The Bible and the Bhagavad Gita 30: Pleasures and Treasures

 

Detail of a botched “restoration” of a painting of Mary by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. News story here.

 

Pleasures conceived in the world of the senses have a beginning and an end and give birth to misery, Arjuna. The wise do not look for happiness in them. But those who overcome the impulses of lust and anger which arise in the body are made whole and live in joy. They find their joy, their light, and their rest completely within themselves. United with the Lord, they attain nirvana in Brahman. (BG, 5:22-24)  

Yesterday I pointed out that like the Sermon on the Mount, the above quote singles out the passions of anger and lust as particular traps. It also connects to Jesus’s words in another way:

“Stop collecting treasures for your own benefit on earth, where moth and rust eat them and where thieves break in and steal them.  Instead, collect treasures for yourselves in heaven, where moth and rust don’t eat them and where thieves don’t break in and steal them. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21, CEB)

Earthly treasures have this in common: they end. We value them for a time because they bring pleasure to the senses, but when they end we feel sad, or angry, and we long for more.

My mind goes to news of the recent botched painting restoration in Spain. Of course we want things of beauty to be preserved, and we want great works of art to last so that they can be seen by future generations. But nothing lasts forever, and sometimes our efforts to preserve our pleasure actually lead to ruin. This particular amateur “restoration” left the Virgin Mary looking hideous and goofy.

Yes, the ruin of a beautiful work of art is sad and outrageous, but I can’t help laughing when I see these photographs. Pleasures conceived in the world of the senses have a beginning and an end and give birth to misery, Arjuna. Sometimes we try to “hold on” to an aesthetic experience of great art by possessing a painting, as if owning it will let us own the feeling of it. We put art in museums (to visit occasionally) or on our walls (where they become simply more furniture). Sometimes artists, like Banksy, try to draw our attention to the strange relationship between art, temporality, money, and ownership by destroying their own art.

Banksy released a video of the “rehearsal” of his prank. Excellent in-depth news here.

Our desire to possess, to keep, to hold on, all of this is attachment. We get angry because our attachment is threatened. We covet and lust because we want to own. We want to preserve this moment of pleasure or comfort and carry it into the next one, and the next, which is an impossible task.

Jesus says our real treasure is “in the heavens,” or the skies. Krishna says it is within ourselves. I think there is little difference between the two.

Prayer:
God of Time and Timelessness, of the Eternal and the Finite, help me to find my treasure in you,
in the sky, in myself.

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Drug Policy and the Church, Day 1: Start Here

Portrait of John D. Ehrlichman, assistant to president Richard Nixon for domestic affairs, by Oliver F. Atikins. From Wikimedia Commons.

“[We] had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This is where we start. This is a quotation from John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, and it needs to be the first thing we consider. Sure, we can talk about addiction, and harm reduction, and prohibition, and the history of drug use and religion, and a number of other things. I plan to touch on those this week. But when we talk about drug policy in the United States—and by extension, in the world and in the church—we need to start with this quote right here.

We start here because nearly everything in our country has been weaponized for the sake of white supremacy and imperialism: religion, roads, housing construction, banking, marriage, the family, mass media. This is not an overstatement. EVERYTHING. But drug policy has been one of the most devastating weapons contrived.

Phyllis Tickle said that society goes through periodic 500-year cycles of revolution and reformation, a “rummage sale” where old ideas are brought out into the light, and we decide what to keep and what to throw away. Our approach to drugs is one of these areas that is up for review. Drugs and drug addiction regularly appear in sermons and prayers, even though these modern terms never appear in the Bible, so it is appropriate for us to consider them. 

I grew up in the 1980’s, during the “Just Say No” campaign. I have practiced abstinence from illegal drugs my whole life. As a pastor, I’ve seen the devastation wrought by opioid addiction—and who profited from it. But I’ve also walked in the Amazon with indigenous people who told me, “God has put a cure for every human ailment in this jungle.” Plant medicine from the rainforest, they believed, could heal the world—if the descendants of Europeans could only stop destroying it.

We need to acknowledge the harm that drugs can do to individuals and society, certainly. Alcohol and nicotine are responsible for tremendous social harm. Prescription drugs are the newest form of a long-term drug problem. Yet we often blame drugs instead of their antecedents: poor quality social relationships, being stuck in meaningless jobs, self-medicating for depression and anxiety. There are behavioral and biological components to addiction. Yet our policies are not about addiction: they are about disrupting communities and targeting certain people.

I start with the above quotation because we need to understand that the stigma associated with addiction and drug use is very intentional. Drug policy is responsible for the massive swelling of our prison population: The “home of the free” imprisons more people than any country on earth. The War on Drugs launched on June 17, fifty years ago, and its purpose was always to delegitimize the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. In order to weed out these toxic policies and attitudes, we need to pull them up by the roots.

Prayer:
God of Justice, we so often do the wrong things for the right reasons, or allow unjust harm because we are convinced of a greater good. Give us wisdom and discernment to know truth from lies, and to be ruled by love rather than fear—in our personal lives, as well as public.  

Let’s Make June 17 “End the War on Drugs” Day

Source: American Enterprise Institute

June 17th is coming. This is the date Nixon declared a War on Drugs.

John Ehrlichman was Nixon’s domestic policy advisor. In 1994 he said in an interview that the administration “…had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The story came out in 2016. Here is the link: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

It has been widely documented how this War on Drugs led to America being the incarceration capital of the world. The State of Alabama has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world.

While most of the people we lock up are white, incarceration disproportionately affects black people. According to Alabama Appleseed, black folks are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white folks, even though we know drug use is the same across race, class, etc. There’s just as much, or more, drug use in Mountain Brook as in West End.

And while pro-prison legislators in Alabama will point out most long-term prisoners are in for violent crimes, we need to ask about how our awful drug and mental health policies LED to those violent crimes. Alabama prisons are the largest provider of mental health care in the state!

As people begin to turn from protest to thinking “What Now?” I want to say again that POLICY needs to change. There is bipartisan support for prison reform, but I want to ask you to look at some of the arguments for prison ABOLITION. You don’t have to sign on. Just LISTEN.

(Even the American Enterprise Institute, who produced the graphic attached, supports changes in policy. The AEI is a conservative capitalist institution.)

Incarceration has add-on effects: many convicted persons can no longer vote. While in prison, census data records them as residents of the (mostly white, rural) counties where they are serving their time. Both of these effects create taxation without representation, and decimate the political power of black citizens. 15% of African-American adults in Alabama cannot vote.

All of the wasted money in prisons could be funneled into things that actually improve people’s lives. Treat addiction as a public and mental health problem. Move cannabis to lowest enforcement priority. Take psychedelics that show therapeutic promise off Schedule 1. Invest in harm reduction programs. Reduce economic inequality, make the world less awful, and people will spend less energy trying to escape it.

Remember, the Nixon administration knew there was a link between white supremacy and perpetual war. They made a strategic 50-year investment in subjugating our nation, creating a permanent carceral state and modern plantation system. We are now seeing the war machine being used on us in our own cities, as police with military hardware treat protesters like a prison population.

June 17 is coming up. We should mark the date by calling for an end to the failed, racist, militarized War on Drugs. Two days later is Juneteenth: a fitting day to celebrate freedom, and recognize that slavery and white supremacy are still very much with us.

The Sermon on the Plain: The Flip Side

 

But how terrible for you who are rich,
    because you have already received your comfort.
How terrible for you who have plenty now,
    because you will be hungry.
How terrible for you who laugh now,
    because you will mourn and weep.
How terrible for you when all speak well of you.
    Their ancestors did the same things to the false prophets. (Luke 6:24-26, CEB)

Wow. Are you ready to hear this? I don’t think any of us are ready.

• This follows the same form as the “happy are you who are poor” section. Jesus names four groups: people who are poor/rich, hungry/full, weeping/laughing, and rejected/praised. 
• Old translations say “Woe to you.” This is classic prophetic language of the Old Testament, like Isaiah and Ezekiel, and was often followed by descriptions of war, famine, exile, and grief. Jesus is putting on the mantel of the old prophets. 
• As we saw yesterday, Luke’s Jesus does not spiritualize poverty or oppression. His words are for people experiencing dramatic economic inequality, and so they are relevant to us today. They also hearken back to his mother’s words in Luke: He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed. (Luke 1:52-53) 
• It’s interesting that Luke’s Jesus uses the same logic here that Matthew’s Jesus uses when talking about hypocrisy in giving, prayer, and fasting for show: “You have already received your comfort.” It’s the same rhetoric applied to a different subject, which makes me think Luke and Matthew are, in fact, drawing from the same source document (Q). They’ve just applied it to different things. 
• This section addresses people on the top, and it’s disturbing and stunning because we all know we want this stuff and spend a huge amount of energy in our lives to acquire it. Who doesn’t want wealth, food security, joy, and people’s praise. Are we not supposed to want wealth, security, and a good reputation? 
• The implicit lesson, though, is that the system is broken. It’s not that we should all aspire to poverty, hunger, and social rejection. It’s that some people have and others do not. The system praises prophets (ahem, televangelists, ahem) who support the status quo, and they reject reformers and revolutionaries. 
• Jesus implicitly invites his followers to be a contrast society, to demonstrate the kind of life that flips our corrupt system of inequality to something more just and loving. 
• But we can’t make that point without directly confronting the power system that maintains injustice. Jesus can’t start off talking about love and peace without exposing the inequality and sin at the heart of human society. 
• God takes sides. God has a preferential option for the poor. 
• Too often, churches mute this section of the sermon. They want to talk about love and justice in the abstract without directly exposing and confronting specific injustices. People say it isn’t loving to make rich people uncomfortable, it isn’t loving to call others “false prophets.” Jesus will certainly talk about love in the next section, but first he must make it clear: He isn’t here to play. He’s here to tell the truth.

Prayer:
Just One, shine your light on our society, so that we may see it clearly and confront its problems  courageously.

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Three Thoughts About Money and Church

Here’s three insights from around the web that I think are great for thinking about fundraising, church budgets, and other money-related stuff.

The first is Amanda Palmer’s TED talk on “The Art of Asking.” What I think is fascinating in her talk is that she puts her finger on what pastors have been saying in churches for ages: we have a need to give, that giving and receiving can be profoundly human and spiritual acts, and that asking should not be shameful. In fact, it is liberating to give.

I think the big disconnect is that people think of giving to individuals differently than they think of giving to organizations. It feels good to give to a person. It feels impersonal to give to an organization. But the reality is that those lines are blurry. Amanda Palmer is an institution, and churches are people who coordinate around a common mission. If church members feel like they are giving to an institution, it’s because somewhere, they lost the sense that they are a community sharing a mission.

The second is also a TED talk, and this was is from Dan Pallotta, called “The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong.”

I think his strongest points is that “low overhead” is not necessarily the best criteria for judging the effectiveness of a non-profit charity. I believe churches have fallen into this trap. There are plenty of critiques of the church spending too much money “on itself,” rather than helping the poor. It’s an easy visual to establish: Church members drive by hungry, homeless people to sit in air-conditioned sanctuaries in cushioned pews surrounded by stained glass. (“Stained glass” and “pews” have come to be shorthand for everything wrong with the church). I used to feel the same way, but I’ve served enough churches to know that the presence or absence of stained glass, air-conditioning, and pews are not indicators of the good a community is doing. Now that I’m on the “doing” side of my church-planting dream, I see the importance of investing money and time in doing something well in order to get more bang for your buck. While I don’t think our own community will be investing money in million-dollar lighting systems and holographic projection (although I’ve learned never to say “never”), I can’t simply claim that a church that does so is missing the mark because they could have spent that money on the poor.

There are also good responses to Dan’s talk here and here. The last one frames the debate among non-profit workers as the difference between “Growing the Pie” and “Giving the Pie Away.” I think it is good for churches to have the same conversation, and to recognize it as the same conversation, that happens in the non-religious non-profit sector.

The third article is “The Shocking Un-Truth About Church Budgets,” from Amy Butler, senior pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington. She makes the case that salaries and buildings are not “overhead” for doing real ministry. If the staff are effective, and our resources (including facilities) are effectively used, then just being the church is ministry. Calling these things “overhead,” as if they were somehow tangential to the real work of ministry, indicates that something is wrong either with our mission or the way we think about it.