COMMMENTARY: When the last become first

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.) DURHAM, N.C. _ As our Saturday errands take us through downtown, we find streets blocked and an arts festival in progress.”Let’s go there for lunch!”says our 8-year-old son. So we make our voluntary […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

DURHAM, N.C. _ As our Saturday errands take us through downtown, we find streets blocked and an arts festival in progress.”Let’s go there for lunch!”says our 8-year-old son. So we make our voluntary contribution to the local arts council and enter a street festival filled with browsers, eaters, sellers and performers.


After burgers eaten on a curb, we wander toward an area set up especially for children. The high point turns out to be a chaotic area sponsored by an outfit called Scrap Exchange.

From what we can tell, Scrap Exchange acquires industrial scraps from local companies _ foam sheets, tubes, balls and cubes; cardboard cones; rolls of plastic mesh; tag ends of fabrics; plastic components of all kinds _ and makes them available for crafts.

In its normal operations, money must change hands somehow. But today it’s all free: barrels of scraps, tables for working, plenty of scissors and tape, and an unspoken message: Be as creative as you can be.

It is the most crowded place in the festival. Children dash from table to table, parents trailing behind. One converts a cone and foam scraps into exotic goggles. Another makes a helmet. Four girls turn industrial mesh into lacy bodices. Our son takes two cones, wraps them in foam, puts in red mesh eyepieces, and creates a space-age telescope.

How ironic that industrial castoffs can unleash this sustained burst of creativity, whereas carefully designed, committee-tested school curricula stir barely a yawn. How ironic that in an elaborate street festival intended to promote artistic excellence and to help professional artists sell their wares, one energy center is a non-juried place where children’s creativity turns refuse into treasure.

When the last become first, this is the sort of thing that happens. What the world views as having little value becomes, by the grace of God, pearls beyond price. Behaviors that have little economic merit _ like love, compassion, forgiveness, charity _ turn out to be the very heart of life.

In God’s strange economy, the powerless matter, the incapable matter, the slow-witted matter. Messiah turned out to have a special heart for children, outcasts and victims. He was drawn to the sick, not the well. He taught the foolish, not the wise. He called the simple, not the well-gowned. He extended not the slightest favoritism to those who were accustomed to receiving favor.


Such evenhanded and generous grace infuriates the capable, long-tenured and successful. They want more, and they believe deeply that they deserve more.

Even though the super-religious like to say that ours is a”God-centered nation,”our public life tends to be grounded in preference and achievement and not in evenhanded grace. Jesus told of a landowner who paid all workers the same wage, not because they had earned it, but because he chose to do so. Make that the basis of public policy, and the ship of state would founder on the shoals of public rage.

As public school systems, for example, contend with determined efforts to resegregate, the issue isn’t race alone. It is also the bedrock belief among the haves that they deserve better schools because they are more successful in life. They also deserve better roads to preserve their property values and better branch libraries to help them read more.

Public university systems have developed a highly prized pecking order, in which flagship schools get the best of everything because they serve the best and brightest, and everyone else gets less.

The heart of government tax policy isn’t greed alone, but also a belief that the wealthy and wise deserve preference because they will contribute more to the commonweal.

Even organized religion buys into the ethics of preference. When leadership conflicts roil the waters, core values come into focus: the long-tenured matter more than the new, those paying the bills deserve to run things, and in the competition for space, budget and the pastor’s time, members come first.


Even a local arts festival becomes primarily a forum for the accomplished, not a celebration of art as such. It is a chance to buy and to applaud, not a venue for imagination, except for this one space where scraps are given freely.

DEA END EHRICH

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