Curate's Corner for April

This is a preview of April's newsletter article:

Last month’s question was “to fast or not to fast”. This is based on our deep-rooted need to better ourselves and atone for mistakes. I don’t really know where that need comes from, but I recognize that it’s there in most of us. In that way, Lent becomes a time of fasting.

Then we run into Holy Week, which often feels like a sprint (or for some of us, a marathon disguised as a sprint). But this disguises the mysteries we experience—or fail to experience—during this one week of the year. So here it is:

Who is Jesus—I mean, really?

The last few weeks we have been bombarded with the politics of race and the gospel in the YouTube-centered circulation of videos of various sermons preached by the pastor of a presidential candidate (Sen. Barack Obama). These videos have been labeled a great number of things: inflammatory, divisive, angry, and even hateful. But did any of us listen to the whole clips? Did we pay attention to what this now retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ actually said? Did you listen to his arguments? He said that violence inspires violence. Abuse of anyone is incompatible with God’s Kingdom. Because the U.S. is preoccupied with abusing others without and within, we don’t embody the Kingdom of God. I couldn’t agree more.

Lent, and especially Holy Week is about the Kingdom of God. In my experience, I have found the church most confused by Holy Week. We can all agree that it is central to our faith. We can all agree that it is something that we ritually celebrate with profound necessity. But somewhere along the way, we made the story less important than the ritual. Jesus’s movement to Jerusalem and time in the city (including death and resurrection) make up more than half of Mark’s Gospel. Jesus’s teachings about the Kingdom of God, so central to his crucifixion, were the exclusive teachings of Jesus’s final months in that gospel. For us, however, we devote one week out of 52. And even then, it is dissected into questions about Jesus’s nature as “Son of God” and what that means in relationship to God, and what our sins have to do with it all. In fact, it seems to be the one week in which we avoid listening to what Jesus actually said. As Barbara Ehrenreich suggests, “it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth (Nickel and Dimed, pp. 68-69).”

The public criticism of Obama’s former spiritual advisor is not only unwarranted, but unjust. His preaching reveals both a strong understanding of Jesus’s message on the path to Jerusalem, and a passion for the justice that Jesus represents. As we revel in the glory of the risen Christ, take time to be that agent of Christly change in the community and examine who Jesus challenged us to be: the present disciples that help God realize his Kingdom in the here and now.

Shalom,

The Rev. Drew Downs