ART FOR COMMUNITY’S SAKE

I’ve been in Philadelphia over the weekend, visiting arts group and talking with artists and community members about how art can transform communities.  Philadelphia is known as the city of murals, and you wouldn’t be disappointed if you came with the expectation to see a lot of them.  There are huge multistory murals on main streets and in downtown, and there are large and small murals in many, many neighborhoods.  A lot of that is done through the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (http://muralarts.org/).  I’ve seen many of the wonderful murals they have commissioned, cajoled or inspired, but today I saw what has become my favorite: a garbage truck mural!  A city garbage truck—picking up recycling to be exact—right in the middle of 11^th Street near Lehigh!

I spent some time at the Village of Arts and Humanities in north Philadelphia (http://villagearts.org/).  It is located in a neighborhood that has—or had—a lot of empty lots.  A lot of lots.  Many of these have been transformed by the organization to be gardens of different types: vegetable gardens, where youth and elders were watering (before the thunderstorm broke through the 90 degree heat).  Gardens with mosaic benches and sculptures.  An open air stage.  There was nothing going on when I was there; and there was everything.  There was nothing going on when I was there; and yet, because of the art and the space it created for people, it felt inhabited.

Some of the murals in the Village area were on buildings whose backyards were full of junk and weeds.  Some were on vacant buildings.  Most people in the Philadelphia area probably never venture to see the great art work there, because it’s in “a rough area”.  I last saw the area 8 years ago, when I was still living in Philly, and some things have not changed: beautiful community-created art next to abandoned buildings.  In some ways, that is exactly where art should be: calling attention not primarily to itself, but to the community that created it and lives in and around it, and their longing for justice, healing and love.

I suppose you could ask if all the effort that went into creating the gardens and sculptures and murals and other public art made any difference.  I sometimes ask myself that about our Semilla Community Arts Program and the ministry of our church in general.  But when I was walking through the uninhabited inhabited beauty of those gardens today—smelling the flowers, and stopping under the shade trees, and even keeping an eye out for rats as I walked through an overgrown jungle of weeds—I had no doubt.

Be beauty.  Be justice.

Patrick

AND THEN THERE WAS CHAOS…

We started our day camp week at our church an hour ago, and like most of the ones I’ve done in the last 30 years, the first day is a dance between chaos and order I used to say that the first day was a battle between chaos and order, but now I am seeing that it is more of a dance, where two partners lean into each other, pull away, improvise, come together, sometimes fight.  I’ve worked in inner cities my whole professional life, and so the joys and struggles of such neighborhoods come to camp as well.  Children who pre-registered don’t show up, but a bunch that didn’t do.  Volunteers show up too early or too late.  Young ones at the first camp refuse to leave their mom or older brother; older young ones refuse to even acknowledge that they have a mom with them.

Our theme this week is Creation, and we acted out the creation story in Genesis, using our hands to represent wind, water, sky, plants, trees and animals (including leopards!  And hippos!).  We have values we want to impart to these children: respect, sharing, care for the earth.  We are teaching skills in mosaic and photography and urban gardening.  But my hope is that the main thing we are teaching is that they have been created by a loving God and called to be creative.  Incredibly creative. 

I see the wonder and joy of that creativity in the littlest ones, and at times it is a struggle to contain it!  I also see how even the 10 year olds are already looking at their peers to see if it’s OK to sing, or act like a hippo or do anything risky.  How our social life—and in many ways our educational system and even our church life—beats the creativity down in us!  I want to say to the older kids: you’re great—just let loose!  (I do have to say to a lot of them—including some volunteers—please sit down!)

This is how the story of the great creation begins: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”  The Hebrew word for wind also means spirit or breath, so that “sweeping over the face of the waters” can take on so many levels of meaning.

This is what I want to take away from it this beautiful morning: the wind blows where it will. It will blow the daylights out of our plans sometime this week, I’m sure.  But if we listen and watch, it will also blow some amazing things around.

Be wind!  Be beauty.  Be the justice of everyone is a creator.

Patrick

What do we need?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much we need and about how much we have.  Two tragic news stories have especially impacted me:  one is the Oklahoma tornado, the other the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh.  More than once, I heard an interview with someone from Oklahoma who said in so many words, “We lost everything we have…but we still have each other.”  I heard similar words after Hurricane Sandy and other natural disasters.  Often there is a promise to rebuild, and more than once I’ve heard someone say, “We can always get new things.”

The promise to rebuild to recover is often lifted up—directly or indirectly—as the true sign of determination and hope.

It struck me today that I have rarely seen an interview with someone who has lost everything they’ve had and also lost their loved ones.  We will see pictures of them mourning, and we will see a lot more pictures of help and “consolation” coming in from people down the block and round the world.  I am grateful that people offer help and consolation. But sometimes I wonder what the limit of our consolation is.  Can we as a culture stand with and in a tragedy that seems to have no hope: everything gone, and loved ones gone? 

My guess is that the more than 1,000 workers who died in the factory collapse didn’t have much stuff to lose.  The average wage for a garment worker in Bangladesh is $37. A month.  Which is criminal.  And I’m sure more than other workers get in Bangladesh, and many other countries. 

What is the connection between all the things we have, and those wages?  Last week, I heard a snippet on Democracy Now, talking about how consumption in the US and Europe drive clothing companies to use cheaper and cheaper labor.  A statistic that jumped out at me was this: the average American buys twice as much clothing as we did in 1980.  Why? I don’t think it’s because we’re better clothed necessarily, in terms of quality of clothing.  It may be that spiritually we are more naked than we have been, despite all the clothing we own.

The increase in the amount of clothing we buy might be due in part to the fact that hardly anything is repaired anymore—clothing, electronics, furniture and other stuff—and that it is “cheaper” to buy new rather than fix something old.  (Although there are hidden costs, in terms of our exploding garbage and carbon problems).  But I think that all of us, even the most frugal, have bought into some part of the clothing industry’s theology that to be whole, we need to be made new.  In clothes.  In spring. In summer. Next year.

I hated that my parents were so frugal when I was growing up, even though I did understand the Depression and the War and all. I did not like getting hand-me downs, and I didn’t like that we got school clothes once a year in the fall, and bigger than we needed, so hems could be let out as we grew.  But I’ve come to see the value of not having so much stuff, and honoring what we have enough to fix it instead of throwing it out.

Both my parents bought into the belief of material progress, and as times got “better” we got air conditioning, frozen instead of canned juice and so on. But there is a dark side to our technological progress, and it is seen both in our waste, and in the working conditions of people in Bangladesh that our consumption makes necessary.

My father broke a bone in his back in a jeep accident in England, after the end of World War II.  He didn’t know what he wanted to do, or could do (he had only finished eighth grade, because his mom died and he had to help take care of the other children and work on the farm).  He decided to become a barber, and shared with me a few times how challenging the life was for a North Dakota farm boy—even one who had seen Europe—to be in postwar Minneapolis, with the money he could afford for food and rent.  The poem below is about that time.

Be justice in buying.  Be beauty in consolation.

Patrick

BARBER COLLEGE, 1946

Your back no longer good

for farming, you went to

barber school on the GI Bill,

rented a room off the downtown

thrum, and night after night

rehearsed your next life.

Snip. Cut. Clip.  The red crease

on your forefinger and thumb from

holding scissors all day long,

their heads unknowable lands.

Your job to harvest

the wheat and chaff a man’s

scalp pushes up every fourteen

days.  Sometimes, I imagined

they sculpted the word fortnight

to divine your hands: fort: a stone

rebuke; night: the last word before

the light goes out.

Each evening, you took off the white

coat, shook off the tin hair bits,

the tailings of gold and coal

your day coughed up. You walked

down the back stairway

where smells of Vitalis and sweat

still mingled, a troubled marriage.  You lit

a Camel and dwelt in its forgiving

breath for a moment.  Then out onto

Washington Avenue, where winos

and streetcar bums had begun

their rounds.  Did you ever

touch their hair made wild

by grief, or reach in your pocket

and hand over a quarter, your next

night’s meal two slices of bread

smothered in hot milk?  I would like                         

to be the spoon you ate with, its tensile                     

wish, the way it held up straight

to your mouth, a smile invading

yours, the silence it fathered

when you laid it down on the dark oak table.

Home to you for many

months, this city running

to grab the men the war coughed

back to its lakes and streets. You hated

its lights, its  velocity, its insistence

on corn and lumber and steel.

You went to barber school,

you told me because you didn’t know

what else to do.  Your fingers

gun-locked, your eyes opened

to the distance family breeds in us.

Every day, you practiced the comb

and cut, the clippers to the neck,

the uneasy truce of the straight edge.

I wonder what your final exam was:

one crew cut, one heiney,

one fat old man going quickly bald?

Then, no more wandering, no crop chasing

or dark night shooting at enemy planes.

You had paper now, permission

to hold men’s heads in your hands

for the rest of your life.

Sunday was the fabulous May Day Parade in Minneapolis, put on for the 39th year by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. The weather cooperated, the spirit was joyful and bright, and as is always the case, the color, the energy, the beauty and the profound challenge to re-think and re-live our world into a better blessing were fantastic. If you've never been to one of the parades, get there next year!

After the ceremony in Powderhorn Park, my wife and older daughter and I were walking around the lake, eating Kettle Korn and stopping at the various booths. One particularly touched me, a group which teaches a way out of trauma that seeks justice and reconciliation rather than revenge. I don't know a lot about their approach, but I do know that that approach is something we really need.

Something happened a few days ago that has struck me also. Protestors gathered at the funeral home where the Boston Marathon bomber's remains were being prepared for burial. I didn't see all the signs or hear all what they said, but I can infer from the funeral director's words that the protestors believe that the man is not entitled to a proper burial.  That his victims didn’t receive justice, so why should he?

I understand the anger, the sorrow and even the rage of those who suffered from the bombing (although I don't know if any of the protestors are in that category).  I have friends whose loved ones were murdered, and have spoken at funerals of senseless shootings.  I know that I would feel a desire for revenge if one of my loved ones were murdered, but I also know that would not be justice.

This Sunday, I am going to preach on justice at our church, a church which may be divided--by age, by culture, by theology--on what justice means and what issues should be addressed. Even when we might all agree on something--for example, that human trafficking should stop, and that we should do what is in our power to stop it--as we get into what that entails, we may start to lose some of that agreement. What would justice for that issue be? Would it be to find, convict and lock up the perpetrators? Would we need to jail the "johns”? Most of us would not prosecute those children who were forced into prostitution, but how about those who were forced as children and now are still "in the life" because of fear, addiction or not knowing how to leave it?

All of those have to do with a sense of retributive justice--of those who've done wrong "getting what they deserve", and I imagine the protestors at the funeral home were motivated by that. But if that is the limit of our justice, we have a pretty small sense of it. If we looked at justice as restoration, rather than just punishment for wrongdoing, what would be steps that we would take? What healing would be possible, and who would have to change?

The group that was sharing information about their program had a diagram showing how trauma can lead to a cycle of depression, isolation and eventually can lead to victimizing someone else.  Not all victims of trauma become perpetrators, of course, but some do.  Victims of child abuse and children who witnessed domestic violence are more likely to become abusers as adults.

They had another diagram as well. Which showed a new path which could lead to a justice that restored the victim and held the perpetrator accountable, but also sought to restore the community and the perpetrator as well.  Not an easy road, and one that—contrary to what we might believe and wish—requires the victim to take a risk, and endure the pain of confronting and eventually forgiving their perpetrator.  That is a radical kind of justice and very challenging, but what healing it could bring!

During the last few weeks, after the Boston Marathon bombing, there was a quote circulated that was attributed to Martin Luther King but turns out to not be his.  But the quote stands as a challenge to us: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

This is a quote from Doctor King, and I close with this hope: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Be a deeper Beauty.  Be a more radical justice.

Patrick

 

(In another post, I want to explore what this means for the church. Unfortunately, too often we in the Christian church have made justice into something that God has to do to us, because we are wrong, and Jesus becomes the just, innocent victim who takes our place. Pretty limited understanding of what God is doing to restore the earth, in my opinion).

WHERE IS EVIL LOCATED?

As I write this, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing is dead, a police officer dead and another critically wounded, and the other suspect is the subject of—as it is chillingly put “a massive manhunt”.  I hope that it ends soon.  I want to hope that he can be “taken” alive, so we that maybe we will find out why this happened, if there are others involved or more attacks planned, but given what seems to have happened overnight, I doubt it.

I put quotations around those two, because I want to talk about how we talk about evil.  I want to see those responsible for this crime caught. I want to see structures and policies in place that help prevent these. But I also want us to think about how we think about and talk about evil, and how that can actually contribute to evil.

One of the commentators on TV this morning said something like (it’s not a direct quote): “what’s particularly chilling is that those who are alleged to have done this horrendous evil seemed to be just like any average American youth.”  The implication being that your average American youth couldn’t do violence like what was done.  I hear young people who knew the brother still at large talk about how he was just a regular guy, laid back, good student, good wrestler, liked to talk about which rapper was better, how the Red Sox did.  In other words, one said, “just like everybody else.” 

What’s behind us is that, I believe is the belief that evil is done by someone else—that it is outside us.  That people who do evil are evil people, and if you’re a good person, you can’t do evil.  Evil people, in our collective mind, must look different, act different, talk different (watch how the right-wing talk folks use this to attack immigration reform).  Evil people are to be “hunted down”, “taken”, “terminated” and so on.

I’m not against prosecuting people who do evil, or trying to stop them.  But when we locate evil outside ourselves, we almost always end up causing evil ourselves.  Because it’s too easy to break the world into evil people who do evil, and good (innocent, law abiding—pick your judgment) who do good.  If we believe that, then what we do to stop or counteract evil must, by definition, be good.  Which, history has shown us is not true at all.

We have been pretty expert at locating evil outside ourselves: Reagan’s “The Evil Empire”, Bush’s “The Axis of Evil”.  No doubt, there was enormous evil done by the Ayatollahs in Iran, Hussein, the Soviets, the north Koreans.  But our response has multiplied that evil, while baptizing it as good.

Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org) had a section today on the genocide trial of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala.  Rios Montt was backed by the US during his reign, where tens of thousands of civilians were murdered by the army (including some trained at our School of the Americas).  We funded and supported his reign of terror, because ideologically he “was on our side” during the Cold War against the Soviets. The genocide trial was stopped by the Guatemalan Supreme Court recently, because evidence points to the involvement of the current President, General Otto Pérez Molina, in the genocide.

The victims tortured and killed by the regime included teachers, church and labor leaders, many peasants, most of them indigenous, entire families with children, entire villages.  Rios Montt was not just supported by our government, but because he was a “born-again Christian”, by many prominent right-wing Christian leaders in the US.

They played a clip from an interview from recently after the genocide in which the journalist, Allan Nairn, was being interviewed on Charlie Rose, along with Eliot Abrams, the Undersecretary of State in the Reagan Administration at the time of the genocide, who was closely involved in funding and directing all the military regimes in Central America.  When    pushed for investigations and war crime trials for those involved—both in Guatemala, and their patrons here—Abrams essentially responded that “we” won the Cold War by what we did, and if “you” are asking these questions, “you” must have wanted “the other side” to win.  We = good, you = evil. 

This good/evil has all sorts of implications.  As long as we locate evil outside ourselves, we will always prosecute those who we see as evil, and never get to root causes.  Criminals—need to be locked up (while causes of crime ignored).  Criminals with guns need to be locked up (while our love of guns as a nation is elevated to a “right”).  Leaders of “terrorist groups” like Hamas need to be assassinated, and their family and homeland destroyed, while Israel—who has killed far more civilians than Hamas—needs to be rewarded with more military aid from the US.  And in a less violent sphere, our politics has degenerated to such a point that we can’t sit down and listen to opposing views, and compromise is seen as a sellout.

Thomas Merton, the great poet and Trappist monk has an essay somewhere (It might be in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander) where he talks about how we as a society have created a worldview that evil is outside us, and how that worldview perpetuates evil.  I will try to hunt that essay down.  In the meantime, maybe these words of Jesus from the gospel of Luke might help (Luke 6:41-42):

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

As we seek justice in the Boston Marathon bombings, let us also look for injustice inside us.  And together, with our “enemies”, seek to understand.

Be justice. Be beauty (even when the world seems so ugly).

Patrick

WHAT IS HOLY ABOUT HOLY WEEK

I have not written anything here for awhile, and have all kinds of excuses: busy with church work, (we pastors earn our pay during these days, for sure!).  Distracted with many things.  Lazy.  And sometimes I feel like I just don’t have anything to say.

Being so immersed in Holy Week activities doesn’t always give me space to actually reflect much on what it means.

This blog is about justice and beauty.  Where are justice and beauty found in a crucifixion?

I grew up in a very religious family, and I carry in me wonderful memories, beautiful memories of special services of Holy Week.  The long procession around the church on Holy Thursday, the power of stripping the altar that night, the darkness and emptiness of Good Friday, the flowers and candles of Easter Vigil.

But I also grew up, in many ways, with a punishing God.  I was told, along with lots of other impressionable youth, that “every time I sinned, I drove another nail into Jesus’ hands”.  (How many nails are there?)  I’m not trying to minimize my sin, but what a terrible thing to say to a child!  That they are co-conspirators in a capital punishment carried out by an oppressive empire. 

As I have grown to know a God of grace and mercy, whose love extends to me and to all creation beyond what we can imagine, I have also grown to know a God of justice, who hears the cries of the poor, and whose justice will triumph over evil.

Walter Bruggeman talks about the crucifixion being the ultimate prophetic criticism of a system of death.  A system that turns human beings into objects.  That is what torture and capital punishment are (which is exactly what the crucifixion is): the treating of the human body and the human spirit as objects to be broken into, violated, humiliated and discarded.

It’s easy for those of us who are Christians to recognize the forgiveness of our sins.  It’s not as easy for us to recognize that we are the executioners.  When we torture, when we kill—as we have and as we continue to do in our wars—we become that punishing God I was taught to fear, and ultimately, hate.  We can say that we don’t torture “personally”, but in today’s global society, we all share responsibility for the evils done in our name, by our system.

What then is the liberation from this?  All too often, I think we stop at a forgiveness that is incomplete.  I know that God forgives me, and that even from the cross Jesus cried, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  But it’s too easy to see that announcement of forgiveness as the end of the issue, when what is really called for is a reconciliation of humans with humans, humans with the earth and ultimately humans with the Creator.

Yesterday, I walked with people from five other churches in a Community Way of the Cross in our Phillips neighborhood.  We stopped at different places in the neighborhood—housing for elders, a drug treatment program, a community garden—and prayed for issues that effect us: racial divisions, gun violence, immigration reform, the desire for healing.  I led the reflection at a mural on Chicago Avenue and 25^th Street, on the side of a corner store.  The mural was done by Waite House, Hope Community and other groups that work with youth in Phillips. 

I shared a line from one of Robert Frost’s poems: “there’s something about a wall”, and talked about how walls can protect and support us, and also how they can divide us.  This past week—which included Frost’s birthday—saw a number of artistic actions for justice at walls meant to divide us.  A demonstration at the Berlin Wall, where art that flourished during the fall of the Stasi state was being dismantled to make room for “development”.  Ongoing demonstrations and prayer vigils at the beautiful murals dividing Palestinians from Israeli citizens. And when some of the “Gang of Eight” went to the border fence between Mexico and the US, they saw a woman trying to scale the fence, who was then arrested for “breaking the law”.  You could look at it from the view of the United States’ side of the wall, and talk about “protecting the border”, “illegal immigrants”, “national security”.  You could look at it from the Mexican side of the wall and see “family reunification”, “justice for the poor” or “following the harvest, as people have for centuries.”  I hope for reconciliation across this wall (or rather, it being torn down as an act of prophetic reconciliation), but that is a hope seed still planted deep in frozen ground.  Which does not relieve us of the joy or responsibility to water the seed.

There is an imbalance at these walls. To my knowledge there are no bright, beautiful murals on the US or Israeli sides of the dividing walls.  There are lights and dogs and men with guns.  On the side of those clamoring for freedom and opportunity, there are beautiful murals of hope.  Why is it that those who have more—more power, more money, more freedom—cannot find any aching beauty to put upon the wall?  Why is it that those who have less—can paint such joyful, hopeful and yet challenging images that speak louder than bulldozers or bullets?

Our church, St. Paul’s Lutheran in Phillips, has done 17 murals in the neighborhood, a part of more than 30 that make the community a living artscape.  One of those is a mosaic mural on Hans Christian Andersen School a couple blocks away.  The school was built in the US in the early ‘70’s, but it has the feel of late Stalinist architecture!  Masses of concrete, a very few small windows.  With the school children, their parents and the neighborhood, we’ve been building a living colorful Semilla—a seed of hope that dares to be beautiful.  Mosaic as an art from lends itself to that hope so well, because its very action of taking what is broken to make beauty is an act of prophetic imagination.  We have used pieces of broken plates, cups, mirrors, even a broken communion chalice to add to the beauty.

At the mural in Phillips, I shared that most of the murals in Phillips were done by youth in the community, who paint not only the reality that they know, but also the reality that they need.  (I stole that from Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer).  An artistic vision that sees the inequality and violence that exists, but sees the seed of new life arising out of that death.

That, I think, is what Jesus saw from his death when he said, “Father, forgive them…”

As we left to march to the next stop on Friday, I looked down at the ground and saw a beautiful piece of blue ceramic.  It looked like one of our mosaic pieces from one of our murals.  Then I saw that there were others around it, and they were indeed mosaic pieces; pieces of the mosaic that is Phillips, pieces that we will use in a mural this summer.

President Reagan famously told Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall!”  It’s time for us to take that advice and tear down our walls.  And in the meantime, while the chisel of justice takes its slow and steady time, let us paint them with the beauty we need, the beauty we believe in.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be holy.

Patrick

See Semilla Project at:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Semilla-Project/148670385198684?fref=ts

EXTRAVAGANCE AND ENTITLEMENT

First a shout-out to the three women I live with on this International Women’s Day!  Thank you, Luisa, Natasha and Talia for all the blessings you bring, and all the blessings you are.

I’ve been thinking about extravagance lately, partly because we have some hard budget issues in our family, and we are taking a real look at what we spend our money on, and what that actually brings us.  We love to eat out, we love to go to the movies, and that has to be cut back. Luisa and I were talking at breakfast about how to bring—or build—other kinds of extravagance in our lives than ones that cost more money. Like actually harvesting all the food we plant each year in our gardens.  Like getting extravagantly simpler with the stuff that is in our house.   The paradox of our society right now is that we are literally drowning in all the crap we purchase—including the crap we put in our eyes and minds through these little screens, and yet by our actions show that we fundamentally believe in scarcity, rather than abundance.

For those of us Christians who follow Lent, the gospels for the next two Sundays are about extravagance.  Which of course, pissed off Jesus’ opponents.  And his disciples too!  The first is the Prodigal Son, who blew his inheritance on on-line gaming, trips to Vegas, hot cars and single malt scotch.  When he wises up—starvation in the midst of feeding pigs will do that to a young man—he decides to go back to his father and say, “I have really blown it. I know I can’t be your son anymore.  Please let me work in your fields, where I can earn my keep.”

So he goes back, broke, hungry with swollen feet and empty belly.  Does the father yell at him? Does he tell him “I told you so”?  Does he give him a lecture on responsibility?  No-he puts a ring on his fingers, the best shoes and best robe on him, and throws a big party!  With the fatted calf.  The one calf that is being saved for that year’s wedding or other big celebration.  His welcome back is an extravagance beyond all measure.  It really ticks off the elder brother, who is righteous and does everything he is supposed to. (I can imagine the inner dialogue in his head.)

In the next week’s story, Mary, the sister of Lazarus who has been raised from the dead, anoints Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume.  It fills the whole room with its fragrance, and probably cost a bundle.  Pretty darn extravagant.   That makes one of the disciples—ok, it’s Judas, but still, he is one of the 12 at that point—get all huffy about how they could have fed the poor with the money “wasted”.

Of course today, if you want to feed the poor in our country today, that’s considered extravagant, if not downright socialist.  Oh, it’s fine to have soup kitchens, and candidates will make sure that they are filmed “giving” to the poor before each campaign.  But to use a small portion of our shared abundance to actually help people survive is cut, because, as the saying goes “we can’t get the deficit under control without dealing with entitlements.”

"Entitlements" is a much more sophisticated word to pick on the poor than previous words, isn’t it?  “Welfare queens” comes off a pretty mean-spirited, while “entitlements”—which still blames recipients of government programs for receiving what is, at least in terms of social security and Medicare due to them—sounds technical. Like if we just get derivatives or entitlements or secondary market streams in control, we’ll be all right.

Leave off for a moment that most of the world sees food as a right, sees health care as a right, sees caring for elders as an obligation.  Leave off for a moment the fact that the main driver of the US federal deficit is that we started (and kept going for a decade) two wars and didn’t raise taxes to pay for them.  No, we cut taxes!  Leave off for a moment that our military budget is greater than the next ten countries combined.  Just look at who really acts entitled and who fights to keep that entitlement.

The one who feels the most entitled in the Prodigal Son story is the older brother—who has everything that is the father’s.  The one who feels most entitled in the anointing story is Judas—who holds the common purse; who has control of the money.  The ones who act entitled in our country today are not by and large the poor, the elderly, the disabled, but those who have and want to keep what they have.  Businesses who whine every time taxes are mentioned, because—get this—not only will they suffer, but we’ll all suffer because they will have to stop making money and will have to lay off people.  Wealthy actors, sports stars, investment bankers who resist considering paying their fair share.  Ball clubs who feel entitled to have cash-strapped governments pay for their new facilities.  Oil companies. Lobbyists.  The NRA. Those are the real entitlement junkies.   I’m entitled to my money.  I’m entitled to my gun.  I’m entitled to my stuff.

Look at the ads tonight if you watch TV, and see how many tell us that we deserve to be “unlimited”, to have what we want when we want it.

I’m not saying there’s no entitlement thinking on behalf of unions or non-profits or the like.  Nor am I saying that those who don’t have as much don’t ever act that way.  It’s a national disease that effects all of us.

I want to see some real extravagance in our country.  What if we made it a priority that all people will eat healthy food? That all people will have health care?  That we will work our tails off to eliminate poverty?  That’s extravagant thinking, and it also says something about our character. Our care of our elderly, our poor, our disabled and our children is what defines us as a people. (I would add immigrants as well, which is what the Hebrew Scriptures do over and over:  treat immigrants fairly because you were foreigners and slaves in Egypt, and now you are free.  That’s to be developed in another post).

Extravagance in this sense only comes from a depth of spirit that trusts rather than fears.  That sees other humans—especially those different from us—as part of us.  That believes in generosity.  That’s willing to risk.  Even to sacrifice.  That’s the kind of God I believe in, and that’s the kind of people I believe we can be.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be extravagant

Patrick