Shane Claiborne -Celebration2

Well, I did a little circus work before I started working in the church, and I love the circus because I think the world needs celebration, the world needs joy, and as you read the prophet Isaiah Isaiah gives this vision of the kind of eschatological apocalyptic end-times as this beautiful banquet feast of God And Jesus and the Gospels often talk about the Kingdom of God as a banquet feast where those on the margins are at the centre of the table and we see the importance of joy. I think the world needs joy and celebration. We love celebration here. At The Simple Way we often talk about not just protesting, but protestifying, proclaiming the world as it could be. And I think for too long Christians have been known for more what we're against than we're for, and we're to be people of hope, people of joy. Something liberals and conservatives often have in common is that they've lost their joy, church is often starved for joy. So one of my favourite celebration stories was a a little party we threw on Wall Street a few years ago. We had gotten arrested, just to put it all out there… and we were sleeping in public, and we ended up having a lawsuit that we won, and we won like $10,000 from that lawsuit, and then we had another $10,000 that had been invested in the stock market, so we were like, what do we do with all this? And we thought, let's throw a celebration, a party on Wall Street. And we invited all of our friends who were homeless, to come to the New York Stock exchange and a bunch of folks from all different walks of life, we met up there. And what we did was we broke up all this money into small change, we had like a thousand dollars worth of quarters and nickels and dimes and had paper money that was spread out, and some folks had suits on, some came on bicycles and we all came that morning as the bell was about to open on Wall Street. And Sister Margaret, she's like our 80-year-old nun, she brought the ram's horn, the shofar, and we proclaimed this ancient vision of Jubilee from the Scripture, where debts are annihilated and the poor are released, slaves are set free. And so we blew the ram's horn and then money started dropping from everywhere, we had folks from the balcony dropping paper money, the bikes came through and poured out quarters, and the streets turned silver. And the celebration was contagious, folks came out of Wall Street and they said 'What's happening out here is more fun than what's happening inside.' And one guy was sweeping the street and he showed us his dustpan full of money, and he goes, 'It's a good day at work today.' It was beautiful and contagious. So I think part of what we've got to do is declare that another world is possible. We've got to celebrate the end vision of God's dream coming on earth as it is in heaven. That the Kingdom of God is a celebration. It is marked by joy and love and we can add a little joy and a little circus to the world.