Community Parson: Hunger Games: bread and circuses in the 21st century

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Hunger Games: bread and circuses in the 21st century

Lent 5 B; March 25, 2012

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 119:9-16

Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

How many of you went to see “The Hunger Games” this weekend?

How many of you read the book?

How many of you know what I am talking about?

I have to admit that the most I know about “The Hunger Games” came from the reviews of the movie in Friday’s newspapers. The story takes place in, as the New York Times calls it, a “picturesque dystopia.” Every year in this post-post-United States North America, a set of teenagers is chosen to fight to the death – and to have these games televised – until one hero or heroine survives. This plot device is a direct steal from the Roman Empire, from the custom of “bread and circuses.” The name of the empire in “The Hunger Games” is even “Panem,” the Latin word for bread.

This formula [of bread and circuses, historians tell us] offered a variety of pleasures such as: the distribution of food, public baths, gladiators, exotic animals, chariot races, sports competition, and theater representation. It was an efficient instrument in the hands of the Emperors to keep the population peaceful, and at the same time giving them the opportunity to voice themselves in these places of performance. … [1]

The emperors and their minions organized the games, and the gladiators were the peoples of the lands conquered by the Empire:

German, Spanish, Welsh, Britannic, black Africans, nomadic Russians, and Jews from Jerusalem. … using the defeated enemy to entertain the public was a triumph in victory.[2]

I think this is indeed what “The Hunger Games” is based on: a central, imperial power using brute force to divide and conquer subjected people.

If we read the Gospels closely, we will see that this reality of empire, this ever-present reality of brute force, of violence, of subjugation, is the foreground of the gospels. The story of Jesus takes place in the face of this empire, of its fear, of its force. It is the social context in which the Jews, and Jesus, lived. It is the air they breathe, the water they drink, the bread they consume.

If you think about it, we Christians cannot really understand why the Romans had Jesus executed. He was such a nice person, who said such nice things. It is hard to get back into that space, where the surrounding world was so brutal, and what Jesus said and did was in such enormous contrast. What was going on, 2000+ years ago?

One historian who has helped me make sense of this context of Jesus ministry is John Dominic Crossan. “Most of the world works on a greed system,” he says.

Keep that in mind. On a big scale, we like to keep ours and take lots of other peoples’ things. So empires usually run on that principle and on the premise that they own the world. The Roman emperors had not the slightest doubt that they were in charge of the entire world … if I were to attach a motto to the Roman Empire, I would say, “First victory, then peace.” It’s the program the world’s been run on for about 5,000 years.

What was so shocking to some, and so thrilling to others, in the first century, was that Jesus proclaimed a very different kind of empire, a different kingdom ruled by a different king. Instead of vanquishing your enemies in the “hunger games,” where death is the final answer, Jesus says, ”unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” The standard for Jesus, and for the kingdom of this God is not victory but service; not smashing one’s enemies but justice. Crossan puts it this way:

Jesus’ program is: “First justice, then peace.” That’s the real thing. Otherwise, you have peace for a while, but then eventually wars break out, and you start all over again.

Jesus’ message was thrilling to some, and threatening to others, because he challenged the “victory” status quo. Peace in the kingdom of heaven came when people realized there was enough to go around, when there was justice, when God worked in a collaborative way. Peace came to Caesar’s empire only after the enemies were vanquished, and forced to “entertain” in the arena of bread and circuses. It became a never-ending cycle of violence and vanquish: there was always someone rising up who did not want to be conquered.

When we enter Holy Week, walking that way with Jesus, we enter that alternate reality, that explanation of the world that Jesus followers found so compelling that they were willing to risk angering the Empire to follow him. We, too, are tired of a world of violence and vanquishment. We too are ready to hear a different story, a different vision of how we can live our lives. We, too, are ready to hear the story of a God who cares about us, who brings us a new vision of how the world works.

[1] http://www.capitolium.org/eng/imperatori/circenses.htm

[2] http://www.capitolium.org/eng/imperatori/circenses.htm

John Dominic Crossan, quoted in an interview in "Zion's Herald" -- http://www.zionsherald.org/interviewJuly05.html

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Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.