The God Who Riots

Taking Back the Radical Jesus

Damon Garcia

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506480374
• eBook ISBN: 9781506480381
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Human Rights

For thousands of years, religious messages have been used to either uphold the status quo or upend it. And while we are all very familiar with the kind of conservative Christianity that suppresses liberation and justifies oppression, progressive Christians are just as guilty of upholding unjust systems when we prioritize harmony and unity over justice. True justice requires us to choose sides. True justice requires action. When we look at Scripture, we see that the God of the Bible was never neutral. Again and again God chooses the side of the oppressed. Jesus said the Spirit of the Lord anointed him "to let the oppressed go free, " and those of us who claim to follow Jesus today must commit to this radical mission of liberation.

In The God Who Riots, popular YouTuber and public theologian Damon Garcia uses his frank, tell-it-like-it-is style to connect us with the Jesus who flipped tables in the temple and led an empire-destabilizing movement for liberation. The spirit of this God is embodied in today's protests, riots, and strikes. As we join this struggle for liberation, we are joining the God who riots alongside us, within us, and through us.

1

Saved from What?

Jesus was arrested and executed because of the trouble he was stirring up in Jerusalem.

The story of Jesus shutting down the temple describes a planned demonstration and a riot, complete with property destruction, looting, and social unrest. This usually isn’t the first image that comes to mind when people think about Jesus. Many of my friends, both Christian and non-Christian, didn’t even know this story was in the Bible. Some of my other friends, both Christian and non-Christian, share my love for this story. I’ve heard people say they don’t support Christianity but have a soft spot for Jesus, and this story is one of the main reasons they do.

A reason we find this story so compelling is because we are typically familiar with religious people—especially Christians—being resistant to change. And yet in this story, one of the most famous religious figures in history is fighting for change. Jesus witnesses injustice and moves against it. Every movement against injustice throughout the last century has been met with suppression from those who resist change, and that suppression has often come from Christians. We’ve seen this in the fight for women’s liberation, Black liberation, gay liberation, and onward. Jesus wants change. And he’s executed for it.

How We Change

Religion has empowered people to fight for a new world, and religion has also justified the institutions of the current world. Religion has served these two roles throughout history. Religion can also empower us to change as individuals, or it can hinder us from changing.

Every time I’ve gone through a significant change in my life, my Christian faith was a part of the process. My faith has always contained this tension. Part of my faith empowered me to change, while another part held me back from changing.

There’s a story I relate to a lot in Acts 10 about the apostle Peter going through this kind of conflict in the midst of change. Peter fell into a trance while deep in prayer and saw a vision of “something like a large sheet” coming down from heaven, filled with “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.” Peter then heard a voice say, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” Peter, being faithful to traditional Jewish dietary laws, responded, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.”

The amusing part of this story is Peter telling God he can’t eat anything unclean because God told him he can’t. Peter has a God-given opportunity for change, but before he can embrace it, he has to confront his conception of God that refuses to change.

The voice from heaven then tells Peter, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Peter awoke from his trance, and while he was trying to figure out the meaning of this vision, he was invited to talk about Jesus to non-Jews for the first time.

Then he got it.

Peter grew up seeing everyone outside his people group as unclean, and in this moment, God called them all clean. In order to embrace this new way of seeing the world, Peter had to embrace a new conception of God. His previous conception of God helped him get to where he was. Now it was time to let it go.

This is how growth works. A new way of life becomes desirable when you experience the constraints of your current way of life. Then the conditions of a new way of life emerge as a solution to the problems caused by the constraints of your current way of life. While you would prefer to peacefully transition to your new way of life, this process is always met with conflict. This conflict comes from the part of you that has previously benefited from the conditions of your current way of life.

And yet, there are other parts of you that have experienced the constraints of your current way of life and cause you to become unhealthy—emotionally unhealthy, or perhaps physically unhealthy. The process of transitioning to a new way of life begins with your dissatisfaction. Initially you try to ignore the dissatisfied part of yourself because the part that benefits from your current way of life has a louder voice within you. That voice gets quieter and quieter as you become more and more dissatisfied, and the dissatisfied voice becomes louder within you.

Inevitably, the dissatisfied part of yourself wins this conflict, and you develop a new way of life. This process is never a singular moment toward a final state of maturity. This process happens again and again throughout your life, beginning again when you inevitably experience the constraints of your new way of life.

Getting Saved

My faith has always empowered me to listen to the dissatisfied voice within me. I’ve always believed this is what the Christian life is supposed to look like. Embracing change always seemed more Christian than resisting change, even when I was a young child.

One Wednesday night during my childhood I was attending a kids’ church service, and I saw another kid I recognized from my elementary school named Richard. Richard had been mean to my friends and me, so I was shocked to see him at church. From my childish perspective I assumed the nice kids at school were probably Christian, and the mean kids were probably the furthest thing from it.

At the end of the service, the minister asked who wanted to accept Jesus into their heart, or something like that, and I saw Richard raise his hand. Once again, I was shocked, but I was mostly happy because I assumed this meant Richard would start being a lot nicer to my friends and me at school.

The next day during P.E. class, as we were standing on our numbers on the blacktop, I told my friends the news. “Richard got saved last night!” I blurted out.

To my surprise, they had no idea what I was talking about. “Saved from what?” they asked.

I was immediately stumped. “Saved” was the word my church used when someone became a Christian. I thought my friends would understand what I meant, and elaborating felt impossibly difficult. I just knew he was saved, and it was good news for us. I couldn’t explain why I thought that way though, and I definitely couldn’t explain what “saved” meant, or what “saved people” are saved from, exactly.

I look back at that moment and recognize that I certainly understood that “getting saved” had something to do with some sort of personal transformation.

I probably had this impression from observing my parents’ own personal transformations. They started going to church when I was two years old. They had both been drug addicts and alcoholics, and my dad had been in and out of prison. One day they both decided they wanted to change their lives. My mom’s sister had recently started going to church, so my parents joined a church.

The spiritual teachings of that community gave them a sense of dignity they didn’t have before. Knowing they were loved and cared for by God and by that supportive community empowered them to live differently. They were saved, and in this circumstance, they were saved from the destructive coping mechanisms they had developed while they were struggling through life on their own.

They were saved from something, yes, but they were also saved for something.

Many Christians use the word “saved” today to refer to their souls being saved from hell. And yet, the idea that Richard’s soul might be saved from hell wasn’t on my mind at all when I was standing there on the blacktop trying to explain to my friends what “saved” meant.

When I looked at my parents, I knew “getting saved” looked like getting saved from the destruction taking place right here and right now. They recovered from the effects of that destruction by living differently in a loving and supportive community. They were saved, but it had nothing to do with their souls or an afterlife.

In the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, salvation is first conceptualized through the experience of the ancient Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt. This is such a defining moment that, throughout the rest of the scripture, God is frequently named as “the God who brought the Israelites out of Egypt.” Much later in the story, Israel is defeated. The Israelites are taken captive by Babylon and exiled from their home. They cry out to God to save them from exile just like God saved them from Egypt, and God sends prophets promising their salvation. Salvation is about the collective fate of a nation. Salvation is about an actual experience of physical liberation during this life.

When we get to the New Testament, the concept of salvation becomes more personal. There is still talk of salvation as collective, but the first Christians viewed their collective liberation as contingent on our individual participation in the work of liberation. The first Christians still longed for a larger collective liberation led by God, but their unique message was that it was going to require our participation as well. For the early Christians, salvation looked like a personal decision to transform our way of being in the world, working out our own salvation “with fear and trembling.”1

In Acts 2, Peter preached to a crowd, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”2 Peter was inviting people to a new way of being in the world. The Christian movement was called The Way before its members were called Christians. The first Christians were distinguished first and foremost by the way they took care of one another in community. Saving oneself looked like choosing the side of the oppressed as they struggled for salvation from their oppression. This was very different from other movements that preached about a coming Messiah.

Many people besides Jesus claimed to be the Messiah in the first century, sent by God to liberate the people of Israel and establish the kingdom of God. Most of them were also executed on crosses by Rome. Whenever a Messiah was executed, their followers decided they were wrong about who the Messiah was and went home to wait for another one. But something different happened among Jesus’s followers after his execution. They decided they were wrong about what the Messiah was, not who.

Then they claimed to be the body of the Messiah, or the body of Christ. Christ is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew term mashiach, which means “anointed one.” The church was a community of anointed ones. They understood that the salvation of the oppressed could only happen through uniting as one body in that struggle for salvation. They claimed that the resurrection of Christ was only the first fruits of a greater resurrection taking place through the continual embodiment of Christ in the lives of this new community.

The fact that the early Christian community made these claims can be confirmed historically. The debate is around what made them shift their perspective. Was it really their experience of Jesus coming back to life? Was it visions they had of Jesus? Was it a collective reinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus years after his death? The answer to that question is a matter of faith, but no matter the reason for changing their minds, the radical shift in the way Jesus’s followers talked about the Messiah, or the Christ, is historical.

This shift in seeing themselves as the body of Christ transformed the way they lived. That’s the part that has always inspired me the most.

When we read in the book of Acts about the first Christians being “saved,” we read about a unique community of people who were transforming people’s lives.

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.3

When you join a community like this, you must have been compelled within yourself to answer the question, Who is making a better world here? Rome? Or Jesus? Whose side do I choose?

Some 2,000 years later, my parents decided to join this movement.

Widening

When I was 18, I felt called into ministry, and after much stubborn refusal I realized I found a lot of fulfillment whenever I preached and taught people about these ideas. I found a new passion and dreamed of being a pastor one day. So I enrolled in a ministry training program in my denomination and took Bible college classes.

The more I studied, however, the more I found myself agreeing with Christian perspectives that were beyond the boundaries of what my denomination considered the right interpretation of the Christian faith. Within the evangelical corner of Christianity I grew up in, I had suddenly become a heretic.

The word heretic comes from the Greek, hairetikós, which simply means “able to choose.” Historically the word has been used to describe Christians who had dissented from the church’s official doctrines and dogmas. And yet, my journey into heresy felt less like a dissent from historical church teaching, and more like a consistent realization that contemporary American evangelicalism had dissented from historical church teaching to a surprising extent. I discovered many evangelical doctrines that were only a couple hundred years old, while my church taught me that they were what the early Christians believed.

I didn’t have an issue with evangelical teachings being new. I’m fine believing in ideas developed in contemporary settings. I’m also not particularly passionate about believing in the oldest—or most original—Christian ideas either. My issue was that contemporary evangelical teachings were taught as the only way to interpret the Christian faith and were tied to the faith of the early Christians in a way that totally obscured church history. I knew there was way more out there.

So my journey of dissent felt more like a loyal commitment to discover truth, which naturally placed me outside the boundaries they wanted me to stay inside of. This journey always felt like a widening. I confronted the limitations of a particular perspective of faith and then widened to a new one. And I just kept allowing this to happen.

One day I could no longer in good conscience and conviction call myself a Pentecostal. And then one day I could no longer call myself an evangelical. And then I could no longer call myself a Protestant. These are various branches within the larger Christian tradition. Pentecostals are a type of evangelical. Evangelicals are a type of Protestant. And Protestants are a type of Christian. So eventually, the only thing I felt I could authentically call myself was a Christian.

Even though my beliefs and values had progressed outside of my denomination’s boundaries, I tried to work around our differences for years. I dropped out of Bible college, but I started working at the church I grew up in as a youth and young adults minister. It was during the process of getting my pastoral license, when I looked at the list of questions I would have to answer in my licensing interview, that I knew I couldn’t make it work anymore. I knew I couldn’t answer their questions the way they wanted me to while still being honest.

So I left. I lost so many friends and opportunities, but I couldn’t risk losing my integrity by staying.

My Christian faith led me out of the community th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Saved from What?
• 2. An Alternative to Your Dehumanization
• 3. White Christianity All the Way Down
• 4. Taking and Reshaping Jesus
• 5. Revelations and Reparations
• 6. Abolition Come, on Earth as It Is in Heaven
• 7. The Obedient, Unrighteous Son
• 8. A Riot at the Temple
• 9. Jesus, the Outside Agitator
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes