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The story of Jesus Christ is jumbled and twisted in a perennial game of telephone every December. The true meaning and interpretation of the Bible is convoluted with ideas heavily relating to whatever the dominant political system is, capitalism the most recent example. Rev. Madison Shockley joins host Robert Scheer on this week’s Scheer Intelligence to provide greater context into the world’s dominant religious force and the stories that define it.
“You cannot understand Jesus without understanding the political context into which he was born, and that’s what the Christmas stories are trying to tell people,” Rev. Shockley said. The different gospels, ruling figures and interpretations of all these things combined give uniquely different understandings to the stories people are familiar with. “The point of the Christmas story is actually the contest of two empires. In its original context, the Empire of Rome, which colonized Palestine and the Judean people, and the Empire of God, which was the God of Israel,” Rev. Shockley said.
While challenging the commercialization of Christmas, Rev. Shockley also cautions against those who want to exploit the holiday by imposing a narrow and reactionary view of Christianity.
“We see many forces that want to return this too cozy relationship between church and state. And whenever you have that close relationship, the emperor, the state, always rules over the church, and it’s been that way ever since Constantine co-opted the Christian church in the fourth century.”
He noted that, “Whenever the church is co-opted by the state or is too afraid to stand up to the caesars of this world in the name of the true sovereign, the church has lost its way, and the church fails whenever it endorses war.”
Rev. Shockley, who served a congregation in inner city LA and for the last two decades in a more affluent community in San Diego County, the Christmas story raises a fundamental moral issue: “Are we willing to risk our personal safety, our personal resources and our status in order to help someone else? That’s the story of the Good Samaritan, and that’s the message of Christmas.”
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Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests and this, because we’re broadcasting around Christmas, I want to put… I remember as a kid, Some of the people used to say, we have to put Christ back in Christmas, becoming too much of a shopping holiday. Well, that was a long, long time ago. In fact, so long ago it was before then the very good [inaudible] Pope Paul John declared that the Jews were not responsible, finally, for the death of Jesus as a kid who grew up with a Jewish mother and a German Protestant father, you know, I never knew how to answer when some anti-Semitic kid would punch me or something and say, “You kill the Lord.” I say, wait a minute, only half of me or something. So, Madison, you’re one of my favorite clerical figures right up there with Chris Hedges and we used to have Rabbi Leonard Beerman, but he’s no longer with us. And anyway, I like to turn to a religious figure just by way of introduction. You’re highly educated, including a stint at Harvard and so forth. But I knew you were, originally, you were an inner city minister, United Church of Christ in downtown Los Angeles. That’s how I met you. You were writing, also, columns for the L.A. Times and a major figure in our community, civil rights and politics. And then you switched to Carlsbad, Southern California, where you have primarily a white congregation. So you’ve gone from the inner city out. You haven’t sold out because you’re still very active in the community and maybe you’re also taking the message to less enlightened people somewhere, the San Diego/Orange County border. So hi, how are you doing?
Rev. Madison Shockley:
Hi, Robert. I have to say two things in my defense. My more notable education actually happened at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where my professor, Cornel West, taught me very well and on whose board of trustees I now serve. And so I’m very honored to be connected to the greatest progressive seminary in the world, Union Theological Seminary. And the Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Carlsbad is a very progressive congregation, kind of a liberal oasis in a sea of more conservative churches here up in North County. So this was quite an enlightened congregation before I got here, so I don’t want to.
Scheer:
I’ll correct the record. I’ve spoken in your church a couple of times, and this is second to no congregation that I have ever encountered for really interesting people, community involved, alert. So I was just making a little joke at their expense. I’m sorry, but it is in the center of what used to be anyway, a very conservative area of Orange County in San Diego. That too has changed.
Shockley:
And I hope that Pilgrim has been part of that…
Scheer:
And I just want to say, yeah, and I want to say in your defense, I know you got out on the limb on issues like gay marriage and how we treat prisoners and welcome [them] back to the community. You’ve had your controversies, immigrant issues and so forth. So you’ve been part of a progressive congregation down there in what was a deeply conservative area. And on some of these issues, we’ve made a lot of progress and others not so much, certainly on gay rights tremendous, but on race relations, unfortunately, that’s what I want to ask you about. But let’s get back to the birthday of Jesus Christ. And first of all, let me just ask you, was there a Jesus Christ? And I should mention your church, which started really as the congregationalist church, is really the oldest practicing denomination in the United States. So if there is a Christian religious heritage in our country, your church is linked to it. It was also linked to the abolitionist movement and was in the front. So why don’t you tell us something about the United Church of Christ, your own… Why you decided to be a minister and what you’ve learned. But also, let’s not end our half hour together without getting back to the man whose birthday we’re celebrating.
Shockley:
Oh, well, I’ll be brief and say yes. The United Church of Christ is both one of the oldest churches in the United States, as you mentioned, the people that got off the Mayflower were Congregationalist and separatists that had left England for their religious freedom. And the United Church of Christ is the successor to the Congregational Church and continues its very progressive message to this day. The Pilgrim United Church of Christ is a part of that expanded denomination, and I have served here since 2004. And yes, it’s a predominantly white congregation and we’ve grown together and we’ve done a lot of work, as you mentioned, across the spectrum of social justice. That is our mantra. We are a church that focuses on social justice and who also focuses on what we call the historical Jesus. And that brings us to our point today. We do believe that Jesus existed as a person. The birth of Jesus is a fact of history. The stories about the birth of Jesus are not. The stories about the birth of Jesus are political and theological interpretations of the meaning of that life that was born 2000 years ago in the person that we come to know as Jesus. And that’s what we teach and preach at Pilgrim. We’re not trying to trick anybody or fool anybody. We want to present Jesus in a way that is meaningful and digestible to the enlightened mind. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. I mean, we are enlightened people. But for much of church history, even modern church history, you had to check your brain at the door and you entered this alternative world of biblicism. And in the church world, where impossible things happened. The enlightened movement, the Enlightenment movement, and the church that grew out of it has grappled with that dichotomy and dispensed of it and said, no. We find in our text the command to worship God with our heart, soul, strength and mind. And that’s what we tried to do. So the point of the Christmas story is actually the contest of two empires. In its original context, the Empire of Rome, which colonized Palestine and the Judean people, and the Empire of God, which was the God of Israel. The Empire of Rome ruled and brought peace, Pax Romana, through violence and the victory of war. The Empire of God brings peace through the victory of justice. This is the heart of the contest. And these birth stories frame the birth of Jesus as the pivotal moment in this contest between empire of violence and the empire of justice. And nothing has changed. The Christmas story today is still really about the contest of two empires, the empires of this world, the greatest of which now is the United States of America and the Empire of God. The empires of this world claim to bring peace through victory in war and violence, while the Empire of God claims to bring peace through the victory of justice. And Jesus is the Messiah, the designated one, the anointed one by God to represent the Empire of Justice. And the point of the Christmas story is best exemplified by the wise ones. You know, the three magi. They went to whom? King Herod. And what did they tell him? Another king is being born. If that’s not political, I don’t know what is. And they turned away from King Herod to worship the king that was being born named Jesus. And this is the question that Christmas asks every year. Whom do you worship? The violent monarch and monarchies of the earth or the nonviolent monarch of justice? That’s really the heart of the Christmas story.
Scheer:
So you say, Reverend Madison Shockley, but I’ll bet you’re within a half mile of your church. There’s those big megachurches that tell you this is the god of consumption and wealth who will reward the rich. And then there’ll be other churches, as there was in the south. You had, yes, a black church that slaves and ex-slaves could participate in, but you had a white church, in fact, the church of Jimmy Carter right down there in Plains, Georgia, I remember interviewing him about that, that was segregationists. And they said this God of justice believed in slavery and segregation. All right. And what believed in wealth and ripping people off. So you could be on Wall Street making a lot of money and you were right. And so you’ve been part of or associated with or studied the Jesus project. What actually can we attribute to Jesus on his birthday? I want to take that in a serious way. Tell me what this biblical scholarship is about. And, you know, what was this historical figure, divine or otherwise? What does he represent? And I would say my favorite. I should say favorite, because I have the prejudice of one who was born out of wedlock and in poverty to be inclined to the tale of the Good Samaritan. But it only appears in one of the Gospels, in Luke. And I use it in my ethics class because I think it shows respect for the other and for somebody who’s been beaten and robbed. And then you will be judged by your, in terms of an afterlife, by how you treat that person. The homeless in L.A. now, and you probably have some around you in Orange County. So why don’t you tell me about who owns this Jesus. Who’s got them? Right. Is it the megachurch or is it you there at Pilgrim?
Shockley:
Well, you know, you hit the nail on the head. The Jesus seminar was organized in 1985, and it brought in scholars from a variety of disciplines, from linguistics to history to archeology to, including the biblical disciplines but a broad array of scholars, to identify what can we best know? I won’t even call it what’s true or what’s historical, but what can we best know about this person, Jesus? And what does that distilled body of teaching tell us about who he was and what he was about? And the Good Samaritan, even though it is only in one gospel, does represent the heart of the message of the historical Jesus, which was compassion. And so the Jesus of history, the historical Jesus, the one that we can wrap our arms around, is the one that the Jesus seminars are trying to present. The Jesus of faith, the Jesus of dogma that’s going to be determined by different churches and different denominations and different Christian traditions. But one of the most important findings of the Jesus seminar was that there were, from the beginning, many different interpretations of Jesus and many different ways that were claimed as the Christian way. So today is no different. You have different responses to the person of Jesus, different interpretations. And as you mentioned, the mega-churches, the evangelical, the conservative, the Orthodox, the traditional, our progressive Christian tradition. And we claim that we are as legitimately Christian as anyone else. We’re not saying the others aren’t Christian. We’re saying they’re a different kind of Christianity and that there are, in fact, not just one Christianity, but Christianity’s, plural. And the interesting fact, the word Christianity’s does not exist in the dictionary. It proposes that there’s only one Christian way and that’s the foundation that the Jesus seminar said. You could take Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and call them four different denominations because they each present Jesus in very different ways. And one of the most overlooked distinctions in this Christmas season is that Matthew and Luke, number one, are the only gospels that even have an infancy narrative. And the infancy narrative in Matthew and the infancy narrative in Luke are very different and irreconcilable. So it does come to…
Scheer:
Well explain that, since we’re here to talk about Christmas, the infancy narrative, what is the difference between the Matthew and the Luke interpretation? Preach, Minister.
Shockley:
Well, I don’t want to get too lost in the differences, because the similarities are more important. But in Matthew, Jesus is born at home in Bethlehem. Whereas in Luke. Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, and the taxation registration requires them to travel to Bethlehem. So that’s the first discrepancy. Where did Jesus’ family live? In Matthew, the Wise Men show up at Jesus home in Bethlehem. They’re not in the stable. There’s no manger in Matthew. It’s in Luke because they are not at home that they find lodging in the stable because there’s no room in the inn. And the shepherds come to see Jesus, not the wise men. But the similarities are these: the wise men come to Bethlehem to worship Jesus as king, not Herod. And even in Luke, this is Augustus Caesar, who orders the taxation of the world, so it puts it in a political context and the angels and the shepherds worship Jesus as king, son of God. And we have to remember the son of God, prince of peace. These were Roman imperial titles before the Gospels were written. So when they claim that Jesus was a prince of peace, son of God, they were juxtaposing Jesus to the current ruling empire of the day. And that’s bald faced politics. We’re saying Caesar is not the ruler of the world, as was his claim, Jesus is. And its empire of God is the true empire, not the empire of Rome. So any attempt to strip this story of its political ramifications is a great disservice to the true meaning of the good news that we don’t have to live under an empire that operates by violence. We have the opportunity to live under an empire that operates by justice.
Scheer:
Time for a break and we’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re back with Scheer intelligence and our guest. So just to deepen the controversy here, the fact is the received wisdom about Jesus can be interpreted in ways that are quite vicious towards the others, quite negative and not at all recognized as being part of justice. You know, for example, the killing, the greatest modern genocide… Nazis, it was aimed primarily at Jewish people who were held responsible for the death of Jesus that leave the historic blood libel of anti-Semitism out, but also against others who were considered to have wrong views. So religion has, Christianity has been not just different forms, but been quite divided. And I would point out, for instance, that in the founders, there was great concern about that, because they themselves, most of the people who came to this country came because of some difference with the Church of England. And the official religion, including your own congregation, right? And so the whole tension in the American experiment is, yes, you’re informed by the morality of religion in different ways. But then how do you build a civil society in which people get to make choices? And, you know, and you find this and it goes to social issues. You know, for a long time, Jefferson was my favorite founder until I explored his slave owning practices and beliefs and so forth, that took the glint off it, you know? And, you know, we can go down the list. They clearly, the founders, were torn by what was negative and what was positive and the whole idea of deism was to deny any current authority to religion, right? And you I just want to say, get you into this, you’ve lived with this all your life because you grew up in a religious environment, and yet you knew other believers in this same religion had favored slavery and segregation, right?
Shockley:
Well, you’re correct. I mean, I went and chose Union Theological Seminary for the express purpose of studying black liberation theology, which rejects slavery as a Christian practice. And that brings us back to the point that when the church fails to heed its own message, that we do not serve Caesar, but we serve God, then the church loses its way. And that’s what happens when you have a state church, and that’s what the founders wanted to do away with the state church. But we see many forces that want to return this very, too cozy relationship between church and state. And whenever you have that close relationship, the emperor, the state, always rules over the church, and it’s been that way ever since Constantine co-opted the Christian church in the fourth century and the Progressive Order, or the church that denies the sovereignty of the monarch or the Emperor in favor of the sovereignty of God, has always been the church on the outs, because the empire tries to destroy it. And so what you have in the United States was basically a state church religion. They weren’t constitutionally connected. But any time the church endorses or accedes to the non-Christian practices of the state, it’s lost its way. And that’s clearly what happened in Germany. The Holocaust was not a Christian program, but the church, the state church, if you will, or the church too closely aligned, or the church afraid to stand up to the Führer.
Scheer:
Which was, by the way, both Protestant and Catholic right?
Shockley:
Oh, yes. I say the church that was afraid, of course, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood up and was executed. But that’s the call of the church to be willing to die for justice. And so whenever the church is co-opted by the state or is too afraid to stand up to the caesars of this world in the name of the true sovereign, the church has lost its way, and the church fails whenever the church endorses war. And this has been the real decline of the church in America started with the Vietnam War, that the young people who knew the war in Vietnam was an atrocity could not understand why the church, writ large, was not in the streets with them. As you well know, with William Sloane Coffin and other church leaders, George Regas and Rabbi Beerman, all of them were in the streets, but they were in the minority.
Scheer:
Let’s not leave out the most important religious figure who did end up being in the streets and was punished for it, which is Martin Luther King.
Shockley:
Absolutely.
Scheer:
And some of them… Really upsets me that when, you know, we celebrate well, we honor Martin Luther King, as we will in February, that, you know.
Shockley:
In January and February…
Scheer:
January, February, we will not generally acknowledge that our own government, our FBI and a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, you know, they went after King and they went after King, that he dared connect the gospel with peace.
Shockley:
Another perfect example of domestication. One of the books written by the Jesus Seminar scholars called The First Christmas gives a great analogy. It says, telling the story of Jesus without putting it in the context of the Roman Empire and its violence, is like telling the story of Martin Luther King without talking about segregation. You cannot understand King without understanding the segregation and the racism and the Jim Crow institutions that he was fighting against. You cannot understand Jesus if you don’t understand the Roman Empire and its violence, its rapaciousness and its hedonistic practices. You cannot understand Jesus without understanding the political context into which he was born. And that’s what the Christmas stories are trying to tell people. The best example, the Magnificat, the story or the song that Mary sings in Luke after she finds out or gets confirmation that she’s carrying the Christ Child? What does Mary say about that? God has shown his strength with his arm—this is Luke 151—He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. That’s the message of Christmas. Now, you spoke down on the street corner without citing the Gospel of Luke. People would call you a socialist, a communist, anti-capitalist, and all kinds of names. Well, that’s exactly the message of Jesus.
Scheer:
Well, that was also the point made by Martin Luther King. And it wasn’t, you know… Whether that was the cause of his death or not, well people will argue about that we still haven’t resolved the questions of what, how a such a visible person who had been the target of assassination attempts and threats and was under FBI surveillance, who had FBI agents sitting at, informants desks right next to him, was killed and why we still know so little about it. But the point was that Martin Luther King connected the U.S. empire with the Roman Empire. And his famous statement, I don’t know how this can be ignored. He said, how can I tell young people in the ghettos of America to shun violence when my own government is, quote, the major purveyor of violence in the world today? That was Martin Luther King, a year before he was killed.
Shockley:
Let us not descend into hero worship. Martin Luther King was the product of the Black church. And that’s what you’re asking me about a moment ago, the Black church struggled against slavery from day one, even though Christianity was force fed to those who were enslaved, they took it and made it their own. It is a distinct expression of the Christian faith on the soil of North America. And it goes to my earlier point, there are Christianity’s. I would dare say that the black church is a different religion than the church of the slave owners. They’re not the same. They don’t worship the same God, even though they have the same banner or title and in terms of Christianity. So that product, Martin Luther King is the most exemplary product, but he is not a single individual, he’s a product of a movement, a movement that continues to this day, but by identifying the United States as the Empire of Rome or the modern day Babylon or whatever you want to call it, he again nailed it. You see, the trick that great empires try to pull is to propose that there is no alternative. They are at once the empire of violent victory, and they claim to be the Empire of justice. The Roman Empire made the emperor divine as a way of combining the two alternatives. By making the emperor divine, there was no appeal from the empire, not even to the gods. And no empire has been more skilled at this illusion than the United States of America. From manifest destiny to American exceptionalism, this is the message: the United States is offering the world, the only option it is us or the devil and the devil is China or Russia. But in truth, all empires are devils. And that’s the message of Christmas. Then it was wrong. Today it’s the United States. But we have stripped the message and we have descended. The vacuum of the real message of Jesus has been filled with old Roman habits of bread and circuses and the bacchanalia of feasting and excess. The most hollow of them all is the fake war on Christmas, which has reduced the entire meaning to just a phrase. But that is hardly the meaning of Christmas. Even the more mundane practices of family gathering and gift exchange are distractions from the fundamental message. Do we choose peace through justice or peace through violence? Whom will we worship? That’s the question.
Scheer:
Well, that’s a good, strong point we’re sending, Reverend Shockley. But I do want to say consumerism, which is really what Christmas comes down to mean for a lot of people, which also has a dark side. Do you have the money for gifts? Have you given enough? Have you failed your family? It’s a moment to which you feel the pain of poverty. I recall it quite well because on the Christian side of my family there were giving out used gifts during the Depression, I was born in ’36. I remember a Christmas tree and, you know, they woke us up and they are old toys. We’re supposed to get new ones. But consumerism is the other side of the coin of worship, of empire, because empire is supposed to deliver prosperity. And I just want to end on a final note with your wisdom. You’ve gone from the inner city, which, by the way, you played football and you had a life. And, you know, and your family has been very active in improving the life of Los Angeles. And then you went to where the devil lives in the eyes of, or used to, in the eyes of liberal, more liberal Los Angeles. And, you know, you’ve been there, as you point out, since 2004. I lived in Orange County for ten years myself, my wife was the editor of the L.A. Times there. And I don’t want to demonize it either. But you live out there. You live there. And it’s changed. I mean, I don’t think you or I ever believe gay marriage would be accepted the way it is. And, you know, we haven’t had you know, we do have some cries for justice about police brutality. So let’s take the last minute or two where you can summarize where we’ve been and where are we going and what’s your positive Christmas…
Shockley:
I get asked that question a lot. Why did I go to Carlsbad, of all places? Did I get lost? But I’ll never forget when I graduated from Union Seminary, one of my classmates who was from Connecticut lived in, you know, bourgeois middle class, upper middle class life, one of the standard denominations, Presbyterian or Episcopalian or whatever. He said to me, Madison, I envy you. I said, why do you envy me? He says, well, I’m going to go to some country club church in the suburbs of Greenwich or somewhere in Connecticut, and you get to go to the inner city where the war really is, where the struggle, where the struggle is hot and fierce and I wish I could do that. And then I thought about it and I said, no. The problem is the real front of the war on justice is in Greenwich, is in the suburbs, is in the places where you can go and I cannot. And so that always stayed with me my entire life and when the opportunity came. To come to the belly of the beast, I felt called to come here and to do that work, which I felt most of my life I was denied access to. But the good people of Pilgrim Church took a leap of faith as well and called me. And we’ve done great work for these almost 20 years. And I won’t say that we singlehandedly ran Darrell Issa out of the 49th District, but many of our members were active in the alternatives. And I will say that we ran the Minutemen out of North County, but you can’t find many of them today. There are some, but they’re disorganized and disbanded. Now, they might have been reformed as the Oath Keepers or the different militia groups. But, yes, right out here in Fallbrook, when I first came, they had just closed down Metzger and his Klan compound here in Southern California was a major Klan compound. But the good graces of the progressive legal community of ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center closed them down. So we continue to do good work. But I thought it was important to take up my classmate on that challenge and say, no, this is where the war has to really be fought, among those who set policy. Another big confusion, you know, they talk about fighting racism, well black people defend themselves against racism. But white racism, white supremacy is a product of white people. And only white people can stop racism. Black people can’t stop it. We can only defend ourselves against it. And so coming to a community where we can have that conversation about what is the burden and responsibility of the perpetrators of racism and get off of the responsibility of the victims of white supremacy and change this conversation totally. And I think we’ve made some progress in that direction.
Scheer:
Let me ask you a final question, though, because among the victims of white supremacy are white people. White supremacy has been used to distract poorer whites from their oppression, to make them feel superior so there are black people they could feel superior to. But actually, one reason we have so much anxiety, turmoil in the white community now and you have figures, demagogues like Trump and so forth, is there’s economic concern, unhappiness. Where do they fit in? Where is their place? So you, I know because I’ve spoken at your church, you have people in your church who are very sensitive to the need for justice for white people as well, who are working, who can’t pay their bills, who, you know, the courts act improperly to them. They get ripped off. So why don’t we end on an economical note here? Because you’re ministering to the people, you’re there at their death, counseling their family. You’re living in a community where we know plenty of white people in America feel threatened by the economic situation. You know, and you have come up against that. You must have. I remember when I spoke down, there was the housing meltdown and you had members of your congregation that were serious economic trouble.
Shockley:
Oh, yeah. Well, there’s no question we’ve always known that the largest number of persons in poverty are white. The largest number of persons on welfare are white. The largest number of persons receiving unemployment benefits are white. Our anti-racism book club just got through reading Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. And it documents how white supremacy is the shiny object that distracts people from their own pain and suffering from the economic deprivation, the cultural and educational deprivation that is spread far and wide across many southern states, particularly. And so the liberation of black people will be the liberation of all people. That’s why we use the phrase Black Lives Matter, because when black lives actually matter, every life will matter. And so the objective of justice is equity inclusion for all the diverse populations and not the dominance of one. And let us not forget that capitalism is the ultimate goal of white supremacists, and they use white supremacy to protect the practice of capitalism that exploits everybody.
Scheer:
So finally, let’s return to the parable of the Good Samaritan. As I say, I teach an ethics class that I begin with. And I’m shocked, shocked that it used to be, at least students knew something about their own religious history, but that’s now given way to the market forces. So let’s think about that, because it basically tells me the parable. And it’s a lawyer, a smart ass lawyer asking Jesus how he gets eternal life.
Shockley:
Yes, right. And Jesus says, you know, love God and love your neighbor. You don’t even have to memorize the Ten Commandments, just those two, love God and love your neighbor. And he says, okay, well, but who’s my neighbor? And then she tells the story about a person who fell victim on the road to Jericho, left half dead.
Scheer:
And Martin Luther King visited that area and reflected on this. I know you once called my attention to that.
Shockley:
And let us remember, this is a parable, not a historical event, which means that the victims are all victims, all victims of the world are laying on the ground. And those who have political power, which the priest had in that day, we have to remember there was no distinction between politics and religion in the first century of the ancient Near East. So the priest passes by. The person with political and theological power and authority ignores the victim.
Scheer:
And the victim is from another tribe. He’s a Samaritan, right?
Shockley:
Oh, yes. But the real point of the story is not so much that they are different in that way, but the lack of compassion, the lack of action. And so this is to a fellow Jew, that’s where the unfortunate term Good Samaritan, because these are Jews passing by a fellow Jew is the presumption although we don’t know the identity of the victim, that person is never identified. But the Jewish priest, the scribe, is identified. And so they passed them by, the persons with authority and responsibility to do something for the victim, failed to execute it. Why? They give personal excuses. I don’t want to be contaminated by the body, if the body is dead, I don’t want to be at risk if the robbers that robbed him are still around. The heart of the story is that this Samaritan risks everything. His personal safety, he goes over to the person to see if they’re all right. His personal fortune, he takes him, puts him on his own donkey, takes him to the inn, this inn has room, not the inn where Jesus’ family was turned away. He says to the innkeeper: here are three Denarii. Take care of this person. Let them stay here in your inn and recover. And if they need more time than the three denarii will cover, I’ll pay you when I come back the other way. That’s the heart of it. Are we willing to risk our personal safety, our personal resources and our status in order to help someone else? That’s the story of the Good Samaritan and that’s the message of Christmas. Are we willing not to give gifts to our own family, I mean Jesus explicitly says, when you have a dinner, don’t invite the people that are going to invite you back. Invite the people who cannot invite you back. The heart of it is: if we’re going to give gifts, can we give a gift to those who cannot reply or exchange a gift? It should be gift giving, not gift exchange.
Scheer:
Yeah. And then you just have the witness of the homeless, not only in L.A., but very, very dominantly in L.A.
Shockley:
Well, let me just make this point. There’s a great article in The Atlantic that talks about, again, the mythology around home ownership. The mythology of home ownership is built on the idea that some people are going to be housed and many people are going to be unhoused. The solution to the housing problem is to build more housing. But what does that do to the market? You build more housing, more supply. The price comes down and the homeowner lobby is the strongest lobby in the state. And so they will not approve any policy that’s going to dilute the value of homeownership.
Scheer:
Right.
Shockley:
That’s the key to solving the homelessness problem.
Scheer:
To summarize this, the message of our little podcast here is the people who are acting in that mean spirited, selfish, materialist way ain’t going to heaven, right? Okay. Can we say that with some confidence?
Shockley:
Jesus said it as well. How hard shall it be for the rich to enter the empire of God?
Scheer:
There you go. Madison Shockley, always a joy to talk to you. And I’m glad and I agree with you, by the way, I’ve been at Pilgrim Church. You have a great congregation down there. I have joy when I go to that church. And the reason I do is those people I remember it around sexual offenders that you had a big controversy, you’ve had a lot of controversy down there. People seem to actually welcome it as a stimulation for their ethical code. And I have great respect for the work and for your congregation. And I’m happy they were able to loan you out to me today to do this podcast. So give them my regards. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho, the producers at this terrific FM station, NPR station in Santa Monica for hosting these podcasts. Joshua Scheer, that you know, Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, I think you’ve given him some very good advice. I want to thank the JKW Foundation, and in particular in the memory of Jean Stein, who was very, very active in the civil rights movement and early supporter of Martin Luther King’s work and thank them for that support. And that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. See you next week.