I have what now becomes more or less of a tradition of posting a diary each Palm Sunday memorializing one of my favorite essays on politics, culture, and religion by the late atheist-sainted (pantheoned?) author Kurt Vonnegut. (The first such diary appeared three years ago; the second one appeared last year.) I was weighing whether I should post it again this year, and then I thought of this diary title and that pretty much settled things.
Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday Sermon to the congregation of St. Clement's Episcopal Church in 1980 is reprinted in his wonderful self-described "autobiographical collage" of essays, Palm Sunday. Why people should want to read a diary by a non-observant Jew recounting the observations of a freethinking atheist on a verse of Christian Scripture is beyond me, but the short essay is so good -- as the dearly departed Vonnegut himself must have known, hence the title of his book and the prominent placement of this essay as the last piece within it -- that it is worth risking a few contradictions to get you, the reader, to read it.
Publishing an entire essay (though in this case it is just over five pages of a larger chapter) is, of course, questionable copyright practice, so the person who pasted the whole thing into a comment in 2007 (that's what the above link is) has helped me solve the question of how to get you to read the whole thing. But should his comment ever be taken down, he in turn snarfed the essay from here, a religious site (that has it as the April 13, 2003 entry under the "Sermons Tab"); it contains this copyright information: "Printed in the San Francisco Chronicle's Review (of books), 14 September, 1980. 'Used by permission from The Nation magazine, copyright 1980, The Nation Associates, Inc.'" Good enough for me.
Personally, I like Vonnegut's essays better than his fiction: like Isaac Asimov, his ideas are better than his dramatic presentation of them, and essays allow the reader to experience them in their most concentrated form. And you can find few better essays for yourself or your loved ones than this book, should you decide to buy a copy.
Vonnegut's concern is with John 12:8, which he notes has often been cited by Christians as justification -- if you ignore most of Jesus' other teachings -- for not taking action to ameliorate poverty. You've probably heard that verse:
For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.
I don't want to take away from Vonnegut's presentation of his thesis by recounting it here: go read the essay right now, dammit! (It won't take long.) But suffice to say that Vonnegut reads it as a mordant joke, from which all of the juice has been squeezed out by a stilted translation. To Vonnegut, not only did Jesus have a penis, and probably dry skin from the desert, as well as other wholly human body parts, but he had some serious wit. Reading Jesus' own "red-letter" teachings makes this thesis seem pretty reasonable.
So this item is intended as a mini-"Book Club" -- an "Essay Club," let's say -- for people who have read Vonnegut's lovely essay to comment on it and people who have not done so to do so and then let us know what they think.
The essay has special resonance this year, with the rise of the teabaggers and their almost incoherent philosophy against government intervention that does not benefit them directly. The belief that God excuses their selfishness, that despite many quotations to the contrary God wants us not to help each other but rather to abide injustice, is so convenient and so ludicrous that it is what puts the "facepalm" into "Facepalm Sunday." I apply that term not particularly to Palm Sunday, but any Sunday that the teabaggers are active and in the news -- which seems like all of them.
I look forward to an interesting discussion of hypocrisy, interpretation of religious text to serve one's convenience, our own efforts to help the poor, and why a little pleasure from a massage with spikenard-scented oil is not incompatible with a moral life. It's highly compatible.
Now, go check out that essay at one of those links. It's worth your time.