Thinking About India

I had coffee with a mentor and fellow traveler yesterday and we were talking a great deal about our upcoming trip to India.  A lot of the conversation related to the culture shock that may be experienced by seeing the poverty that we will experience in many of the parts of India we will be traveling in. 

Having seen the shanty towns and lean to shacks of the super-impoverished in a number of other countries, I have at least glimpsed the level of poverty that my friend spoke of.  To be so surrounded by it for a period of a week and a half will no doubt leave a mark on my being, but there was more.  You see, India is estimated to have as much as one third of the world's poor among their population.  There is great disparity between the towers of the modern cities like New Delhi and the slums of Kolkata.  In some ways, that holds true here in the US as well...there is great difference between the financial and "galleria" type retail districts and the wards and slums of our inner cities.

As our conversation continued, the comment that really got to me was that there was a temple that was erected in India, that had the money gone towards feeding the hungry and the poor, there would have been enough money to feed them for several years.  Again, not that unlike here in the states (think about the towers, office buildings, stadiums, temples, etc that we have built).

I am not sure if it is greed, a lack of compassion, or some other shortcoming in our human nature that  would cause us (no matter where in the world we are) to build monuments to ourselves in the forms of temples and buildings, rather than caring for those who are around us.  I wonder if this is why Jesus said something along the lines, "the poor you will always have with you..." when he was speaking to his disciples about his imposing departure.

I throw all of this out there, not because I have some profound answer, but simply to put voice the the beginnings of some deep questions that are resurfacing in my faith journey.

15 years ago, I asked a church why they were spending about 16 million to rebuild their sanctuary rather than do more of the missions work they were known for.  The answers were not as clear as I would have liked them to be...and I am sure that the answers won't come any easier with this round of questioning...but I do wonder what God thinks about all of this.

I wonder if we are just re-offending in the department of idolatry...I wonder if we are just finding shortcuts around the rules that we think don't apply to us any more...I just wonder.

What do you think?  Are we getting this right by building these multi million/billion dollar monuments (in all forms from sports to worship to business) or are we missing the bigger picture of Kingdom building?