Shane Claiborne - Social Activist, Author, and Speaker

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Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People podcast. This episode's guest is Shane Claiborne. Claiborne is what one would call a cool Christian. He's the author of 10 books and he has worked alongside Mother Teresa. He also served in Baghdad on the Iraqi peace team. He's the opposite of megachurch pastors with private jets and palace like churches. He describes himself as a champion for grace, which means he helps the homeless, protests against wars, advocates for the end of the death penalty, and supports methods to end gun violence. One of his props is an AK47 beaten into a plow. Cleburne is also the co founder of Red Letter Christians, named because because the words of Jesus were printed and read in Bibles among the organization's values. Freedom comes through serving others, not power, politics or materialism. Diversity and collaboration make us stronger, not weaker. We embrace and work alongside people of different faiths, erasing the lines of us versus them. By the way, do you know why Gandhi traveled in third class on trains in India? Keep listening to find out. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People podcast. And now here's Shane Claiborne.

Is it possible to find a Bible passage to rationalize almost anything? For example, if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. I read that in one of your pieces to justify gun ownership. So effectively, isn't there a Bible lets me off the hook Gospel.

I think that you can read anything you want to into the Bible, you know, and that's been true for generations, for millennia. I think it was Stringfellow that said a lot of us read the Bible Americanly rather than read America biblically. So we project ourselves onto the scripture. Or as someone once said, God created us in his image and we decided to return the favor. We make God into who we want God to be. So now, I mean you literally have bumper stickers that say if Jesus had had an AR15 assault rifle, he'd still be Alive, like, whoa. But here's the thing, guy. What I love about Jesus and my understanding of Jesus is that this is where we have God putting on skin, moving into the neighborhood, living among us, showing us what God is like with skin on, what love looks like with flesh on. And so a lot of the work that we do within red letter Christians and the larger circles that I'm in is allow Jesus to be the litmus test. You know, Jesus is a sounding board for whatever. So whatever. We end up interpreting scripture as we bounce it off of Jesus. In my community, we say, before you eat some donated food, it needs to pass the sniff test. And we're saying we need it to pass the Jesus sniff test. Does it smell like Jesus? And the great thing about Jesus is I think we can see that God is not violent, that God loves God's enemies, that God cares about the poor. God is born as a refugee, dies executed on the cross. So God is near to the suffering of the world. And now when Bible verses can be interpreted to say anything we want, Jesus becomes the referee of our kind of interpretation of when we're pitting Bible verses against each other or whatever else. Yeah, that's how. That's how.

But when somebody cites something like that to justify buying a gun, that person believes that he passes or she passes the sniff test. So how do you administer the sniff test?

Effectively, the interesting thing I think with like say justifying guns and using a scripture to do that is, is that we don't just have the words on paper paper, but we have the life of Jesus that speaks for itself too. So for inst. When one of Jesus own disciples uses a weapon to defend him and ends up cutting a guy's ear off, that was Peter. Jesus scolds him and says, no, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Put that away. And then he puts the ear back on the guy that Peter had wounded and heals him. And the early Christians understood that as the final triumph over the idea of redemptive violence. And Tertullian, one of the early Christians, he said, when Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarmed every one of us. Because if ever there was a case for justifying violence to protect the innocent, Peter had the best case. In the book, we also have things like how the early Christians heard this. So it's very important to me as I study church history, that for 300 years, Christians were committed passionately to non violence. So they stood against war and violence in every iteration. They stood against the death penalty, they stood against abortion, they spoke against the gladiatorial games. So that commitment to nonviolence, it does come from Jesus for me, but it also comes from the earliest Christians, how they interpreted the life and teaching of Jesus, which ended up meaning a life that was committed to nonviolence and to loving our enemies, which meant not killing them.

So tough question number two. If you were to just read the news today, many people would conclude that a large percentage of evangelical Christians, if not all, believe that if a person is anti abortion, all other sins are forgiven, forgotten, or ignored or secondary. So as long as you're anti abortion, go ahead, grab women by the private parts, call Muslims, terrorists, Mexicans, rapists, it's all okay as long as you're anti abortion. So what percentage of evangelical Christians really believe this?

I think most of the world outside of that kind of very narrow anti abortion group is baffled by this, you know, by how narrowly we've defined what it means to be pro life to one issue. And I think we would be more accurate in that group saying they're, they're pro birth or they are anti abortion rather than pro life. Because the irony is that you can be pro guns, pro death penalty, pro military, and still say you're pro life as long as you're right on abortion. And I write and talk a lot about this, how we need a more robust ethic of life that encompasses everything that is destroying the life and squashing the dignity of God's people. Every person is created in the image of God, and when a life is squashed or destroyed, it grieves God's heart because we lose an image bearer of God in the world. So to be pro life to me doesn't just mean being anti abortion. It means that I care about immigrant lives, that black lives matter, that the environment matters, like ending the death penalty, gun violence, all these things. So I think it really does kind of blow folks mind when they see those contradictions that the same people that are against abortion are for life on a whole lot of other issues. So the younger generation, I think, though, sees that like a recent poll of millennial Christians so born after 1980 showed that overwhelmingly, like 80% of them are against the death penalty. And it's not in spite of their faith, but because of their faith, because of how they interpret the life and teachings of Jesus and stuff. So I'm encouraged. I do think that that older anti abortion movement, there's one iteration of that, when the culture wars of the 80s and stuff, that continues to have some residue. But I think there's a whole generation rising up that has a much more robust ethic of life. And in fact, there's a whole new conversation coming around abortion where the actual conversation is how can we reduce abortions in America? And some of the folks on the far left and far right have really held the conversation hostage. So, yeah, one of the things I love about Mother Teresa, who I've learned a lot from, is that she was consistent. She cared and spoke passionately about eradicating abortion, but she was also passionate about the death penalty and all these other things that were destroying life. And for her and for me, for a lot of us, I think our passion on reducing abortions is not just about T shirts and bumper stickers and picketing Planned Parenthood, but it means we've got to be ready to take in 14 year old moms. You know, it means that we've got to foster and adopt kids that don't have families. Because I think that ideologies can be cheap. But if we really have these deep convictions, then they require that we take responsibility and not just have a bumper sticker.

Even beyond a bumper sticker, it's hard to put two things together that you're pro life but okay with separating families at the border. How do you, how do you put those two things together?

I can't put those two things together. I have friends that work for some of these groups like Focus on the Family, that I disagree with on a number of things. But I will go to them and say, how can you possibly allow this to happen? How can we see folks who care about family? I mean, it's in the name of not speaking out against the caging of kids on the border.

And what do they say?

Some of them privately will say, we're deeply concerned about this. But then what you're getting at guy happens is they're calculating the risks that they're taking and they want to keep a seat at the table. But like when people tell me and I have close friends that are in conversation with this administration and they're like, well, we care about the persecuted church overseas, but that doesn't translate into like welcoming Syrian refugees that are escaping persecution into our country. Like, those are the contradictions that I. That just caused my head to spin and my heart to ache.

You touched on this briefly earlier, but I want to revisit it. So what, what is your reaction when people seem to be saying that God has chosen America?

Like, where, where do you.

Where did they get that from?

Oh, wow. My first response is that this is nothing New, some of the exact language that we use around the sort of exceptionalism of America was exactly what Rome was using, that it was the light of the world. Right.

And that's not good news.

No, I mean, and this is the wild thing, is that Jesus could not be more overt in his critique of that. I mean, Jesus's language in the Gospels is like ripped right out of the imperial lexicon. And he's challenging that. It was really a theology that created the foundation for this kind of Roman exceptionalism. So sometimes, you know, when I hear like America first, this, this political ideology, I mean, I can no more imagine Jesus wearing a Rome first shirt. This idea of America first or that we have a whole idea even of the doctrine of discovery, right. There's almost this manifest destiny of America. So one of the greatest challenges in America right now is the co opting of real Christianity with this kind of American nationalism that kind of camouflages itself as Christianity because like our money says in God we trust, but our economy looks like the seven deadly sins. What we're in danger of is kind of inoculating people from Christianity with this idea that the Bible doesn't say God so loved America, it says God so loved the world.

Are we in the presence of a modern day Cyrus?

We're in the presence of a very unhealthy, broken man with a whole lot of power and a lot of Christians that are providing cover for that and defending things that are indefensible. And one of my friend's kids said it best. They said we have to remember God loves Donald Trump, but that doesn't mean God wants him to be president. So I think that we can insist on that. God redeems broken people, but we have absolutely no signs of repentance and life change. And, and that's where, you know, for Christians, that's been. One of our core beliefs is that God can redeem anybody. But we also believe in repentance and that we need to show signs of our change of heart, our commitment to Christ. And when Donald Trump was asked, you know, point blank about his relationship with God, if you ask for forgiveness for your sins, his answer is stunning. Over and over. So that's just not how God and I roll. I don't ask God for forgiveness. I live in ways where I don't need to ask for. That's what he said. Right. And we can't hang with that. As Christians, you know, we believe that we are all sinners. We've got a whole lot. And yet when we, when we provide Grace without repentance. That's where Bonhoeffer talks about cheap grace. We cheapen what it looks like, and we end up defending things that are indefensible. I mean, where to start? I mean, the lifestyle commitments to the tweets, to the policies of Trump almost daily betray the very core values of Christianity. So it becomes impossible to hold together a fidelity, a loyalty to Jesus and this loyalty to Trump. They're like opposing magnets. So, yeah, I hope that Donald Trump dedicates his life to Jesus, but when he does, we should see some signs for that. And we know the fruits of the spirit. The fruit of the spirit that the scripture says this is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, kindness, goodness, gentleness. Like that, faithfulness, self control. Like, that's what God is like. And none of us are fully there, but that's what. That's what we're going for. And so when you look at things like the Beatitudes, where Jesus says, blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, they are the antithesis of the things that this administration is blessing. And that's where I think, you know, it becomes, as Jesus said, you can't serve two masters. You just can't reconcile our. The. The. The gospel of Jesus looks so different from the gospel of Trump.

Can you tell me how you really feel, Shane? Like, just let it rip. Don't hold yourself back, bro.

I'll tell you, I'm so concerned. I'm so concerned because 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the last election, but not only that, they continue to defend things that are just indefensible. And I'm not partisan. I don't endorse presidential candidates. I love Jesus, and it's my love for Jesus that causes me such concern for the things that Trump is doing and that the folks that are enabling him. And the problem for me is, too, that folks like Franklin Graham and Robert Jefferson, these very prominent evangelical Christians that defend Trump, it doesn't feel like they see the damage that that is doing to an entire generation that is looking in on this and going, if that's what Christianity is, I don't want anything to do with it. I thought it was better than that.

I would make the case that Christianity has a real marketing problem these days.

Yeah.

Can you explain to me how a group like the Prosperity Gospel comes to form? Like, what. How does something like that evolve?

Well, it does resonate with people, so I think there's an importance to understand. Like, why does it resonate with people? When I travel around the World. There is an aching, hurting world with people in desperate poverty, people that are coming out of real struggle, that want to know that there is a God that wants to bless us. But what the prosperity gospel has done is manipulate and capitalize and exploit that pain in a way that. And it's not just poor folks. I mean, you got rich folks that want to justify their private planes, you know, so you literally have these televangelists that are like, well, God gave me a private jet because my ministry is so important. I can't fly in coach class with ordinary people. You're like, oh, what the what? Doctor?

You see this list of questions? Literally one of my questions I'm about to come to is, is any pastor's time so valuable that he or she needs a private job?

Oh my gosh, I'll just cross that one off right now. So Gandhi's response when, when he they said, why do you travel third class on all the trains in India? And Gandhi said, because there's no fourth class. And I mean, I think that looks more like Jesus than most of the televangelists. Like, like, because what Jesus is doing is inviting us not to climb the ladder up, but to keep moving closer to the bot, those who are at the bottom. So I heard a pastor saying, if we find ourselves climbing up, up the ladder of success and upward mobility and status, we should be careful or else on our way up, we'll pass Jesus on his way down. Because Jesus shows us a God that leaves all the comfort of heaven and is born as a baby refugee, a brown skinned Palestinian Jewish refugee, in the middle of a genocide when King Herod was destroying families, ripping kids apart from their parents. And that's how Jesus is born. And he all through his life, until he dies on the cross, executed by the state, with someone dying on his left and on his right. I mean, he enters into the human struggle. And so we spend most of our life trying to move away from suffering. And yet the gravity of the gospel should be pulling us into the suffering of the world as it did Christ. So this prosperity gospel, that God just wants to bless us with riches, it doesn't pass the sniff test. It doesn't look like Jesus. Jesus said, sell everything you have and give it to the poor. And I heard someone once say, we're all into the born again thing, that if you want to enter the kingdom, you should be born again. But this songwriter, Rich Mullins, he used to say, but if you tell me I've got to be born again, then I can tell you You've got to sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Because Jesus said that too. But that's rich said. This is why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like. I know this. I know that God wants us to move closer to the suffering in the world. And I also know that we have a whole lot of ways that we do theological gymnastics in order to justify things that just don't just fly in the face of everything that Jesus taught and lived for us. So now one thing I would say is this though guy, is that I believe a better model than the prosperity gospel is this idea that God wants everybody to have what they need. And so in the prayer Jesus teaches us, he says, pray that I would have this, that we would have this day our daily bread. And Proverbs says, give me neither poverty nor, nor riches, for in my poverty I might be forced to steal, and in my riches I might forget my God. So I mean, that's beautiful. It's this vision of enough. So we talk about in our community a theology of enough where people neither have less than they need or more than they need, but that people have this day our daily bread. And I think in a world with such deep inequity between the super rich and super poor, that's a really wonderful vision. So that's what we're trying to live into.

So this would be the enough gospel.

Yeah, man. And that's what the early church talked about. They shared everything they had. No one claimed their possessions as their own. And they put their offerings at the apostles feet and it was distributed to folks as they had need. And it says there were no needy persons among them because they shared. There were even stories in the early church of when poor people would come to the community if there wasn't enough food, then no one would eat. No one would eat until everyone would eat. They would literally fast to make sure there was enough food for everyone.

What are the telltale signs that your church has gone astray?

Well, I don't think that I'm the moral gatekeeper of the world, but I do think that Jesus really is our sounding board for this. So for instance, when churches are telling their parishioners, the folks in their congregation, to bring guns to church, that's a problem, right? Because Jesus didn't carry a weapon, he carried a cross. And I think that the gun and the cross give us two very different versions of power. And one of them says, I am willing to kill and the other says I'm willing to die. And I think we really have many competing things. For us, I think entitlement is demonic entitlement. The idea that we deserve something, it flies in the face of everything I think Jesus stood for. So whenever we hear preachers saying that we're entitled to fly first class or God gave me this mansion or something, I have a lot of questions about that. I think that, that so much of the gospel is about being showered with things that we don't deserve, like grace. Yeah.

What if someone pushes back and says Christianity is inherently quid pro quo. You believe you get eternal life. Isn't that quid pro quo?

I don't think that it's an exchange like that. I think we can definitely cheapen what the sacrifice that Jesus did on the cross. Again, like Bonhoeffer said, you know, we can cheapen grace and just make it this experience exchange. Just like God paid the bill or God, you know, you can have all kinds of theology that turns God out to be a real monster. There's a lot of versions of why Jesus died that are like God was holding a gun at humanity and God took it off of us and put it on Jesus and killed Jesus so that we didn't have to die. But it makes God out to be sort of a bloodthirsty monster. And I think that's problematic. We can have versions of the gospel that make God really easy to fear, but really hard to love. And, and in the end, the God that I see in Jesus is a God that, that is so gracious and, and, and in some ways, like anybody who thinks that they are entitled, Jesus consistently challenges them. And those who think that they don't deserve anything at all, they're showered with love, you know, and included. So one of the, Joan Chittister, she's a wonderful nun, she says Jesus consistently challenges the chosen and includes the excluded. And we see that like when Jesus is talking to the religious elite, the kind of self righteous teachers of the law and the Pharisees who thought they were the hub of everything they had to corner on the market of everything God was doing in the world. And Jesus said to them, you're a brood of vipers. Right. The tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. That's the stuff that gets you killed. Right. And so I think that's where we really need to challenge ourselves to say, are we challenging the chosen and including the excluded? And a lot of times the church has been guilty of exactly the opposite. We've frustrated the people that Jesus magnetized and we've massaged and cared for the people that Jesus was constantly ticking off.

When you hear leaders after a tragedy offer their thoughts and prayers, what's your response to that?

First of all, someone who believes in prayer. I believe in the power of prayer. Yeah. But, I mean, there's a lot of activists that don't spend much time praying. Right. However, I also believe that prayer can become a place to hide, a place to hide from responsibility. And so after a mass shooting, when politicians and preachers offer thoughts and prayers, I think that can be empty words, because thoughts and prayers need to turn into actions and policies. And when people say, all we can do is pray, that's not true. We can pray, but we can also organize. We can boycott, we can engage politicians. We can amplify the voices of the oppressed. We can march in the streets. We can do direct action. There's all kinds of things that we need to do to supplement our prayers and put feet on them. Right? So. And I think sometimes, frankly, Guy, we, a lot of Christians, we put all of this responsibility on God, where one of the greatest mysteries of our faith, I believe, is that God actually invites us to be a part of the miracle of changing and healing and redeeming the world. So when we throw our hands up at God and we say, God, why don't you do something about this injustice? If we listen closely, we may hear God say, I did do something. I made you get out there. So sometimes I think we're praying and waiting on God, and God may very well be waiting on us. So one of my mentors said, good things come to those who wait upon the Lord, and good things also come to those who get off their butts and organize. And so week after week, in our little small group, if we're praying for our friend to get a wheelchair ramp, maybe we actually need to get some carpenters together and build them a wheelchair ramp. Right. We can pray, but we also have gifts and skills and resources that we often don't tap into.

Do you think God is sitting around saying, boy, I regret this whole free will, man.

I should have.

I don't know that God has. Has regrets like that. But I do think that. Oh, man, I saw this film series one time that was. It was like this series about Jesus. And there are parts of it that I, you know, wasn't crazy about. But there was a really interesting scene where all of this is flashing before Jesus's eyes as he's going to the cross, and it's the devil telling Jesus, this is what you're dying for. And it shows the Crusades and it shows all of these distorted versions of the Christians that are in Nazi Germany defending Hitler. And he's like, are you sure you want to die for these people? That was the question. So, you know, but I, I think that's, that's the miracle of God's grace. And it's also why we hold out the hope that no one's beyond redemption.

Prayer in public schools.

I did it. I believe in it, love it. Like I, I, when I was in high school, I organized those see you at the poll rallies where we'd gather around the flagpole and pray to keep the prayer in the public schools and whatnot. And you know, I, I think a lot of these, these things have become more about a culture war that we've created than about the real reality. Because I, I mean, people can pray wherever they want. In fact, I just got invited back to my public high school to speak to an all school assembly and I was able to share about my faith things that, and this isn't a public high school. I feel like I, I, sometimes we are so aggressive with things that it's like we, we, what we actually want is we want to impose our religion on everybody. So like, I don't think that we should be forcing people to say prayers that they don't like or recite the ten Commandments in public schools or something like that. I also don't think we should be making kids say the Pledge of Allegiance. We tell our kids, if folks ask you to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance, we invite you just to not make a big deal out of it, but just pray the Lord's Prayer as the Pledge of Allegiance is saying. Because sometimes you end up with these kind of competing narratives, like I said, of American nationalism and trying to stay true to where we've actually pledged our allegiance, which is Jesus. We teach our kids, if we obey the laws of our government, when they reflect the values of our faith, and when our government does things that we don't agree with, then we're called to stay faithful to loving our neighbor, which right now means challenging immigration laws and things like that. So yeah, so I, I, I, I, I love prayer. I also don't think that we need to use it as. Foreign.

Hypothetical question, but do you think Jesus would be on social media?

Ah, that's a good question. I haven't got. You got such good questions, guy. You know, Jesus is on Twitter. Haven't you seen that? So I think there's actually four or five Jesuses on Twitter. But anyway, yeah, I think that it's hard to say, you know, would Jesus drive a car? Well, Jesus rode a donkey. But I think Jesus came in a particular space and time and communicated with the means that were available to him. And so I think each of us is asking, how can we communicate in the age and time that we're living in? But I do think the question around, like, social media is a really good one, because virtual relationships can't replace real ones. And at the end of the day, I do worry about a generation that's growing up looking at pixels on screens rather than the eye in the eyes of human beings. And so I think we've got to be really careful not to replace real love, real activism, real relationships with virtual stuff. Because I told some of the young people I was working with, like, if you only eat virtual food, you will be very hungry and malnourished. And if all we have is virtual relationships, then I think we still end up very lonely people.

If God, if Jesus had not been resurrected, do you think he'd be turning over in his grave right now?

I saw this great comic with. It was. It was actually Jesus and Obama talking, and Obama's shaking his head and he's going, oh, Jesus. Trump is undermining everything that I did in my presidency. And Jesus looks back at Obama and says, oh, oh, Barack. The evangelicals are undermining everything that I lived and died for. But I'm encouraged because of this guy, I think my friend Richard Rohr, he's wonderful Catholic, Franciscan priest, and he says the best corrective for what's wrong is the practice of something better. You know, as Gandhi said, be the change you want to see. And I think we need folks who will live a better version of Christianity, one that is fascinating people with love and with compassion. One thing that we often say is that the gospel spreads not through force, but through fascination. But a lot of our Christianity has become less and less fascinating to the world. And in fact, a lot of people, they love Jesus. They just wish the Christians acted more like him. And that's what we're trying to build, is a movement of Christians who live like Jesus meant the stuff he said. And when we fall short of that, we're honest about it, in a sense.

Aren't you saying that? I don't know if you're saying it, but isn't one interpretation that's viable is that you love God, but you don't like the church. The two don't people can. This is a really weird Metaphor. But I think there are people who love Macintosh but hate Apple.

There are things that there are some deep wounds and some traumatic experiences that people have had from church. The tricky thing is, I think, is that, as the early Christians said, we can't have the God as our father without having the church as our mother. And so, like, you can't be Christian without the church in a big sense, you know, I mean, I think we can. Augustine. It was attributed to Augustine that he said, the church is a whore, but she's my mother. And pretty strong language. Pretty strong language. But so I think what we can.

See that is a nuance.

Shane. I gotta admit, I never heard that one before.

Wow.

So that we can see that the church is very dysfunctional. But I think we love the church back to life. And here's another one for you. This is a pastor in my neighborhood who said the church is kind of like Noah's Ark, the old boat with all the animals. He said, think about must have really stunk inside the ark. And the church is kind of like that. Sometimes it stinks inside, but if you jump out, you're going to drown. And so what we need to be about, I think, is cleaning up the stench, you know, and doing something about that. But I don't think that the answer is to kind of try to be Christian without the church. I think that the answer is to try to have a church that's more like what Jesus wants it to be. And we do that by kind of building the kind of church that we dream of and that we think that God longs for. Now, there are some versions, there are some congregations and even some denominations that I think are quite toxic. And some of them are built on being on the wrong side of history when it comes to race and slavery. And the residue of that is very apparent. So I think we need to join the healthiest parts of the church that we can and also begin restoring those other parts.

Is it possible that just like Jesus, the church has to die and be resurrected? Do we need a church 2.0? A second coming of church.

I love this. We're going to have to do a second podcast. Man, this is awesome. Here's what I would say to that. Is that the church that Jesus describes is a body, a living body, right? And bodies are constantly living and dying like cells of bodies. And I think of congregations and maybe even denominations like cells of a body, and cells are constantly dying and being born and multiplying and. But the body lives. And that's where we. There are parts. There are some cells that need to die. There are some versions and denominations, even in congregations, that they are very unhealthy and they are dying, but the body continues to live. And that's where I think that we need to build on the best of our past and of our traditions and, and be honest about healing and confessing the worst of it. So we did a project called Common Prayer, a prayer book with prayers for each day. We worked with like 30 different people from all different denominations. So we're. It was a holy project because we've got Orthodox Christians and Catholics and Pentecostals and Protestants, Mennonites, Anabaptists, and all working together to say, let's remember the best of our traditions and let's also be honest about some of the worst parts of that history. So that's. That's kind of the restoration of the church is what I believe in. And my. One of my friends who's Catholic, Chris ha, we wrote a book together, Jesus for President, and he's passionately Catholic. And people go, why are you joining the Catholic Church? And he says, well, he says it's similar to why I moved into Camden. When he moved into Camden, New Jersey, it was rated the worst place to live in America. And he said, I believe in a God of resurrection. We buy abandoned houses because we bring them back to life. He said, I joined a church because I believe in a God that is constantly resurrecting dead things. That's a powerful line.

Let's end this podcast with. On an upbeat. Give us some hope. What can any listener do to make the world a better place?

Oh, man, I am. I'm so excited to be alive because I think all of us, especially younger folks, I'm just going to put you and I in that group too, guy. I'm not young. Are aware that the world that we've been handed is really fragile and is far from what God would like it to be. But hope comes from that place that things are not as they should be, but they can be. They can be different. And we don't have to settle for what is. We can build what should be. So a friend, Walter Brueggemann, he's a great Christian writer. He wrote a book called the Prophetic Imagination. He's a dear friend, and one of the things he says is that we often misunderstand the prophets. And we think that the prophets, the biblical prophets, that they were fortune tellers, but they were truth tellers. They weren't just trying to predict the future. They. They were trying to change the future by naming the present, by shaking us and waking us up and inviting us to imagine a world that's different from where we're headed right now. So I think we're called to that prophetic imagination, right? So, like, one of the things we've been doing, inspired by Micah and Isaiah, when they talk about beating swords into plows and spears into pruning hooks, is we've been taking. We don't have any swords in the US but we have a lot of guns. So we've been taking guns and melting them in the garden tools. And. And that vision is that something can be made different. A gun can become a plow or a shovel. Something that's designed for death can be made into something new that's designed for life. And Jesus took a cross that was an instrument of torture and humiliation. And now we think of it as an instrument of God's love, a conduit of God's grace. And so we need to be prophets of the new world. And that scripture of Mike and Isaiah, swords in the plows, it ends by saying, nation will not rise up against nation. People will study war no more. But that vision begins not with politicians, but it begins with the people of God. And it's an invitation for us to remember that change doesn't come from the top down. It comes from the bottom up. And we are the people that we've been waiting for. So let's build a new world. We're the midwives of a different and more beautiful world. So I'll end us with that brother guy. Like, we do not have to accept the world as it is. We can build the world that God dreams of. And before every movement that changed the world, everybody said it's impossible. Ending slavery, women's voting, the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Before every social movement, people said it's impossible. But then after that movement, everybody looks back and says that was inevitable. So let's be the people who believe despite what we see right now and build a better world. And I really believe that it takes courage to say slavery is wrong not a generation after we've ended it. But it takes courage to say slavery is wrong when it's the status quo, when it's accepted, when Christians are defending it with the Bible. And so right now is a time where I think we can have courage to say that many of the things that we see in our world are wrong. And the Christians that are defending them, they're not bad, but they're wrong. And we need to cling to Jesus.

I hope you enjoyed this interview of Shane Claiborne. Actually, I hope that it challenged you. When in doubt, check what's in red. And now you know why Gandhi traveled in third class. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People podcast. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick. And my thanks to Katie Jo Brotherton, who helped make this interview happen for.

Our Bible doesn't say God so loved America. It says God so loved the world. Our Bible doesn't talk about standing your ground. It talks about turning the other cheek. Our gospel says, when you welcome the stranger, you welcome me. If you don't welcome the stranger, you don't welcome me.

This is remarkable people.