Prodigal Prophet

I popped onto Facebook to wish someone a “Happy Birthday” and read one or two posts by somewhat fundamentalist Christian friends along the way. Both were busy telling others how they were “less than” in God’s eyes either because of what those others thought or how they’d spoken in favor of another group “bound for hell” based on some relatively obscure verses in the Old Testament that have been taken out of context.

I found myself feeling sad, as I usually do after reading posts like these, though there are times when my frustration pops through in something I write in response, and I’m as guilty as the next. Once my anger dies down, I’m usually even sadder, discouraged even, because I think that if those fundamentalist Christian friends would only stop and think about what they’re saying, they might see that they’ve bound themselves up into rule-ridden boxes. I always go back to the fact that Jesus reportedly said that knowing the truth would set us free—not tie us up.

I almost always come around, too, to the parable of the prodigal son. But it isn’t the prodigal that I think of—it’s the other brother, the one who is outraged at the very idea that his father would make so much over the prodigal when he was the one who had been there. He was the one who had followed the rules, who’d stayed behind to do his father’s bidding (or what he thought was his father’s bidding). He was the good son. At least that’s how he’d thought of himself before.

I imagine that if there were other siblings in the family, he’d pontificated many times about how one was supposed to act. He’d probably talked about how that prodigal brother of theirs was evil and how he’d squandered his birthright. He was proud of the fact that he’d never strayed away. And on one level, I believe he should have been.

But the problem, I think, is that the older brother had made a mistaken assumption about his father’s love. He thought it was to his credit that he’d stayed at home and done the “right” thing. To say that something is to one’s “credit” is an accounting term, suggesting that on the score card of debits and credits, he’d deposited “cash” in his account that would be there when judgment came to call—leverage against the day when he’d be called on to pay a debt.

And then the prodigal came home. And his father, instead of demanding payment, had had the audacity to run out to meet the prodigal on the way. And then, OMG, to throw a party for him! Because the older brother had made that misassumption about his father’s love, everything on which he had based his sense of security, his pride in himself, his plans for the future crumbled right there in front of him.

We don’t know if there was more to the parable. We don’t know what happened in the days and weeks and years after the party was over. But I know what I hope happened, because it’s what I hope every day will happen to those fundamentalist friends of mine. You see, I hope that it dawns on them one day that although it is wonderful that they live what they consider to be “clean” lives—because they save themselves a measure of pain by never waking up in a pigsty—that that fact has nothing at all to do with their father’s love. I believe that if the older brother had waked up in a pigsty, his father would have responded in exactly the same way for him, but they never seem to think about that.

I’ll go out on a limb here and confess that I don’t believe the often trite pronouncement that Jesus came to “die for our sins,” so any argument based on that falls flat for me anymore. I don’t think Jesus came to die, though because he was human, he would’ve eventually anyway, like the rest of us.

Rather, I think Jesus came to show what it is like to live absolutely, positively, unconditionally loved—freed by the assurance that there is nothing we can believe or stop believing, nothing we can do or refrain from doing, zero, nada, nothing (which encompasses what anyone, including my fundamentalist friends, has to say about it) that can separate us from God’s love. (Paul said that, by the way.) My God doesn’t love us because. My God loves us, period. End of story.

So why am I sad? At the thought that anyone is so focused on following (and trying to force others to follow) a set of rules that he’ll never know what it is to live loved and discover the joy of living a “clean” life for no other reason than because it feels good. And I’m sad at the paradox that, of the two of them, it was the prodigal son who really understood the meaning of God’s grace.

I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR, where I heard part of an interview done by Joe Palca, a guy on the Science desk there. He was talking with a scientist about a “smart glass” technology she and her staff have been working on for a while. Its application would be in “smart windows,” which would control the amount of sunlight and heat coming through into a building and theoretically reduce the amount of energy required to heat or cool the inside.

As usual, in addition to the express topic of the conversation, I heard something else. Here’s the transcript from the clip I’m talking about.

MILLIRON: In terms of demonstration products, I think it would be reasonable to see something even in the next three years or so.

PALCA: And when I talked to her last week, she said there was progress but still a ways to go.

MILLIRON: We’re discussing with very large scale glass manufacturers what really needs to happen to make it viable for broad deployment in architectural glass.

PALCA: The point here is that getting a good idea out of the lab and into the show room requires patience, hard work, and yeah, maybe even a bit of luck. When Milliron talked to Richard, she spelled out for him the hurdles that lie ahead: finding the right materials, scaling up the manufacturing process, making glass that’s free from defects.

What did I hear in that? An expert in science say that she’s “discussing with very large scale glass manufacturers what really needs to happen to make the [smart windows] viable for broad deployment…” An expert in one field quite freely and quite reasonably admitting without shame that she isn’t an expert in everything. There is someone who knows something she doesn’t know. Her expertise in nanotechnology doesn’t impact her ability to recognize that she doesn’t know the ins and outs of manufacturing. And as a result, someday soon—though maybe not in the three years Milliron hopes—the day will come when smart windows are introduced into the marketplace. If all goes well, they will provide a service to homeowners (more efficient and lower energy bills), a profit to those large scale glass manufacturers and a host of wholesalers and retailers and installers down the line (supporting the capitalistic drive), and a patent and more money for research for Dr. Milliron. A bunch of experts on different sides of things who know what they know and what they don’t, and are strong enough in character to go to those on the other sides to get their input in how to best produce a solution that is a win-win for all concerned. Wow. How refreshing.

Our government was, in theory, designed to operate like Dr. Milliron. People, from different states, with different topographies, different cultural challenges, different sizes, different populations, different livelihoods, were to come together and talk about solutions that allowed EVERY represented citizen to come away from the discussion satisfied that the needs of their states had been acknowledged, and the needs of every constituent considered.

But it doesn’t operate that way today. The agenda is increasingly clear—our representatives, specifically in the House, but not limited to them because state and local governments who operate with the same agenda are popping up all over, are after only one thing: “solutions” that benefit them and only them right now. If you’re not in the groups they’d describe as “we,” your needs, your privileges of citizenship, and your right to equal consideration under the law irrespective of any number of irrelevant demographic characteristics is dismissed. Your ideas, no matter how well thought out or defended are not only ignored, but attacked with arguments only a full-blown psychotic would make, believing that nobody’s on to them.

I recently re-read a speech given by former President Teddy Roosevelt in Paris one hundred years ago. It’s the same one that the well-known quote called “The Man in the Arena” was excerpted from. I was impressed with a personal anecdote he shared later in the speech:

A number of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each one was determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on a round-up an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it in the fire; and then the cowboy started to put on the brand.

I said to him, “It So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be.

He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.”

In another moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!”

To which he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.”

I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.”

He jumped up and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.”

And I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal from me.”

Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong IN your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong AGAINST your interest.”

I have only one thing to say to those who pretend they are public servants in today’s legislatures:

I am not fooled. If you will steal FOR me, then you will steal FROM me. And you have. So go get whatever is owing to you; we don’t need you any longer. You are an empty bag taking up space that could be better filled by someone like Dr. Milliron.

In the midst of the Paula Deen fiasco and the George Zimmerman trial, argument over what constitutes racism and sexism and “profiling” has risen to a fever pitch once again. “Everybody does it,” the standard argument of adolescents caught in an uncomfortable place, is one response. “Not me,” is the even more infantile defense. Denial of responsibility for one’s words and actions is increasingly the new standard—with no cognizance of the fact that it doesn’t really matter if one’s intentions were good. As the old adage says, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Think you’re unaffected by what others say and do? That you never blindly accept as “true” or “right” that others do and say without question? Take this “test.”

There’s a story in the New Testament in which, in answer to a lawyer’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asks him what the Hebrew law says. He replies, among other things, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Reportedly to make sure he isn’t setting himself up for judgment, the lawyer then asks who his neighbor is. Jesus elaborates with a parable about a guy on a trip who is beaten and robbed and what three other guys who happen along the same road later do (or don’t). What is the name of the parable?

If your answer includes the word “Samaritan,” I applaud your awareness, at least, of this one story in the Bible. But if your answer includes the word “good,” you might be guilty of racism. Or, at best, an unwitting carrier of it.

A skilled English composition teacher or grammarian or writer knows that the insertion of any adjective modifies the noun which follows it, most often as an intentionally exclusionary device. To call a day “beautiful” excludes from the reader or listener’s imagination those days that are “not beautiful,” according to their definitions of beauty. (I submit that the rain in Asheville, NC that would cause me to describe today as a “not-so-beautiful” day would be the very feature that would cause those in the southwest to describe their day as “beautiful,” for instance.) To describe a stove as “hot” intentionally excludes “warm” or “cold” from the sensual experience.

Obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with adjectives or modifiers, or their use as exclusionary devices. Our problems begin when we use emotionally-tinged modifiers with nouns that serve to differentiate one human demographic from another.

Before I go too far afield from my original premise, however, I would invite you to grab your Bible, if you have one, or search for the passage online. If you like, click here. It’s Luke 10:25-37.

Did you notice?

If you read from a version into which some human translator has inserted a “heading,” I would mention that an English composition teacher or editor worth his or her “salt” would mark down the grade of the student whose paper included this header for the story if it were written today. This story isn’t a parable about a good Samaritan. It’s a parable about a good neighbor.

If you haven’t yet begun to see what I’m getting at, go back and read the passage (minus the header). Nowhere does Jesus ever refer to the man as anything but a Samaritan. Someone else along the way inserted the word “good.”

But without skipping a beat, there are those among us—unfortunately most of us, it seems—who accept the exclusionary premise that this Samaritan was different from other Samaritans. That by virtue of his being Samaritan, there was a need to differentiate him further, to include him in an “exclusive” group of “good” Samaritans, as opposed to the “usual” lot of “bad” Samaritans.

Jesus chose to use a Samaritan in the example for a reason. The lawyer, no doubt, had already decided, without justification, that Samaritans were despicable, immoral, inferior… because they were Samaritans.

Samaria no longer exists today as a geographic entity, so we have to use our imaginations. If he were here today, what demographic group do you think Jesus would choose to demonstrate his point about neighbors? Homosexuals? Heterosexuals? Blacks? Whites? Asians? Africans? Hispanics? Jews? Arabs? Republicans? Democrats? Men? Women? Liberals? Conservatives? Teachers? Firemen? Beer Drinkers? Union Members? Christians? Muslims? Buddhists? Mormons? Americans? Europeans? Koreans? Georgians? New Yorkers? Texans? Californians? The 1%? The 99%? The filthy rich? The filthy Occupy X demonstrators?

Okay. Who is my neighbor? A certain human (gender, religion, skin color, ethnicity, nationality unspecified) stopped for gas and was ripped off by a thief (gender, religion, skin color, ethnicity, nationality unspecified). A Christian Republican, a black Muslim, and a liberal woman all individually stop for gas at the same place…which one is the neighbor?

If, at any moment, you label, diminish, or judge another individual in a demographic group into which you were not born on the basis of their membership in that same group, wittingly or unwittingly, or stand by and allow it to happen, you’re a racist. And so, too, am I.

[And Jesus said:]

³⁶…which of these three do you think proved himself a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers? ³⁷ He answered, “The one who showed pity and mercy to him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Lord, have mercy.

For years I have struggled with a sense that there was something not quite right about the religion into which I was born. I’m not talking about the leader or “founder,” as he is sometimes called because common sense tells me that Jesus never set out to start a religion at all. It was something else but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

It would take two conversations a decade apart for clarity to come—one with an African-American man in my office in the weeks after 9/11 and another earlier this year, while I was editing a novel based on the true story of a Jewish immigrant to New York from Lithuania at the turn of the last century.

The first conversation had to do with the fact that I’d noticed that most of my African-American friends and co-workers didn’t seem quite as overtly upset by the World Trade Center attack as the rest of us. Where for white people like me 9/11 and where we were and what we were doing when it happened was for weeks the prevailing topic of every non-work-related conversation, it was not so with most people of color.

I knew that my black friends weren’t immune to feelings about the tragedy, so it had to be something else. So I asked.

Duncan looked at me for a moment. “We’re not afraid of attacks by people we don’t know,” he said. “We’re more afraid of things like Oklahoma City.” He was, of course, referring to the 1993 bombing of the federal building there.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He paused before responding. “I guess you’ve never had a cross burned on your lawn.”

It was like a brick between the eyes. He was right—I’d been an adolescent in the Deep South during the 1960s. I had mourned the death of Martin and seen hooded KKK members and winced at early photos of dead humans hung from trees for no other reason than the color of their skin. But I had never once actually experienced the terror of waking in the night to bricks through windows and fires in my front yard.

For the next few years, I was haunted by that conversation. Its result was to remind me with a vengeance that there are some things we can never truly understand about what drives another’s behavior, another’s thoughts, another’s feelings—even if we, with compassion, try to imagine. The limitations of these skin-enclosed bodies and brains of ours make it impossible for us ever to understand absolutely what it is like to walk in another’s shoes. To try is both crucial and honorable, but to do so with the arrogance of assurance that we can ever know the “truth” of another’s experience is dangerous. Couple that narcissistic ignorance with a weapon and injustice hiding behind an imaginary need for self-defense too often prevails. Bring out the big guns. Create the reality of an adversary where there never had to be.

I’m afraid of violence for a number of reasons—most notably because it never solves anything, unless your full intent is to try to make someone else cower in your presence—which, frankly, says more about the powerlessness you feel than anything else. Violence begets violence in return— physical, emotional and spiritual—unless, of course you’re Jesus.

And that’s exactly the point. But I’m ahead of myself.

The second conversation, which took place largely in my head, came about when, after I watched a National Geographic special around Easter, I was reminded that when the state religion of Rome became Christianity, Constantine required that an X-shaped cross be painted on the shields of his soldiers. Could there have been more of a travesty than to turn the message of the man from Nazareth into a military one? Never mind the fact that the word “religio” in Latin literally means to conform, to be rebound by whatever ideas the temporary ruler has about God.

Mixed with reading to gain a historical perspective about what compelled many of the Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States, the pogroms against Jews in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—mobs often led by men carrying crosses like battle flags, I was reminded of that first conversation.

When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he wasn’t talking about guns or spears or bows or quartering or lynching or water torture…or crosses. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the “icon” for a religion whose members profess to follow the Prince of Peace is a weapon of torture?

It strikes me as odd. Blessed are the peacemakers, he said. Blessed are the meek, the bendable, those who mourn. Nowhere in that cobbled together “sermon on the mount” does it say, “Blessed are the violent.” To imply otherwise is to deny not self, but sanity.

So, in the end, I threw away my crosses for Lent…and, frankly, probably forever. If I must have a symbol of my belief that what the man Jesus reportedly said is indeed the way, the truth and the life, it will be a pearl or a mustard seed or a sunflower. Or maybe it will be a life lived non-violently.

I kept one of my crosses, though. As a reminder. Of man’s unceasing inhumanity to man. And that time after time, the most cruel acts of violence have lain powerless in the face of love.

A while back, I wrote a blog by the same title as this one, promising a second part. For what it’s worth, the time between Part I and Part II hasn’t been a function of distraction, though God knows there have been many. It’s been more of a time of observation and reflection, reading of others’ thoughts and opinions, and assimilating some of their ideas while discarding others.

My answer to the question in Part I was yes…and no, depending on which definition of “church” was in focus—the church as an institution, an organized structure of unchanging dogma and doctrine or the more loosely organized group of those worldwide who seek to apply the principles of Jesus, as they understand them, in a tangible form in their everyday lives.

For what it’s worth, my answer is still the same. And I think it both good and natural. Energy spent in service of maintaining rigid structures in the midst of constant change is generally wasted—as demonstrated by the failure of countless organizations whose management refused to adapt to changing conditions or the collapse of buildings constructed with no flexibility, no capacity for moving with as opposed to against the forces they will always encounter. I remember the first and only time I visited the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. I could feel that the skyscraper was bending every so slightly in the wind, and though it was a bit disconcerting to watch low-hanging clouds drift by the windows, I understood, at least, the reason the physics principle employed in determining which materials to use in construction were what they are.

As a lifelong student of human emotion and behavior in a variety of settings, I depend, too, on core principles I’ve learned through the years when I think about the church. Having faced the challenges of leading a membership-based organization (Georgia Writers Association) and of developing and executing a strategic marketing plan for a charitable nonprofit, I often employ what I learned back in college and on the job, as a marketing director for a corporate firm and my own small businesses. (I can feel the pushback already from those Christians who think of marketing as advertising and consider the whole idea of “marketing” the church abhorrent at best, but stay with me for a moment.)

Here’s the deal. It is much easier to keep customers than to win them back. In many ways, it’s admittedly more complex and therefore somewhat harder on the church and nonprofit side of things, because most of the time on the for-profit side, the “buyer” is also the direct beneficiary of the service or product, and it’s usually tangible, at least in a dollar and cents way. (You buy the cereal—and usually you’re the one who eats it, so you also have a front-row seat in evaluating the effectiveness of the product in achieving what it says it does.) That’s not necessarily so for churches, whose focus (hopefully) is quality of one’s spiritual life, a most intangible thing. Hard to measure.

At the same time, when we give money to our local churches and parishes, it is much easier to see the result – the improvements in the parish hall, the PowerPoint presentation of the J2A trip to England, etc. And that’s where the loyalty lies.

But that’s just the back end issue. The problem in the church today, across denominations, is that the average age of a church member is aging and that “customer” isn’t being replaced. It’s the new members we’re failing to attract. When you look at it through the lens of a marketing professional, the evidence seems to suggest that what we’re offering isn’t something people—especially younger ones—want and certainly not what they need. The noise of anti-this and anti-that coming from the mouths of many so-called “Christian” leaders certainly isn’t it. I don’t recall Christ ever holding a town-hall meeting to talk about how to depose Roman rule.

I often think, “What was it about Jesus that made grown men stop doing what they’d done perhaps all their lives – fishing, carpentry, tax collecting – and go with him? How was it that he made them feel that was so irresistible? What need, what hole, what craving did Jesus fulfill? What would be so compelling that I would drop everything and follow this guy?” And the answer I come to is always the same. If I know that you love me, you will have my loyalty forever. If I know that no matter what I may have done, you will never reject me, you will have my loyalty forever. (I don’t mean accept and condone my behavior, by the way.) If I know that we can differ in our opinions and get into heated arguments about everything else in the world but never lose sight of the fact that if God loves me and God loves you NO MATTER WHAT, then who are WE to draw lines?

If we care for each other, respect the boundaries of each other (including the boundaries protecting our individual relationships with God), celebrate the successes of each other without jealousy or rancor or fear…you will have my loyalty forever.

How can we offer what Jesus offered those so long ago? Isn’t that why the church was established in the first place? That’s the question the institutional church needs to ask and answer for itself, the “message” it needs to return to—the only one that has any relevance at all.

But it can’t stop there. A marketing “message” has short shelf-life if it isn’t true—cereal promoted as cholesterol lowering stops being exciting if your blood work doesn’t reflect that yours has gone down. When we as Christians figure out that we are all in obvious pain, that all the things we are trying to fill the voids in our lives obviously don’t work, that no man-made solution to any problem will ever be forever, then differentiating the message of Christ from all of the noise will be easy. But the marketing person in me is pretty darn sure that until we “get” that and live up to it, nothing we “advertise” about the church will make any difference.

I was with friends at a collegiate basketball game Thursday night when a woman came up to visit. The friend who had invited us introduced us to the woman, who sat down and stayed with us for a while. The normal social chatter continued until my friend asked the woman, “How are you?”

She paused for a moment, revealing to the others of us who didn’t know her that she’d recently been through a rough time. And then she smiled.

“I’m great,” she said. “I still have some things to work out, but I’m great.” It didn’t stop there. Beaming, she talked about how she’d been reading a series of books written by a Buddhist nun and how it had changed her life, how her perspective on things had changed and how she had realized just how much she’d lived focused only on the future and how she was working on being present with people she met and how excited she was about the next phase of her life, whatever that materialized to be.

This went on for several more minutes until someone called to her and she excused herself, going back to whatever it was she’d been doing before she’d stopped by.

Later that night, as I was lying in bed, I was thinking about the woman and I realized there was something bothering me. Her visit had left me unsettled, rather than inspired, as I might have expected. I knew it wasn’t a discomfort with Buddhism. I have read quite a bit about different facets of the Buddhist philosophy and I simply adore the Dalai Lama. His smile is so infectious and he never engages in the culture wars. His spirituality goes much deeper—when he’s invariably asked about the political and cultural “wars” of our time, he is thoughtful and respectful, but his message is always the same. Love. Kindness. Peace. All answers to the conflicts that plague us.

Rattling around in my head too was something a close friend of mine who is no longer with us said years ago in the midst of a dinner party I’d arranged—a group of women, all of whom I knew had different perspectives on religion and spirituality. If I remember right, there was a woman for whom I can find no real descriptive label, a free spirit for whom nature is affirming, a Jewish New Yorker turned New Thought, a Unitarian, a Roman Catholic nun who’d left the convent long before and become a teacher of the Course in Miracles before Marianne Williamson hit the scene, and my friend Alleyne, a Christian lay leader. At the time, I could only be described as a Christian agnostic—I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, though I’d been very involved in my early life.

There had been a raucous discussion over dinner, one I tried to record, but as one might imagine, no individual voices were particularly distinguishable. The cacophony had quieted down a bit and Alleyne, who’d been respectfully watching and listening the whole time, finally spoke. “I have to say I don’t disagree with anything I’ve heard here tonight,” she said. “But I’ve heard nothing new. I’ve found every truth you’ve described in what Jesus said.”

I slept fitfully, waking up once or twice to find myself still thinking about the woman, but went about the stuff of my day come Friday morning—After driving Jan to work, I headed on foot to the shop where my Jeep was being worked on, drove to the bank to take care of a little business and then came back home to start on the various projects I have at the moment. The woman was long out of my mind.

Until this morning, when I realized what it was that had left me somber.

I absolutely agree with my friend Alleyne. The New Testament, especially the Gospels, are chock full of stories about what Jesus said and did, stories that demonstrate virtually everything the women talked about that night. I could quote parables and sermons and conversations Jesus reportedly had that say to me exactly what the Dalai Lama also says. What’s going on in the world is an illusion. Only our attitudes need to change. The answer is focusing on…Love. Kindness. Peace.

So what’s the problem?

When was the last time you were at a basketball game and a regular person, not a priest or preacher, spontaneously started talking, with sparkling eyes, about how they’d been reading what Jesus said and it had changed their lives?

Not clergy and not in some church activity. At a basketball game. Spontaneously. With sparkling eyes.

Yeah, I thought so.

Lord, have mercy.

I think it’s because trust was obliterated for my older sister and me when we were very young, when our father betrayed his daughters, abandoning us and ultimately dying before either of us ever saw him again, but if I had to choose the one thing that can set me off, it’s discovering that I, or anyone I perceive to be vulnerable or naïve has been “duped.” Nothing can evoke my contempt and sometimes my full-fledged anger more quickly than what I perceive as the intentional manipulation of one person’s trust by another with no regard for the truth or the wellbeing of the person whose trust he betrays.

When I read in the New Testament of Jesus’ storming into the temple, upsetting the tables of the money-changers, I see a similar frustration. Given what I’ve observed, that those who publicly protest against the thievery of trust usually end up dead, I suspect that episode in the temple is when Jesus tripped the lever in the minds of the power-hungry Pharisees and Sadducees. That’s when Jesus truly showed his hand—up to that point, he’d made them a wee bit nervous with his suggestions that their puny laws about washing hands and who it was okay to eat with and who not completely missed the point, but he hadn’t been quite so aggressive about challenging their perversity until then. In short, it was then they knew they had to get him out of the way.

So they cooked up a story, putting forth circumstantial evidence to convince those really in power that Jesus was up to no good. He was, after all, out to shake up the status quo, which inconveniently for them included their unchallenged riches, power and influence. It was okay for them to parade their gaudy wealth around—that was evidence of their righteousness. If one was poor, he was poor because of his own inadequacy, they said, and he needed to pray and present a sacrifice before god—providing a new opportunity to take his money by offering him the “service” of convenience in purchasing something he didn’t need. I can hear the carnival call: “Step right up, buy your forgiveness here!”

God, Jesus said, didn’t want their sacrifices but their love (and for the record, a bunch of other prophets, even in the Old Testament said so, too). He invited them to trust his Abba, his beloved, also their beloved, revealing for those who were paying attention that the religious leaders, the establishment of the time, had successfully manipulated them into believing that love, importance, influence, even life, was a commodity to be purchased—as if the value of a single human being were subject to the laws of supply and demand. The good people of Judea had been duped, and so, I’m afraid, have we.

Winston Churchill is reported as saying, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He also said, for the record, in defense of capitalism over socialism, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” (Note that he compares socialism to capitalism, and not democracy. One can be both a democrat and a socialist, as demonstrated by our neighbors to the north.)

Don’t get me wrong. As I think Churchill was also, based on those two quotes taken completely out of the context of the speeches in which he spoke them, I am, for the most part, a democrat and a capitalist. I believe that I am entitled by citizenship in this country to equal opportunity to pursue my happiness, and that includes receiving remuneration for services performed. I like business, I like financial statements, I like marketing. No matter which of the different jobs I’ve had during my career—and they have been varied, at least from the outside, I’ve most enjoyed the tasks of marketing associated with each. But I’m not talking about what mostly passes as marketing and advertising today. I’m talking about solving the puzzle of how the product or service I have fulfills a real and honorable need on the part of the person on the other end of the transaction, and figuring out how best to let that person know my product or service is available and how it is truly superior to a similar product.

When the idea of buying and selling first started, and that was long before Columbus was a gleam in his mother’s eye, if you were in the business of selling and your product either wasn’t durable or didn’t do what you said it did or simply wasn’t needed as much as another, your business failed. And if your product did what it said it did and fulfilled a real need (and not a “manufactured” one), your customer was so delighted that he or she couldn’t help but tell others about it, and your business thrived. Your business success and failure hinged largely on your ability and effort to create and market a product that others would willingly part with their money to obtain.

That, to me, is the definition of a “free” market—one where the job of the marketer is to inform that group of people with the need that could be fulfilled by it that the product existed, where it could be obtained and how much (or how little) it cost. In a “free” market, neither supply nor demand is manipulated by those with the power or opportunity to do it. One’s success, which was necessarily measured in part by the amount of currency acquired, was largely dependent on the accuracy of his assessment of the perceived value of the product to those to whom he sought to sell it. But when the honorable professions of marketing and selling morphed into activities aimed at coaxing potential customers into believing an untruth about their need, that their lives would be better or easier, or that their own value or importance or opportunities for growth would be increased by the use of a product or service or the election of a particular candidate, the “free” market ceased to exist. Instead, the “free for all” market came into being and with it, the mob-like behavior we’ve come to associate with that phrase.

Just for the record, in an economic sense, if such a thing existed, I’d be all for letting the “free” market rule. I like honorable competition—where ingenuity and intelligence and good judgment and talent prevail. I like coming in first in a race as much as the next person, if I achieved it on my own steam. But the “free” market doesn’t exist, except in the minds of those who, when they say it, mean a market in which they’re free of regulation—regulation that wouldn’t be necessary if their past actions hadn’t already made it clear, to those who are looking, that they can’t be trusted to tell the truth about what they’re “selling.” Like the moneychangers in the temple, who duped widows and orphans into believing that if they would just buy their doves, their sins would be forgiven, when all along, forgiveness was already theirs.

And there we are. Back at trust. Funny, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. And that comes from the little girl in me who had to learn the hard way that she was still worth just as much as the girl whose father hung around.

In God we trust, says our money, of all things.

Wonder what Jesus thinks about that.

And then again, I think I can guess.