Armenian image
The Rev. Jim Burklo found this Armenian textbook – complete with images on community service – discarded on a Hollywood street. (Courtesy image)
To follow Jesus is to take responsibility – personally and socially.
If you fly on a passenger jet, you’ll be told that should the cabin lose pressure, an oxygen mask will drop in front of you. You will be told to put yours on first and then help others put on theirs, as needed.
On this flight called life, we’re all in the cabin together. It is our responsibility to take care of ourselves so we can take care of others so they can take care of us so that we can take care of them.
When I served as the ecumenical Protestant campus minister at Stanford University, I had a conversation with a student who had just read “The Fountainhead”, the book by the radical libertarian writer Ayn Rand. “If people just pursued self interest, then everything would work out perfectly!” he declaimed, with the glassy-eyed gaze of a true believer.
I responded: “Consider this question: what is the self? And after you have thought about it, let’s talk some more.”
Months later, we resumed the conversation. “So Jim, I thought about your question. And I’m not a libertarian anymore.”
Because my self includes your self, and everyone else’s. The rights and responsibilities of individuals matter very much. But they matter in the context that each individual is inseparable from others.
“I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17: 23) Jesus taught that in the love that is God, we’re all one. We’re all connected by a thread that can’t be unraveled. Our interests are utterly intertwined.
Last week, Ben Carson, member of Trump's cabinet, came to our USC campus in LA for a meeting with the mayor about homelessness. True to Republican form, he proposed the privatization of homelessness. His stated solution: if every church sponsored a homeless person, they'd all be off the streets.
As a pastor, as the former lead organizer and executive director of a faith-based private charity serving homeless people, I can say with some authority that Carson is either spectacularly misinformed or is lying. Either he hasn't a clue about the nature and scope of the challenge of homelessness, which will require enormous taxpayer-funded investments to address effectively - or he is active in deceiving the public that somehow this problem can be solved by charity. If churches could solve this problem, it would already be solved. An evangelical Christian charity, Habitat for Humanity, has created 30,000 units of housing since 1978 in the US. Every year, federal Section 8 funds 1,400,000 units for the poor at the same rate of subsidy. And that's only a fraction of the number of families eligible for Section 8. So if church folks care, surely they'll take both personal and social responsibility: being charitable, but also promoting and voting for politicians who are actually informed and serious about ending homelessness.
Taking “personal responsibility” means making sensible choices for ourselves, and at the same time making good choices as voters and activists. In order to “become completely one”, we are called by Jesus to refine our civic engagement, transforming political and economic structures to meet the needs of everyone – particularly those who are most vulnerable.
The Rev, Jim Burklo serves as senior associate for religious life at the University of Southern California. This post is republished from his blog, Musings.