…I am not particularly enamoured of homeless people either. They need help in order to sort themselves out, but all too often the government and social service agencies are not helpful. They often have substance abuse difficulties or mental health issues that make housing them problematic. However, take a look at the YouTube video below:
(I’ll wait…)
This young gentleman is also not particularly enamoured of the homeless. However, just like many on the right who trivialise other people’s problems and reduce them to one-dimensional caricatures (The homeless are all alcoholics and all the money they beg goes toward beer…) Kyle actually seems to think that the homeless are like mosquitoes or flies—they are a personal irritant of his, perhaps sent by someone who doesn’t like him.
I don’t know where to go with this. I didn’t leave a comment on his YouTube page because I didn’t know where to start. In addition, the people who watch his videos are an unknown quantity to me and I am so over engaging in pointless personal opinion ping-pong. Life is too short. I take as my motto: “Why try to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
At the end of the video I caught a caption that exhorts us all to “World peace”. Now, how can someone who thinks that the homeless are on a par with a rash in his crotch actually be an effective advocate for “world peace”. In fact, can someone of that opinion actually know what “world peace” means?
Now I have to write possibly my tenth sermon for Low Sunday in 20 years, and I would love to get all worked up about this and link it somehow to Doubting Thomas, but I’m afraid that even my fertile brain would stretch too far in doing so.
P.S. The thought that he might have been putting on an attitude for the video has just occurred to me. However, when you wind people up like this it’s only fair to point out that you’re doing so at some point, and he hasn’t done that.
some thoughts for possible inspiration for sermons:
a) this is what has spoken to you this week, so use it as springboard for preaching. I won’t go so far as to put words into her beak, but maybe this is what the Holy Spirit is calling you to talk about
b) he reduces “the poor” to one dimensional drug-afflicted social parasites. Reducing anyone(s) to one-dimensional-ness denies their reality, their incarnational selves
c) people tend to do the same thing to the church – the current scandal around pedophilia/abuse in the RC church drowns out the rest. Likewise, to hear david virtue or the global south tell the story, north american anglicans only think about homos. *I’m* a north american homo anglican, & that’s certainly not all I do in church
d) thomas wasn’t going to take a one-dimensional tale from the other disciples. He needed 3dimensional proof. He wanted to see this risen Jesus, more than just a magic-lantern image.
e) the further away you are from something, the easier it is to think of it in one dimension, a single adjective. Even God the transcendent is a long way away, and easy to pigeonhole. That’s what the incarnation is about – Jesus was among us, a three-dimensional human person
f) jesus never trivialised, one-dimensionalised the disadvantaged. He wanted to be with them – yes, and touch them, just as thomas needed to touch jesus
g) i think your decision not to engage in youtube comments is wise – that too is a very limited communication; the best communication comes face-to-face. The conversations in youtube (and newspaper) comments are necessarily (but often excessively) removed, and the subject here gets trivialised as the flamewar escalates. maximising direct communication is teh best for all of us as we go about our lives. Incarnational, not pigeon-holed (and the net does a great job of isolating us from each other)
just a few thoughts
Nice thoughts
However, when you wind people up like this it’s only fair to point out that you’re doing so at some point […]
A lesson our news outlets in the US, both local and national, would do well to heed. Particularly Faux News.
I shall have to keep your kind contributed thoughts for Pentecost, as I got inspired and wrote the sermon before I saw them.
you seemed to do just fine by yourself – you’re welcome to pillage the above, or not; as whatever speaks to you at the time
Andrew-my-rector preached this morning, and began with Helen Keller as an infant, having to get (eventually, she spent a lot of time NOT getting it) words spelled tangibly into her hand. It was only with the touch that she was able to break out of the prison her illness left her in. (just like Thomas needing to touch)
That’s quite good. I would have to restrain myself from telling Helen Keller jokes, of which I know several, but which are definitely NOT in good taste.