In a Clown's World

Lent 3 Year B
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
In a Clown’s World
By Rich Gamble

I can’t remember the movie but I remember this scene in which there is this sea of people in clown makeup, all walking along a sidewalk; and in the middle of this sea of clowns, walks one person without any clown makeup, an average person, but given their surroundings they look like the odd one.

Ever heard of a “Potemkin Village?” During the reign of Czarina Catherine the Great in Russia the members of her court wanted to free her from any misgivings she might have about the way things were going in her nation. In her court there was astounding opulence. She had great wealth, the people around her had great wealth. From Catherine’s perspective, things looked great in Russia. But occasionally Catherine would like to travel through the countryside outside of her protected world. This posed a problem for her ministers. If she traveled the roads of her nation she would see villages ravaged by poverty. Perhaps she would have doubts about the way things were being handled in her nation.

So a plan was arrived at. The ministers would find out which way Catherine was to travel and then along the way the signs of poverty and suffering would be erased and the fronts of clean and prosperous villages would be built and people playing happy well off peasants would play their part as Catherine’s coach rolled by. Behind the facades of these happy villages the ugly face of poverty would exist untouched but in Catherine’s world everything seemed rosy.

Here in America, the leaders of banks loaned money to all sorts of people who could not pay it back. The banks got lots of money from the fees charged to the people for the loans they could not pay back. Loaning money to people who would not ordinarily qualify for a loan meant that more people could enter into the real estate market, and with so many people buying houses, the prices of houses went up and as long as the prices of houses went up everybody made money. But anybody with a couple of spare brains cells could have predicted that the time would come when this house of cards would come crashing down. But the lure of fast money blinded the captains of finance to what would be obvious to most of us common people.

Our government is now giving tax dollars to the institutions which, through their shortsighted greed brought down our whole economy. We are spending trillions of dollars that someone will theoretically have to repay without any sign that anyone has any idea of how that money will be repaid.

And the goal of all of this chicanery and shortsightedness is to regain, achieve and maintain income levels that are beyond the capacity of our planet to support. There are not enough raw materials, for the world to live at our level of consumption. The air and water and soils of the planet cannot absorb that much pollution. So we either have to figure out how to live on a lot less, or figure out how we can keep the rest of the world from challenging our level of consumption of the world’s resources.

Did Catherine the Great build the fake villages? No. Did the bankers know they were destroying the economy Perhaps not. Did the Congress understand the danger of trying to keep the American economy at its past levels of greed and consumption? Maybe not. Maybe they all believed that the false reality that was created for them was really true. As long as they didn’t bother to look too closely at the world that was presented to them, they could all live happily.

In Russia peasants died from poverty. In America people have lost their jobs, their retirements, and their homes. In the world people continue to die because of the violence of our economic system and the violence needed to maintain that system.

Of course we all live in a manufactured reality. If we, like Catherine, the bankers and Congress want to enjoy our relatively well off place in the human community there are plenty of people out there offering us comforting rationales. We can feel good about our lives, our destruction of the environment isn’t that bad, our goods which come from sweat shop labor are supplying poor people with jobs, our quiet complicity with war is an expression of our faith in the democratic system. And there is always a preacher out there to tell us that God is after all Christian and American. Our Potemkin Village glows on in our homes. Television and the internet entertains, distracts and sedates us, showing a vision of a world of consumerist glee. It is a fake front over a tortured planet.

In the novel Catch 22 the hero would be chided for his actions. “What if everybody acted like you?” some self-righteous person would ask. “Then I would be a fool to act differently.” He would respond.

Those who spoke up against the injustice in Russia, were ignored, imprisoned or killed. Those who spoke up against the practices of bankers, lost their bonuses or their jobs. Those who speak up against war and greed here in this country are told that they are unpatriotic and ignored.

If everyone thinks that things are ok then you would be a fool to think otherwise, right? Why pay a price to be different?

But fools are what we are called to be. Paul says that the God we worship calls us to stand contrary to the way of the world. The painful truth of God may seem ridiculous in the world of the happy lie but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Compassion and love and not fear and desire are the things a family, a community, a nation and a world must be built upon.

“Love your enemies” sounds insane in a world complacently accepting an unending war on terrorism.

Jesus’ call to abandon wealth makes no sense in the world of gadgets and glamour.

So we are called to stand firmly behind the denunciation of the accumulation of wealth and firmly behind the call to love our enemies. It may seem like insanity to the world but that just goes to show how insane the world is.

Once we have experienced the truth of Christ we cannot hide behind the excuses of Catherine, the bankers and Congress. We cannot say, O gosh we didn’t know. Christ has come. An alternative as been asserted, a light has split the darkness.

Our call is not just to awaken to the radical alternative love offers in our lives, but to figure out ways to open other people’s eyes to this truth as well. To do this we have to be creative. We cannot simply accept that gathering under a cross on Sunday makes a statement about this truth. Most of those who gather under this symbol use it to adorn their personal Potemkin Villages. We can’t simply bandy about the name of Jesus and assume that people understand what a radically different personal, political and economic life the path of Christ entails.

In this time of hardship, there is need and opportunity.

It’s time for us to wipe off the clown face and start looking like holy fools.
Amen.