John 7: 37-39 (links validated 5/15/25a)

In 2009 Kanye West infamously interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Music Video at the MTV Video Music Awards to declare that Beyonce should have won. Not attempting to connect Kanye’s actions too closely to Jesus’s at the Festival, I do want to highlight how out of place Jesus’s words probably felt and sounded in that moment. No wonder he caused the stir—just as Kanye also received a lot of backlash about his actions—and why people continued to pursue getting rid of him. Interestingly, there’s another layer of connection between Kanye and Jesus: both were proclaiming that someone else should be paid attention to.

I was reading recently about the African-American community. Until the 1960s suicide rates were lower than for any other group of Americans. The people may have been poor, had inferior education and suffered institutional discrimination and bigotry, but they had intact families and communities. They had hope. Over the last forty years there have been so many advances to a non-racist nation but suicide rates have doubled in the African-American community. The article attributed the cause to lack of hope. Similarly, forty years ago the clergy were the healthiest group in America with much lower rates of alcoholism and obesity, divorce and abusive behaviors. Now they mirror the rest of the country and in areas of job and family have stress higher than many other groups of people. Perhaps as respect for the clergy, decline of many denominations, marginalization of religion, have advances, ministers too have lost purpose and hope...

The story is about a man in his early fifties who woke up one Sunday morning rather late. His mother, who lived with him, woke him and said, "Son you're going to be late for church." "I don't feel like going to church today," he replied. "It doesn't matter how you feel," she countered, "You should go anyway." "Gee, Mother," the man continues, "Give me three good reasons why I should go to church today." "Well," she says, "First of all, church is good for you. Secondly, you need to set a good example for your children. And thirdly, you're the pastor!"...

("At bedtime I sometimes read to my five-year-old daughter the Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax. The story takes place in a bucolic setting of heavily fruited Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, and Brown Bear Bar-ba-loots; it is a place where 'from the rippulous pond[s] / comes the comforting sounds / of the Humming-fish humming / while splashing around...")

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