March 10, 2006
Protest
I spent a few days in Kansas City once at one of those tedious professional conferences featuring experts who claim expertise, you know, that attribute of knowing more and more about less and less until you know all there is to know about nothing and just can’t wait to tell others about it for a handsome fee. The only redeeming grace about the time I was there was getting to hear Count Basie’s band in person a couple of nights in a row.
Sorry about this clumsy segué, but Kansas has been on my mind of late, and it’s mostly been about God. First, there’s the penchant over there for creation being intelligently designed. Now I don’t see how anybody can take issue with that. After all, the more we find out about creation, the more remarkable it seems. Even to call it “creation,” though, is something of an act of faith that implies a creator, as if that weren’t enough in itself to rankle the ACLU. But then to go so far as to suggest that we’re intelligent enough to know that it was somehow intelligently brought about might only serve to amuse both Charles Darwin and God.
But that’s not all. There are some crazies from Kansas who are actually marching in protest at funerals and in the name of Jesus, of all people. They’re marching around with vulgar signs claiming who God loves and who God doesn’t love as if they’re on some kind of inside track with heavenly priorities. Everybody knows that when a person’s dead, they’re dead, regardless of their principles. What is done about grieving them and their life is the business of their family and their friends. It’s a time to make nice, not naughty, to celebrate the Big Sleep with the Big Wake.
We forget that Jesus never wrote anything that we know about, nor said anything that we know first hand about, save only that he had to depend on other people’s filters. And there’s nothing in even that corpus that could lend even the slightest credence to protest marches at somebody’s funeral. One could make biblical argument for having an adequate supply of the sauce at weddings, maybe, but protest marches at funerals?
We should know better. We should be ashamed. Because we’re all in this together. What we should really be about grieving and protesting is the unthinking and devastating complicity in our own lives and in the lives of others.
Everybody knows how it is to feel good and safe about something even if we’ve only had a few moments feeling it. Everybody should be aware and alert about that and about how to make feeling safe in a just society possible for ourselves and for others as far as we can reach. If the church is about anything, it’s about that, about teaching folk to be human and to get some pleasure out of it, for God’s sake, and to be grateful. I suppose there are those who’d protest even that for lack of something better to grouse about just to get themselves noticed.
We’re better than that. God said so when he wrote Genesis and when he baptised Jesus and started off Lent so we’d take notice.