ask, excited to see people’s reaction.

The men could see the Jesus had apparently followed gangster Matthew into his barrio and joined his homies for a meal.

“So what do you think you guys, would you let Jesus join your gang?” I ask, looking directly to the man I’d just prayed for in his cell and the other gang chief.

They were caught off guard by such a question—but there we all were, deep in their turf being welcomed, Bibles, guitar and all– and nobody was resisting. Big smiles lit up both their faces as we looked at Jesus’ reaction to the Pharisees’ distain. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”

I ask them if they are at all offended to think of themselves as sick—and they don’t seem to be at all. I’ve got their attention and Jesus’ final word to the religious insiders hits these guys like a spray of spiritual bullets from a drive by:

“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

Jesus’ firm dismissal of the accusing Pharisees “go and learn” and clear preference for sinners as the “called” drew the circle of gang members irresistibly into Jesus’ company.

I was delighted that the men agreed to let us lay hands on every one of their bare, heavily-tatted backs as my colleague sang worship songs over them, including: “Jesus, friend of sinners, we love you.” I heard from a pastor that the gang leader I had prayed with was amazed at how his “homies” (fellow gang members) were letting us pray for him and whispered: “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the Presence of the Holy Spirit in my life and seen the homies at peace. I feel really good.”

Two months later last November 22nd I spent a day in a bleak French prison in Lyon where suicide was rampant. I was there training French prison chaplains and ministering to inmates. That night I took a train back to Paris to learn the horrific news that the Guatemalan gang leader I’d prayed with who had the hole in his side and three others had been taken in the middle of the night by the police and placed into a prison of 900 inmates that were all violently anti-gang. On the morning of November 22, 2008 rioting inmates killed, decapitated and mutilated the bodies of these four men who we’d laid hands on to bless.

While carrying off these men authorities also burned all the 150+ inmates possessions, sheets and makeshift shacks they’d built for conjugal visits in a big bonfire—leaving them beaten up, naked and traumatized. Local gang pastors boldly accompanied the shattered families and inmates in the aftermath of this event. They brought over 25 huge bags of clothes collected from churches, deeply touching the gang inmates who are used to being despised and excluded.

Yet anti-gang sentiment is rising in the country and scapegoating continues in full swing. Recently authorities invaded the prison again and apprehended the other leader and two others, transporting to another prison. A plot was exposed showing their killings were being arranged for the anniversary of last year’s killing of four. This time high level advocacy on their behalf exposed the plot and led to greater security and visits for these inmates. The gang members inside and outside the prison and their families have been deeply moved by Christian solidarity.

Direct confrontation of false images of God, fresh readings of Biblical texts, pastoral accompaniment, advocacy, prophetic ministry and healing prayer are some of the ways that prepare people to meet God as an Other who transforms. The kindness of God leads to repentance—understood as a change of heart (Rom 2:4). So we do everything we can to effectively pluck up, break down, destroy and overthrow the false while also facilitating, ushering in, and preparing the way for the revelation of the kind God who has the power to save.

For over 28 years I have pursued a Gospel with power to change lives and mobilize people as agents of transformation. I long to see transformation from below as the Good News of Jesus Christ impacts the poorest of the poor in every area of their lives and society. I have ministered among peasants in rural Honduras, Mexican immigrant farm workers in migrant labor camps in Washington State and with inmates in Skagit County Jail and in other countries. I find that men and women trapped in addictions, violence, penal systems, poverty and the like are often desperate enough to open themselves to help from God. However negative images of God and self constantly threaten the conversion process. These must be identified and countered in a holistic way as the basis for empowerment and transformation. Our mission to people caught up in places of greatest spiritual darkness require a vaster array of approaches, greater unity and collaboration within the body of Christ, strategic engagement with social-service, business other players and advocacy before civil authorities.

Confronting oppressive images of God begins as trust in built through authentic relationships. Negative perceptions about God and self come from abusive parenting, unjust social structures, experiencing poverty, calamities, and other suffering, traditional religious interpretations, spiritual oppression and other sources. The origins of oppressive theology must be identified and addressed in a holistic way that includes proclamation and teaching backed up by signs and wonders, advocacy, accompaniment, counseling, inner healing and deliverance, sustainable development, preventative health care and many other approaches. A constantly evolving biblical theology informed by Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit’s guidance, intercession and worship and fruitful engagement with the larger body of Christ and world must ground our efforts.

God’s respectful, saving Presence and high view of humans launches the Bible’s story of redemption. The Spirit hovers over the darkness and chaos and God speaks light into existence, and orders time and space (Gen 1:1ff). God makes humans in his image and likeness, commanding them to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:28). This reflects God’s mission to bless, send out and multiply his image-bearers to fill the earth with his glory. This is nothing less than a vision of the Kingdom of heaven invading earth. Humans in right relationship with God are given authority to subdue, and rule over an earth under the power of the ruler of this world. This authority is lost when we let the creature define God, “did God say…?” Letting creation itself or competing voices reveal God rather than God’s very words and acts erodes our confidence in God’s total goodness and grace causing us to live by grasping, by the sweat of our brow instead of by gift.

Restoration is only possible when we find ourselves in some way met by a God who reveals himself as one who pursues us, meeting, confronting and yet loving us in the midst of our sin.

Cain is the first human God pursues—and we see that God’s ministry priority from day one outside the garden is to deal with this violent, resistant humankind embodied in Cain. Persistent pursuit of notorious sinners through acts of love and holistic witness must be one of the church’s highest ministry priorities.

Even for God this mission is not easy. The Lord does not succeed in stopping Cain from killing his brother Abel, even after his timely intervention in the heat of Cain’s anger with one-on-one counseling “why are you angry…” personal mentoring “if you do well…” and discipling “sin is crouching at the door, and it’s desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain kills his brother anyway, but God does not give up on him or on anyone following in his footsteps.

The Lord confronts Cain for his murder, advocating for the voiceless victim Abel by directly questioning the powerful: “Cain, where is your brother?” God confronts the perpetrator with the secret sins, the hidden crime as the One who sees and hears the cries of the oppressed, and knows every clandestine burial site: “the voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (4:10). God reveals himself as an advocate for the oppressed who is totally committed to justice on behalf of the voiceless victims. Caring for orphans, widows, the unborn, the disabled, all oppressed minority groups, victims of human trafficking, and others must be high priority for missions today.

The Lord describes hard consequences coming to perpetrator Cain as a result of his killing—not as direct punishments but natural consequences of his violence. “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you; you shall be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth” (Gen 4:11-12). Judgment leads Cain to cry outs to God.

“My punishment is too great to bear! Behold, thou hast driven me this day from the face of the ground; and from thy face I shall be hidden, and I shall be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, and it will come about that whoever finds me will kill me” (Gen 4:13-14). God’s response shows amazing mercy to undeserving sinners and illustrates the later word: “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. God’s stern warning of hard consequences is announced to all who decide to use violence against the violent, even in the name of justice. “Whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold.”

God puts a sign of protection on Cain to keep people from killing him— showing special interest in violent perpetrators. This continues through Scripture and must inform our mission priorities today. Christians must die daily in the waters of baptism, emerging cleansed from allegiances to nation, laws, policies, attitudes and practices that would disqualify them from bearing good news to enemies and sinners.

While Cain goes away from the presence of God in spite of God’s best efforts, like the prodigal son he is coming back—and the Father pursues him with open arms. Will the prodigals find themselves wanting to return to us? Are we joining the Father in running towards and embracing the broken, returning ones?

We see God’s preferential option for sinners continues through Scripture. God chooses many key biblical characters who were violent men or criminals: Moses, Samson, Jacob, Judah, David, Matthew the tax-collector, Simon the zealot, the Apostle Paul.

God cares about violent perpetrators for many reasons. He longs to see an end to violence of every kind and pursues would-be violators and seasoned killers to help them face their sin and receive healing for their deepest wounds—before they do more damage to others and themselves. Since the violent are those who remain alive, who “win” over and against the weak, God pursues these survivors, winning them over through the only effective violence, the violence of love– the kindness that leads to repentance.

God’s mission continues throughout Scripture, and is ultimately successful in Jesus, who undoes the entire system of vengeance by letting himself be delivered over into the hands of violent men for our (and their) salvation. Should this not be one of our highest priorities today?

Violent men continue to be marked with the sign of the cross. Followers of Jesus must pray for the protection and peace God afforded Cain to be on contemporary equivalents of Cain (whether they be local criminals or Al Queda or Taliban combatants) —and for the 70×7 forgiveness that Jesus taught and embodied to overcome the 77 vengeance curse of Cain’s descendant Lamech (Gen 4:24; Matt 18:22) that menaces in places where violence is on the rise. Jesus accomplished this as he died at the hands of violent men, between two criminals. And we worship him for this unfathomable love that saves.

We must pray for people caught up in violence—for safety so they will grow up into their highest callings in Christ. We must also pray for God’s powerful presence of love to stop people currently engaged in violence or plotting acts of vengeance or terror in their tracks as the resurrected Jesus stopped Saul in his on the road to Damascus. We long to hear all these gang members testify with Paul:

“I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful, putting me into service; even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. And yet I was shown mercy, because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus. It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. And yet for this reason I found mercy, in order that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate his perfect patience, as an example for those who could believe in Him for eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Tim 1:12-17)

Facilitating Transformation through Confronting Negative Images of God
Facilitating transformation of individuals oppressed by negative images of God involves us first identifying and breaking agreement with false notions of God and self that demobilize us from becoming free subjects in God’s Kingdom. The process of conversion involves progressive differentiation of images of God and self from false notions of God’s and our own identity to increasingly truer perceptions. This happens through deliberate confrontation of negative theology and most importantly, through experiences of the fullest, most authentic encounter with God in Jesus Christ. This frees humans to be the subject of their desire.

Many people on the margins of society have images of God that are mostly negative in ways that hold them back from any positive benefit or any spiritual attraction whatsoever. For many “god” has already been defined by core experiences of human father or authority figures who abandoned or rejected them, punished or abused them, was impossible to please and controlling or permissive and negligent. Negative images of God also come through people’s assumptions that calamities, injustice, sickness and other forms of oppression are willed by God or sent as punishments.

When my Honduran peasant colleague Fernando and I first began asking impoverished peasants why their corn and bean harvest were so dismal I was startled by their near unanimous responses: “It’s God’s will.” We launched our ministry Tierra Nueva by starting a demonstration farm– cultivating steep, eroded mountainsides using contoured terraces, rock or pasture grass barriers to prevent further erosion and soil building strategies like compost and cover crops. We planted corn, beans, vegetables and fruit trees to the curve of the land, experimented with fish ponds, fuel efficient mud stoves and other appropriate technologies.

Our first year’s harvest was ten times better than people were accustomed to seeing, drawing the attention of peasants from the surrounding area. We helped those interested in attempting our approach establish an experimental plot on their own land, discipling them in these organic-intensive farming methods. When they saw for themselves that protecting and rebuilding soil led to dramatically improved harvests, God was “off the hook,” no longer to blame— and a space was opened for them to hear about a good God who does not will crop failures and poverty.

My wife Gracie and our Guatemalan colleague Catalina taught vegetable gardening, nutritious recipes, hygiene and other preventative health measures people found their health improving. As people learned that amoebas and bacteria could be eradicated through boiling their water, once again God was no longer to blame for the premature death of their children through malnutrition and dysentery. Health education brought a needed corrective to traditional explanations that attributed most common health problems to witchcraft or curses from enemy neighbors. While deliverance continued to be important in combating other kinds of oppression, subsistence farming and health education are also critical for community wellbeing—easing tensions due to false accusations and taking away power from local corianders (witch doctors).

While negative images of God can be removed through helping people see natural causes for common afflictions and social problems, the Good News of God’s self-revelation as Jesus is essential. We find that getting people to read and study the Bible, though very important, does not automatically bring clarity. We need to clearly present Jesus as the full embodiment of the Old Testament God and interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures—law and prophets. When Jesus is transfigured before his disciples the Father makes it clear that listening to Jesus trumps Moses and Elijah. Without this continual clarification people get tripped up in legalistic and excluding appropriations of OT laws or justifications of violence based on Joshua. Reading the Bible for Good News begins with clear New Testament teachings regarding Jesus.

In these last days God has spoken to us in his Son, … and he is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature (Heb 1:2-3)

For he delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of this beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And he is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation (Col 1:13-15).

In the Gospel of John there is a clear articulation of God’s unexpected otherness/holiness revealed in Jesus. In the prologue the logos is identified as present with God at the beginning and as actually being God. To avoid any confusion the writer emphasizes that this logos-God created all things, is the life and light shining on people and cannot be overcome by darkness. The writer of John emphasizes that this word/life/light enlightens every human (1:9).

Yet in a surprising twist the prologue states that the world does not recognize the word who becomes flesh, nor do his own people receive him! This is because a God “full of grace and truth” is completely different than the familiar, dominant images of God as an all-powerful, imposing, aggressive and conquering Sovereign. This word/life/light represents a God who is powerful. Yet at the same time there is a foreignness, and holiness to this kind of power, and it can go unperceived. It can be resisted.

Receiving/believing in this very different God leads to being born of God— a filial event called adoption. When this one is received and believed people share in God’s “other” power, which is called exousia, “authority.”

But a many as received him, who believe in his name, to them he gave the authority to become children of God (Jn 1:12)

Does being born of God shift people away from the limitations of their human identities as addicted, bound, imprisoned, unemployed, and oppressed? People on the margins are desperate to experience authority over longstanding habits and powers that oppress.

John’s Gospel describes with great subtlety the process of becoming such an empowered child of God—and it all has to do with communion with Jesus. Human witnesses point to Jesus as the fullest revelation of God: “No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known” (John 1:18).

John the Baptist articulates the role of all missionary announcers of Jesus as the “voice crying in the wilderness, ‘make straight the way of the Lord’ (Jn 1:23). He points people to prophetically to Jesus, who himself invites potential disciples to come and see where he stays. His team grows as he exercises authority by means of his prophetic gifting: naming Simon “Cephas/Peter”, seeing Nathaniel where only God could see him and affirming his true identity “behold an Israelite in whom is no guile!” (1:47). The role of prophetic ministry is to directly challenges negative views of self—inviting people into their highest callings.

Often my colleagues and I find ourselves sharing spontaneous impressions that people recognize as bringing to light details that only God could know. Recently while praying for a Mexican farm worker in his late thirties a faint picture flashed across my mind of an adult throwing rocks at young boy who was shepherded animals. I asked him if his father ever lost his temper and threw rocks at him when he was a boy, causing him to run away terrified. He began to cry and grabbed his leg where he had been hit. That day he forgave his father for this offence, which was one of many others that contributed to this man’s fear of displeasing employers and others in authority.

The Apostle Paul writes that the one who prophesies “speaks to people for their strengthening, encouragement, and consolation” (1 Cor 14:3) and makes God real to a person who do not yet believe “when the secrets of his heart are disclosed” (1 Cor 14:25).

A close look at Jesus’ prophetic ministry as depicted in the Gospels overturns alienating traditional images of God. Jesus’ revelation to the astounded Samaritan woman that she had had five husbands as he offered her living water in John 4 is one of many examples that subverts contemporary readers assumptions. Jesus’ witness regularly challenges common beliefs that God favors the righteous over sinners, law-abiding people over criminals, the rich over the poor, the beautiful over the ugly, the intelligent over the ignorant, offering flashes of a very different sort of God.

People assume that God is like a rigorous admissions officer at an exclusive University or a demanding, scrupulous employer examining resumes— choosing only the most deserving into his ranks—especially if they are to be ministry workers or any kind of leader. Yet right from the beginning of the Bible we see that God pursues the most unlikely candidates.

I recently led a Bible study on 1 Corinthians 1:26-2:5 to a group of 12-14 bedraggled Caucasian and Hispanic inmates in the jail. Most of the men were in their 20s and 30s were addicted to drugs and alcohol, had not completed high school and would be hard pressed to qualify for anything but low-wage jobs. Before reading the text I asked the men what sort of people they think God would chose to be pastors or missionaries.

“People from higher social classes,” said one man. “People who were smart and educated, who had their shit together,” he continued.

“I think he’d chose people who’d been through lots of big troubles,” said an older man. “He’d want people who could relate to ordinary people like us.”

“Do you think they’d have to be educated, able to explain things well, be good public speakers and all?” I asked.

I could see that the men were unsure how to answer, divided between the what they assumed to be the conventional answer that God chooses strong, smart, righteous people and the wisdom of the older man that included them. I invited someone to read the texts and watch people’s eyes brighten as the words witness to a God very unlike normal human authorities.

Consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that he might nullify the things that are… (1 Cor 1:26-28).

A God who purposely chooses those not mighty, noble, brilliant but rather those who are despised and nothing is a God that gives them hope. What kinds of God reveals through being crucified, through speaking through the weak and nobodies? The next reading brought even more hope to the inarticulate ones there in the circle.

Brothers I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God… And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God (1 Cor 2:-5).

I often invite people to read the account of Jesus’ calling of the fishermen in Matthew 4:18-22, asking questions like “where were Jesus’ first recruits and what were they looking for when Jesus called them? Inmates are sometimes visibly afraid to state the obvious as the “correct” answer as it do directly counters the dominant theology. “At the sea looking for fish” is contextualized to “at work looking for money” and people are invited to include their actual places of work—even if they are drug houses, bars, factories or fields.

When I ask people what Jesus’ call of the disciples in Matthew tells us about God people begin to perceive the refreshing otherness revealed in Jesus. God comes to where we are, wherever we are. God calls people who are not visibly seeking God, righteous or religious in any way to join him. Luke 15:1’s description that “all the tax-collectors and sinners drew near to Jesus to listen to him” confounds people expecting God to be a law-enforcement agent type. There must have been something about Jesus that attracted the bad guys. What was it?

I often invite people to look at the immediate aftermath of the first disciples’ following of Jesus. In response to the question “where did they go and what did they do?” The text offers a compelling picture of an adventurous life that positively impacts hurting people that is far more attractive than minimum-wage jobs, drugs and alcohol or a life of crime.

And Jesus was going about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people… and they brought to him all who were ill, taken with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and he healed them. (Matt 4:23-24)

In our weekly jail Bible studies, visits to migrant camps and rural villages in Central America and everywhere we go we regularly lead Bible studies and pray for suffering people and witness God’s power to heal. Healing often happens before people come to faith, undermining the dominant image of God that sees sickness and a sanction for bad behavior and healing or any sort of benefit as a reward for good behavior.

Once I offered to pray for a man suffering from shoulder and lower back pain after the police had violently pulled his arms behind his back nearly dislocating his shoulders to handcuff him. They had thrown him in the back of the police car and the handcuffs had dug into his back. Before praying for him I asked if he felt he needed to forgive the police for their excessive use of force.

“No,” he said. “I was drunk and resisting arrest. I’m a big dude and was pretty out of control. They were just doing their job.”

I prayed that Jesus would undo the damage done by the police and show the man how much he loved him regardless of his violence. I stepped away and asked him if he felt any improvement. He said he felt the pain leave his lower back but said he was sure that if he drew his arms back behind his back the pain would be intolerable. He began to gingerly move his arms behind his back and amazement came over his face. “I’ll grant it to you. I’ll grant it to you. The pain is completely gone,” he said, dropping to his chair and crying with his head in his hands. Like in the Gospel accounts we regularly see God’s healing presence overturn people’s negative expectations as the one full of grace and truth makes himself known concretely.

Healing is one important dimension of an important Greek verb sotzo, which literally means “to save,” but is often used in the Gospels as a synonym for “to heal.” There are two other Greek verbs used in miracles of healing, therapueo ”to cure” and iaomai “to heal,” so Gospel writers seem to be making a special point in using the highly theological sotzo, which is used in Paul’s writings to refer almost exclusively to Jesus’ saving work on the cross for eternal life (see Rom 5:9-10; 8:24; 9:22; 10:9-10,13; 11:14,26; 1 Cor 1:18, 21; 1 Cor 3:15; 5:5; 7:16; 9:22; 10:33; 15:2; Eph 2:5,8; 1 Tim 1:15). This meaning of salvation for eternal life is also present in the Gospels (Mat 10:22; 16:25; 24:12-13; 19:16, 25; John 3:17; 5:34; 10:9; 12:47). However there are many occurrences of sotzo that are rendered in English translations as “heal” in miracle stories where people experience physical healing (Matt 9:21,22,22; Mk 3:4; 5:23, 28, 34; 6:56; 10:52; Luke 6:9; 8:48, 50; 17:19; 18:42; Acts 4:9; 14:9). In addition, we see many other occurrences of sotzo in the Gospels and Acts that refer to being saved or rescued from danger in the lifetime of the beneficiary (Matt 8:25; 14:30; 27:40, 42; 27:49; Mk 8:35, 35; Lk 9:55-56; 23:35, 37, 39; Acts 27:20, 31). This rich verb and the related noun soteria “salvation” present a holistic notion of saving/salvation that includes salvation for eternal life, supernatural healing and deliverance, but also physical acts of helping, rescuing and liberation. Mission must take into account this rich diversity of actions that communicate God’s love to our hurting world.

I traveled to Guatemala in September, 2008 to train pastors working with gang members. We visited one of Central America’s most infamous prisons to visit the gang member inmates of perhaps the most notorious street gang in the WesternHemisphere. A week before leaving for Guatemala City I dreamed of a heavily-tattooed man with a hole in his right side. I met this man in the second prison– a big intimidating guy with tattoos and a myriad of scars from stab wounds and bullets all over his body—including a big indentation on his right side from a near-death shootout with the police.

This man, a gang leader serving a 135-year sentence, ended up taking me back into the heart of the prison to find a bathroom, and then inviting me into his cell. I shared with him my dream and he was visibly moved, welcoming my offer to pray for him. He told me about his worries about his son and shared his longing for God’s peace and love in his heart. I prayed for him and anointed him with oil.

He led me back into the yard where we succeeded in gathering many inmates for a Bible study on Jesus’ call of Matthew the tax collector. I described how Matthew was a tax-collector—a member of a notorious class of people that nearly everyone hated.

“Who might fit the description of tax-collectors today?” I asked.

Gangs in Guatemala force businesses in their territories to pay “protection taxes” [from themselves] and taxi drivers to pay “circulation taxes”- and the men smiled and looked at each other, acknowledging that they fit the description.

“So what was Matthew doing when Jesus called him?” I ask.

The men look surprised when they note that he wasn’t following any rules, seeking God or doing anything religious, but practicing his despised trade when Jesus showed up on the street and chose him.

“So let’s see if Jesus made Matthew leave his gang to be a Christian,” I suggest, and people look closely at the next verse.

There Jesus is eating at Matthew’s house with other tax-collectors and sinners and the disciples.

“So who followed whom?” I ask, excited to see people’s reaction.

The men could see the Jesus had apparently followed gangster Matthew into his barrio and joined his homies for a meal.

“So what do you think you guys, would you let Jesus join your gang?” I ask, looking directly to the man I’d just prayed for in his cell and the other gang chief.

They were caught off guard by such a question—but there we all were, deep in their turf being welcomed, Bibles, guitar and all– and nobody was resisting. Big smiles lit up both their faces as we looked at Jesus’ reaction to the Pharisees’ distain. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”

I ask them if they are at all offended to think of themselves as sick—and they don’t seem to be at all. I’ve got their attention and Jesus’ final word to the religious insiders hits these guys like a spray of spiritual bullets from a drive by:

“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

Jesus’ firm dismissal of the accusing Pharisees “go and learn” and clear preference for sinners as the “called” drew the circle of gang members irresistibly into Jesus’ company.

I was delighted that the men agreed to let us lay hands on every one of their bare, heavily-tatted backs as my colleague sang worship songs over them, including: “Jesus, friend of sinners, we love you.” I heard from a pastor that the gang leader I had prayed with was amazed at how his “homies” (fellow gang members) were letting us pray for him and whispered: “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the Presence of the Holy Spirit in my life and seen the homies at peace. I feel really good.”

Two months later last November 22nd I spent a day in a bleak French prison in Lyon where suicide was rampant. I was there training French prison chaplains and ministering to inmates. That night I took a train back to Paris to learn the horrific news that the Guatemalan gang leader I’d prayed with who had the hole in his side and three others had been taken in the middle of the night by the police and placed into a prison of 900 inmates that were all violently anti-gang. On the morning of November 22, 2008 rioting inmates killed, decapitated and mutilated the bodies of these four men who we’d laid hands on to bless.

While carrying off these men authorities also burned all the 150+ inmates possessions, sheets and makeshift shacks they’d built for conjugal visits in a big bonfire—leaving them beaten up, naked and traumatized. Local gang pastors boldly accompanied the shattered families and inmates in the aftermath of this event. They brought over 25 huge bags of clothes collected from churches, deeply touching the gang inmates who are used to being despised and excluded.

Yet anti-gang sentiment is rising in the country and scapegoating continues in full swing. Recently authorities invaded the prison again and apprehended the other leader and two others, transporting to another prison. A plot was exposed showing their killings were being arranged for the anniversary of last year’s killing of four. This time high-level advocacy on their behalf before government officials in the USA and Guatemala exposed the plot and led to greater security and visits for these inmates. The gang members inside and outside the prison and their families have been deeply moved by Christian solidarity.

Micro-enterprise & mission

Gang members, drug-dealers and ex-offenders need opportunities to develop other stills so they can step away from lives of crime and become legally-functioning members of society. Tierra Nueva is working to establish micro-businesses both in Honduras and in the USA to provide skills training, jobs and income to sustain our ministries. We continue to work to help famers improve production and storage of basic grains, bring water to marginal neighborhoods for basic needs and vegetable gardens, increase the quality of coffee and distribution of specialty coffee and establishing a water-purification plant to sell bottled water. We import Honduran coffee to the United States, where we have train and employ gang members and ex-offenders to roast and market specialty coffee through Underground Coffee Project. Tierra Nueva runs an organic farm called Jubilee Farm, producing and selling vegetables and flowers as a site for discipleship and training for farm workers and others on the margins. Micro-businesses are increasingly important to provide alternatives for felons, sites for ministry and income for ministries.

Direct confrontation of false images of God through proclamation and holistic responses to people’s felt needs, fresh readings of Biblical texts, pastoral accompaniment, advocacy, prophetic ministry and healing prayer are some of the ways that prepare people to meet Jesus as the one who saves them from their sins and transforms their lives. The kindness of God leads to repentance—understood as a change of heart (Rom 2:4). So we do everything we can to effectively pluck up, break down, destroy and overthrow the false while also facilitating, ushering in, and preparing the way for the revelation of the kind God who has the power to save.

“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.
What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light;
and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”

Chris Hoke, Assistant Jail Chaplain

Introduction

There persists a rather wide chasm between two schools of Christian faith and ministry: the highly personal and individual on one hand, and the socially informed, engaged and resistant on the other. Social and structural injustices are so overwhelming that the latter activist tradition may actively avoid what seems to be an overly individualistic and internal ministry, seeing it as a pacifying distraction from more urgent communal and organizational development. And more evangelical or inner healing traditions moving in a sensitivity to the Spirit too often embrace an extremely “sovereign” understanding of God’s will on the earth that would see little need for people of faith to question or challenge kings, rulers, authorities, markets and injustices beyond issues of personal morality or the nuclear family.

Both these traditions have an understanding of the prophetic: for one it is to cultivate intimacy with the Father in the Holy Spirit, hearing his voice for the edification of the church (1 Corinthians 14), and for the other it is to be a bold voice on behalf of the oppressed, seeking to dismantle the powers of the dominant social order to make way for God’s totally Other revolution and reign of mercy and justice.

From the way that I have set up even the first two paragraphs, it is clear that this paper will reject such a duality between the “two” prophetic traditions. However, my aim is not to merely disqualify the distinction theoretically, as is the binary-busting trend these days in the academy. Instead, it is a brief look concretely at the life and ministry of Jesus as the pinnacle of the biblical prophets, observing how his radical ministry was empowered and propelled by an inseparable array of prophetic functions. His intimacy with God as father, which empowered him to speak words of life as well as administer healing to individuals along the margins, led to the animation and development of a Spirit-charged social body resistant to the state and religious dominance. And this social body—the Body of Christ—will be increasingly strengthened and sensitized in God’s voice, edifying a growing and truly alternative community with prophetic witness and force amidst the dominant culture of imperial wealth, numbness and injustice.

Prophetic Baptism

Jesus grew up under Roman imperial occupation, and like us, with great political unrest throughout his land, and all sorts of religious perspectives from resistance to complete allegiance to Ceasar, seen in the official offering in the Temple for the emperor’s health every day. As social historian and archeologist Richard Horsley and Neil Silberman remind us, “Theology aside, we can say that the baptism of Jesus took place within a popular revival movement that was spreading among a predominantly rural population that was being taxed, exploited in new—and to their eyes—extremely threatening ways”. Outside the Temple and out along the wilderness margins of the Jordan’s banks, John the Baptist was inviting ordinary people—not just religious ascetics, as with other religious baptismal rites—into a cleansing act of repentance, “a personal pledge to return to the way of life that God had decreed for the people of Israel”. “Like Amos and Hosea and Jeremiah before him,” Horsley and Silberman note, John the Baptist “was a prophet engaged in a passionate critique of current political happenings, never afraid to point fingers or name names” (Luke 3:14-20). Carrying on the social prophetic tradition of Israel’s prophets, John directly challenged the rule of client-king Herod Antipas in the land of Judea, who “began to act as if he believed that the divine promises to the People of Israel could best be fulfilled through him”—“that his people’s best route to salvation was through economic development,” and enforced with military and police protection throughout the land. John’s prophetic call back to God as away from the empire’s ways, we can say, “posed a serious internal political threat,” so much so that first century historian Josephus noted that “When others joined the crowds about him, because they were so aroused to the greatest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed.”

The ministry and vocation of Jesus of Nazareth, then, began with his arrival on this dissident scene on the edge of his society to undergo a baptism of radical renunciation and commitment. “A journey out to see John the Baptist in the wilderness,” Horsley and Silberman conjecture, would have taken Jesus—presumably in the company of other people from Nazareth—out across the fringe of the Jezreel Valley where they would have passed through other rural villages, meeting tenant farmers and migrant workers, and seeing, at least from a distance, the houses of the overseers and the great villas of the wealthy lords…a world of carefully regulated oppression, closely guarded by soldiers, loyalists, and paid informers.
Like the earliest prophet Moses, after Jesus “had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor” (Exodus 2:11). Like all prophets and interruptions of God’s presence and voice into human history, Jesus walked through a specific social, religious, and political moment with a specific landscape of actual, scattered, confused, powerless and hopeless people. Standing in solidarity with such people, fully immersing himself in the grim and complex realities of the time, Jesus descended into the Jordan’s waters alongside the throngs of peasants. Like so many in baptismal commitments before him, Jesus “had rejected the entire complex of economics, political institutions, and cultural expression that was being carried on in mainstream society.”

Mark’s gospel vividly records what Jesus experienced immediately after this bold step, dying to the warring cultural allegiances in his submersion beneath the Jordan.

And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:10-11)
Dripping wet, as if a newborn child, vulnerable now without any attachment to society’s structures or solutions apart from his creator’s, Jesus is able to hear his true identity—clearly, directly, and personally from God, his Father. Jesus’ prophetic vocation is not grounded in an anti-state orientation, an identity defined against something else with a resentment justified as “righteous.” Rather, Jesus here is freshly rooted in the deeply affirming and loving embrace of God. Though Jesus humbled himself to being baptized by John, his hearing of God’s voice was unmediated by any clerical, pastoral or leadership figure. Jesus is not immediately armed with either revolutionary weapons, materials or rhetoric for further education and public organization. In his weakness and belovedness, Jesus passively receives the Spirit of God upon him as a gift of God’s felt favor and power.

Today, the contemporary international charismatic renewal is fueled by this intimate experience and reality—what Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Senior Pastor John Arnott calls “the Father’s blessing.” Yet even social historians and archeologists like Horsley and Silberman cannot help but note the transformative power of this supremely subjective, internal and individual encounter with God’s voice. “From that moment on,” they write of Jesus’ soaked reception of God’s words, “even after John the Baptist was hauled away to prison by soldiers—the power of Herod Antipas”—the human figurehead for the whole Roman Empire, the government, the taxes, the military, the economic development overhauling and weighing on the entire region—“would have seemed empty to him.”

We cannot too quickly pass over this observation. This is where we see the “two” traditions of the prophetic superimposed. To uproot this individual experience of God’s intimate embrace from the soil of the larger social landscape and jagged terrain of shining, oppressive powers demanding allegiance, is to cause the prophetic “anointing” to wither and have very little fruit or substantial impact on the world. Such an purely spiritual yet “anointed” community, that is not rooted in the circumstances of the poor and marginalized, no matter how much soaking in God’s nourishing Spirit, will not grow tall or strong enough to come up against nor challenge the world’s reigning identities and counterfeit authorities.

On the other hand, it is dry and mechanistic to try to educate and mobilize just another structured constituency of orphaned and hungry individuals into the same material struggle, which kings and principalities will always dominate, no matter how rebellious the upstart ideology is. It is hopeless to think we can carry on the subversive and prophetic project of bringing about Jesus’ Kingdom reality while denying God’s complete and intangible subversion of our internal reality with his specific words to constantly edify, guide and reveal all things to us.

We see in the initiation of Jesus’ prophetic life these basic ingredients: an immersion in social reality, a public step away from the dominant culture’s rulers and methods, a vulnerable and personal touch in the reality of God’s Spirit into an identity as his beloved child, and an empowered ministry to follow, which would be so free, fearless and transformative of individuals along the bottom of society that the religious, state and economic establishments would fear it as an intolerable revolution. From the intimate words of the Spirit to the ignited waves of the hopeful social body, Jesus enjoys the full prophetic vocation.

On Being Liked, Adopted, and Called

There is more to observe in the baptism of Jesus. We do not see any prophet in the biblical witness who is self-appointed or self-motivated. The living and continually misrepresented God of Israel freely initiates every communication with his people. So the prophet his- or herself is the first to experience the call to repentance, the interrupting word that jars and transforms the current identity and lifestyle of the people. The center of this repentance is the supreme shift of one’s identity: as personally known, seen, touched, called by and belonging to only God. This is the core event of the prophetic. Senses of existential meaninglessness, strife, and performance to belong to other fabricated and temporal identities are exposed and countered when hearing the personal words God speaks to his/her people. One’s true identity is touched by God. One’s deepest self hears what it’s been hoping to hear from the world by serving it all this time.

We can look back and see this sort of encounter in the records of the major prophets. Moses was met amidst his confusion between Egyptian or Israelite, royal or vigilante, identity by God’s embrace of adoption over his concerns, absorbing Moses at the burning bush into his heart and mission: “I have observed the misery of my people in Egypt, I have heard…Indeed, I know…So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, our of Egypt” (Exodus 3:7, emphasis mine). The work is God’s, the people are his children, and the love and concern and even the words will come from God. “I will be with you,” God assures him, as a parent. So Moses is freed from confusion, indirection, warring allegiances, despair or inaction. He is relieved of his own efforts, words, strivings or failures. He and his desires for liberation are adopted by God, personally. He has become a prophet.

And there’s Isaiah. In his famous calling text (Isaiah 6), he initially does not aspire to the office of a prophet. Isaiah is so overwhelmed by the way God reveals himself to him that Isaiah identifies himself as among a wayward people of “unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5) It is God’s merciful and personal move to cleanse Isaiah’s lips and announce his guilt as “departed” and his sin “blotted out” that constitutes a washing, a baptism of the one he is embracing to his side, to his project. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” the LORD asks rhetorically to this trembling man, inviting Isaiah into the “us.” Isaiah can then “go to this people” as an ambassador who has himself undergone the immense shift in identity and personal restoration that God will offer his people through Isaiah’s lips.

Jeremiah’s vocation also begins with God’s radically intimate initiation: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). The subversive and threatening confrontation God would throw at the religious, state, and military establishment first ruptured young Jeremiah’s read on reality, his current identity: “’Do not say ‘I am only a boy’…Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,’ says the LORD” (1:7). The personal voice that speaks of being alongside him since the womb, that identifies him as known, consecrated and appointed by God, now reaches out with a hand and tenderly touches him, the way one touches only a lover or their own child: “Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, ‘Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’” (1:10). From then on, a clearer path of communication exists between the two, and through personal dialogue, Jeremiah is tutored in receiving God’s more vivid revelation of images (1:11-15). The record of his entire prophetic experience is filled with pages of uncensored, personal dialogue to the point that God’s heart and words are so internalized that even when Jeremiah strives not to be a prophet and keep silent, he feels “something like a fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (20:9).

This is the relationship characterizing Jesus’ prophetic life and ministry, first seen in the record of his baptism where he hears the voice of God publicly identifying him as son, in the center of God’s affection: “You are my son, the Beloved”—other ancient authorities read “You are my son, today I have begotten you”—“with you I am well pleased”. This is more than an adoption and more than a calling. And more explicitly than with any other prophet’s personal encounter with God, Jesus’ ministry is grounded in the consciousness of being personally liked by God. There is no mandate given, no mission imperative. We must assume, and acknowledge in our own experience, how empowering it is to be liked by another, how freeing, and how open a friendship or communication can be when the other openly enjoys simply who you are. Jesus is thus called intimately like the prophets before him, only with an unprecedented informality of favor and tenderness, held in identity as God’s child.

The Prophetically-Awakened Communities

While these prophet narratives begin around the central figure who is washed and held as God’s own, Walter Brueggeman notes in the preface to his second edition of The Prophetic Imagination that since his first publication, “Robert Wilson helped us to see that the prophets are not lonely voices against the establishment but are in fact representative voices that give social expression to what may be important and engaged social constituencies.” As individual as the prophetic embrace and calling appears in our texts, it is important to appreciate that an entire community was necessary to record, preserve, and presumably embrace the perspective and embody the stance of that prophetic reception and mobilization of God’s new word for their moment. While also acknowledging that the individual prophet came from a particular social location, we remember that the prophetic voice, or “alternative consciousness,” as Brueggeman puts it, cannot be divorced from the larger social body in which it incubated and which followed and grew out of God’s awakening word to be an “alternative community” challenging the reigning identities of the day. We see in Jesus’ journey out to the Baptist how he was a member of his Nazarene community as well as the peripheral renewal movement of rural villagers gathering along the Jordan’s banks. God raised up his child/prophet in the prophetic “natural habitat” described by Brueggeman: “subcommunities that stand in tension with the dominant community in any political economy.” An even more powerful movement of subcommunities came out of Jesus’ ministry, becoming a prophetic social body in Galilee, eventually descending upon Jerusalem and becoming His Body to the ends of the earth upon his prophetic self-giving of his body to the powers on the cross.

This paper will try to unpack that last string of statements in the pages that remain. But let us now zoom in more closely, so to say, at the specific actions of this newly-anointed and –appointed prophet that began to edify, animate and mobilize an alternative community. Jesus’ ministry began with individuals. And it continued to grow with physical and spiritual transformations individuals experienced at the personal words and touch of Jesus. Unlike Jeremiah at the Temple gate or John the Baptist at the Jordan who waited for the people to come into their hearing, Jesus went to the people. The synoptic gospels do not record Jesus going to the Jerusalem Temple at the beginning: he began in the villages and towns, with the peasants held captive and oppressed by the imperial, religious and spiritual forces at work. Jesus went to the distinct social location announced as his prophetic vocation: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19).

He did not look like a movement leader, speaker or intellectual at first, but rather a servant of afflicted people. “Full of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus came out of the wilderness with more than “people power” to directly cast out unclean spirits where he taught and visited the homes of people with sicknesses to heal them, such as Simon’s mother-in-law suffering from a fatal fever (Luke 4:31-39, Mark 1:21-31). Jesus showed care for people’s personal bodies in his constant healing ministry, where individuals, families and whole villages experienced a compassion beyond presence and words. Jesus carried an anointing able to immediately transform daily, physical reality and reanimate what had been weighed down, immobile and decaying. This is what gathered and organized the scattered people: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons” (Mark 1:32-34).

More than utopian rhetoric, Marxist ideology, or emphatic calls to uprising, Jesus displayed a sustainable power and alternative source of life that countered the hegemony of Death in people’s felt needs. Here was the incarnation of Israel’s prophetic words about the physical restoration of Israel. As Horsley and Silberman point out, this restoration of the people “was not political protest in the sense of making overt, anti-government speeches or secretly plotting armed rebellion” or focusing energy on getting the Romans or scribes to adjust structure and policy. Jesus’ prophetic mobilization had its own power and ability to change reality, which threatened the establishment’s monopoly and control, where the people saw that they didn’t need the structures. Jesus’ power “was political in a far more powerful way. In Jesus’ presence or under his influence, people who had been previously paralyzed or crippled by forces beyond their control began to piece their lives back together.”

This ministry was not, on the other hand, merely that of a local pastor or village healer, handing out miracles to atomized, middle-class conference attendees. ‘Jesus’ healings and exorcisms were, in fact, part of a larger program…not aimed solely at individuals but…as a way of transforming wider community life,” Horsley and Silberman emphasize. “His miracles were seen not so much as bizarre natural curiosities but as additional signs that God had once again chosen to intervene in the earthly history,” the thrust of the entire prophetic tradition. Jesus, like Elijah, demonstrated God’s ability to provide even food. Even if some scholars choose to read the feedings of the four- and five thousand as only the “miracle” of communal sharing, those events directed by Jesus drew the people together in amazement and nourishment, weaning them away from the centralized market dependence and the authorities regulating it.

Jesus’ seemingly presumptuous ministry of rampantly declaring forgiveness of sin to individuals, not based on compliance with any religious formula, was a direct threat to the authorities regulating the economy of guilt. Daringly speaking for God, Jesus derailed the public’s internal space one by one from the legal and religious tracks for clearing their record. Brueggeman describes how “Hannah Arendt had discerned that this was Jesus’ most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. Thus the refusal to forgive sin…amounts to enormous social control.” Rather than lobbying for the religious or legal institutions to be more forgiving, Jesus’ prophetic ministry brought the forgiving, liberating words of God directly to the people, making the official authorities and avenues obsolete for a growing portion of the region.

Jesus’ teaching, we will briefly mention here, constantly “amazes” the listeners. He proclaims startlingly good and simple news about who God really is (Luke 15, ), what sin truly is (Matt. 5-7, 23, 25; John 9, ), whom the Kingdom is primarily for (Matt. 5, 11:25; Luke 4) and how it is actually “at hand.” In all this, he is described as teaching with unprecedented “authority” in his direct and piercing word, and facile, accessible images in parables for the illiterate, revealing his deeply intimate understanding of God’s heart and Kingdom.

Thus far, we see how Jesus awakened communities not with removed, prophetic proclamations and dissemination of educational materials, but by going to the poor with direct healing, deliverance, forgiveness and teaching. And this ministry was not a pacifying, charitable stop-gap covering society’s failures with spiritually consoling platitudes. His presence, touch and words were so radical and personal that docile working class communities were awakened and the establishment was threatened.

Intimacy with the Father

How, then, did Jesus actually heal people’s bodies? Or how did he know to forgive one individual versus calmly commanding an evil spirit to leave the next person? Where did he learn to teach so well—the religious educational avenues of the synagogue? Talking to the people directly? Or was he uncannily sharp and insightful, having a way with words? While some of these biographical experiences are possible, too often the churched assumption is to not ask these questions: instead, we are left with merely “Jesus was God, so he can do whatever and obviously knows all things (unlike us).” This assumption is widely out of step with the key to Jesus’ ministry, which he repeatedly shared with his disciples and those who were amazed. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus speaks to others’ disempowered or angered feelings in witnessing his authority to heal, teach, and know: the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished. (John 5:19-20)

Jesus’ project of social renewal filled with personal insights, teachings, healings and exorcisms all comes out of a vulnerable and constant prophetic posture of dependence. Jesus is perpetually listening to God. In that receptivity, Jesus has become forged in his identity as the beloved son, and so God as his father.

Not only does the authority over physical bodies as well as spiritual afflictions come being God’s child, as an inheritance, but the thoughts, words, and discernment in using them with each person he faces comes from constant, unseen communication with God. Bill Johnson, a pastor who has experienced such a healing and deliverance ministry—though with possibly less socially prophetic potential in the Northern Californian, suburban church setting—is free enough to state: “I continue to remind people, Jesus had no ability to heal the sick. He couldn’t cast out devils, and He had no ability to raise the dead.” Rather, alluding to Phillipians 2, Johnson unsettles the traditional church assumptions, either conservative or liberal: Jesus
had set aside His divinity. He did miracles as a man in right relationship with God because He was setting forth a model for us, something for us to follow. If He did miracles as God, we would all be extremely impressed, but we would have no compulsion to emulate Him…. Jesus so emptied Himself that He was incapable of doing what was required of Him by the Father—without the Father’s help. That is the nature of our call—it requires more than we are capable of. When we stick to doing only the stuff we can do, we are not involved in the call.

This is the humility, the weakness of the prophet, or the prophetic calling: to receive power and words that are not our own. It puts one in the constant position of a receiver, never a doer. Jesus says, “I have not spoken on my own, but the father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak….What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me” (John 12:49, 50). As if constantly in need of counsel, Jesus is recorded at many points as going off to a secret place, or alone to pray before the sun had risen (Mark 1:35; Luke 4:42). As Guy Chevreau notes, who has been involved in wide, socially transformative ministries among the poor, including heroin addicts in Spain and thousands of orphans in Mozambique: “prophetic announcement is always nurtured in the secret place, alone, in silence.” Jesus lives out what Second Isaiah describes in one of the Servant poems: “The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a taught-one, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught” (Isaiah 50:4).

We see in Jesus the extreme immersion in what the earlier prophets had only indulged in (so it seems in the written record)for the larger pronouncements: listening to God, seeing God, as if in his presence. This is a distinction we see between Jesus and Israel’s prophets: while the prophets received God’s words to proclaim to the rulers and the nations on highly-public and significant scales, Jesus also listened to his Father facing smaller, personal interactions, bringing the power of the direct heart and word of God to the weak and weary, to their unique problems and existential obstacles. Many ministries are re-discovering this totally blind and free aspect of Jesus’ ministry, now calling it “prophetic evangelism.” It is what so far has been referred to in this paper as Jesus’ amazing “insights” into people’s lives, which always made the woman or man feel known by God personally, animating them to be vigorous recruiters or joyfully repentant givers. Mark Stibbe says this:

Jesus consistently operated in the gift of prophecy in his ministry to the lost. In fact, one of the distinctive features of Jesus’ life is what theologians call cardiagnosis….Jesus had a special knowledge of the human heart. By prophetic revelation, he read the lives of everyone he met….Jesus knew full well in his spirit what the scribes were saying to themselves (literally, within their hearts) [Mark 2:1-12].

The social prophetic tradition often overlooks this aspect of Jesus’ life, not recognizing it as an expansion of the prophetic vocation and power of carrying God’s spoken, living and active word to his people. Jesus did not address and exhort only the “people of Israel” en masse. He was able to be in deeper, truer solidarity with the downtrodden or alienated as he listened to what the Father would reveal about individuals in the crowds or alone in unexpected encounters, connecting to their deepest issues or desires.

Weaving Their Stories into One

We see in Jesus’ brief interaction with the Samaritan woman in a village where he knew no people how a single prophetic insight so animated a mere woman of ill-repute that her sudden excitement accomplished the work of vigilant community organizer (John 4:7-42). In what could be a casual interaction over a drink of water, Jesus discerns the stranger’s true thirst and speaks into the private details of her life and past relationships, causing her to exclaim, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet” (4:19). This leads her to ask possibly her deepest question about her people’s subordinated status compared to the mainstream Jewish religion, and Jesus offers radical, non-Temple words of God’s radical freeness and presence to all people. Within minutes, the woman leaves her jar for water to go tell the entire city, “Come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” (4:29). It is not Jesus’ radical teaching that propels her to gather so many others, but the highly subjective word she heard. It apparently convinces her that she has tasted something real, that God might after all be with her. With this, she brings her people together with a conviction that they too will find something real, not to be disappointed by more meetings and tired talk of traveling speakers about Samaritan and Messianic issues of the day. “The conclusion is inescapable,” Stibbe believes: “Jesus listened prophetically to what the Father was saying in his ministry to the lost. This is one of the major characteristics of his earthly ministry.” The potency of his prophetic word to one disenfranchised woman is seen when it not only brings up the core social identity issues, but when she actually returns:

They left the city and were on their way to him…So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” (4:30, 40-42)

Stibbe goes farther than many charismatic/renewal voices in acknowledging that this kind of personal “prophecy can bring release, healing, liberation, and favour to the poor.”

Brueggeman, who writes from the historical-critical perspective, offers an insight that also superimposes the aim of the prophetic—both individually and socially. “Prophetic ministry consists in,” he writes, “letting people see their own history in the light of God’s freedom and his will for justice. (117) Both alienated individuals and marginalized social groups have experienced their identities as sidelined from society’s central narrative. Just as when Yahweh says to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people…I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them…I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt,” so God reveals his intimate knowledge of and concern for individuals when they hear God’s description of their stories, as with the Samaritan woman (Exodus 3:7, 9, 10). As we’ve seen, this is powerful enough to awaken an entire ethnic makeup in a city as they sense that God is with them, as well.

In John 1, a skeptical Nathaniel is quickly converted into a follower and joins the social body Jesus is building when he hears his own story in the light of God’s movement of “freedom and will for justice.” What Nathaniel probably thought of as just another moment of his isolated existence, his afternoon sitting under the tree, is mentioned—“seen”—by Jesus when they later meet. Jesus similarly “seeing” Zacchaeus individually in the crowd, with prophetic insight from hearing the Father, leads a man complicit in oppression to joyfully repent in word and in money, joining the movement (Luke 19:1-10). In this instance, Jesus’ prophetic ministry is clearly conscious and critical of the established injustices, yet his prophetic presence with individuals goes beyond blanket denunciations and demonstrates power over personal bondage to greed and corruption, effecting immediate change. “This repentance is public, radical, and saving,” Stibbe concludes. Jesus also concludes this episode with Zacchaeus with another clarification of his prophetic mission: “I, the Son of Man, have come to seek and save those like him who are lost” (19:10). Prophetic ministry consists in letting individuals and people groups see their own stories as parts of this unfolding and free mission of God.

Raising up the Prophetic Social Body of Christ

There is a healthy fear among liberation theologians and ministers along the social margins of anything which leans back to “that unfettered individualism which seeks to fragment and destroy.” William T. Cavanaugh’s study, Torture and Eucharist: Challenges in Contemporary Theology, painstakingly dissects the Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1970s, where state tactics of fear, torture, and disappearance effected an intensely individualized and passive population. Cavanaugh focuses on the official Roman Catholic Church’s subservient ecclesiology, which for decades abandoned the physical bodies and material, political matters to the State, only taking care of the “soul’ of Chile. His familiarity with the work of social theorists from Max Weber to Michel Foucault leads him to the guiding conviction that “true resistance…depends on the reappearance of social bodies capable of countering the atomizing performance of the state.” And this, he rightly concludes, is the role of the Body of Christ. Just as Jesus himself embodied the fulfillment of the prophetic, so his larger Body should continue to incarnate and amplify his prophetic vocation.

While Cavanaugh’s assessment of the Pinochet machinations delivers a foreboding example of how far individualism can be taken, enforced, and used to separate and control a people, his central narrative of prophetic resistance is essentially a top-down solution where the clergy finally get their ideological act together and take a stand apart from the tyrannous reign of state control and allegiance. The leading role in the story he tells belongs to the collection of bishops, and, in their own eventual suffering at the hands of the state, how they begin to “discern the bodily nature of the church, to feel that the sufferings of others are in fact their own sufferings, torturing the Body of Christ, which is the church.” Cavanaugh distills the story he tells to that of how “the official church began to learn how to be oppressed and thus become incarnate in opposition to the state.” Despite his beautiful language about “discerning the body of Christ,” Cavanaugh ultimately assumes that this Body is the already-established ecclesial institution and hierarchies of the Catholic Church.

The prophetic voice and presence of Jesus, however, did not rise within the established religious order of the Temple to make formally approved statements with the High Priest and scribes, expressing their eventual consensus of displeasure with the Roman occupation, followed by more charitable temple activities to better care for the bodies of Jerusalem’s oppressed citizens. While this may be the shift many religious structures need to make throughout the world, we see that Jesus’ way of building a social body was quite different. As we have seen, he did not rely on the strength of offices and clout, nor traditional organizing methods. In utter weakness, the prophet began at the bottom, vulnerably dependent on the voice of God and the strength of his Spirit to bring God’s felt and heard presence to those on the outskirts of society. Beyond the power to heal, cast out afflicting spirits, and speak surprisingly personal words to animate individuals and communities into something new and growing, Jesus taught the multitudes of disciples a new way of existing and interrelating. Going to the “sinners” and everyday workers and not the religious leaders, Jesus began to build fearless communities fused with cooperation, forgiveness, selfless love and servanthood.

As if adopting each of them into a new identity as God’s children, Jesus gives his growing numbers of disciples the same authority he received from the Father to go to smaller towns with the same animating ministry: to cast out unclean spirits and to cure every kind of disease and sickness (Matthew 10:1). Just as Brueggeman highlights Isaiah’s prophetic role of announcing a new kingdom and reality in the face of the existing one, as well as Jeremiah’s role of announcing the end of the kings’ royal illusions, so Jesus’ social body of prophets move from town to town as he does, proclaiming “the good news”: “‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons” (10:7, 8). From the bottom up, this continues to bring God’s presence directly to the people’s ears, eyes, hearts and homes, not waiting for the religious structures to catch on and formalize or distribute a single thing.

Rather, this prophetic, decentralized social body will threaten ecclesial and state dominance. It will expose their latent reliance on hatred, violence, and the formalized methods of social care-and-control. It will incur their discipline, Jesus warns: “Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils to flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles.” (10:17, 18). This is where Jesus trains his radically free social force in the prophetic: “When they hand you over, do not worry about what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (10:19, 20). Jesus’ revolution does not protest the powers mainly in the streets, reserving the face-to-face encounters with officials for the educated, more articulate leaders of the movement. Instead, as the Body of Christ fearlessly gives itself over to the authorities of domination, each member is another voice speaking truth directly to the power trying to swallow him or her.

And the truth they speak, Jesus insists, should not be their own human eloquence or vocalized resentment but the direct and living word of God to the principalities through the lips of each humble child of God—to the individual situation, to the individual ruler or official presiding at the moment. “So have no fear of them,” Jesus daringly says to fishermen and common folk. “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light.; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops” (10:27, emphasis mine). This is the destabilizing, dismantling presence of the prophetic word now set loose and lived out in hundreds of scenarios simultaneously. And it only comes through bodies that are in God’s presence, listening intimately in the secret place where no state surveillance, nor theological technician, nor formula for revolution can go.

The author of Luke-Acts understands this historical shift—accelerated at the disciples’ transformative ignition of the Spirit at Pentecost—as that which the prophet Joel had envisioned: “Even upon slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:18). Far from being an individualistic spiritual subculture obsessed with hearing vague, internal messages, we see in Acts 9 an example of Peter privately receiving a vision that abolishes his personal, religious and ethnic barriers and opens him to fellowship with the “unclean” Gentiles both in their homes and across the nations in years to follow. Paul’s famous discourse on tongues and prophesy to the alternative community in Corinth has everything to do with this unifying movement of hearing God’s voice (1 Corinthians 14). To those who were overwhelmed with this new phenomena of communing directly in spirit with the heart of God, Paul tries to communicate the priority of letting this gift open them to each other, as if grafted into one body, rather than it being an atomizing experience.

Those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding encouragement and consolation. Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church. Now I would like all of you to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy…so that the church may be built up. (14:3,4)
This was Jesus’ desire, expressed in his last recorded prayer before dying: that—unlike so many eventually-exhausted and fractioned movements—his brothers and sisters would remain as a body in the same intimate unity which Jesus has as a whole person in relationship with the Father.

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:22, 23)

This is a social body and revolution resistant to any eventual hierarchical or authoritarian tendencies, as all hear the Father’s voice directly—not only for their own grounding and growth, but also to be able to hear and speak God’s words of adoration, affirmation, discernment and calling over each other. The body is constantly refreshed as God’s words and touch move throughout its members, one into the other. Such a prophetic experience in the Body of Christ is resistant to unclean spirits of religion or dogmatic adherence to words of the past that are purely external and etched in sacred centers of texts and temples (which always end up in the few hands of those more competent in the world’s categories of power, such as wealth, education, and cultural preference and prejudice). The Johannine tradition continues to stress this theme in its first letter: “As for you, the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and so you do not need anyone [like a priest or official teacher] to teach you.” The Greek word used is τις, or some, connoting a select few, as opposed to all who hear from God as prophets. “But,” the letter presses, “as his anointing teaches you,” and the Greek is plural, speaking to all, “about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, abide in him” (1 John 2:27).

Matthew’s gospel casts this “anointing” (as John calls it) of Jesus in the deep prophetic tradition of Moses, where he gives the people a new covenant on the mountain. In what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, this new law that Jesus hears from the Father and gives to the people in mosaic-prophetic stance is inscribed not in stone but inside each person (Matthew 5-7). The author of the letter to the Hebrews confirms this by also comparing what Jesus shares to what Israel had originally received through Moses: “But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). The same author goes on to recognize Jesus’ shared prophetic anointing and relationship with the Father as the radical shift that Jeremiah had foreseen long before: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel” This announcement came at the end of Jeremiah’s anguished career as the lone voice of God to a deaf and war-bent nation: “I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (31:34 emphasis mine).

The Heart of God Bombards the Authorities

In Jeremiah we see a series of “prophetic jests,” where the prophet goes beyond words and enacts the message of God visually and viscerally before the kings and the public. God tells Jeremiah to go buy an earthenware jug, take the elders and senior priests out to the place of Judah’s eventual disaster for their allegiance and child-sacrifice to other idols, and to break the jug as a tangible vision of how their nation will then be similarly broken (Jeremiah 19:1-12). The false prophet Hananiah employs this technique when he breaks the wooden yoke before the king to announce how God will break Babylon’s yoke over Israel (28:10-11). Just as a prophet not only hears but sees, so the prophet lets the people and authorities see as well.

In Jesus’ prophetic vocation, many of his actions can be understood in this way. His teaching before the religious authorities about the Father’s embrace of all that is discarded and lost in Luke 15 is simultaneously enacted as he sits elbow to elbow with “sinners and tax collectors.” Rather than just talk about compassion for the idealized downtrodden, Jesus’ enacting this love makes it visible and visceral both to the rejected and to the offended elite. “Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction,” Brueggeman notes in Jesus’ prophetic stance, “but as a public criticism…of the system, forces, and ideologies that produce the hurt. Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it.” Just like the father in the parable with “his ready embrace of his unacceptable son,” Jesus boldly “condemns the ‘righteousness of the law’ by which society is currently ordered and by which social rejects are forever rejected.” Jesus prophetically enacts God’s loving presence with criminals and the transgressors of moral codes.

There are consequences to this enactment. As the body of Christ is aligned with transgressors, daringly enacting God’s presence and compassion among them and his noninvolvement with the respected forces of political or moral enforcement, he is maligned and persecuted as the shamed ones are. In more than words, then, Jesus carries out the prophet’s tradition of exposing the suffering going on amidst everyday life which the people have come to numbly accept. Just as Jeremiah was put in the stocks for highlighting injustice and cruelty of the righteous regime (Jeremiah 20:2), so Jesus carries on the prophetic experience of willfully provoking the establishment with his ministry and message, resulting in criminal treatment. Jesus foresaw his execution and invited his disciples to follow. “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you,’ he says in the middle of teaching his body of followers about abiding in the Father’s love, hearing his voice, receiving the Advocate, and loving one another, Jesus warns that following him in this prophetic life will uncomfortably invoke the sharp distinction between God’s ways and the world’s. “Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you…I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God” (John 15:18,19-16:1,2). Jesus forewarns and models for the Body of Christ the consequences of living in relationship with the Father, and living out his heart prophetically in the world.

To prophetically enact the heart of the Father—the central word of God which Jesus brings to the world—is to come unarmed. The only times Jesus is described as having a sword are, first, in his own words about bringing not a pacifying and false unity but rather intensifying division (Matthew 10:34), and second, as coming to judge Babylon with a sword-sharp tongue, with which he will slay the beast (Revelation 19:15). Metaphors aside, Jesus, as the clearest image of the Father, is clean of any violence, physical threat, or other vestiges of authoritarian force. He comes enacting the love, vulnerability and non-wrathfulness of the Father among his sinful, violent, and deceived creation—to save and serve his children unto death. What is more, if Jesus as prophet came with worldly force, defending himself and distancing the most sinful structures by causing them to draw up their defenses, his word would never be heard nor seen by them. The only aim would be to conquer and destroy them, to win. Instead, we see in Jesus’ willingly giving himself over to the authorities without running or striking them down how many opportunities he gains to speak and demonstrate God’s truth directly to the powers. In Gethsemane, the guards witness and experience a compassion even for them in the healing of the ear. In the Roman Empire’s official courts the client-kings are confronted with the bare character and words of the living God. Even the hired torturers, the perpetrators of state oppression and violence are struck by the living word of God among them, as the Roman Centurion receives it at the foot of the crucified and forgiving Christ. In Luke’s account, the Centurion confesses a changed heart toward the Son of God upon witnessing Jesus speak forgiveness over his killers, accept of a criminal beside him, and cry intimate words to the Father all while bearing a shameful, naked, and painful treatment of execution (Luke 23:34, 43, 46, 47-48).

This is the revolutionary model for the social body of Christ to carry out across the world before the powers. To pick up a weapon or support others’ doing so is to abandon the prophetic office and anointing given by Jesus. To opt for arms, force or violence in the face of evil and injustice in the world is to willingly dis-member oneself from the prophetic Body of Christ. Jesus’ daring way is our way, as the same first Johannine letter reminded: “Beloved, we are God’s children now,” adopted into this identity of Jesus’. “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:2, 16). So as Jesus sends out his disciples unarmed with provisions, verbal self-defense, or swords, he is casting a shower of prophets into the unguarded hands and hearts of evil powers and authorities. To come unarmed is to give your life, to happily let the structures most in need of God’s living and dismantling word take you into their realms and courts and before their leaders and perpetrators. The followers of Jesus carrying the seed of God’s word essentially swan dive before the officials’ faces and into the mouths and bellies of the powers and authorities. Such is the radical prophetic—to enact and utter the heart of God while in the very hands of governments, terrorists, sinners and empires, into which you have freely given yourself. Such is the meaning of the thirteenth “chapter” of Romans and other letters passed between the early movement which advise the scattered prophetic communities to not “resist” evil in the futile way, and be overcome by the same evil, but to overcome evil (not comply with its oppressive governments) with good. With something different. With the word of God. New Testament prophets submit to subvert, to undermine, to topple. We let them apprehend us and draw us near to their citadels of authority, where we offer the flaming hot words from God’s heart, and—like the burning coal with which the angel of the LORD touched and cleansed Isaiah’s unclean lips—“heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12:20).

Bibliography

Alison, James. On Being Liked. New York: Crossroad. 2003.
Arnott, John. The Father’s Blessing. Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Media. 1995.
Brueggeman, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Second Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2001.
Cavanaugh, William T.. Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 1998.
Chevreau, Guy. Turnings. Kent, England: Sovereign World Lt.. 2004.
Cooke, Graham. Developing Your Prophetic Gifting. Grand Rapids: Chosen Books. 2003
Johnson, Bill. The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind: Access to a Life of Miracles. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image. 2005.
Horsley, Richard A. and Neil Asher Silberman. The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 1997.
McReynolds, Paul R.. Word Study Greek-English New Testament With Complete Concordance. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale. 1998.
New Testament. New Revised Standard Version. Division of Education and Ministry, National Council of the Churches of Christ. 1990.
Rowland, Christopher, Ed.. The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
Stibbe, Mark. Prophetic Evangelism: When God Speaks to Those Who Don’t Know Him. Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Media. 2004.
Stringfellow, William. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. 2004.
Horsley & Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom, 40
Ibid, 34
Ibid, 38
Ibid, 35
Ibid. 39
Ibid. 41
Ibid, 32
Theologian James Alison has dedicated much of his work to this sensitivity, eg. Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay and On Being Liked.
John Arnott, The Father’s Blessing
Horsley and Silberman, 41
Walter Brueggeman, in his book The Prophetic Imagination, stresses the reality of a radically free God behind the destabilizing prophetic tradition inaugurated with Moses. It is a God who is free and outside of the cultural and religions constraints, calendars, customs, expectations and structures of either the temple or pagan kingdoms. Chapters 1 and 2.
Cited in the NRSV footnotes
Brueggeman, p.x
Ibid, p. xvi
William Stringfellow, in his Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, speaks of Jesus’ healing as, though “an intimate event,” “utterly threatening politically”: “he exemplified life transcending the moral power of death in this world and this world’s strongholds and kingdoms.” (148-149)
Horsley and Silberman, 51
Ibid, 51, 52
Brueggeman, 85, citing Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 236-243
Bill Johnson, The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind, 50
Ibid.
Guy Chevreau, Turnings, 97
Mark Stibbe, Prophetic Evangelism, 154
Ibid., 155
Ibid, 58
Christopher Rowland, in his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, 10
Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 4
Ibid, 106
Ibid, 74
Ibid, 110: The diocese’s established Vicaría de Solidaridad is described with all its services to the people as an alternative social program. Cavanaugh also notes as the third response of the Church the Sebastián Acevedo Movement, a more grass-roots resistance community on the streets with a more creative, inspired, and prophetic voice to the powers and citizens.
Horsley and Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom, 221
Brueggeman, 89
Ibid, 91
When we remember that the original epistles were written with no “chapter” divisions or “verse” enumeration, the context of the author’s point is more clear. For instance, we can misread the apparent beginning of “Chapter 13” as advocating cooperating with earthly governments if we forget to read it together with the end of “Chapter 12,” where Paul’s whole argument is based around strategies to overcome the evil around them with good, not condone secular oppressors.

Chris Hoke, Assistant Jail Chaplain

During the months Daniel was in Skagit County Jail, he dreamt of oceans and oceans. He would be swimming, he tells me, with whales and his family.

Daniel has never been to the ocean; the closest this recently released, 19-year-old local gang affiliate gets to the Pacific is when we stand on the dyke behind his parents’ house in West Mount Vernon and he points out where he’d play on a large drainage pipe in the Skagit River at low tide when he was a kid.

In the last year here in the valley, much of my time has been split between working on a picturesque organic farm on Fir Island and five nights a week in the county jail as a young chaplain with hundreds of inmates. Praying, reading and discussing the Bible, doing advocacy and meeting with incarcerated, multiracial men on the underside of the social chain has caused me, a privileged and educated white man, to question the authority of many laws that have governed my imagination. Especially those of celebrated Mother Nature.

I sometimes share with the men at the jail that the original vision of the Garden of Eden was dreamt by captives. That is, most scholars believe that the creation accounts of the book of Genesis sprung from the Israelites’ time of captivity in Babylonian exile. Like Eden, Daniel also dreamt of a surreal, lush, and boundary-less existence of delight with the environment, other creatures, and those he loves.

Both Daniel and the Israelites, as captives, have experienced the brunt of Natural Law: they have been conquered by more powerful, predatory forces in their habitats; they have learned the game of survival, its unforgiving fate for the less fit, and how their elimination is the unquestioned logic and law that keeps everything in the environment so beautiful and all in the order and balance we enjoy.

While many voices these days speak of the earth’s “balance, harmony and cooperation,” from which we humans can re-learn an existence of “peace and unity,” the captive knows better, and so dreams beyond this Natural Law. Their dreams reject the necessary terrors and predatory forces of the dominant reality. Their dreams help us imagine open places of beauty and unfettered intimacy free of the laws of death.

Stand with an inmate, talk to a prisoner of war, imagine the Skagit Valley from the perspective of a laboring mouse dodging raptors in the corn fields. Soon Mother Nature seems less kind, less of a calendar pin-up. She seems more like our City Administrators and County Judges in her operation and indifference. The captive’s perspective forces subtle but far-reaching questions. Is it really Nature we love, in its full and harsh reality? Or have we come to accept that darker side of things if we learn that is sustains what first captured our heart: the peace, the sense of awe, the rush of life and existential perspective that restores us during relatively brief immersions in our favorite, scenic, inspiring, and highly specific locations?

If the captive’s experience exposes such a distinction between our thirst for what is truly life-giving and the more pervasive, dominant modes of survival, rivalry and violence, then we too may awkwardly realize that our deepest desires are often at odds with many of the natural world’s assumed and respected laws.

Few people love decay, self-defense, territorial boundaries and how the strong prey on the weak. Rather, as earth’s citizens we do not question these authorities of decomposition and defensiveness. We watch a child waste away with Leukemia and comfort ourselves with poetic images of fallen leaves turning to humus under trees, reconciling our revolting grief to Nature’s reigning rhythms based on death.

However, we find that the captive’s defiant dreams are shared with our children. Ask any child—as I did last night just to double-check—if they accept the death of the pet they loved deeply, if they can appreciate the circle of life natural to the coyote predator’s life. “No,” 10-year-old Nicoleina of Burlington told me, immediately, looking me in the eye. “I wanted it to come back to life.”

I am challenged in the jail to allow myself to share this place of seeming idiocy and delinquent noncompliance by actually wanting to break some laws, to allow love and a desire for more life to set me against the respected powers of Nature and Death.

Two weeks ago another young inmate shared with me off-handedly during a visit that he’s been in jail so long now that he no longer dreams of life outside the correctional facility’s walls. “Now, even all my dreams at night are about, you know, things in here,” Joey told me, suddenly saddened at hearing his own words. His imagination is now completely captive, enclosed within the immediate and solid realities of his environment.

It is just as tragic, I am beginning to think, if our imaginations as poets, activists, scientists, lovers, parents—all adults—can no longer imagine or dream outside the apparent confines of our immediate environment: the natural world’s order. Daniel was able to dream beyond the concrete walls since he was only in for less then a year, like the child who has not been in this system so long that her imagination and desires are conformed to the way things are. But Joey has been in so long—like us adults in the world that our hopes are trapped in the grim reality of Nature’s paradigm and necessities.

So reading about Jesus alongside the incarcerated can begin to puncture open our imaginations. Recently four separate groups of about ten men read with me the 22nd chapter of Luke’s gospel, narrating how Jesus spent his last hours before getting arrested and taken into custody by the law. We recognize at one point that the Eden fantasy is actualized, finally, as Jesus takes his disciples outside Jerusalem’s walls to the garden of Gethsemane: God chooses to walk intimately with humans as friends, among olive trees and under the stars after eating together earlier, where he had washed their naked feet.

Together we wonder why we had never recognized this Eden dream actually lived out in such a familiar scripture. We realize we are not alone in our blindness when we keep reading that Judas, a man in competition for power with Jesus, shows up with a pack of armed officials. They arrive at the leafy scene, not to share in the ultimate human dream, but only to—more “realistically”—shackle and eliminate Jesus, having caught him like prey in a vulnerable position. What plays out in this scene seems pretty natural to the inmates I read with, socially and ecologically: the more powerful take Jesus’ hands not in love but to drag him away, prompting Peter’s mother-bear instincts to lash out and tear the ear off the predatory guard threatening to take away what is precious to Peter.

What strikes us as unnatural, even shocking to some inmates, is how Jesus throughout this episode doesn’t defend himself. He seems reproductively unfit, not trying to survive, as most of these men have tried all their lives on the streets and in their cells, as most every species we can think of does. Not only does Jesus freely operate outside these laws as he offers himself vulnerably, he also stops to care for his immediate threat and captor. He picks up the severed ear and reverses the trajectory of violence and eventual decay by replacing it on the wound of the guard, where it is fully and instantly healed, according to the account, in a tender and entirely unnatural way.

Dozens of inmates, the head chaplain Bob Ekblad, and I have been similarly surprised throughout this last year when we all together pray for and lay hands on their chronic lower back spasms, collapsing livers and despairing hearts—only to see these natural consequences of hard labor, drug and alcohol abuse, and others’ selfishness actually reversed as the men are healed. Sometimes in a matter of hours, if not seconds.

This violation is not an uncaring disregard for the living world in all its ecosystems, like some religious justifications of “dominion” for trashing the planet. Rather, this is a love and insistence on life so rich that it exposes and transgresses the limiting codes of “Nature”’s pervasive, indifferent, and sometimes cruelly balanced regime.

But I don’t think we can regain an ability to imagine an alternative existence outside our confines on our own, any more than captives can free themselves from high security facilities. It is an experience of surprise, of being set free. It is a quiet and wide-eyed exhale and smile, how Joey told me two days ago, a week after we prayed over his incarcerated dream life: “I can dream again, man! All week, when I go to bed, I’ve been with my girl and our kids.”

Thousands of migrant farm workers have moved into Skagit County’s ten labor camps this summer with hopes of plentiful work harvesting strawberries and other local crops. Many have found work. At the same time workers complain that more laborers and increased machine harvesting has meant far less work than expected.

“Yesterday we only worked two hours, and today nobody is working,” said Camilo Santiago glumly from the open window of his running car. He asked directions to Lynden, where he thinks he might find more work than what Sakuma Brothers Farms’ blueberry harvest allows.
“There are too many people and not enough work. Many people are leaving. They say the grape harvest is starting in California. We may be leaving too,” he continued.

There are many explanations for the larger numbers of farm workers this past season, from family reunification to the closure of two Oregon processing plants due to the forces of globalization. Over thirty new Triqui-speaking families from Oaxaca showed up this year from California. They joined family and neighbors who have worked Skagit County’s harvest for over six years.

“We came up from California, where we harvest apricots, tomatoes and other vegetables,” said Marcelino Raymundo, a burly Triqui-speaking man in his mid thirties who lay resting in his bunk after a morning of picking blueberries. When we came to where we normally work in Oregon, the camps were closed. Others were already filled up.”

Two Oregon fruit processing plants closed early in the season, depriving numerous strawberry growers of a market. Many chose to not even harvest their berries, disking them under or letting them rot in the fields. Farm workers on their way to their yearly Oregon destinations simply continued North, hoping for better pickings in Washington.

The Northwest produces a high-end specialty strawberry, known for its sweetness. High quality strawberries however come at great financial risk to growers. The Northwest’s colder and wetter climate usually means a fourteen to twenty-eight day harvest season that usually begins in mid June. Good weather and adequate labor are critical components in a successful harvest. A good market is even more essential.

The closing of processing plants in Oregon reflects a growing crisis in NW strawberry production. High quality Northwest strawberries are more expensive than strawberries grown in California and Mexico, where warm weather allows for a much longer growing season. Big companies out to increase their profits are increasingly unwilling to pay the price for Washington and Oregon’s higher quality berries. Many big multinationals out to maximize their profits are opting to save by purchasing cheaper and lower quality berries from California, Mexico and China, adding artificial coloring, sugar and other taste enhancers to make up the difference.

This year’s markets were so low that Northwest growers were unable to cover their production and labor costs. Production expenses including strawberry plants, fertilizer, planting and fumigating were between $.10-.15 per pound. Farm workers were paid an average of $.14 per pound. Haulers, checkers and other workers add as much as $.14 per pound of additional expense. Skagit Valley growers sold their berries for an average of $.32 a pound, far short of their actual costs.

Several local growers sell fresh market berries or operate their own processing plants, which helps increase their profits. Many smaller growers are especially vulnerable to low prices, and may well be going out of business. Raspberry prices were especially low, due to Bosnia’s increased production since the end of the war and Chile’s dumping of berries into the US market.

“The American Farmer is an endangered species,” says Jeanne Youngquist of Mike and Jean’s Berry Farm. She claims they decreased their strawberries by over 50% this year. American-grown food, our most precious resource, is now threatened,” concluded Youngquist.
Many farmers argue they must be increasingly astute with their labor force to avoid extinction.

“Larger numbers of workers is definitely an advantage to us,” said Steve Sakuma of Sakuma Brothers Farms. Large, efficient crews are able to move through a field quickly. This year nearly every strawberry was harvested. A stretch of warm weather combined with an abundance of workers permitted a record fourteen-day strawberry harvest.”

A glut of workers allowed local farmers to maximize both the size and the quality of their crews, which numbered as many as 375 workers per day at Sakumas. Worker efficiency is an increasing priority for farmers required to supplement worker’s income to meet Washington State’s minimum wage of $6.72 per hour.

Keenly aware of the abundance of workers, Sakuma Brother’s required pickers to harvest a minimum number of pounds per day to cover minimum wage, confiscating name badges of those who did not harvest the minimum.

Fear of losing a place in the field made workers especially speedy, both increasing their income while at the same time decreasing the time they worked.

Larger and more efficient crews clearly meant less work for farm workers -especially when weather kept berries from ripening fast enough to meet the needs of workers. Farm workers complained that machines were also being used instead of people to harvest blueberries and raspberries, leading to less work then anyone can remember.

“Next year many of the people from California will not come back. There is not enough work,” said Francisco, a Triqui-speaking man from Oaxaca living in one of Sakuma Brothers three migrant camps.
Without farm workers, many Skagit County growers could not continue operating. Yet if current trends continue, farm workers will clearly have less and less work to come back to as local farmers fight to survive.

American consumers themselves must be willing to pay the price for American-grown food in order for American agriculture to continue.

Contextual encounters at the well with Latino inmates in US jails

Intercultural reading of the Bible demonstrates that reading strategies and interpretations vary widely and are relevant to reading communities to the extent that they are faithful to the text, the social context of the group, and the daily lives and concerns of individual readers. In this article I seek to include the perspectives of Latino immigrant inmates who participated in the Intercultural Reading of the Bible Project. How might these people identify the contemporary equivalent of the well and water in their communities and lives? Where are today’s wells where contemporary Samaritans might quench their thirst in their encounter with the Word become flesh? What is the role of the facilitator among people who are mostly first-time Bible readers, are outside the church, and often consider themselves condemned by God and unable to change?

As part-time chaplain of a jail in Washington State I meet with Mexican and American inmates twice weekly to read and discuss our questions, the Scriptures and to pray. I met two times with two different groups to discuss the encounter between the Samaritan woman and Jesus in John 4 with hopes of forming partnerships with other reading communities through the Intercultural Reading of the Bible Project. Several insurmountable difficulties made it impossible for me to fully incorporate this group into the project through partnering with other groups. However due to the richness of our discussions, the fruitfulness of several emphases, and the unique perspective of the men with whom I read, I will present one feature of this story that particularly engages men in jail: the symbolic function of the well as place of encounter par excellence between Jesus and the excluded.

Leading Bible studies in a jail presents special challenges to the facilitator that are similar but also different from those encountered in more stable prison environments where people have already been sentenced and are doing their time. Our Bible study group changes from week to week as new inmates arrive and others are sent to prison, deported or released. County jails function in the United States as maximum security detention centers where people arrested for crimes committed in the immediate area of the county are held until charged, tried and sentenced. Those with financial means are allowed to post bail and remain free until their sentencing or acquittal. Those unable to come up with bail money are confined until they have either been acquitted of their charges or have served their time. People charged with misdemeanors can be sentenced to anywhere from one to 364 days in the county jail. People charged with more serious crimes can spend anywhere from two months to a year negotiating a plea agreement with the prosecutors or fighting to overturn their charges by trial. If the judge sentences someone to anything less than one year, the convicted serve their time there in the county jail. Any sentence over one year is served in one of Washington State’s many state prisons. In addition, the jail serves as a holding facility for immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security for deportation or to serve federal prison time for repeated illegal entry as criminal aliens.

Jail inmates are often in a state of uncertainty and crisis. In addition, many find themselves incarcerated together with enemies from the streets. Tensions between individuals, people’s emotional instability due to stress from family crisis, court troubles, or detoxing from drugs or alcohol require very deliberate and often directive facilitation and more crafted, time-limited Bible studies.

Privacy issues and jail rules further limit the possibilities of verbatim recording of Bible studies. Even if they were permitted, recording devices would inhibit people’s participation, as anything they said could be subpoenaed for use against the defendant in court. The voices of the inmate participants included in this article were written down from memory outside the jail and then translated into English.

As I prepare to facilitate a Bible study on John 4 in Skagit County Jail it is easy to notice that my own social location among Latino immigrant inmates loosely parallels Jesus’ status before the Samaritan woman. As a Caucasian, English-speaking, US citizen, educated, male I represent the dominant mainstream American culture in a way loosely paralleling Jesus’ Jewish, male identity. My parents were both born in the United States. My grandfather on my father’s side migrated from Sweden in the first decade of the twentieth century, while on my mother’s side my descendants go back to some of the first English settlers in the 1700s. I grew up as a fairly privileged member of the dominant US ethnicity, and benefited from many opportunities, including an undergraduate and graduate education. I now am an ordained Presbyterian pastor, jail chaplain and director of an ecumenical ministry to immigrants called Tierra Nueva (New Earth).

My corresponding passing through Samaria and sitting by the well began in 1981 with a life-changing trip to Central America. Encounters with contemporary equivalents of the Samaritan woman now consist in weekly Spanish-English Bible studies in the jail and with Latino immigrants at Tierra Nueva’s Family Support Center. Every Thursday evening and Sunday afternoon uniformed jail guards usher me through the thick steel doors into the jail’s multipurpose room to meet with 10-30 men. The guards then corral red-uniformed inmates through two steel doors take their places in the circle of blue plastic chairs where we sit and read the Bible together.

The men with whom I read more closely resemble Samaritan villagers than I embody Jesus. Many are originally peasants from impoverished rural villages in Mexico. Pushed away by landlessness, drought, unemployment, government neglect and global market forces, they are drawn to the perceived bounty of El Norte (the USA)—a modern-day well of sorts. Once in the United States they find work as farm laborers or minimum-wage restaurant, construction or factory workers. Their willingness to work hard for low wages makes them invaluable to the US economy. Many have entered the United States illegally, and live on the margins of American society. Others are second-generation immigrants identified by first generation immigrants as “pochos” or “cholos,” if they belong to a gang. Many do not have valid driver’s licenses or even identification and make use of counterfeit residency and social security cards. Others have had their drivers licenses confiscated due to driving offences and have alias names in an attempt to escape arrest for active warrants or known illegal immigration status. Most have partners and children to support, sometimes in Mexico and in the USA. This is a near impossible feat when making minimum wage. Many people are tempted and succumb to small-scale drug dealing for extra cash. This often leads people into more serious drug dealing. Theirs’ is a life of constant insecurity. If ever arrested for anything undocumented immigrants can be assured that they will be deported by the Department of Homeland Security back to Mexico immediately after doing their jail time.

The visible gap between me as facilitator and my immigrant – inmate reading community has often provoked new insights that have proved fruitful in engaging people in reflection on particular texts. An event associated with a Bible study on John 4 several years before the launching of the Intercultural Reading of the Bible Project inspired my later reflections on the symbolic function of the well. This event illustrates the special challenges that can require a more directive facilitation style and the urgency of coming up with contextualized interpretation, one way or another.

During one of my Thursday evening Bible studies eight years or so ago some 30 inmates bustled into the jail’s multipurpose room and the guards shut the doors, locking us in the room together. I had arranged the plastic chairs in a large circle. Once seated I invited the men to pray with me for God to send the Spirit to illuminate our reading and discussion. I noticed from the start that there was an uneasy tension in the room as finished the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit. On this occasion I invited a volunteer to read John 4:1-15.

During the reading and immediately afterwards I found myself distracted by a number of people’s nervous glances and aggressive glares. Several pairs of men talked softly to each other. Pukie, a mustached gang member in his early twenties with his shoulder heavily bandaged from a gun shot wound he acquired in an attempt to rob at gunpoint the home of another drug dealer looked especially agitated. Stimy, a heavily-tattooed young white guy on his way to six years in prison for a drive-by shooting sits sullenly in the middle of the men to my left.

I reach into my store of methods for engaging distracted people, directing my first questions to people who were talking or glaring. “Who are the participants in this story?” When nobody answered I invite Pukie, the most agitated in the group, to reread John 4:4-8, and then ask the men again to identify the story’s characters. After getting feeble responses I continued with my questions, addressing this one to Stimy: “So where are they and what’s happening in this story?”

“Shit I don’t know man, I wasn’t paying attention,” says Stimy, looking down at his Bible. “At some well, I guess, talking and shit.”

While these questions work to some extent, people were less engaged than I could ever remember and tensions continued to mount. I am increasingly aware that I need either more engaging questions or an attention-grabbing story to captivate their interest. In a last ditch effort to salvage a Bible study that was spinning out of control I launch into my own contextual interpretation in a more monologuing, even preaching style.

Since I know that many of the men in the group are long-time drug dealers and/or addicts I invite the men to imagine that they are selling drugs out of their apartment, a quickly-grasped attempt to present a contemporary equivalent to the well. I am drawing on my experience talking with hundreds of addicts about their desperation to acquire more crack cocaine, which often propels them into selling drugs themselves to assure their own supply. Most local dealers who operate out of low income apartments or motels.

“So there you are, and Jesus comes up to your door, but you don’t know who he is. He just looks like some normal gabacho (white person), maybe like me. He says, “hey, sell me some coke,” or “sell me some crack.”

The men all look at me, some smiling uneasily, others clearly wondering what I am going to say next.

I continue my monologue, suggesting what I imagine that Latino drug dealers -Samaritan women might be thinking.

“You wonder if you can trust him, and inside you are thinking this is an undercover drug task force officer trying to make a sting operation. You say to him: “No way man, I can’t help you,” and wish he’d just go away. But he keeps insisting on talking with you.

“Hey, listen,” he tells you. “If you knew God’s gift and if you knew who it is who is asking you to sell him some cocaine, you’d ask him and he would give you living crack. Because the crack that you smoke only gives you a high for a moment, and you have to keep buying more, but the coke that I will give you will give you a permanent high.”

Many of the men have raised eyebrows, and seem surprised, even shocked. I suggest at this moment that this story shows us that Jesus comes to us where we are and respect us. Many of the men though are fidgeting nervously and glancing across the circle and then down. Willie, a Chicano gang member I have been meeting one-on-one with, who is sitting beside me, taps me on the shoulder and insists that he wants to go back to his cell.

“We need to wrap this up Roberto, now” he tells me with urgency in his voice.

I tell the men that it appears we’re all having a hard time getting focused, and that maybe we should end our study early. I invite them to stand and pray the Lord’s Prayer together in Spanish.

Everyone stands and I close my eyes and begin the prayer. Right away I notice that only a few people are praying with me and I hear increasing rustling around me. I speed up my prayer and race for the closing “libranos del mal” deliver us from evil—the official ending of the Roman Catholic Spanish version of the prayer. I open my eyes to a scene of terror.

The men to my left all have blue plastic chairs raised over their heads, the metal legs ready to crash down upon the men on my right, whose chairs are all in different stages of being raised. A Native American man has a leaded microphone jack raised above his head like a tomahawk ready to come down on Willie’s head. I walk quickly through the middle of the crowd to the buzzer on the wall that calls the guards. Almost instantly they are on the scene, hustling the men against the wall and out the doors into their pods. I stand there stunned, my heart beating wildly, feeling foolish and impotent. The guards usher me out and I drive home completely dejected. The next morning I call into the jail and ask to speak with Willie.

He immediately begins apologizing and then starts to cry. “I’m so sorry Roberto. It was my fault. I had it all planned with my homeboys, the nortenos. We were all going to jump the others there in the group who were sudenos. One of them had insulted Stimy, saying his girl friend was pregnant with someone else’s baby. We don’t take those kinds of insults lightly. We had it all planned to fight them right at the beginning of the study, but didn’t out of respect for you. Man, I’m really sorry for what happened. That Bible study though has been going through my mind all night. Mostly though I want to thank you for your prayer. That prayer stopped everything man,” he concluded.

“Prayer, what prayer?” I ask. “You know, that prayer right at the end.”

“What do you mean it stopped everything?” I ask.

Willie alerts me to the fact that nobody hit anyone, that everyone had their chairs raised over their heads ready to fight, but that he had felt completely paralyzed, unable to move the moment that I had finished my prayer.

I think back to the night before and recall that there were in fact no blows that I could remember. I had walked right through the middle of the warring gangs to buzz for the guards. “Libranos del mal – deliver us from evil” had been my last words. I find Willie’s explanation unbelievable but intriguing and thank him and tell him that I didn’t hold anything against him. After hanging up I call Pukie, who tells me nearly the same thing. That the Bible study was in his head all night and thanks for the prayer that stopped everything. The story spreads through the jail and then the Latino community about how the pastor stopped a gang confrontation with a prayer. This event clearly engraved both a particular way to contextualize John 4 and the power of the ending of the Lord’s Prayer into my heart. At the same time I recognize the limitations of a monologue, seeking ways to engage people that help them identify contemporary equivalents of the Bible characters, movements and geography in their own lives and communities.

The studies I led two years ago with Latino immigrants in the jail with the Intercultural Reading of the Bible Project clearly benefited from this earlier experience. There in the face of escalating tensions, I felt an urgent need for the Bible story to somehow become more obviously relevant through some sort of immediate relectura or actualization. I also am convinced that there is a place for the facilitator to take the initiative in introducing contextual readings that go beyond people’s natural expectations, grabbing their attention in a way that penetrates through their indifference. While a contemporary rereading was not enough to stop the confrontation from erupting, it may have held it at bay until God became more fully present in response to our prayer.

In preparation for my more recent Bible study studies on John 4 I ponder the most accessible launching point in the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. The actual location of the encounter where Jesus offers living water provides a fruitful metaphor upon which I as facilitator can invite people to a contemplative site for possible contemporary meetings between today’s Samaritans and Jesus. The deeper meaning of the well, it’s location outside the town and most importantly its symbolic distantiation from any official religious place where “sinners” would typically expect to meet God offers a surprise to people who feel unworthy of approaching God in traditional “holy” places.

Jesus’ surprising presence among people who are not engaged in overtly religious behavior in non-religious places is a consistent theme in the stories surrounding John 4. The reader of John’s Gospel is alerted to Jesus’ incognito presence right from the start with statements like “he was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him” (Jn 1:10). John’s description of the word becoming flesh and dwelling (literally pitching it’s tent) among us (Jn 1:14) invites the reader to identity God as present and moving with humans. John goes on to describe Jesus showing up outside the traditional religious places when people are going about their lives. The first sign of turning water into wine takes place at a wedding (Jn 2:1-12). Nicodemus comes to him by night (Jn 3:2), the official appeals to him at Cana and his son does nothing, being healed from a distance in Jesus’ absence. Jesus meets the paralytic while he is laying beside the pool—a place symbolic of wherever people have been living in frustrated expectation of finding relief. The feeds the five thousand on a mountain while they are sitting passively with no apparent faith (Jn 6:1-14). The adulterous woman is defended and pardoned outside of religious places without her taking any initiative (Jn 8:1-11) as is the man born blind (Jn 9:1-12) and Lazarus (Jn 11:1-46). These details are highly significant for people on the margins of society and church, who assume that their salvation depends entirely on their going to the right places and doing the right things.

In my Bible studies on John 4 with inmates or others I work with who consider themselves excluded by the church or dominant culture I typically begin with either a first question regarding their lives and world, or with a brief question regarding the narrative detail of the text—specifically the characters and geography. With people who I suspect feel wary of anything religious who may well assume that the Biblical story is irrelevant, I usually begin with a question about their lives and values. In the following composite of two different jail Bible studies with Latino inmates the text appeared to provide an ideal jumping off place to talk about our lives as it introduces the well.

In both of my studies for the Intercultural Reading of the Bible Project in the jail I begin with a prayer for God to send the Holy Spirit to open our hearts and minds and then invite a volunteer to read John 4:1-4 before briefly commenting on Jesus’ passing through Samaria. I give them a brief description of behind the text information about Samaria, its location outside of acceptable Jewish religious places, and the religious and ethnic divisions that existed between Jews and Samaritans that do not keep Jesus from showing up.

I ask another volunteer to read John 4:5-8 and ask some basic questions to get people to pay attention to some of the narrative detail in this evolving story.

“Who are the characters in this story and what do we know about them up to this point?” I ask.

“There’s Jesus, who has been passing through Samaria and sits by a well tired and thirsty,” someone says.

“Then who comes along?” I probe, inviting the men to look back down at their Bibles.

“There’s a Samaritan woman who comes to draw water,” someone responds.

I talk briefly about the importance of wells for people in the first century. “Everyone needed water to meet their most basic needs: to quench their thirst, water their animals, irrigate any crops, wash their clothes and bodies”, I say.

“Do any of you go to wells to meet your most basic needs?” I ask, a question that I know will acknowledge our distance from the world of the text.

They shake their heads and someone answers the obvious. “None of us.”

“So where do you go when you are thirsty for something, or when you are seeking to meet your most urgent needs?” I ask, seeking to inspire reflection on possible contemporary equivalents.

“I go to church,” says a man who is a newcomer to our jail Bible study group. While this may indeed be where he would go, I suspect that he is trying to please me and God by giving the spiritually correct answer.

If people look uncertain about what I am trying to ask or are not feeling enough trust to answer honestly I often re-phrase the question.

“What do people you know do or where do they go to find satisfaction, to meet their needs?” Or, “if you were released right now for 24 hours where are the first three places you’d go?”

“To the bar,” says a Mexican farm worker in his early thirties. People smile and some nod.

“I’d go to my girl friends place man,” says a young Chicano gangster known as Neeners. Neeners has 666 tattooed under his lower lip and the names of past girl friends tattooed on his neck. People laugh and nod their agreement.

“To the crack house,” says a heavily-tattooed Chicano man. A number of men rock back in their plastic chairs and laugh.

“Hey wait a minute,” interjects Neeners. “You may not believe this, but I go to jail to get my real needs met.” This is the only place right here where I feel like I can think straight and get my shit together. Coming in here to study the Bible and shit helps me gain a new perspective,” he says.

These answers loosen up the group, and men mention other places they frequent or activities: the mall, heroin, sex, music, family, dealing drugs, cars, work, partying, dancing.

“So do these places and activities give you total satisfaction?” I ask. “Do you feel like you are able to meet your needs?” I continue.

“No way homes,” says Ben. “Look, here we are, all of us stuck in here. I ain’t satisfied by my life, not out there, not in here. None of us are.”

Ben’s answer seems to resonate with most of the men, who nod their agreement that nothing really satisfies them.

“I’ve had everything money can buy: cars, women, drugs, money, jewelry. I’ve never been satisfied,” says someone. “I know that I’m still thirsty for something.

Others nod their heads in agreement.

“So, the woman from Samaria shows up at the well to get the water she needs to survive, and Jesus is already there,” I summarize. “What might this mean for us?” I ask. “If this story tells us where Jesus hung out back then, what does it suggest about where we might run into Jesus now?” I ask.

The men are tentative in responding to the obvious. They look at me and down at their Bibles awkwardly, afraid to say something blasphemous. They start with safer responses.

“Could this be saying that Jesus may come to us when we are out working?” someone asks.

“Well, if that is a place where you are seeking to meet your needs, the place where you work would be a sort of well. Where else do you go to satisfy your needs, to quench your thirst?” I probe.

Eyebrows are raised and I see some slow nods and slight smiles. However at this point I am aware that I am running into serious resistance from a dominant theology deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of Latino immigrants and most Caucasian men and women on the margins of North American society. The dominant theology envisions God as being found in Catholic or evangelical churches, and other religious places, or far away in heaven looking at the earth from a distance. Some may envision God as being near a religious shrine in the corner of their home, when candles are lit before the Virgin of Guadalupe or other saints. No one would naturally envision God as meeting them at the above mentioned places where they would actually frequent to meet their actual physical and psychological urges.

The Bible is another place that people would naturally view as a sacred site for God’s presence. However, most inmates assume that the Bible is too holy a place for them to feel welcomed into. The Bible is not viewed as containing refreshing, surprising good news for people like them. The only people who might hear good news are good people who are complying with God’s infinite demands. Many Latino inmates fear that the Bible will confirm their worst fears: that they are damned because they cannot succeed at obeying the rules or because they avoid exposing themselves to new demands. Do this, believe that…change or else. The Bible is not viewed as offering anything that would meet any of their most pressing needs. Consequently whoever facilitates the Bible study is viewed as someone who invites them into a foreign, irrelevant place associated with punishment for crimes committed. People’s first time attendance at my Bible studies are often motivated by their boredom with the monotonous life in their cell blocks or by their sense of desperation leading them to do everything possible to comply with God’s demands that they comply with religious demands.

“If today’s wells are places where we go to quench our thirst like bars, crack houses, and meth labs, what do you think of Jesus’ question to the woman: “Give me a drink”? I ask, inviting a direct confrontation with the dominant theology.

I believe that my question which overtly invites people to interpret Jesus’ presence in a way that challenges the dominant theology directly parallels Jesus’ provocative request to the Samaritan woman: “give me a drink” (4:7). My inmate Bible study participants often fear departing from the official transcript, especially when they are detained by the State, which appears to have received power sanctioned by the all-powerful God. Standing with Jesus whose request shows total solidarity with them in their thirst is a challenge to the entire system. Embracing this challenge appears risky. What if God in fact legitimates and upholds the power of the State? Their embracing of a God with them right where they are rather than renouncing their wells in breast-beating repentance may be perceived to lead to further sanctions in the form of more jail time or a guaranteed deportation.

The woman’s response to Jesus parallels inmates gut response to the interpretation I suggest. I ask a volunteer to read John 4:9.

The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, “how is it that you, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?”(For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans).

The woman’s questioning of Jesus’ openness to her reflects both her and inmate equivalent Samaritans recognition that they are being called to ignore traditional boundaries. She reflects a hesitancy to move beyond the official transcript. At the same time, her hidden transcript apparently is not as risky as Jesus’. Jesus, a Jewish male who would normally view himself as superior to and forever separate from an unclean Samaritan woman is willing to receive from and drink her water.

“Let’s see how Jesus responds to the woman?” I suggest, inviting someone to read John 4:10.

I invite the men to imagine what Jesus’ offer of living water might sound like to them, if he were to actually meet them at their particular wells where they actually go to quench their thirst.

Knowing full well that I am inviting people to risk blasphemy, I myself suggest a contextual rereading of this verse based on one of the men’s identification of the crack house as his well.

Is it possible that Jesus’ answer might sound something like this,” I ask. “Ïf you knew the gift of God, and who is who says to you, ‘Give me some cocaine,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living cocaine”?

The men smile hesitantly at first and then begin to see that indeed Jesus is not taking the expected sermonizing, judging tone they assume he would have. Nor am I. When we read on in John 4:13-14 “everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” the men can see that Jesus is talking about more than actual water, cocaine, or whatever the contemporary equivalent of the contents in the well might be. At the same time, to help people identify God’s surprising presence there outside the religious spaces where they would least expect God, I ask another question.

“Have any of you experienced God as being present with you in a positive, helpful way while your were drinking or doing drugs?”

Several men start talking at the same time, feeling permission to express a hidden transcript that they had never expressed public ally to anyone. Arnold tells of how he would often drive home after drinking and doing drugs and that he never got in an accident even though in the morning he would have no memory of having driven his car the night before. Another man tells about how God speaks to him when he is high, making him feel a hunger for God’s Presence and for reading the Bible. Neeners tells about how as a teenager he prayed to God while he was stealing car stereos that he would not be caught, and how he felt God’s protection. Another man mentions that is a miracle that he and many of them are alive at all. He went on to tell the group how he is sure that if the police had not arrested him and brought him to the jail this time, he would be dead from an overdose. God allowed me to be arrested to save my life and bring me here to get closer to God. Through these stories the men identify God as a gracious presence who accompanies them despite their crimes and brokenness.

When we read together Jesus’ order for her to return for the living water with her husband and note that Jesus’ offer was given with full knowledge that she had had five husbands, the men become more confident that this new theology may be believable.

“So if Jesus reveals God’s true identity, as it says in different places in John’s Gospel, what is God like according to this story, “I ask, inviting the men to summarize this positive theology for themselves.

“Jesus comes to people right where they are, no matter what they’re doing or if they’re messed up and shit,” says Neeners.

“He offered living water to the woman even though he knew she’d lived a bad life and without making her change first,” says someone else.

The men are visibly moved as we glimpse together Jesus’ startling solidarity with people as apparently messed up as this Samaritan woman. Jesus seems more approachable now that they have seen his offer of living water, no strings attached to an undeserving woman.

I ask the men how many of them feel thirsty, desirous of this living water that Jesus offers. Everyone raises their hand or nods. An idea pops into my head that seems rather extreme but still appropriate.

I invite the men to imagine a 40 ounce can of the least expensive and highest alcohol content malt liquor preferred by people on the street known as a “forty.” I invite them to imagine that it contains the living water that Jesus offers that will permanently quench their thirst instead of the old, well-known malt liquor. At this point everyone is clear that the living water Jesus offers is not actual water much as the malt liquor equivalent I invite them to drink is not literal malt liquor. I invite them to pop off the top and raise it up and drink freely together as I pray. Everyone pops the tops and we raise up our imaginary cans together over our mouths while I pray: “Jesus we receive your gift of living water. We drink it down into our beings. Satisfy us with your loving, gracious Presence.”

Everyone crosses themselves in a way that I have come to recognize means they have been deeply touched. I leave for home feeling like I have shared living water at a place that functions regularly like a life-giving well for me: Skagit County Jail. I return again the next Sunday, hoping that trust has grown between them an God, each other, the Bible and myself as pastor and facilitator. My hope is that my presence, however directive or incomplete, would somehow fit within the company of Jesus and the woman, who both in their own ways bring people into authentic encounters with the source of living water.

E. Robert Ekblad Jr.

Tierra Nueva and The People’s Seminary, Burlington, Washington, USA

Today we are facing an unprecedented assault on both the world’s poor and the natural world.   Marginalized people and wildlife all need refuge or the planet’s most vulnerable and beautiful life will become extinguished.   Those of us in solidarity with people at the edges of society and with nature feel the pain and chaos of marginalization.   We often find it difficult to step out of the fray into contemplative spaces where our minds, bodies and spirits can be renewed.   Yet this is essential since there are direct links between the degradation of the human spirit and the destruction of the natural world.

Seeing the beauty in God, in ourselves, in the poor and in nature is essential if our resistance is to be sustainable.   In fact it was Moses’ mother and Pharaoh’s daughters’ seeing the baby’s beauty that led to the first acts of non-compliance with Pharaoh’s imperial power in Exodus. Seeing the beauty requires cultivating watchfulness and prayer—precursors to contemplation.   I am convinced that we all need sanctuaries so we can not only survive but flourish in the struggle for life and liberation.

We have recently been graced with 35 acres of forest and pastureland on the Skagit River an hour north of Seattle where we have established New Earth Refuge—a family-based hospitality and retreat center tied to Tierra Nueva—a ministry to Latino immigrants and others on the margins.   Here we actively seek a sustainable life of solidarity with both people and nature under assault.

Our journey has been long and perilous, but also rich and rewarding.   An extended trip to Central America in 1980-1981 was both an awe-inspiring awakening to the beauty and dignity of the poor and a jarring introduction to the dark side of US Empire.   While studying Spanish in Guatemala for six months we learned from our Guatemalan teachers about our nation’s numerous violent interventions against democratic movements throughout Latin America.   We witnessed the terror of a civil war that claimed thousands of lives of Guatemala ‘s indigenous peoples.   We felt called to somehow address the root causes of poverty, and found support from a Christian community in Oregon to work among peasants in Honduras.

Honduras

In 1982 we partnered with a Honduran development maverick named Jose Elias Sanchez , who insisted that if we wanted to combat poverty at it’s roots we had to teach farming.   “Production must be increased so people can feed their families and the nation,” insisted Elias.   First the soil and forests must be protected and rebuilt. Yet material change was not enough for Elias. Compost piles and contoured, soil and water-conserving ditches must be built and dug into people’s minds or they have no lasting value for the land.   People must conscientized, converted so that their “si” comes from the heart and head, leading to action.   Elias recruited us a Honduran campesino sage, Fernando Andrade to help us set up an experimental farm and training center for teaching sustainable farming and preventive health to help rural people avoid migrating from country to city and from city to North America.

For six years we lived in rural Honduras , farming our own land, training village promoters in preventative health, intensive hillside agriculture and leading Bible studies. Courses happened under mango trees in what we called the Universidad del Campo (University of the Countryside).   We founded Tierra Nueva (New Earth) together with longtime activists with the Omaha Catholic Worker, Larry and Joni Geer-Sell and a cadre of campesino promoters, who have continued to provide technical and pastoral support to small farmers since 1988.   The teaching consists in practical alternatives to slash and burn that include composting, mulching and planting green manure crops instead of burning, as well as digging contoured ditches, building soil conserving barriers and planting to the contour instead of farming steep land unprotected from torrential tropical downpours.   We organized women’s groups, trained health workers and launched campaigns to teach intensive vegetable gardening, hygiene, nutrition and herbal medicine.

Together we witnessed first-hand God’s creating “a new heaven and a new earth” (Isa 65) during a time when the United States was building military bases, pressuring countries to recruit the region’s youth into the armed forces, conducting endless military maneuvers to train the region’s armies and launching wars against the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Our farm was a hub of hospitality and training that both enriched and exhausted us.   What most sustained us in the end was our growing practice of reading Scripture with the people.

Through trial and error we learned to read for the good news in the Bible with people who often felt at the receiving end of God’s big stick.   We learned to directly confront pervasive negative images of God through asking questions that helped people identify a liberating God at the heart of both the Biblical stories and their broken lives.   Eventually we came to feel that we could best serve the people as pastoral agents, but felt we needed more training ourselves.

We left Honduras in 1989 and spent five years studying theology, raising children and making regular trips back to Honduras .   As a result of our studies and continual work leading Bible studies we are convinced of the need for quality theological training to be offered to people at the margins.   This requires deliberate, creative work as Biblical scholarship does not trickle down any more than do financial resources.   Our own conversion “from below” in Honduras convinced us that mainstream churches and the Biblical studies and theological academy need direct contact with both marginalized people and nature for their spiritual health and survival.   We felt called back into the mainstream church to serve as agents of call and empowerment for ministry.   In 1994 we launched Tierra Nueva del Norte (New Earth of the North)– an ecumenical ministry among migrant farm workers and other Latino immigrants in Washington State .

Tierra Nueva del Norte

Burlington is in the heart of the Skagit Valley , a fertile, agricultural valley an hour north of Seattle that winds down from the North Cascades, and is drained by the scenic Skagit River . Like many farming communities near cities, Skagit farmland is under assault.   This is most visible in Burlington , where hundreds of acres of prime farmland have been paved over to host nearly every major retailer imaginable.   Cucumber, berry and apple farmers struggle to compete with producers in Sri Lanka , Mexico , Chile and China .   Farmland is giving way to housing developments as Seattle commuters looking further north for affordable housing.

Thousands of farmworkers from Mexico have been drawn to Skagit County , where they find work in fields, fish processing plants, restaurants and in construction.   Seasonal workers crowd into nine migrant labor camps from June through October.   Most of Skagit County ‘s immigrant workers are undocumented, placing them at constant risk of deportation should they run into the growing army of Department of Homeland Security agents who patrol this area an hour south of the Canadian border.   Skagit County Jail is used as a holding facility for immigrants arrested by local law enforcement and detained by the DHS for deportation.

In 1994 we moved into a downscale residential neighborhood a few blocks from the Latino center of Burlington .   We began visiting immigrants in the strawberry and cucumber fields and migrant labor camps of the Skagit Valley .   I was hired as part-time chaplain of Skagit County Jail, where I   lead Spanish Bible studies twice a week.   In the nine years now that I have led these Bible studies I have met thousands of immigrants and locals who have cycled through jail.   The jail serves as the primary connection place between Tierra Nueva and the most marginalized Latinos.   Many men ask me to visit their families, help them with immigration and other legal difficulties, get into drug or alcohol treatment.

TNN has grown rapidly and become increasingly demanding.   Our home became known to migrants and ex-offenders, who came by unexpectedly, day or night.   Clearly we needed to train volunteers and future staff through setting up some kind of equivalent to our earlier Honduran Universidad del Campo.   Our first seminars involved bringing farmers and farmworkers, and community members   together to oppose INS raids.   We then began offering courses like “Reading the Bible with the Damned” and “Walking with People on the Margins,” to train jail volunteers and then expanded our courses to seminarians and community members with courses like: “Breaking the Chains: Social and Biblical Perspectives on Resisting personal and structural evil,” “Exodus and Liberation,” “Reading the Word, Reading the Street.”   Then in 2000 The People’s Seminary – Seminario del Pueblo was formally launched with help from a generous grant.

The People’s Seminary is now up and running as an ecumenical learning center where people from the mainstream and the margins meet for Scripture study and theological reflection in preparation for service, ministry and social transformation.   Scholars & leaders from all over the world come to teach here, together with farmworkers, ex-offenders, & people who serve at the margins.   Through Seminario del Pueblo we offer courses in Spanish to train Hispanic pastors and lay leaders.

Now Tierra Nueva (we dropped off the Norte due to our work with members of both Nortenos and Sudeno gangs) includes eight full-time staff and 17 half-time Honduran workers and many volunteers to operate the Skagit County Jail ministry, the Family Support Center , a bilingual faith community Camino de Emmaus-Road to Emmaus, The People’s Seminary and TN Honduras.   Tierra Nueva seeks to link together issues that are often separated.   For example, preservation of farmland must be linked with the preservation of farmers and farmworkers—which requires confronting globalization.

In July of 2002 Gracie and I and our three children Isaac, Luke and Anna moved onto 35 acres of land near the mouth of the North Fork of the Skagit River .   The land consists of 10 acres of pasture and 25 acres of second growth forest.   Now a healthy twenty minutes away from Tierra Nueva and The People’s Seminary instead of three blocks, we are coexisting with raccoons, beaver, river otter, coyotes, deer, hawks, eagles, and numerous migratory bird species.   In addition we are raising eight sheep, a llama, dog, two rabbits, a rat, and guinea pig.

Since this is our home, our first commitment is to learn to live out spiritual practices that sustain us for life and ministry as both individuals and a family.     We are committed to watchfulness, which includes daily prayer and Scripture reading: morning, noon and night when possible, regular walks, Sunday worship and many experiments.   One family practice that has been working lately as we homeschool our children is to begin in the morning by reading a local, national and international articles from the newspaper or news magazines followed by a chapter from one of the Gospels.   The children are challenged to find some connection between the world and the Bible—not always immediately evident.

Conclusions

We are currently raising money to build outbuildings so we can host as many as 20 visitors.   In their d esire to protect the land forever, the previous owner placed 34 of the 35 acres into a conservation easement with Skagit Land Trust, limiting our building to the one acre house site.   Here we intend to offer hospitality to friends, families and people visiting Tierra Nueva and taking courses at The People’s Seminary.   We want people to experience this beauty and find rest through spiritual retreats.

Nurturing and protecting the human spirit must be directly linked to the nurturing and protection of the natural world.   Solidarity with the vulnerable natural world must be dynamically linked with solidarity with vulnerable human communities.   True solidarity begins when we contemplate and value the beauty: in God, ourselves, in the other and in nature.

Snow geese are flying low over our land today, free over this acreage from the danger of hunters.   Last night’s Spanish Bible study in the jail was on Jesus as our “coyote”— who brings us into the Reign of God, into the Garden, the New Earth, against the law, free of charge.   There is good news to be discovered and new life to be protected from the hunters, whether they are law-enforcers, addictions or other forces that oppress.   Living a sustainable life in these dark times demands constant watching, praying and delight.   Without times of retreat & fellowship, all people, including those seeking to serve in the mainstream or at the margins will become endangered species.   Yet with or without a riverfront paradise we affirm with the Psalmist: “God is a refuge for us” (Ps 62:8).