Table Overturners By Mike Benson

“Shame” Artist Mike Benson

Artist Mike Benson

Artist Mike Benson just launched micobenson.com displaying his work and thoughts. 

Why was Jesus so animated in his reaction to what was going on in the temple that day? Why did he feel compelled to disrupt, to call attention to himself? Was his anger justifiable? And why did he choose to make the temple, the sacred community to which he was called, the very place where he would stage a protest?

These are some of the questions that probe deep at my heart when I reflect upon these passages. Jesus enters the temple and becomes so angry with what he sees that it moves him to begin shouting and overturning tables. He was causing disturbance, and disrupting the status-quo. He claimed that the temple was meant to be a place for welcoming all, a house of prayer, but that it had been reduced to a den of thieves and robbers. This was a harsh claim against the church.

In my reflection on this passage I ask myself what would this act of robbery look like in many of our churches of today? How are we, the Church, robbing and taking from others, turning them away, and driving Jesus into a righteous rage of overturning tables, and disrupting the way we do church?

As an African-American, I have unfortunately witnessed and experienced racial injustice on many of occasions. I can personally attest to the spiritual damage that is done to a person when he is discriminated against, only because the color of his skin is different. I know what it feels like to be part of a community of people who have been historically shunned by a society, a people who have been marginalized, disenfranchised, denigrated, and hated. A people who transcended above these assaults to become survivors.

I have seen the two-facedness of Christians using Christianity as a canopy to discriminate against our sisters and brothers in the churches today, not only because of racial differences, but also because of their gender differences, their sexuality differences, and their theological differences.

This has motivated me as an African-American and a Christian to learn how to see myself the way that I believe Jesus sees. We must learn to love our whole selves, including our “queered” bodies, as they continue to evolve.

Why do we, the Church, often feel threatened and afraid when we encounter bodies that are different in our churches? Why do we look ways to restrain them, to quiet them, to reject their individualities, while we often benefit from their creativity? When we do these things to anyone we deny them basic human rights. We slowly go about finding ways of killing off the Spirit of God that is within each of us.

This is what I name to be a form of “church robbery,” and it continues to drive Jesus into a rage. The passage says that “when the chief priests and the scribes heard what Jesus was teaching, they began looking for ways to kill him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching.”

I believe that all churches are called to take this prophetic stance of being “table overturners.” We are called to speak out against the forms of injustices that I have named. We must find the courage to hold our churches accountable to the same radical way of loving one another that Jesus often practiced.

As Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “injustice anywhere, is against justice everywhere.” Just as with our Brethren Jesus Christ, there is a cost to this way of discipleship. May we find his bravery, and step up to the calling.

Extraños y extranjeros no más

Traducción por Saulo Padilla y Charletta Erb del Strangers No More Statement

Pink Menno cantando himnos antes de testimonio público el viernes en la MCUSA Convención. Foto por Kelli Yoder

Cerca de 50 “Pink Mennos” se ​​unieron a la asamblea de delegados MCUSA como parte de un testimonio público. Aliados mostraron fotos en blanco y negro de personas de la comunidad LGBTQ. Pink Menno líder Katie Hochstetler leyó un comunicado. MCUSA Moderador Richard Thomas llevó en un momento de silencio y oración. Pink Menno apoya la inclusión de las personas LGBT en MCUSA. (Pink Menno)

El declaración

Esta es la declaración que compartimos con la asamblea de delegados de la Iglesia Menonita de EE.UU. el 5 de julio 2103 en Phoenix, Arizona.

Avoid Getting Crushed as the Dividing Wall Falls By Sarah Thompson

New CPT logo by Nekeisha Alexis-Baker

Sarah Thompson is Outreach Coordinator for Christian Peacemaker Teams (cpt.org), an organization building partnerships to transform violence and oppression. 

Ephesians 2:14-16 illustrates the way Jesus’ life, teaching, death and resurrection brought people from different primary-identity groups together. Indeed Jesus’ call was broad, beautiful, and boundary crossing. It was not, however, without challenge as to how people from different primary-identity groups were to come together as part of the larger, new body.

Why Phoenix is an Unsafe Place by Kathleen Kern

MCUSA Convention Prayer Walk, July 5 2013 Photo by Tim Nafziger

Mennonites poured into the streets for a prayer walk on the final day of convention in Phoenix. The route took us right past the courts and the prisons and the office of Joe Arpaio, a sheriff notorious for racist practices and horrible jail conditions. Kathy Kern provides some historical perspective on why Latino Mennonites legitimately fear Phoenix…

In May, United States District Court Judge, G. Murray Snow, an appointee of the George W. Bush administration, handed down a 142-page ruling that concluded Maricopa County, Arizona Sherriff Joe Arpaio’s policy of detaining people who looked Latino violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  In his ruling, Judge Snow noted that Arpaio routinely violated federal law and the constitutional rights of Latinos in his County—of which Phoenix is the county seat—and blatantly violated the terms of a prior court order that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) stop engaging in immigration-related enforcement operations.  

Excerpts from the Potawatomi and Plow Creek sequence by Rich Foss

Written in the fall of 1996 and the winter of 2011, Rich Foss reflects on the inheritance of land taken from native people in Illinois.

The rain remembers 1830, the last days, when Black Hawk

and a thousand warriors danced a war dance for three days in Tiskilwa,

feet pounding and pounding in a circle,

claiming and proclaiming this place as their place,

Can the whole of my being serve God? by Anonymous

I value tradition and love structure. I like lists and clean lines, delineated boundaries and predictable expectations. I’ll admit, ‘going with the flow’ isn’t exactly my strength.

I also like to think that changes in mind and thought are at times difficult for everyone, and I would have liked to see the faces of the Jewish people upon hearing Jesus’ explained ‘sign’ for his actions in the temple as described in John 2:13-22.

Racial healing from a dominant culture perspective by Joanna Shenk

Racial Healing Task Group

First published in The Mennonite 2010-09-01

What does it mean to acknowledge and lament the injustices of the past and wrestle with the reality of continued racism?It’s hard sometimes for me to see the ways I perpetuate racism. This is uncomfortable. It’s not my intention.

As we on the Racial Healing Task Group shared meals and stories with members of the Intercultural Relations Reference Council (IRRC), we heard difficult things. We listened as our sisters and brothers told of their regular experiences of racism.

Common Threads by Tony Brown and John Sharp

Dividing walls and hostilities abound in the stories of Anabaptist suffering and African American slavery. On one hand, the intolerance of magisterial authorities in Europe excluded Anabaptists when they chose counter-cultural expressions of faith—believers’ baptism, voluntary church membership, disengagement from the state, Jesus as lord and model, the Sermon on the Mount as normative. In Catholic, Lutheran, and Swiss Reformed regions, the sword of the state became the instrument of the church in its bloody ritual of discipline. As a consequence, Anabaptists were hunted, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and some were executed by beheading, drowning, or burning. Authorities banished them from their homes and their properties confiscated.

On the other hand, Africans were stolen from their homeland, bound in chains, transported across the torturous Middle Passage, and sold to the highest bidder in the Americas. Savers, traders, and planters used the Bible in justification—the curse of Ham in Genesis 9, the patriarchs’ use of slavery, and the submission texts of Paul. The economic benefit of slavery, hugely profitable, outweighed all other concerns. They were whipped, maimed, and tortured, all made legal by the Slave Codes of both the North and the South.

Anabaptists were strangers and aliens in their own lands; enslaved Africans were strangers and aliens in a foreign land.

A house of prayer for all nations by Tim Nafziger

Photo by Jacklyn Wells

The triumphal entry was a potent symbol of the Jewish Resistance and the Roman Repression that came in response. Josephus describes this violent cycle, how Titus’ final siege of Jerusalem killed over 1 million people. That’s out of 4-5 million Jews in the Roman world. Mark was writing the Jesus story during this same bloody period.

How the vision began By Saulo Padilla

Photo by Chris Marquardt 2003

Written February 2010

4:44 a.m., I am awake.
First thought – the church.
I am dreaming, but I am awake.
I see tables overturned.
There are paintings and writings on them.
One has the famous picture of Dirk Willems.
Some have writings about Anabaptist deportations from Bern in the early 1700’s.
Another one has a date, “1711” with boats that say “Ritter Company” on them.
Others narrate migrations of Mennonites from all over Europe to America.
I walk a few blocks. It is hot.
Tables have been overturned all over.
I am in Phoenix.
I am awake!

Read how the story unfolds from Saulo’s dream. Also read Saulo’s invitation to demonstrating our true citizenship.