Poverty

Dear Eugene,

As followers of Jesus, how do we want others to see us?

It's a strange question, isn't it?  We think we know the answer and even lived the answer, but we have only acted out a set of assumptions.

For example, we are supposed to be decent people.  We might not be "nice" people when it comes to insisting on what is "right," because, you know, (another assumption) being in the right is very important.

In this age of compromise, we might or might not engage in vigorous lobbying to set the world right (even in matters of cardinal concern in the traditional "Christian agenda," such as sexuality and...well, sexuality), but, in order to honor God and make Christianity look good, we must direct the world's eyesight to what we are doing right, the dignified aspects of our life, if not stories of triumphs, at least a stubborn insistence on common decency.  Who are we to call ourselves Christians if we are not even half decent?

Um...what is "half decent" though?  Well, to begin with, let's try not to do weird things.  And what are "weird" things?  Things questionable, things that raise eyebrows, things just, you know, "shouldn't be."  That's not too hard for most churchgoers.  The fact that we could keep our spot on the pew after all these years is a testament to our behavioral upkeep and moral acumen.

But how about when we failed?  I don't mean a driving test.  I mean things shameful we have done as in what common decency would judge them, bad things as even a random irreligious guy would call them.  What then are we to do about ourselves?  Of course we do shameful things all the time, but none matters until people know.  I am talking about now everybody knows.  How do I still walk into church with a straight back?

There are only two options really: deny the wrongdoing or deny God.

If I can appear blameless again, somehow wipe away my blemish, or, even better, prove that the other party in my moral transaction was, after all, the one who was really in the wrong and got lucky with framing me but only for so long, wouldn't that be a true triumph of faith, God's ultimate victory, my trial and tribulation vindicated?

Well, that's if I could actually spin it well enough.  When everything else fails I could use force too.  Yelling sometimes helps with winning, especially when losing seems increasingly likely.  News is only fake if one chooses to not believe it.  My friends would always believe me, the true ones, the truly Godly ones, the ones with authentic spiritual discernment.  We will read the Book of Job together and discuss theodicy.

If finally nothing works...well, then, you know what, God doesn't work either.  His has never worked anyway.  Look at the world, like, take a truly honest look.  Everything sucks, and He didn't do nothing about none.  Now I am being thrown into a lion's den, suffering injustice (you know, there is no way I am 100% in the wrong), and God gives me not even one friend to speak on my behalf.  All I want is to keep only a tiny bit of dignity and he would not even allow that.  Shame on me for warming His pew all these years.  I should have known better.  I played along.  My stupid.

Now of course I didn't just make up the above.  We are, sadly, all too familiar with scenarios like this.  But that is not the point today.  The point is, we could take away the word "Jesus" in my initial question and replace it with another saintly, religious figure, leader of an ideology, or just any sort of enlightenment initiative, and the scenario I've played out above would still unravel the same way.

We just need to be right and be acknowledged for our rightness, period.  Who cares if there is finally a God if he/she doesn't care about making me look right and decent and respectable and a winner?

No wonder we don't get Jesus, especially church people.  The world despises Him and thinks Him stupid and we despise Him more and pay Him no attention.  We are not losers and shall never want to be.

The authentic Gospel, Good News, as spoken by Rowan Williams, a big fat loser for Jesus:

"So, if the ‘wretched of the earth’ are to hear our gospel, perhaps they will only be able to hear it from those who are themselves victims, diminished people, who have yet understood their poverty, through the gifts they have themselves received in the compassionate company of Jesus’ family and body; understood their poverty as one with the poverty of others; people who do not come with possessions and ideas to distribute, but come to offer some opportunity of a fellowship of giving and receiving. They will be people who see the deprivation of others not as a sign of their subhuman and hopeless status, still less as a regrettable but inevitable result of ‘the way the world goes’, but as something crying out for solidarity and understanding, for a word of hope that itself includes and shares the protest, the injury, the sense of incompleteness.

The only preachers, the only lovers, with anything to say will be the ones who can make their own the frustration of the despised, because they have recognised with tears, with irony, with anger perhaps, but also with acceptance their poverty: that, whatever the outward securities (social, professional, religious), they too are mutilated. These are the preachers who can speak a gospel which is never a word of condescending encouragement from the possessors to the dispossessed, but the generation of a new community, the fellowship of poor men and women, at work to make each other rich, to make each other human."

Thank you, Jesus.

Yours, Alex