A couple months ago I was driving through a little Ohio town and saw that one of my favorite country stores was gone. In the window was a sign advertising the space as the meeting place for a church.
Have you noticed, how in tough times, the small town stores vanish and many are replaced by the common but still strange phenomenon of the Non-denominational storefront Church -- you know, the ones with the full sentence-length names?
Well, whether it's a foxhole or Main Street USA, human nature doesn't change much, do it....
Who or what do you put your faith in? The power of the US economy? The government as an extension of the "good" in humanity? Your neighbors? Smooth politicos with big plans and promises they can't pay for and designs on your wallet? Your pitifully frail and fatally flawed human self? Or the God so big that he holds universes in His hand and so artful that He designed every strand of your DNA - and knows your every thought.
This is a rough. And, if you care to reference, you'll find numerous paraphrased (and twisted) quotes from MLK throughout:
Promise Land
I used to drive thru every week or so, past the stoplight at the Dew Drop Inn
Get some egg-salad sandwiches, mayo, pickle relish, mustard mixed right in
Local farm-raised Chocolate milk right from the Amish Friends
As an early lunch, it’s good hang-over medicine
I didn’t pass thru for a year or more, and the economy set in
Blue-collar blight hit all the hotspot gentrification
No matter who the blames goes to, changes come with the election
While we all play our little violin
And the Village Store is now the village store-front church
With a name from a list of promises made from a politician’s perch
On a stage so far removed from all the pain and hurt
That you can’t see the end of all the promises
You can’t see the end of all the promises
It’s the Pentecostal Church of The Holy Roller Sanctified
To the 13th and no longer secret Apostle Stan the Mortified
Praise the ego as the alter on which the future’s sacrificed
A long-lost verse and a smaller slice of Pie (The Day the Future died)
Hope and Change and Righteousness and Love and Peace all Come To Him
With the Seven Signs, Four Horsemen, Second Coming tacked right on The End
Sweet Mary Holy Mother of All Sinners Take me IN
Oh save me... Hymn Forty-three
Oh, promise us the Promise Land
Promise us the Promise Land
Command the deficit to part
Right through that big hole in your heart
Raise that dead electric car
Put down your jobs and follow him
Oh… follow him
Golden tongue and golden words fall on the floor and spin
Make you dizzy with a light that glows from who knows where-why-how-and-when
Struck down there by the Spirit that flows around, without, within
Testify and tell a lot in the silence of your friends
If empty suits can empathize, oh… let him
The arc of the moral universe is long, but not that long
When it slips the balance point and it all tips toward wrong
No matter all the unarmed truth and love we dare sing in song
If there’s no justice
And there’s no mercy
And nothing burning
But the urgency of now
Oh, promise us the Promise Land
Promise us the Promise Land
Command the deficit to part
Right through that big hole in your heart...
And the Village Store is now the village store-front church
With a name from a list of promises made from a politician’s perch
On a stage so far removed from all the pain and hurt
That you can’t see the end of all the promises
You can’t see the end of all the promises
You can’t see the end of all the promises
You can’t see the end of all the promises
Ah, promise us the Promise Land
© DDC, 2009
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