Saturday, February 21, 2009
The Great Dictator...
Who knew that Charlie Chaplin was epic? This is an unbelievable and profound message by a comedian who almost never spoke. Charlie Chaplin made this in 1940. He had identified the true evils of the Nazi regime before America ever decided to do anything about it. He showed us that the injustice was not entirely in the deaths that were being caused, but it was in the dehumanization of everyone involved. The Nazi's themselves were being dehumanized by their machine-like devotion and the things that they were forced to do. At the same time of course there was dehumanization of the people that were oppressed by Hitler and his regime. This video is just wonderful. I had to pass it along...Grace and Peace.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Jesus was in the student center...
The hallways of my conservative Christian college - which is currently constructing a $20,000,000 new chapel building - are currently stained with the smell of cigarettes and poverty.
Let me explain, A Meijer store is opening almost across the street from the college that I attend. The county in which we are located has one of the worst unemployment rates in the state and the depravity and poverty are evident. The new store will be offering hundreds of jobs to both students and residents of this county. Our school agreed to be the location for the mass interviews that are happening for this store. Over the next few days the store will interview more than 1000 people for these positions. The people who are filling the hallways are surprising in many ways. They are first noticeably different than 95% of the student body here. The tuition at the school is nearing $30,000 per year and most of the people in this snaking line of people are not only unemployed but even while employed, were not making that much in a year.
Most of us here at this school have never lived in any sort of poverty or even what it is like to be a part of even the “lower class” in America. (I will abstain from discussions of what Poverty is for now, and believe me I know that $30,000 is not that terrible a salary, unless it is accompanied by the more than $100,000 debt that many students and families accrue at this school.) The second reason that these people seem out of place is their age. Many of the people standing in this nearly endless line are well over the age of retirement or at the very least above a minimum wage job such as this.
The tragedy of this is that people who were promised pensions for their many years of hard service are not receiving them either because of the fund no longer existing or that they were laid off. The others in the group are Mothers and Fathers and Aunts and Uncles who lost careers because of the squalor that is our current economy. They are now forced to take a job that high school and college students are the usual recipients of. The last demographic that could be seen in this group were those who have been driven all the way to homelessness, and were looking for a way out of a system that had (and still has) everything moving against them.
Now the really sad part of this is that these people were being stared at by so many of the students that passed them on the way to Chapel or to lunch. (As an aside, I think it’s beautiful that, though it has become so easy to remove ourselves from the “unsavory” parts of town and to see the poor and homeless as something far away, God brought them to our doorstep this week.) There was this general feeling throughout the hallway that “these people do not belong.” But the beautiful thing is that God had some teaching in store with this. This week is “Missions Week” in chapel and there are missions reps in our student center for all sorts of Global and domestic missions.
It is perfect that in these days it can be seen by all at the school that we do not have to travel thousands of miles to reach a need. There is a mission field right here only miles from where we live, and for a few days in our midst. But then we are confronted with the dilemma of what to do about this.
How do we proclaim a good God in a world that has good reason to believe otherwise?
Well the first thing that we need to do is to form relationships. When we look at these issues as issues then they are distant and abstract. But when we think of poverty and are reminded of friends of ours who are stuck in poverty, then suddenly poverty is not an idea, but it is a person. It’s so much easier and useful to help a person than to attack a “problem” or issue. I don’t know where you come from or what your background is, but we could all use some people in our lives who are not like us.
I guess in the end that’s all I’m trying to say. If we can expand "our people" to include those unlike us, I don’t think we’ll have to be told to move into action. I believe that we will do all that we can to help our friends. And maybe next time there is a line of people waiting for their chance, we won’t stare, but we’ll do something about it. Because our friends are in that line... because Jesus is in that line. Grace and Peace.
Let me explain, A Meijer store is opening almost across the street from the college that I attend. The county in which we are located has one of the worst unemployment rates in the state and the depravity and poverty are evident. The new store will be offering hundreds of jobs to both students and residents of this county. Our school agreed to be the location for the mass interviews that are happening for this store. Over the next few days the store will interview more than 1000 people for these positions. The people who are filling the hallways are surprising in many ways. They are first noticeably different than 95% of the student body here. The tuition at the school is nearing $30,000 per year and most of the people in this snaking line of people are not only unemployed but even while employed, were not making that much in a year.
Most of us here at this school have never lived in any sort of poverty or even what it is like to be a part of even the “lower class” in America. (I will abstain from discussions of what Poverty is for now, and believe me I know that $30,000 is not that terrible a salary, unless it is accompanied by the more than $100,000 debt that many students and families accrue at this school.) The second reason that these people seem out of place is their age. Many of the people standing in this nearly endless line are well over the age of retirement or at the very least above a minimum wage job such as this.
The tragedy of this is that people who were promised pensions for their many years of hard service are not receiving them either because of the fund no longer existing or that they were laid off. The others in the group are Mothers and Fathers and Aunts and Uncles who lost careers because of the squalor that is our current economy. They are now forced to take a job that high school and college students are the usual recipients of. The last demographic that could be seen in this group were those who have been driven all the way to homelessness, and were looking for a way out of a system that had (and still has) everything moving against them.
Now the really sad part of this is that these people were being stared at by so many of the students that passed them on the way to Chapel or to lunch. (As an aside, I think it’s beautiful that, though it has become so easy to remove ourselves from the “unsavory” parts of town and to see the poor and homeless as something far away, God brought them to our doorstep this week.) There was this general feeling throughout the hallway that “these people do not belong.” But the beautiful thing is that God had some teaching in store with this. This week is “Missions Week” in chapel and there are missions reps in our student center for all sorts of Global and domestic missions.
It is perfect that in these days it can be seen by all at the school that we do not have to travel thousands of miles to reach a need. There is a mission field right here only miles from where we live, and for a few days in our midst. But then we are confronted with the dilemma of what to do about this.
How do we proclaim a good God in a world that has good reason to believe otherwise?
Well the first thing that we need to do is to form relationships. When we look at these issues as issues then they are distant and abstract. But when we think of poverty and are reminded of friends of ours who are stuck in poverty, then suddenly poverty is not an idea, but it is a person. It’s so much easier and useful to help a person than to attack a “problem” or issue. I don’t know where you come from or what your background is, but we could all use some people in our lives who are not like us.
I guess in the end that’s all I’m trying to say. If we can expand "our people" to include those unlike us, I don’t think we’ll have to be told to move into action. I believe that we will do all that we can to help our friends. And maybe next time there is a line of people waiting for their chance, we won’t stare, but we’ll do something about it. Because our friends are in that line... because Jesus is in that line. Grace and Peace.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Elephant Men...
So we watched the movie The Elephant Man in my Philosophy and Theology of Film class last night and I was heartbroken. That is such a beautiful and tragic and just plain amazing movie. For those of you that don’t know, the movie is based upon the life of a real person named Joseph Merrick (called John Merrick in the movie) who had horrible deformities all over his body. He was nicknamed the elephant man because they say he looked like an elephant, and his mother had been mauled by an elephant when she was 4 months pregnant with him. His life was of course a living hell because of his deformities and he was actually a sideshow freak in the circus for many years. Well eventually a doctor finds him and takes him in to the hospital. The doctor knows that there is nothing he can do to physically help the condition of John, but he tries to give him a more dignified life. At first everyone assumes that John’s brain is in about the same shape as his body, which one character actually comments: “God, I pray he’s an imbecile” because he can’t imagine what it would be like if that man was cognizant for all the ridicule and hatred that he received. The doctor soon realizes however that John is a (somewhat) cultured and smart man. From this point we see the progression of John from being (seen as) a freak, to him becoming a popular guest of many people in high society in England. Throughout the rest of the movie there are people who continue to treat him like absolute trash and I wanted to cry at times. The real hard part came however when my professor asked us “Who are the Elephant Men in our lives?” At first I was convicted by this and then it really hit me: It’s easy to feel for people like the Elephant man, or for the poor and homeless, because their need is easily perceived (once we look through all that extra tissue and skin) but those aren’t our Elephant Men. We are to love those people, but we are also to love those that are hard to be around. The “cool” guy who is really just a jerk, he needs love as much as anyone. The Risk Management lawyer at my college. I could think of plenty more but you get the idea. The Elephant Men of the world aren’t just the marginalized, but they are also those people that we generally don’t like, even if it’s for good reason (at least in our minds). Let’s remember to love our neighbors and our enemies. Well everybody should see the movie, it’s great. Grace and Peace.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Segmented Kingdom...
So I was sitting in church on Sunday and listening to a great message. We were talking about missions and the things that were being done all over the world when something caught me in the wrong way. The speaker made a statement that “Now there is a presence of the (fill in the blank denomination) church in northern Africa. Now this is fine except that it broke my heart a bit to see that our denominationalism has fragmented us so much that we have to differentiate where “our” church is in the world. It’s totally fine to have differences in doctrine and church practices by why do we have to look at this from the standpoint of “churches” or “denominations”? Why can’t “The Church” be in Northern Africa? I wonder if it confuses people in other countries when we decide to bring our particular flavor of Christianity and separate it from the others? We are always looking for points of difference instead of unification. This was happening even in the scriptures. Paul mentions this in 1 Corinthians. People are differentiating their particular flavor of Christianity. “I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Mark Driscoll, I follow Shane Claiborne...” This is a call for us to not follow one teacher, or to differentiate ourselves from other churches or denominations but to follow Christ. Jesus is the teacher that we follow and after that we need to see and take all things that are true in all of these other places. Well my mind has wandered a bit, but this is how it works so deal with it. Just something that has been bouncing around in my head since Sunday. Grace and Peace.
A New Start
It's time to restart the Blog. So consider this the first real post on the Blog. I'm gonna try to update it when I can, We'll see what hapens.
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