A Poverty of Imagination
September 9, 2012
I was standing on F Street the other day, talking with a
friend, and a guy walks up and asks, “would you help a homeless brother?”
How does the love
of God abide in us if we have this world’s goods but refuse to help someone in
need?
That’s not my rhetorical question; that is the gospel of
Jesus Christ demanding a response.
When I was thirsty
you gave me something to drink.
That’s not some preacherly flourish; that is the gospel
of Jesus Christ demanding a response.
If a brother or
sister lacks food and you say to them, “go in peace; keep warm and eat your
fill,” but don’t feed them, what good is that?
That’s not a social worker talking; that is the gospel of
Jesus Christ demanding a response.
Would you help a
homeless brother?
That’s not just some guy on the street; that is the
person of Jesus Christ demanding a response.
It’s also one of the most difficult social situations we
navigate. I know that I don’t like to hand over cash to a stranger with a hand
out. My best self is reluctant because I know that lots of folks on the street
are struggling with addictions and I don’t want to fund that. My worst self is
reluctant because I’ve bought into the great American mythology of equating
money with value and I don’t want to give away my “hard-earned” cash to someone
who “doesn’t deserve it.” Somewhere in between is a wounded self who doesn’t
want to be scammed and victimized by a well-told lie about some horrible
circumstance.
Nowhere in me is a self who actually wants to give away
money.
Which is odd, if you think about, given an increasingly
massive amount of social science research that shows us that giving makes us
happier than receiving. That research simply affirms the wisdom captured in
Proverbs: “those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with
the poor.” (Notice how that is phrased: we are not talking about prosperity
gospel stuff here. There’s no notion in this that if you give you will be
blessed by receiving back even more, as if it is all some kind of investment
scheme. No. For the author of Proverbs the blessing comes in the simple act of
sharing bread with the poor. That is the blessing: that I get the opportunity
and the experience of sharing bread with the poor.) Still, there does not seem
to be in me a self who actually wants to give away my money.
And that is, first and foremost, a problem of faith. Let
me put that a bit more directly: the fact that I do not want to give away money
is a matter of faith. It might, on the face of it, seem like a matter of
ethical action or, to use the language employed in the book of James, a matter
of “works.” But when I dig a bit deeper, I begin to see quite clearly that it
is a question of faith.
I hold on with tightly clenched fists when I do not trust
in any provision beyond what my own hands can grasp. It’s a funny thing that
when my fists are clenched tightly closed so is my mind. Sometimes, the only
thing I cannot grasp is the obvious.
You see, as Richard Rohr puts it, “Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, inclusive, and loving. We made it, however, into a formal established religion, in order to avoid the demanding lifestyle itself. One could then be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain at the highest levels of the church, and still easily believe that Jesus is ‘my personal Lord and Savior.’ The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.”
Yet, I am happy to remain trapped within the limits of my
own imagination when it comes to questions of faith that touch on how I
actually live day to day in the presence of that suffering, in the presence of others
who are wounded by an unjust economic system, by violence, by racism, by
homophobia, and so on.
Really, it is a poverty of imagination that I suffer most
often when confronted by human brokenness, perhaps most of all when I confront
it in myself.
I’m in good company, though. Jesus seemed to suffer the
same thing in the challenging text that is today’s gospel reading from Mark.
It’s the story of the Syropheoenician woman, and it’s one that lots of
preachers avoid because it does not shed a kindly light on Jesus.
Listen, then, for a word from God:
From there he set out and went away to
the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was
there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an
unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his
feet.
Now the woman was a Gentile, of
Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
He said to her, “Let the children be
fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the
dogs.”
But she answered him, “Sir, even the
dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Then he said to her, “For saying that,
you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child
lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
This is the word of the Lord.
Jesus is pretty darn rude to a woman who is doubly and
perhaps triply marginalized. To begin with, she is a woman who dares to speak
to a man in a culture that condemned such speech categorically. On top of that,
she is a Gentile and thus not a member of the chosen people. She was the mother
of a demon-possessed child in a culture that understood disease in terms of
ethical judgment so she must have done something terrible to deserve such an
unclean daughter.
Yet she dares to speak to Jesus, and, not only that, she
dares to challenge him when he, also breaking cultural taboos, speaks to her.
In the exchange, Jesus is changed. Because he is willing
to let go of his own cultural assumptions, because he trusts ultimately in
God’s good provision, because he is willing to open his hands and his heart,
his own imagination is forever expanded, and in the gospel of Mark, from this
moment forward, the message, the good news, is for everyone.
Nothing defines our place in this culture more than
money. In Jesus’ time, while wealth was clearly a significant cultural marker,
gender and tribe were even more important. Jesus lets go of the presumptions
that held the most power over him, and his imagination was enriched such that
his world was suddenly limitless. He could see possibilities previously cut off
to him and his ministry, and he was able to live into them faithfully when he
let go of his own privileges as male and Jewish.
As I ponder this challenging text and the equally
powerful ideas in the other readings I am left wondering what privileges I
cling to, and how that clinging limits my own imagination. Can I imagine a self
that gives away with authentic joy, and finds blessing in the giving? What
privileges bind me and blind me? How do these privileges get in the way of
living fully into the Christian lifestyle that I claim? How does this get in
the way of our being the church we feel called to be?
I want to take just a moment now, to open that question
to all of us. What are some of the privileges we carry? How do these privileges
impact others? What limits might these privileges place on those of us who hold
them?
* * * * *
And
my friend and I asked the man what he needed. He told us he wanted to get some
personal care items, shampoo, a razor, shaving cream, because he wanted to get
clean for a job interview. There was a CVS around the corner so I walked with
him. We talked along the way.
His
name is Joe. He is a Vietnam vet, happy to have been too big to be a tunnel rat
during his tour in 1968.
He’s
also a Nats fan, and hopes someday to get to a game.
I
got him the simple stuff he was looking for. Cost less than 10 bucks, and I was
blessed in the sharing because my own imagination was expanded in the
encounter.
Indeed,
after the conversation I wrote a letter to Ted Lerner, owner of the Nats,
thanking him for fielding such a fun, exciting team, and acknowledging his
clear commitment to honoring returning vets.
To
tell the truth, I find the over-the-top, borderline jingoistic patriotism on
display at Nationals Park off-putting, but my encounter with Joe expanded my
own imagination enough to turn my personal gripe into a suggestion for Mr.
Lerner. I simply asked that he consider doing some outreach through DC shelters
to enable vets living on the streets of the capital to enjoy an afternoon or
evening at the ballpark.
It’s
nothing like a systematic solution to the problem of homelessness. I know that.
That’s not the point. What is the point, then?
Simply
this – simply this lesson that Jesus, himself, learned, that when we break down
the barriers of our own privilege and encounter one another as human beings
across all the lines that would seem to separate us from one another, then
there’s no limit to the ways we might imagine sharing the commonwealth of God’s
incredibly abundant provision for all of creation.
The rich and the poor
have this in common: the same God made us all. As the psalmist insisted:
Those who trust in the
Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
As the mountains
surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds the people, from this time on and
forevermore. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:44 AM
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