When Jesus looked at Jerusalem, the most religious city in the world at a time of high religious fervor, he wept. He wept because Jerusalem, steeped as it was in 'godliness', despised the work of shalom - an all-encompassing cosmic peace that comprehends and lives out the basic truth that everything and everyone is sacred because everything and everyone bears the imprint of God's love.
"But as he came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, he began to weep. 'How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace. But now it is too late, and peace is hidden from your eyes.'" (Luke 19:41-42)
In both Hebrew and Christian scriptures (Old and New Testaments) the goal of all things is summarized with this word, 'shalom.' Justice and compassion are the tools of God's love that bring healing to a world 'sick unto death' with oppression and hard heartedness so that all things can be made new. Justice and compassion are the pathway to shalom.
Individual salvation is a whole-hearted participation in God's shalom, a welcoming of the process of justice and compassion into the center of one's own being. Individual salvation is not the goal of Christian faith so much as a byproduct. Any form of Christianity that isn't dismantling oppression and overcoming hard-heartedness is profoundly out of line with the teachings of the scriptures. Frankly, most of what passes for Christian faith in America today is simply old fashioned idolatry dressed up in a culture of religious mumbo-jumbo and self-righteousness.
I genuinely believe Christianity in America today needs reform more urgently than in the day of Luther, Calvin and the gang. I genuinely worry that the current religious posture in America is so blinded by the cult of individual salvation and so enmeshed with oppressive structures of racism, militarism and greed that we have become a serious threat to humanity. I genuinely worry that we have thrown shalom in a dungeon and grown so used to calling this state of affairs 'righteousness' that nothing short of a new dawn of the Holy Spirit outside the bounds of the church will bring new life.
