Luke 4
I first preached in church when I was 17. Wore a light blue polyester suit. I had never spoken in public before. Never. Not even in school. Every year, my English teachers would insist that I go to the front of the class, and do some public-speaking. Every year I'd refuse, they'd give me a zero, and that'd be that. I was happy to crack jokes from my seat, but go stand up front of everyone? No chance. Same thing kept me from answering the phone, or buying things in the store. I had to get other people to do it for me.
However, I felt seized of a topic. A message. Couldn't sleep. Knew what I had to do. I talked to my father - a Deacon - and he arranged it. We were the kind of Baptist Church that tried to live out that "priesthood of all believers" thing, so we let members of the congregation preach from time to time. The Deacons ok'ed it for me. After all, I was a pretty conservative, clean-cut kid. Never drank, had never had sex, and my career path was to become a lawyer, and maybe someday, the next local Conservative MP. None of those things changed 'til I was 20.
The Sunday came, and I stepped up to the pulpit. Terrified. I remember I gripped the edges of the wooden pulpit and did not let go. Through the entire sermon. I knew what scripture I wanted to read. I say "wanted to," but truth was, it felt like "had to." The scripture was just a couple of verses from Luke 4. The ones where Jesus preaches about healing the brokenhearted, bringing sight to the blind, release to those in prison. But especially, about bringing "Good news to the poor."
After that opening verse, I basically just called it as I saw it. Said that "poor" meant just what it said - poor. I talked about how our village (480 people) was split into the reasonably well off, and those who had nothing at all. I stated what we all knew, that the poor were easy to find, because they all lived on the dirt roads. That was the boundary. They had houses with dirt floors, outhouses and broken windows. I was polite when I described this, because I liked the people in my church - the paved road people. They're weren't rich, just better off. Their houses were well kept, they taught school or ran the post office or had a gas station or owned a functioning farm. They sang in choirs, and organized free bricks and labour to build our school, made a baseball field for us kids. My people.
But I knew - we all knew - that we didn't cross that line onto the dirt roads. Unless you were after bootleg liquor, or women maybe - "running the roads" as they called it. Or maybe you needed extra hands for picking apples, or maybe some welding done. We all knew what went on in those homes. There was no way to say this all directly. But this is what I knew, what I saw.
A family with 13 kids in a two room shack. The kids were called "the grubs" they were so dirty. Filthy. You'd hunt them, with rocks. Hit 'em - and hit 'em hard. Grubs. Another family, the father's name was exactly the same as that President you lost in 1963. Really. This guy drove truck. They lived in the top of an old chicken barn. The dried chicken shit still there, inches deep. That was their floor. With a big color tv set up on it. Both kids were his, a boy and a girl. They say he fucked 'em both. The boy used to drool out the window of the bus. The girl went to college. Second year, jumped out a window in her residence. A different kid, from down the road, used to come up to the farm a lot. Told my Dad he liked it at our place, asked if it was ok. Dad said sure. A few months later the kid comes up to our place with a gun. Goes out behind the barn and blows his head off. Another time, my Dad gets a call, this guy, 50 maybe, had been on a bender for a week. Was out of control. Everybody phoned my Dad when stuff like this happened. We drove down. The guy came raging out of the shed where they fixed equipment, screaming. Dad walked up to him, and the guy bit him. Tore a chunk right out of his arm. I drove with Dad to the hospital afterward. This other guy, I worked with him when we built the ball-field. Old guy. Nice. Sweet. Just never bothered much with fixing his place up. Tough as nails. Except, you let your house slide too far, and hit a real cold night, you might not make it. He didn't. Froze. And the really badly off families lived on the dirt roads that went up the mountain. The cops broke one incest ring up there, dozens of adults involved, going back generations. They gave this one kid 7 years in the Pen for incest. Billy. We knew him from school. He used to stand and bang his head against the concrete blocks. He wasn't really retarded, just slow. Spoke in a real soft whisper. Anyway, the whole thing's in the national papers, tv. Judge says to him, "I'm giving you 7 years because you have shown no remorse. Do you have anything to say for yourself?" Billy says, "What's remorse?" He meant it.
