So, you've been wondering why all these Sesame Street characters have been woven into your Google homepage this week, eh?

Well, it just so happens to be the show's 40th Anniversary.

I was actually excited to see Cookie Monster stuffing himself in the center of my computer screen, because he's actually worked his way into my Senior Intergration Paper (SIP) this semester. Now what could Cookie Monster possibly have to do with my SIP topic on art as a means of healing and restoration? Well, I'll tell you...

        Since the very beginning, the preschool television show Sesame Street has been a  social activist force. “The show arrived on the heels of riots in Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr… It was intentional from the beginning to show different races living together,”[1] said David Kleeman, exectutive director of the American Center for Children and Media. By characterizing the show’s set with a lower-income, urban atmosphere, the show catered to a diverse group of preschoolers who needed to understand and visualize what a world without segregation could look like.

Forty years later, the children’s show has been broadcasted in an additional sixteen countries and regions around the world. However, Sesame doesn't "dump" Western culture into each country in which it is broadcasted, but it creates a specific curriculum to fit the context of each unique culture. The Sesame employees many times travel to an international location and rely on the locals. These local people are equipped to identify what issues need to be addressed and how the show should be presented so that the community will respond positively.

In Palestinian territory Kosovo, Sesame supported peace in the midst of Albanian and Serbian ethnic tension. The show aired clips of preschoolers from both ethnicities in an effort to educate the other group and to stir up empathy. In South Africa, Sesame introduced an HIV-positive Muppet to break the stigma and attitudes surrounding the AIDS issue there. But not only does Sesame address political issues, it meets difficult topics such as death head-on. In addition, the show regularly hosts children with illnesses and Down syndrome and has launched an obesity awareness campaign called Healthy Habitats for life.[2] The discernment and insight that Sesame has exhibited for the past forty years has surely been a large contributing factor to their international success. Since what the children see on the show reflects their own unique environment, Sesame proves to be and effective teaching tool.

One of my roommates, Olivia, showed me a postcard the other day that piqued my interest. It was an advertisement that began with this insightful question:
Is there something you feel you can't say in a church?

Anne Jackson, an avid writer and advocate of recovery and justice, is working on a new project entitled Permission to Speak Freely: Essays and Art on Fear, Confession, and Grace. She is compiling artistic submissions (photos, postcards, letters, etc.) that are in response to the aforementioned question: What are we afraid to speak of in religious circles? Many pieces of artwork express feelings of estrangement from God and the church based on past sin or brokenness in their lives. For fear of being harshly judged by fellow Christians, most are submitted as anonymous confessionals. 



Jackson is highly active in empowering those who seem to have no voice. Her website states, "She contributes to various blogs like Christianity Today and Deadly Viper Character Assassins. Anne has also written for PurposeDriven.com, Willow Arts, Outreach Magazine, Catalyst Groupzine, and a variety of other publications. She is a licensed and ordained lay pastor serving under the leadership at Cross Point Church in Nashville, as well as a speaker advocate for Compassion International."

While I admire her drive and commitment, I don't know enough about her thoughts on the matter. The website doesn't go into detail about how this issue is addressed. While I think that her project is presented as a challenge for us to be honest in order to encourage healing and restoration, I'm not sure what she is advocating to be that means of healing. If simply "speaking freely" is her form of ultimate healing, then she's only gathered together a group of disgruntled and broken people who now feel free to grumble about how the church is not meeting their needs. However, if she is encouraging a more biblical honesty as a means to forgiveness and restoration in Christ as the ultimate healing process, then I think she's right on target. 

Either way, her project raises a relevant issue. How freely do we confess to one another? I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers rich insight in his work Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith and Community.

       The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.  Sin wants to remain unknown.  It shuns the light.  In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person.  This can happen even in the midst of a pious community…

The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power…It can no longer tear the fellowship asunder.  Now the fellowship bears the sin of the brother.  He is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handed it over to God…Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the cross of Jesus Christ.

In confession occurs the break-through to the cross… Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation.  It hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride.  To stand there before a brother as a sinner is an ignominy that is almost unbearable.  In the confession of concrete sins the old man dies a painful, shameful death before the eyes of a brother.  Because this humiliation is so hard we continually scheme to evade confessing to a brother.  Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and the glory in such abasement.

The Cross of Jesus Christ destroys all pride.  We cannot find the Cross of Jesus if we shrink from going to the place where it is to be found, namely, the public death of the sinner.  And we refuse to bear the Cross when we are ashamed to take upon ourselves the shameful death of the sinner in confession.  In confession we break through to the true fellowship of the Cross of Jesus Christ, in confession we affirm and accept our Cross.

Now I can just see your little minds wondering.
Just to calm your fears right up front: No. I am not interning at a bakery.
I will not be making cupcakes for a living.
But I suppose there are worse things to do with your life.

Last night my roommates and I all sat on our dorm room couch at about 11:30 PM in our PJs, each holding a gigantic cupcake. Michelle (fondly called "Mish") recently had a birthday and we were intent on celebrating in style. Gigi's cupcakes are known for their whimsical but enormous nature, so needless to say, the experience was nigh perfect. Here are a few of these lovely creations...

 

On a more serious note, I've been thinking about the future lately. This does seem to happen quite a bit during one's senior year of college. In May, the education, art, business, and history departments send a group of students to New York for three weeks. The students and faculty live in a hostel and treat the trip as a May term experience, thus divying out college credit, projects, hands-on-experiences and more. The education department, in particular, gives eight internships to students who desire to work in an urban schooling environment.

Mustard Seed School is located in Hoboken, NJ, about 5 miles from Manhattan/Chinatown. As their facebook page states, the school "was founded in 1979 to address the educational needs of the urban community by educating students in an intercultural, interdenominational Christian setting. Mustard Seed School has an intentional mission to the urban poor."

This kind of work is certainly where my heart is. The internship, for now, is something that I'll be praying about. The future... who knows?  

"The irony is that while God doesn't need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don't really want Him most of the time. He treasures us and anticipates our departure on this earth to be with Him -and we wonder, indifferently, how much we have to do for Him in order to get by."

-Francis Chan