poor and oppressed

i have a bumper sticker on my office door that says "Jesus is a liberal."

An irate math student stopped at my door the other day and demanded an accounting for such a claim. Was I saying that Jesus was like Bill Clinton? I tried to be generous and provocative in my response to him, but I was forced to remember how totalizing the world I grew up in was toward the term. The word "liberal" itself was justification for alientation and ridicule.

(I understand that many liberals live in the same sort of totalizing world -- where "conservative" is just a devil a term...)

since i've moved so far left, sometimes I have to try to remember how, in general, the right came to hold such widespread, unquestioning cache' with the evangelicals...?

i *do* understand some of the historical antecedents and the political bedfellows that made for this union between the american religious mainstream and the political right wing....but i also feel passionate about making arguments for why / how a more liberal political agenda is more consonant with historical christianity.

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Harry preached this sunday focusing upon this text --

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Not from Isaiah, but from Luke 4 -- the passage where Jesus talks about how a prophet is -- in his own city -- reviled.

that latter idea really resonated with me. For lots of reasons....

i joke that i'm a "black sheep" in my family -- and Lynn often feels keenly the weight of being the child that left her farming community -- being a "black sheep" does not (i'm aware) constitute being a prophet, but the experience does resonate with me as having some shared territory.

Isn't it a bedrock American Axiom that once you leave -- you can never go home?

Isn't that, on some level, the experience that most people face when they're honest about the intergenerational clash of values, directions, and dreams that they face with their parents?

I've just ordered Limbo after hearing a great interview of the author on NPR.



I'm not really a straddler in Lubrano's sense, but having left fundamentalism and evangelicalism, both very dense & total cultural groups...and having married a "straddler" (as he calls them) who moved from rural agrarian roots into a white collar world -- his ideas resonated deeply with me.

Harry's point (or one of them at least) was that Jesus was intentionally enraging the comfortable, powerful locals in order to be invitational to the outsiders, the strangers, the Samaritans and the disenfranchised.

Obviously, this is the connection that I feel between (contemporary) liberal ideology and Christian thought. That the ultimate tear in the fabric of the universe is: devotion to intentional poverty, intentional death, intentional weakness in order to PARTICIPATE in the incarnation of God.

So how’s that connected to the black sheep in all of us?

Lynn and I watched Lost in Translation this weekend. I loved it – she was so-so.



One thing that I loved was that – while the obvious meaning: that much important meaning gets “lost in translation” was great and true and particularly salient in this story – it was the third layer of that metaphor (lostness) that seemed most important and profound to me.

The second layer – that these particular characters were uniquely “lost” in a foreign culture – provided a great explanation of some of the freedom and happiness that they’re able to find in unexpected experiences.

But the third layer – that these particular characters were, at least on some level, powerful privileged people in the Great Economy of Being: A movie star, a jet-setting Yale Graduate. Yet the experience of being lost in another culture had clarified for them both POWERFULLY how LOST they were in their own worlds, in their own lives, in between their hopes and their dreams.

And what I like about Jesus’ appropriation of Isaiah’s message is that he affirms the truth that:

in order to proclaim freedom and hope for the poor and oppressed – you have to be ready and willing to participate in the one-down position of being an ex-pat prophet. You have to embrace the alienation that comes from returning to your hometown – and you have to announce and renounce the power structures and struggles that prop your home town up.

For me, I realized that I’m too often looking at the power structures wherever I am with the eye of a radical revolutionary looking to upend things – instead of recognizing and embracing the reality that the people inside of those power structures are just as poor and oppressed as anybody…only they don’t recognize those traits as definitive of themselves, because to do so would be (not only) counterintuitive and (also) counterproductive.

If I didn’t have a front burner I’d go on to make the next important leap which is …

And that’s why art is better than preaching (of any kind: religious, educational, political or scientific)…

peace (or a sword, whichever you need today)~