Raising Flower-Boys

A Meditation for Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend ~ "A voice echoing, through the corridors of time, says to every intemperate Peter, 'Put up thy sword.'  History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that failed to follow Christ's command."

Is It Society?

Nature or nurture? At first glance, the question Simon Armitage asks, at the very end of his hugely unsettling poem, is the classic one: nature or nurture? “Is it something in the mind that grows from birth, like a seed, or is it society that makes a person that kind?” And in a flash, we’re taken back to Columbine High School: where all those kids, all those teachers died. In a flash, we’re reminded of the violent obsessions of our culture: the warrior video games adults sell to kids, the unmanned American drones strafing the Afghan countryside, the gangs here on the Central Coast training 12 year olds to kill. Is it something in the mind that grows from birth, like a seed, or is it society that makes a person that way? Nature or nurture?

But I read it again, this poem, I step out of the cold and into the poet’s imaginary high school, where “two apparently quiet kids from an apple-pie town [got] their hands on a veritable rain-forest of plants and [brought] down a whole botanical digest of one species or another onto the heads of classmates and teachers…” I read it again, this weekend, and another question stands out. Cries out really. Raising flower boys. Have we given up on raising flower boys? Has our culture given up completely on raising human beings capable of showering one another with marigold blossoms and peonies? We teach our kids to scratch and claw for good grades. We teach our kids to scratch and claw for the best schools. We teach our kids to master i-phones and laptops and complex calculus. But when do they learn to shower one another with blossoms, to decorate one another with buds and rosettes and daffodils?

And let’s be clear that we’re not just talking about boys now. We’re talking about girls, too. Just this week, the AP ran a story citing a government report saying that 26.7 percent of girls between 12 and 17 had been involved in some sort of violent behavior at school or at work. 26.7! More than one in four! Serious fights. Group-against-group violence. Attacks with the intent to harm. 26.7! So we’re talking about girls, too. Where does it come from, this willingness to hurt, to scar, to wound another?

The Hardhearted Fool

Martin Luther King inspired a generation with soaring rhetoric and preaching. We know that. But he also diagnosed our human obsession with violence, and he looked deeply into this American addiction. You see a little of that in the passage we’ve read here this morning. King recalls Jesus’ parable about poor Lazarus and the rich fool. Remember how that goes? Jesus condemns the fool for his hardheartedness: he makes no attempt to bridge the gulf, the economic gulf mind you, between his poor brother and himself. In a nutshell, that’s the parable. And King recognizes in it a familiar biblical concern. He says that “life for [the fool] was a mirror in which he saw only himself, and not a window through which he saw other selves.”

You could make a pretty good argument – and I would – that King has his finger on the nature of sin as the bible understands it. It’s not a word we toss around freely in churches like ours. But there’s a place and a time, I think; and Martin Luther King knew that. Sin has to do with the “hardhearted [who never see] people as people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel.” And as soon as you depersonalize life in that way, as soon as you see just objects or statistics or just consumers or markets, you become capable of terrible things. Drones in Afghanistan. Abu Grahib in Iraq. Columbine in Colorado. Fort Hood in Texas. 9/11. Violence. Dehumanizing violence.

Sin has an important and misunderstood social setting. This is something King grasped so clearly – like Hebrew prophets and the great liberal theologians of his era. It has to do with the way cultures and communities co-modify everything from childhood to friendship, everything from communication to education. When we look in the mirror and see only ourselves, our people, our race, our country, our neighborhood, we ignore or diminish the humanity of others. And that makes all kinds of violence not only possible, but in a sad way, inevitable.

I was rushing, yesterday, up to the second floor at the hospital to see a friend when a security guard grabbed me from behind and pulled me to a stop. Doesn’t happen much at the hospital. But the guard, a young guy, asked me to speak with a woman who was standing, embarrassed, by the front door. She was kind of covering her face. He said she needed something – and he didn’t know what to say. When I got close, I could see that she had a badly bruised face and blood dripping down her cheek. But she saw me coming and dashed for the door and out into the street. When I followed and asked if I could help, she ran faster and into the parking lot. She was gone.

The young guard was really shaken. She’d told him someone had hit her – but he couldn’t get her to stay, he couldn’t get her to hang around. Now there’s no way of knowing, but I’m guessing her boyfriend’s like that rich fool in Jesus’ parable. He looks in the mirror and he sees only himself. He gets in his car in the morning and he doesn’t even notice the homeless guy on the corner, or the teenager shooting up. He crawls into bed at night and he’s angry because she’s moved out and she’s selfish and she’s not there for him. He’s the center of his own universe: and that’s a lonely place, a painful place, even a violent place to be.

Munificence

But we can’t talk about sin – if we’re going to go out on that limb – we can’t talk about sin without talking about forgiveness and grace. Because that’s what Christian faith is really all about. Jesus doesn’t come to condemn or berate or give up on any of us. No, Jesus invites you and me to live in God’s universe, to make our home in God’s love. And it’s a huge love, a great big love. We no longer need to be the center of the universe: we know there’s enough love, enough grace, enough bread for everyone, for our neighbors and friends, for our enemies and antagonists. It’s all God’s – the stuff we understand and the stuff we don’t, the people we love and the folks we just can’t. Grace recognizes all human beings, all life, as God’s own, as God’s family: and grace envelops the whole universe in the light and love of God. We don’t always understand why; but that’s grace.

Now this journey – this journey of forgiveness and grace: it’s not an easy one, and grace doesn’t come cheap. Opening your heart to the world’s pain is hard, costly, and it’ll leave you vulnerable and raw with weeping. Reaching out to one who’s done you wrong, offering forgiveness, is unnerving, difficult, and it’ll shake your soul to its core. But Jesus never said it’d be easy. He said take up your cross; he said leave the old world behind; he said lose everything to find it all. Grace is costly, it’s true; but look around this hall and see dozens of sisters, dozens of brothers who can tell you it’s worth it. Every tear. Every cross. Every one. It’s worth it.

And what happens? What happens when you and I leave our mirrors behind, our self-obsessing behind, and follow Jesus into God’s universe? The bible’s got some ideas: bread gets broken and scattered and shared among thousands; the battered and bruised of the world find advocates, friends on the road; and children find a safe place, a generous space for play and prayer and just growing up. And that gets me thinking some more about this remarkable poem, about Simon Armitage and those flower-boys in Colorado. Isn’t this what happens when we leave our mirrors behind, when we leave our grievances behind, when we forget about making a killing on Wall Street and invest our energies in life and children and hope? “Armed to the teeth with thousands of flowers, two boys entered the front door of their own high school and for almost four hours gave floral tributes to fellow students and teachers…” The word the poet chooses for all this foolishness is a wonderful one: munificence. Whatever happened to munificence. I don’t know that I’ve heard the word or seen it in print in two, three decades. Munificence. It means generous in giving, extravagant in generosity, liberal in all the right ways. It’s a gospel word, munificence, loaded with grace.

So here’s what I’m thinking on this MLK Weekend: isn’t it time – in our churches, in our schools, in our government, in our neighborhoods – isn’t it time for a renaissance of munificence? A renaissance of munificence! Let’s use every church resource we’ve got to stoke the fires of munificence, to inspire leaps of munificence, to train our kids in the fine arts of munificence! Let’s insist that schools and governments do the same. Because we won’t be the greatest country on earth if all we do is make computers and space shuttles. And we won’t be the greatest country on earth if all we do is fly drone planes over Afghanistan. Let’s start with the church and let’s spread a renaissance of munificence all over this state, all over this land, all over the world. It won’t come cheap. But can’t we do better? Can’t we do better than Columbine? Can’t we do better than a generation of commando kids and kamikaze warriors?

The question is: How do we go about raising flower-boys – instead of commando kids, kamikaze warriors? Flower- boys. Shouldn’t we spend every waking hour conspiring to do just that? Shouldn’t we pray about it and dream about it and find ourselves a minister who gets it and feels it? We can be the incubator, the spirit lab, the catalyst of change. Flower-boys: tough-minded and tender-hearted. Flower-boys: like Martin Luther King and the young guard at the hospital whose heart breaks for a beaten woman he’ll never know. Flower boys: who wake in the morning dreaming of ways to feed the hungry, and rebuild Haiti, and end war forever. Yeah. A renaissance of munificence. Maybe someday they’ll say we were the ones who showered the kids with blossoms and rose petals.