The Reality Cup

In many circles in Rochester, the PGA was the talk of the town last week. From the lead up to the event, to the thrill of seeing golf legends up close to the ever-present Goodyear blimp hovering in the sky, you couldn’t really miss some form of PGA hype. I know quite a few folks who took in some portion of it, and from what I hear, it was quite an event.

One of my favorite local writers who has focused a lot of attention on disparities, Justin Murphy, posted a tweet the other day that highlighted a 1995 article in the Democrat and Chronicle. It was a picture of Minister Franklin Florence, Sister Grace Miller and others who gathered for a press conference called the “Reality Cup” during the Ryder Cup (which was also at Oak Hill and is a PGA sponsored event) to highlight the lives of people living in poverty in contrast to the luxury of the Ryder Cup.

While events like the PGA tour do bring revenue to the area and enhance the overall economic picture, Justin’s tweet gave me pause.

Where do people living in poverty fit into our economic equations and collective decisions? What events benefit them in corresponding ways?

And while I am focusing on golf because it was here so recently, we can easily look elsewhere and ask similar questions. For example, I did a quick search (trying to find the best information I could) and found that, just in professional sports, for example, every Major League Baseball (MLB) game is probably making about $4 million dollars per game, every National Football League (NFL) game is making about $7 million dollars, and every National basketball Association (NBA) game is making about $2 million.

And those are just major sporting events…we’re not even talking about other businesses and economic arrangements.

In today’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers, “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage…”

When I read that and read the rest of the gospels, I hear Jesus raising questions about the world and how it works AND asking his followers to raise similar questions. Jesus seems to make the assumption that we will have trouble living in the world, and if the accounts of the early church are any indicator, Jesus’ followers were constantly getting in trouble with the “powers that be” for speaking up, disrupting business as usual and causing a stir – not because they were trying to be agitators, per se. They were just following what Jesus had taught them to do. They were trying to live out the vision of the beloved community taught by their mentor.

Just take that in for a minute.

Now I know that I can romanticize some of the early church witness, and the world that we live in is a very complex one that the writers of Acts of the Apostles could never have imagined. And still, the vision of the beloved community remains.

People like Sr. Grace Miller (one of the founders of the House of Mercy and a long-time advocate of people living in poverty, and Minister Franklin Florence (a close friend of Malcolm X, a co-founder of the local F.I.G.H.T. organization and tireless advocate for civil and human rights) were people who raised “good trouble” (to borrow a phrase from Rep. John Lewis) and tried to help us collectively turn our attention back towards those who are consistently forgotten, left out and excluded.

Sadly, not much has fundamentally changed in Rochester since 1995 with respect to poverty and affluence. In fact, indicators that I read would suggest that Rochester remains one of the most racially and economically segregated and unequal places.

I say all this not to overwhelm people, but to bring us back to the choices we make – personally and collectively. I know that I can grow weary or tired sometimes or even accept that “this is just the world that we live in…” and shrug my shoulders. Yet I keep returning to the wisdom of the Jewish Talmudic writings which says, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s [problems]. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

May we be inspired by some of the tireless voices in the cloud of witnesses and continue to be part of “good trouble” in whatever ways that we can.