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Lamp Oil   Here’s our parable for the day: There are some bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom to show up so they can all join the feast. Apparently this is how weddings worked back in the day. And since this bridegroom might show up at any time, day or night, the ladies have to have their lamps ready. If we ran a wedding reception that way nowadays, it would be chaos. We live by clocks and schedules, and if we say an event will start at 6, it starts more or less at 6. I guess concepts of time were more organic back then. So the bridegroom takes longer than the ladies expected, and some run out of olive oil in their lamps. It might seem like the wise bridesmaids were being mean, not sharing their oil with the foolish ones. But imagine what would happen. If these wise bridesmaids had split their their oil with the others, everyone would have run out before they got to the wedding hall. They’d all be in the dark, and the wedding party would be lacking any bridesmaids. So ...
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Pocket Idols

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  Pocket Idols A nation's currency says a lot about its priorities and aspirations. Monarchies put the king's face on the money to show that, even as they publicize the human foibles of their rulers, they feel there is something important about loyalty to the crown. In our country, we have a rule against putting a sitting President on a coin, because that would be too much like monarchy. (Notwithstanding this rule, the current POTUS is planning a “commemorative” dollar with his own face. Many Americans interpret this as him trying to be a king. Or even an emperor?) But what images do our actual coins bear? Mostly dead Presidents. Those delightful dollar coins with women on them have never really caught on, which also says something about us. If you carry change, which I realize a lot of people don't anymore, take a coin from your pocket or purse and really look at it. What iconography do you see? What does it say about our own empire? My roommate Lauranne has a theory about...
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     A KID WITH A LUNCH Isaiah asked, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Michael Pollan, in his book In Defense of Food , talks about how we often consume what he calls “edible, food-like substances,” items you find on a grocery shelf that are so processed they can no longer really be considered food. Cheetos, for instance. Diet soda. Or how about my favorite: Pasteurized Processed Cheese Food? Pro tip—if they have to tell you it’s food, it probably isn’t. Pollan’s simple nutrition advice is, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” We modern, Western people are frequently caught spending our money for that which is not bread, which does not nourish, and it shows in our health. And I think of the labor we spend on non-nourishing brain content. I love Facebook. I’m on there all the time. I like feeling like I’m in touch with all these people. But I have to ask myself—is this stuff actually good for...
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  The Unknown God   Paul is trying so hard to be clever, up there on what the Romans called Mars Hill. This was a location dedicated to Ares or Mars, the god of war. Paul has a learn รจ d audience to try and get through to. The guys in the Areopagus meeting were some of the most respected philosophers in Athens. They were defenders of the status quo, which in this case meant polytheism. But they were also curious about this stranger who was talking about ideas that were new to them. Athenians, according to verse 21, were always interested in discussing the latest ideas. Paul thought he had a great angle to argue from. He had seen an altar, among the city’s many altars and shrines to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, one dedicated to an Unknown God. Hey, he said, I know who that God is. That God isn’t unknown at all. Let me tell you about the Creator of the Universe, who is not like any of your usual gods, who can’t live in an image made by human hands and doesn’t need tem...
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  Don’t you love it when the Lectionary starts with a line like, “Six days later”? In case you were wondering what happened six days ago, it was when Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the Living God…and shortly thereafter got on Jesus’ case for saying he would have to die and got called Satan for his trouble. So stuff is getting real at this point in the story. Jesus is getting ready to head for Jerusalem where, he knows, death is waiting. The New Orleans custom called Second Line expresses the ultimate joy of earthly death, that even when we are gone from this world, resurrection awaits. If you like, we could think of Palm Sunday as a kind of Second Line, a demonstration of jubilation in the face of doom. This was a critical idea for Black people in Louisiana for so many centuries. When your daily walk is through the valley of the shadow of death, it is healthy to believe that this abysmal world with its cruel masters and massive oppression is not the last wo...
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  Bait   You are thinking about Spiderman And Mama’s pan de yuca , But there is no cassava here, only Broccoli with worms and greenish water, And you wish you were Spiderman. You would Catch all the bad guys in your web And let all the children and daddies go free.   You were thinking about Spiderman And pulling down the tassles on your Bunny hat to make the ears flap up when The car door opened before the engine had stopped And Daddy shouted WHAT THE HELL As two thick white hands Smelling of stale coffee and gunpowder Unclasped the buckle at your crotch And pulled you from your car seat, And the hands were attached to a man Whose face was covered up to his eyes, which Sparkled with loathing, his middle fat With thick vest and bristling black weapons, And he stood you on the driveway And pulled your arms through the straps of your Spiderman backpack And there were more men who looked just the same, Who smelled just the...
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  “Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble?” Habakkuk, prophesying shortly before Judah was conquered by Babylon, looked at his world around 600 BCE and saw violence and trouble and wrong-doing on all sides, including an imminent war that his country was going to lose. Two and a half millennia later, I look around at my world, and I see environmental destruction and political violence, strife between citizens here, and contention over land and resources there. And God doesn’t have to make me see it. I can doom-scroll at 3am all on my own. It’s bad news, as far as the algorithm can see. Everyone is blaming someone else as the law becomes slack about the crimes of the rich but tightens its noose around the poor. It becomes a toy in the hands of the ambitious, and the wicked surround the innocent in search of someone or something to punish for the problems they themselves often created. Yet the psalmist tells us not to fret ourselves. They use that phrase three ti...
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