[people of the second chance]

People of the Second Chance (overthrow judgment. liberate love) bills itself as "a global community of activists, imperfectionists and second chancers committed to unleashing radical grace everyday, in every moment, for everyone." They seem to be a "newer kid on the block", but have well-expressed mission and goals, and some interesting projects to show with more planned for the future.

They have just launched a new campaign called "Labels Lie: Don't Accept Them. Don't Use Them." Here's how they describe the campaign:

"The campaign’s focus is on being liberated from the prison of societies’ labels. We don’t have to live with the shame of what people have said about us. We don’t have to accept these statements as our true identity....

When we judge, label, diminish and criticize each other, this becomes the fuel for
shame and guilt to fester in our souls. A label says we are unworthy, flawed and unacceptable.

Sadly we live in a society driven by stereotyping, gossiping, labeling and blame…and it is destroying us. Words like ugly, stupid, adulterer, addict, illegal, failure, ex-con, slut, fag and other dehumanizing labels are thrown around with no regard for how they damage.

It is time to talk about shame and the toxic labels we believe about ourselves.

It is time to be liberated from the lies of labels and experience the powerful truth of who we really are…Loved…Worthy…Beautiful…Accepted. "

(from Mike Foster's introduction)

View entire set of Labels Lie posters

People of the Second Chance website

hellooo

It's easy to "love" people from a distance. But do they feel the love?

 It's also easy to label people from a distance, a distance that lets us think that we (whoever we are) are somehow different, normal, better, right, a distance that hides our common humanity.

[sin as exclusion]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

An advantage of conceiving sin as the practice of exclusion is that it names as sin what often passes as virtue, especially in religious circles. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, “sinners” were not simply “the wicked” who were therefore religiously bankrupt (so Sanders 1985), but also social outcasts, people who practiced despised trades, Gentiles and Samaritans, those who failed to keep the Law as interpreted by a particular sect (Dunn 1988, 276-80). A “righteous” person had to separate herself from the latter; their presence defiled because they were defiled. Jesus’ table fellowship with “tax collectors and sinners” (Mark 2:15-17), a fellowship that indisputably belonged to the central features of his ministry, offset this conception of sin. Since he who was innocent, sinless, and fully within God’s camp transgressed social boundaries that excluded the outcasts, these boundaries themselves were evil, sinful, and outside God’s will (Neyrey 1988, 79). By embracing the “outcast,” Jesus underscored the “sinfulness” of the persons and systems that cast them out.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from Jesus’ compassion toward those who transgressed social boundaries that his mission was merely to demask the mechanisms that created “sinners” by falsely ascribing sinfulness to those who were considered socially unacceptable (pace Borg 1994, 46-61). He was no prophet of “inclusion” (with Johnson 1996, 43f.), for whom the chief virtue was acceptance and the cardinal vice intolerance. Instead, he was the bringer of “grace,” who not only scandalously included “anyone” in the fellowship of “open commensality” (Crossan 1991, 261-64; Crossan 1994, 66-70), but made the “intolerant” demand of repentance and the “condescending” offer of forgiveness (Mark 1:15; 2:15-17). The mission of Jesus consisted not simply in re-naming the behavior that was falsely labeled “sinful” but also in re-making the people who have actually sinned or suffered misfortune. The double strategy of re-naming and re-making, rooted in the commitment to both the outcast and the sinner, to the victim and the perpetrator, is the proper background against which an adequate notion of sin as exclusion can emerge.

Volf, pp. 72-73

third row

I often hear Christians use the phrase "love the sinner and hate the sin" when responding to the topic of homosexuality. Little do they know that this statement is hated by many gay and lesbian people.

"Love the sinner and hate the sin." We don't typically use this to refer to our friend, our grandma, our neighbour or the pastor at church. No, it's used to refer to someone whom we see as being different than us, someone who is a sinner unlike me and you who are good Christians. It labels people. It puts distance between us. It others them.

And despite the first half of the saying, the other person in the relationship rarely feels the love.

n.b. This phrase is not in the Bible. It "apparently comes from a letter that St. Augustine wrote to some contentious nuns. Augustine's phrase, "cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum," "with love of persons and hatred of sins," is used parenthetically, and does not even mention "sinners." (source)

reprobates

dictionary.reference.com defines the noun "reprobate" as:

1. a depraved, unprincipled, or wicked person: a drunken reprobate.
2. a person rejected by God and beyond hope of salvation.

Clearly not a nice word to use for referring to another person. While I can certainly see churchgoers expressing the attitude shown in this cartoon, I can't imagine Jesus using it. While initially it's easy to think he never called anyone names, he actually did:

There's the time when in answer to a question, he obliquely referred to a Canaanite woman as a dog (Matthew 15:21-28). And the times that he called the Pharisees names.

From what I recall, the Pharisees were the religious people of His day. What might Jesus be calling the religious people of today if he came down to earth?

[from labels to liberty]

My friend Jamie Arpin-Ricci, "an urban missionary, pastor, church planter and writer living in Winnipeg’s inner city West End neighbourhood", wrote an excellent post on from labels to liberty, addressing first the importance of seeing people primarily as people rather than based on labels, then giving a specific example in the context of mental illness and the church, and closing with the importance of truth-speaking. I recommend the article highly – Jamie is articulate and speaks from his experience within his community.

He has also just released a book called The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis and Life in the Kingdom (click to find out more about this book, including "a look inside").