Okay, so I'm a coward

Nobody has called me a coward (as a matter of fact, nobody says much of anything in the comments of this blog; where are you people! Go ahead and say something) but I am one.

When Jesus saw oppression, he did something about it. The most memorable example was when he overturned the moneychangers’ tables. Only Israelite currency was allowed for offerings within the Temple, but the people had only Roman currency, so they had to exchange their money before entering. The moneychangers charged a hefty fee for this service. Jesus saw these men using religion as a tool for making money. He told them, loudly enough for the crowd to hear, that they had turned the Temple into a den of thieves.

And then he turned their tables over and spilled their coins. What a scene this must have been! I recommend watching this scene in the Martin Scorsese movie The Last Temptation of Christ. In this scene of the movie, gold coins flew up against a blue sky, then plopped down into a stream of blood that drained from the sacrificial altars into the gutters.

You all know perfectly well that if Jesus had done anything like that today, the conservatives would have called perhaps for his blood to be shed but at least for him to be imprisoned as a terrorist. In 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the material witness law as an excuse to detain American citizens of Arabic descent without charge indefinitely. He is currently being sued for this. The people who were imprisoned by the direct will of Ashcroft had done much less (as far as I have heard, nothing at all) than what Jesus did. Certainly an American Jesus would have fallen under Ashcroft’s policy.

If I were to really be a follower of Jesus, I would go straight into the offices of religious organizations who manipulate their followers to give them money, and start pulling computer cords out of the wall, or something, a twenty-first-century equivalent of overturning their tables. The perfect place is right here in Tulsa, the headquarters of Oral Roberts ministries. Oral Roberts helped make religion into a den of thieves. But I won’t. I’m a coward. I’ll just write blog entries, website entries, and books. And I have to advise all of you that you should not do it, because it is illegal. I just use this as an example that nobody is really a faithful follower of Jesus. We are all cowards. Of course, being heroic would do no good; it would just get us in prison and slow down religious moneymaking for maybe an hour or so. Being a hero is not necessarily the best way to get things done. It is perhaps more effective for us to continue adding our voices to changing society so that it is, ever less and less, victimized by religious manipulation.