Vote for Joe

We’re in Americus, Georgia, at Koinonia Farm.   Koinonia is a Christian farm community that was the backwater Selma and Montgomery of the Civil Rights Movement (way before Selma and Montgomery).   It was here that Whites and Blacks worked side by side for equal pay in the fields.   And this was segregated southern Georgia in the late 1940s.   One of the community co-founders, Clarence Jordan, went on to write the Cotton Patch Parables.   The parables revolved around Jesus coming to earth, not 2,000 years ago to the Middle East, but rather in the 1940s to southern Georgia.   What happened at Koinonia was not without a lot of struggle.   There were drive by shootings, Klansmen burning crosses across from Koinonia, local stores boycotting selling things to the farm…   When Jordan was approached about buying the farm out (at a significant price), he said it would be like selling his soul.

I stopped in at a Community Action for Teens’ Safe & Sober Prom Campaign event over the weekend in Decatur, Georgia.   At the event was a display with some of the following statistics.   1) Traffic crashes currently are the greatest single cause of death for people ages six to 33.   At a Driving School in Loudonville, Ohio, owner Brad Porter told me 33,000 people die on our nation’s highways every year.   That’s the equivalent of, for instance, a half-full airliner going down: every day!     2) Some 45% of these traffic related deaths are alcohol related (among the six to 33-year-olds)… During some of our cross country research, we stopped at Mothers Against Drunk Driving Headquarters   in Dallas, Texas.   One room is devoted solely to a wall with the photographs of some people who had been killed in drunk driving accidents.   From the babies, to the children, to the moms… it was tremendously impacting. A police officer at the event in Decatur said to the youth that she too had seen tremendously impacting carnage in the aftermath of some of these accident scenes…   In Columbiana County, Ohio, several years ago, we met a former bartender who proposed to us that each state consider introducing a “drinking license.”   One that can be revoked for various periods of time for, say, a DWI or other criminal offenses where alcohol is involved.   Note:   Program literature this day in Decatur included the following:   “Every year more money is spent promoting the use of alcohol than any other product.   Perhaps through its elaborate and creative marketing, the most basic, yet important fact about alcohol is often overlooked.   Alcohol is a drug.”

For Good Friday, I went with a group for a prayer service in front of the State House in Atlanta.   One t-shirt read:   “Jesus was a victim of the death penalty.”   The group leader this day, Calvin Kimbrough, said we were gathering in front of the State House because the legislation for Georgia’s Death Penalty law was crafted inside.   (The group does a protest vigil here on the day of practically every execution.)   Ed Weir has a ministry to those on death row in Georgia’s Jackson Prison.   He said the first time he went there, upon entering, he was questioned by a guard — positioned high up in a 50 foot tower.   “He was the receptionist,” Weir laughed (only sort of).   He said once past this guard, he was led through an underground tunnel, past a series of heavy metal doors and finally into the room where the prisoner was.   A prisoner who is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day.   A prisoner who has little hope of ever seeing the outside again. “There is more to a person than the worst moments of their life,” Ed quoted Murphy Davis, co-founder of the Open Door Community here. Note:   I also saw a very dramatic “Stations of the Cross” depiction today at the Open Door.   It was a series of posters from around the world depicting each station.   Some examples:   For “Jesus carries his cross,” a Mayan father carries a small wooden casket on his back through the streets toward the cemetery.   His son had just been killed in war-torn Guatemala…   For “Simon helps Jesus,” two six-year-old South American boys push a heavy cart of rocks with the caption:   “They bear each others’ burdens where children have no time for study or play…”   And for “Jesus falls a third time,” there is a picture of a stick thin woman in India dying alone on the sidewalk below a shop window featuring expensive, pristine statues of Jesus.   The caption:   “When people ignore the true     image of God in one another…”   And so it will be today in ‘pristine’ churches with pristine statues across the country.   People, many people, will go, will pray, will sing laments about Jesus’ death… and then give hardly a thought (much less any significant money or volunteer time) to help those dying without health care insurance; to help those dying of starvation in the Third World; to help those violently dying on the urban streets of America…   It’s like we’ve bought into this ‘Hallmark Card’   version of Jesus, while the ‘true’ Jesus sleeps in the back alleys with the homeless.   And we sleep in our comfortable beds next to the expensive, pristine cross on the wall.   Note 2:   Leo Chang comes to the Open Door Community for Holy Week from Memphis Theological Seminary every year.   He goes out on the street for the week in solidarity with the homeless.   Last year he was robbed at gun point.   Undaunted, he’s back again this year.   “I feel a call to be out here with the people who are poor,” he said to me.   Note 3:   The day I was homeless in the city, a group of us were discussing the Biblical scene where Jesus angrily turns over the tables in the temple.   During a short talk at an Open Door service later that evening, I said if Jesus came back today to Atlanta, I believe he’d ‘turn over’ the huge Coca Cola sign shadowing Woodruff Park.   They make non-nutritional beverages at a profit, while one sixth of the world doesn’t have access to clean drinking water.   I said Jesus would then overturn the Georgia Pacific Lumber high rise just beyond the other end of the park.   I said if GP is like so many other lumber companies these days, they rape the land without much of a second thought about environmental consciousness.   Then… I said Jesus would probably come to our apartment in Cleveland, where he’d turn over the maybe a-little-too-nice kitchen table made of Georgia Pacific wood — spilling the Coca Cola can on top of the table in the process.   We Americans are, indeed, complicit.

I was ‘homeless’ in Atlanta today… I went out with a group of guys from the Open Door Community early this morning to stand in solidarity with the some 10,000 homeless people.   We took no money, no food… and headed off to walk the streets of downtown Atlanta all day going to places where the homeless hang out.   Our first stop was a downtown park in the shadows of sparkling high rise office buildings.   Here I observed a number of homeless people being rousted for sleeping on the grass.   Other homeless shuffled about trying to stay awake after, for many, a few (if any) hours of sleep under some church ground bushes, or makeshift tent camps below underpasses, or…   For lunch we went to Our Lady of Lourdes Soup Kitchen where I got in a conversation with one of the fellow Open Door group members.   We discussed college degrees.   I had a degree in journalism.   He got a Fulbright Scholarship to study philosophy in France and is a professor at a university in Ohio.   Across the table from us was an African American homeless man with a mental problem.   He spoke to himself in what could be described as gibberish throughout the meal.   As the professor and I talked, I would periodically glance over at the other man thinking to myself what a tremendous social disparity (read: injustice) between our side of the table and his.   Some might even refer to it in what could best be described (in Biblical terms) as a “chasm.” In the afternoon we walked about a rather rough area of the city, homeless people dotted the street corners. In mid-afternoon, we went to a worship service at the Common Ground drop-in center, an Episcopal Church outreach in the city.   Today was Holy Thursday and there was the traditional washing of the feet.   In this particular “church,” you couldn’t help but notice the tremendously dirty feet, gnarled toes, callouses… from all the walking and standing the homeless do each day.   Part of Psalm 22 was read during the service.   One line was “the poor will be satisfied.”   I couldn’t help but think that the poor in Atlanta won’t be satisfied until us folks on this side of the “chasm” start sacrificing tremendously and using the money to set up solid, multi-tiered programs to not only get the homeless off the street, but into adequate housing, into quality mental health and job counseling, and into eduction programs to help them develop their God given talents…   Anything other than this is a band aid approach to something that needs major surgery.

I interviewed Don Beisswenger who is a retired professor of theology at Vanderbilt University.   He now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and is extremely active with various projects to help the homeless (and others on the margins) in that city.   He said he taught about “practical theology” at Vanderbilt which, in part, means connecting the gospel message with the present in quite tangible ways.   And Jesus was forever talking about helping the poor and so, well, that’s what professor Beisswenger does.   Besides his extensive work in the city, professor Beisswenger also established the Penual Retreat Center in nearby rural Ashland City, Tennessee.   It’s a retreat center, with a twist.   He offers free getaways for the homeless — who are often perpetually trapped in the city.   What’s more, if they want, the homeless can also work around the retreat center grounds during their stay   — for pay.   Note:   Professor Beisswenger added that the prevailing climate in society is one of “charity” toward the poor.   And he finds that tremendously one dimensional.   That is, he said we should be looking at the systems that are keeping the poor, poor.