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Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics
Above: the cover of Ched’s1996 Say to This Mountain featured a print by his mother, Charlotte Myers.
Ched describes his work
“Over four decades I have sought to respond to the discipleship call in a variety of ways: as an activist, writer, community builder and popular educator. It is my conviction that the First World church can only be renewed by rediscovering its witness to God’s dream of the Peaceable Kingdom and justice for all. In the metaphor of Jesus, we must be willing to “address the mountain” of injustice. I’ve traveled widely in pursuit of this vision, moving among a cross-section of faith-based groups and parishes teaching, listening, challenging, encouraging and networking. I pursue a holistic pedagogy of “theological animation” that integrates the disciplines of popular education, evangelism, political organizing, pastoring and theological reflection.
At the center of my approach is the practice of relectura: a “rereading” of the Bible in light of concrete struggles against violence and oppression. I believe that the Judeo-Christian sacred story is an older, deeper and wiser tradition that has the power to transform our lives and our history–but only if we can overcome its domestication under the dominant culture. Our churches – conservative and liberal alike – are often inhospitable to the gospel’s invitation to the cross, to solidarity with the least, and to watershed discipleship, decolonization and Sabbath Economics. Our task is thus to rebuild literacy in which Word and world are brought to bear on each other at every turn.
When and wherever this has happened throughout the history of the church, communities of discipleship, creative celebration, healing and solidarity with the marginalized have been born or born again! The same holds true for our time. I have heard from participants countless times exclamations such as these:
“Why haven’t we heard this before in church?”
”I’ve been waiting my whole life to encounter this gospel!”
“I’ve long suspected there was more in that text than I was being told!”
Such responses express at once both frustration and hope, and indicate how hungry our people are for an integrative approach to faith and politics.
Right: Ched leading a Bible study by the Ventura River, 2013. Photo Tim Nafziger
My work has three goals:
- To recover the vocation of evangelism grounded in Jesus’ call, engaging communities of faith across the ecumenical spectrum in critical conversation about the shape of discipleship today.
- To help rebuild a movement of faith-based witness for peace and justice by supporting, encouraging and interconnecting diverse local, regional and national expressions of faith and action.
- To promote and nurture biblical literacy and social analysis among Christians by helping groups re-ground their perspectives in sacred stories and discern how those visions can be embodied in our contemporary contexts.
People often chuckle when we describe our work as “theological animation.” Apparently this is seen as contradictory: the serious endeavor of theology is perceived to have little in common with something as fun-loving as cartoons. But this is exactly the problem. So we use intentionally the double entendre of “animation.” We’ve explained the first meaning above–facilitating a “coming to life.” The next paragraphs reflect on the other meaning.
One of the cultural founts from which I draw inspiration is early American animation. Years ago my brother Grob turned me on to the work of pioneering animated filmmaker Max Fleischer, whose short features, such as the “Out of the Inkwell” series, pre-dated (and profoundly influenced) Walt Disney. There were two very cool things about Fleischer’s cartoons. For one, they rolled to jazz music–at a time jazz was still very much edgy and underground. This manic, free music cohered perfectly with Fleischer’s rubbery, weird Vaudevillesque toon characters (such as Koko the Clown, left).
Jazz also fit with Fleischer’s non-agonistic, non-linear stories. There were no good guys or bad guys, no plot crises in this fabulated toon-world; just characters bumping along to the music, having adventures and silly fun. Theologically speaking, this early art form represented a sort of utopian dreaming, imagining a world in which characters never die or suffer, but instead laugh and dance. (Fleischer invented the time-honored cartoon convention in which characters bounce right back from any and all mayhem.) A vision, in other words, of heaven on earth.
It is no accident that Fleischer and many of his colleagues were Jewish immigrants. They were, like the musicians to whom they were drawn, brilliant artists marginalized by the racial-ethnic codes of the times (the first Black jazz musician ever to appear on film was in a Fleischer short). I think of Fleischer’s early cartoons as a sort of midrash on America, reflecting a longing for life-after-transfiguration: goofy, happy, everything good.
That kind of mystical vision of the world-as-it-should-be should inform any theology that hopes to struggle for redemption in the real world–which could not be further from a Fleischer cartoon. Which is why I strive to practice theological animation.