Silver,Gold, Naked Pastor, & Apartheid

This photo of the crippled beggar we met near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has always haunted me (along with my other three haunting photos linked here), and called to mind the man the disciples met at nearly the same spot in Acts:
"Silver and gold have I none.."

I can still hear his voice. Whether he was a fake or not (Kathy L., who took the photo, comments on the back, "Even though he was blind and crippled, he still beat us down the Palm Sunday road"), I do not know. Which is why I use the photo as a case study in discernment.

I might have had a bit of silver in my pocket to stick into his outstretched hand, but I didn't.
And is that what he needed?



David Hayward/Naked Pastor, soon to be in our own Bohemian Alien magazine,
has some brilliant cartoons..most would be censored and censured by fundagelicalz.

Like this one, which the passoniate provocateuress Lisa/Uprising posted.

Believe it or not...I had never connected (Tim says "Yeah, right!") this "silver and gold" Scripture to the amazing anti-apartheid U2 song (below) by the same title...but it is the same message..
and the same holy subversion of the dominant paradigm/pair of dimes is found in the
Isaiah section of the live version of U2's underappreciated

multiplex, rash midrash prophecy,"Last Night on Earth" (see "I wanted to know Jesus, but you gave me a library").

All that to say, in some sense, The Four Spiritual Laws are apartheid.

Here's the clip; enjoy/be bugged by the sermon section by Bono (4:24ff), followed by The Edge's classic wordless prayer/sermon on guitar (5:46ff). If Edge's sermon doesn't move you; you may be on the wrong blog(: