On Entitlement

by Lyndsey Graves 

It is true that entitlements become dependencies. It is especially true for the most vulnerable people.

“You are entitled to eat”, our government says to people.
“I think you are right,” say the people.
“Only you must fill out this bewildering stack of forms every few months,” says the government.

The food pantry I worked with was able to serve people with higher incomes than the food stamp program did – one could receive three days’ worth of groceries if the family’s income was anywhere below 185% of the poverty level. Interacting with people, it became clear that if anyone is less secure than food stamp recipients, it is the “working poor” who hover just above income limits for these kinds of safety net programs. If you are a single mother with few job skills, your options are to stay home with your children and feed, clothe, and provide medical care for them using various welfare programs; or to get a job, put your children in day care, and probably end up continuing to barely provide for your family’s basic needs.

To escape would be a feat of gigantic proportion.

It is true that entitlements become dependencies. 

It is especially true for the youngest people.

“You deserve a new car upon college graduation!” shouts the television.
“I think you are right,” say the people.
“Only you must add this little bit of debt onto the mountain of your school loans,” says the television. “But don’t worry. We can all pretend it’s not really there.”

I’ve seen several variations on this advertisement from different car dealerships. If asked, I suppose we’d all agree that the only thing one has actually earned upon college graduation is a diploma and hearty congratulations. But it is nice to hear someone say that you deserve more. It’s almost like they recognize your worth. If you are a young person uncertain of your place in the world, it is easy to believe that entering the world of adults requires certain paraphernalia and thus, that the world owes it to you. The world obliges, offering you a car and a new professional wardrobe and a nice watch and a house just a bit nicer than the one whose mortgage you knew you could truly afford.

To escape would mean giving all that up; and then what did you even go to college for?

It is true that entitlements become dependencies. 

It is especially true for the individualist.

“Your money entitles you to whatever goods are available at whatever price they are available,” says the market.
“This is the way it has always been,” say the people.
“Only do not imagine that the cost of something is anything other than the price that you pay for it,” replies the market, and we oblige.

We all know, on some level, that our purchases connect us to other people – even if it’s only that, of the twenty we hand to the grocery store clerk, a few pennies will go to her, a few pennies to her supervisor, a few dollars to the store owner, a few to a supplier, some manufacturers, and the producers of raw materials. But all these steps are so complex, and so far removed, that thinking about them is maddening, and so functionally it is easier to believe that tomatoes and boxes of crackers appear on the shelves by magic while we are sleeping. It often seems pointless to think about where things came from and how they got to us, because there are so few alternatives anyway. We go on buying cheap chocolate, cheap toys, cheap clothes, because we need them and they’re there and someone else has taken responsibility for the logistics of it all (how kind of them). The free market floods the shelves with forty-seven kinds of tea, lets us make our choice amidst the overwhelming options, all while hoping we’ll be so enthralled by flavors and colors we’ll forget to notice the Fair Trade label is missing. And so, instead of magic, it’s our slaves who go on working for us in other time zones, while we are sleeping.

To escape would require sacrifice and help from other people.

It would require that we acknowledge our own entitlement-dependencies and lose our license to judge others for theirs; and then we might find ourselves angry enough to actually leave the systems we all currently serve. It would force us to question assumptions – to put it calmly – and stop listening to lies – to put it biblically. We’d have to find out where our stuff came from, and probably figure out how to get it somewhere else – or to do without it. Yes, we would do a lot of doing without. But maybe we’d find ourselves less burdened by imaginary needs, and more willing to ask a favor rather than demand access to a right. We’d discover the joy of producing rather than consuming. We’d discover that the things we thought we needed to have weren’t essentials at all, but were just excess baggage, weighing us down.

Some dependencies are nearly impossible to escape. Those of us who have a choice at all are usually not expected to make it with much seriousness, but we must. No tea at all is an option available to us. Will we choose it – will we be thankful that we are free?

Lyndsey lives in Boston, MA where she is pursuing her Master's in Theological Studies at Boston University. She enjoys Community, Mad Men and Beauty and the Beast and her spirit animal is a sloth. She would like to know if this is some kind of interactive theater art piece. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
  You might also like:  

• Perhaps, For Now, This Is Enough
• Matriculation Day
• How-To Theology

Intertwined With the Poor: What the Missional Movement Lacks

by Lyndsey Graves

“I read the Bible, but I forgot the verses

The liquor store is open later than the church is”

- Macklemore, "Neon Cathedral"

 

“Our doors are locked all but four hours a week. If our neighbors think about our church at all, it must be as a place where dressed-up people gather to do... who knows what?”

- removed from my report to University Church regarding Outreach ministries

“We don’t want to offend anyone. Let’s take it out.”

I tried to argue for a bit. I mentioned that some others who read the draft had specifically mentioned that they found the sentence powerful. “More to the point,” I said, “this is not even an insulting statement; I’m just trying to be frank here.” And that is where I shut myself up.

As I spoke those words, I realized: to some of the powerful members of an upper-middle-class, white church situated in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood, the truth, frankly-stated, is itself offensive.

I don’t want to characterize my church unfairly. I believe the Holy Spirit is moving there: they are highly committed to social justice (and more so every day), and their hospitality to me has gone far beyond ordinary politeness. If I thought they were committing a heinous or unique sin, I wouldn’t bother to blog about it. Frankly, though, this “institutional blind spot”, represented in thousands of churches, contributes to the alienation of huge groups of people and, for some of these churches, their own demise.

To be clear, the blind spot I’m referring to is not necessarily the fact that people dress up on Sunday morning. I have no feelings about that one way or the other; every group of people follows norms that newcomers don’t expect or understand. What I take issue with is the fact that churches evaluate themselves on all sorts of scales, statistics, surveys, and checklists, but they rarely evaluate themselves from the perspective of the poor.

More importantly, churches sometimes evaluate their institutions from the perspective of the poor. Or they’ll demonstrate “Point #5 of our Strategic Mission: Commitment to Social Justice” by doing a Service Project once a month. But the people? They are afraid to look in the mirror, loath to ask themselves, “How do I welcome the poor into my church and my life?”

Once, a woman asked me with wide eyes, “Why don’t the young families come to church anymore? How come church is no longer their place to connect with other people?” A few weeks later she said to me, “I like to entertain people, but I can’t just throw open my home to the whole church any more. Some people - like [one of the poor single mothers in our congregation] - I’m just not comfortable around.” I still wonder if I should have confronted her about it.

Last week, I helped another coffee-shop-church in our neighborhood distribute flyers about a block party. Kind as they are to sponsor a neighborhood event, I wonder which of these poor people they expect to join a church that meets in a place of business where everyone else around the table cradles coffee at $2 a pop. They eschew sermons in favor of conversations, vaguely referring to God once in a while, in an effort to attract millenials and postmoderns. I wonder how many of these conversations revolve around matters with any connection to life in Syracuse’s Near East Side.

The thing about all this is, I care about the old people who love dressing up and listening to organ music. I care about millenials and postmoderns. And I care about the people of the Near East Side. Am I supposed to choose one group to belong to or minister to? If being “missional” means reinventing “church” and tailoring it to the tastes of any particular segment of society, it seems impossible to ever bring the college students together with the lifelong welfare recipients in this neighborhood.

I admire the missional movement and the coffee-shop-church, the desire to go out instead of holing up and daring others to come in. My church needs more of that. My church needs to at least unlock the doors more often. But sometimes, we get so caught up in movements that reimagine how we do ministry, we can lose sight of what we’re doing and whom we’re here for.

I do not know the answers to all this, but I do know one thing that law students and welfare recipients have in common: they are human, and we humans are desperate to be loved. We need to belong. We just want someone to take an interest in us and our well-being.

We know when someone only wants to collect our tithe, or add us to their Sunday school tally, or give us food so we’ll go away; but we also know when someone genuinely cares for us. And when we meet that person to whom we finally matter, it turns out we don’t really care how they’re dressed or what they look like or whether their organization implements a cool graphic design strategy.

I hope we learn to just love people, even if we’re afraid that they’re too dirty for us or that we’re not cool enough for them. May we ask God to reveal God’s love for every person to our own hearts, that we might reveal it all over again to them.

May we emerge from our self-imposed loneliness and open the doors even to those who might mistake us for a liquor store, that we may encounter new facets of that love every terrifying new day.

Lyndsey lives and works in Syracuse, NY. She majored in theology at Lee University, which is like eating cake or listening to thunderstorms - too enjoyable to be called work. Also, no one will pay you to do it. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
You might also like:  

• The Day I Was Called a Demon
• Because It's Not My Tragedy
• Let's All Talk About What We're Tired Of (A Response to Tony Jones)

The Day I Was Called a Demon

Demon. Not Lyndsey.

by Lyndsey Graves

Four days ago, I was accused of being a demon.

A woman came from the food pantry where I work into the church office, demanding to “speak to the head pastor about a family emergency” (read: ask for money). When I offered to go with her to speak with the assistant pastor, who is equipped to handle such requests and does so with real compassion, I became the subject of a long diatribe, beginning with “You a racist” and ending with “you a demon” as the elevator doors closed to take her away.

Since moving to a predominantly black neighborhood in Syracuse, I’ve been called a racist too many times to count; and a racist is a step below a demon in most people’s books so I shouldn’t have been too shocked. And in fact I wasn’t. A lot of unrelated but truly crazy things happened to me last week, so I was already in emotional survival mode. I had no reserves on which to draw to feel hurt or sad, or to consider the woman’s mental illness, or painful past, and feel an appropriate resolve to continue on in my work righting wrongs. I only sort of cared; I didn’t even give much thought to the episode until a few days later.

After three years of intentionally joining in with the lives of my neighbors in poverty, I’ve seen a lot, but Friday felt like a new line: the day being called a demon wouldn’t faze me.

Now that I think about it, a part of me is sad that it’s so difficult to help people, and that this is the reward one gets for trying. Another part of me does want to do something more to help this woman. But overall, it’s a necessary skill in these kinds of jobs (or volunteer positions) to not care sometimes. When you’re trying to feed sixty families in two hours, you can’t worry about “troublesome” individuals while ten “normal” people get passed by for help. You just can’t. You carry on. You laugh.

A necessary coping mechanism

And on days when you’ve got the time, you ask God to send someone, someone with more to spare than you have right now, to look on that person with more compassion than you can.

I decided to write about being called a demon, and then sat down to catch up on reading. It turns out Ben posted on oppression the same day I was exorcized:

“I don’t know how to untangle the oppressive nature of societal institutions from their pragmatic necessity. I’m open to suggestions. If you know anyone involved with these communities, leave a comment, get in touch with me, I want to know them.

I want to learn from them.

But in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to grow. I’ll keep trying to become a person who sees both the redeemed person who someone can become as well as the broken person they are. I’ll keep trying to be better, to be more loving. I’ll keep trying to love man in particular, instead of the easy love of all mankind.”

He had already put words to the solution for my own frustration with my job; this jaded volunteer 

lady is asking you to hear them. Because the more time I spend around the poor, the formerly incarcerated, around government welfare systems and nonprofits, the more convinced I become that “society” only improves one life at a time. Those of us trying to change society on a large scale are consistently overwhelmed and under-resourced, but maybe we’re missing the point a little - Jesus touched people one at a time. 

Awww *sniffles*

He didn’t seem too worried with setting up a program or fixing everything for everyone; instead, he met people singly, he stopped to talk to them, he stopped to listen, and he chose to help, one at a time. Maybe Jesus knew that there is no such thing as a more “efficient” healing, that there is no lawn sprinkler to cover everyone in the kind of deep love this world longs for. There is only the touch of a hand for an infirm woman, a gaze of compassion for a rich man, a call by name for a fisherman. 

It’s so often easier to love mankind in general, than to love the individual man or woman who are its constituency.  At times, I even wonder if food pantries aren’t one of the oppressive societal institutions Ben is referencing, meant as much to maintain class separations as to lessen income disparities. On balance, I think food pantries do serve an important purpose and can contribute to positive life change. But they are only stopgap measures. 

If we want to really change the way people experience poverty, or prison, or whatever other structure contributes to injustice, we need to become more willing simply to dig in with people one at a time, to take the time to listen, and to hear, and to share, to take the time, truly, to just be friends.

Lyndsey lives and works in Syracuse, NY. She majored in theology at Lee University, which is like eating cake or listening to thunderstorms - too enjoyable to be called work. Also, no one will pay you to do it. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.

The Election Chronicles: Why You Should Vote for Barack Obama

by Ben Howard

Yesterday we took a look at why a thoughtful Christian could and should vote for Mitt Romney. If you missed it you can read it here. Today we'll take a look at why that same Christian could and should vote for Barack Obama.

I want to remind you that this entire series is predicated on having a more constructive conversation around politics based around what each party, and each voter, is for instead of what they are opposed to.

With all that said, why should you vote for Barack Obama?

First, you should vote for Barack Obama because he supports government assistance for the poor and those without a safety net. 

This position has expressed itself many times, predominantly in the expansion of the healthcare. An Obama administration has and will continue to keep an eye on how it can help the impoverished in our country and how they can help them break free from the cycle of poverty that grips so many.

That isn't to say that the Obama administration, or any administration for that matter, will be able to end poverty, but it is something that Barack Obama has been adamant about. The poor in this country have been underrepresented for too long, and I believe that Barack Obama will do what he can to support them and try to help them out of poverty.

Second, you should vote for Barack Obama because he supports gay marriage. Now, before you get your pitchforks out, let me explain why I say that.

The debate over gay marriage has always been a contentious one mainly because the two sides are not debating on the same grounds. Those in favor of gay marriage argue on the grounds of civil rights while those who oppose gay marriage argue from religious beliefs about sin and homosexuality. I think we can all understand that we aren't having the same conversation.

With that in mind, and remembering that I cringe every time I hear "rights" language invoked, I think we should grant gay and lesbian couples the legal rights contingent in marriage. However, the settlement of the civil rights side of this argument does not answer the religious aspect of the question.

I think that removing the civil rights argument by allowing the legal marriage of gay and lesbian couples, will allow churches to have an honest discussion about whether or not they will support and perform same-sex marriages. If a church supports them, then they will perform them, and if they don't, then they won't. Moreover, I think this could force churches to investigate what they mean by the term marriage in a religious context and how that differs from a legal contract between two consenting parties.

Finally, you should vote for Barack Obama because he supports the environment.

Whether or not you agree with the science that supports global warming, the world and everything in it is part of God's good creation. As a result, we should do our best to care for it and use its resources carefully, deliberately and responsibly. I don't think that using oil and gasoline is bad, but it is in the amounts that we use them. We are wasteful and rip-roaring drunk on fossil fuels. It would probably do us some good to reconsider the way we live our lives in relationship with the world that surrounds us.

With all of this said, I want to leave you with the same reality check that I left yesterday for supporters of Mitt Romney. Even though the government is supporting and aiding the poor financially, they still need you, and they still need me. A check is not the only thing people need to escape the grasp of poverty and the church needs to be deeply, deeply involved in trying to alleviate these ills (as many of them already are). 

Also, and I say this with all due respect, just because you support the poor, and gay rights, and the environment, it does not make you morally superior over those who vote differently or over those who hold different priorities. The arrogance of one party fuels the hatred of the other in a never-ending spiral of loathing and frustration. It divides us and forces us to view each other as caricatures and issue arguments. Remember, the other side is made up of people just like you and there may just be something to what they are saying.

I look forward to hearing your comments and tomorrow we'll address why you should vote for a third party candidate.

Peace,
Ben

You can follow Ben on Twitter @BenHoward87 or email him at benjamin.howard87 [at] gmail.com.

Also, you can subscribe to On Pop Theology via RSS feed or email on the top right corner of the main page.

There's a Thin Line Between Heaven and Here

by Ben Howard

The title of this post is a taken from a show called The Wire. It's a really great show, and I expect I'll write about it at some point in the future, but today's post isn't about the show. This post won't be about pop culture at all, it's just something I need to write. It's about that line and it's about what that line means.

As a lot of you may know, I live in a not so great neighborhood. It isn't necessarily dangerous, but it does have it's seedier elements. In the time I've lived in my apartment I've been broken into three times. Needless to say, that can be a bit frustrating, but such is life and things are just things. However, the last break-in brought about a new experience. A few weeks after the house was broken into, we received word that the perpetrator had been arrested. We're still awaiting word on the outcome of the case, but the prosecutor is convinced he'll go to prison for at least a few years.

Ever since the arrest, I've felt strangely about the entire situation. Since I had the guy's name, I visited his Facebook page. I found out he has a girlfriend and a young daughter. At first, I thought I might be feeling guilt for my role in his probable incarceration, but that wasn't it. He chose his course of action, I never had any control over the situation. I don't feel guilt, but I do feel sadness.

I'm sad for people who feel like they have to steal in order to survive and I'm sad for children who have to grow up without fathers. I'm sad because of a system that treats people like nuisances and rap sheets and robs them of their humanity while simultaneously saying that it's all being done in the name of justice. I'm sad because of that little twinge I feel when I see a lonely black man walking down my street at night, and I'm sad because, while I know it's wrong, I know plenty of people will tell me it's right. I'm sad because it's so easy to see just how broken things are.

There's been a lot of talk about hell in the evangelical community in the last year. In my mind almost all of it misses the point. Why do we worry so much about where everybody will go after they die, yet we have no problem avoiding the very hell that ensnares so many among us? Yes, hell is real. Hell is addiction and pain. It is violence and abuse and depression and that glazed over look of defeat, the loss of hope. Hell is the place where we throw those we no longer know what to do with. Hell is all of the brokenness that batters us on every side. It is the destruction of our very humanity. Hell is here.

The church's task is not about defining where we go when we die. Our job, our mission, the reason we exist is to join with the work of God and the Spirit to bring heaven to the places where hell has infected our day to day. We are in the business of redemption and salvation, not prognosticating about the afterlife. We are being called to bring about the abolition of war and poverty; to stand with the isolated, the hated, and the miserable. We are called to bring reconciliation between the oppressed and the oppressor, between the victim and the criminal. There's a thin line between heaven and here.

Peace,

Ben

You can contact me on Twitter @BenHoward87, leave a comment or email me. I'd love to hear your thoughts.