Who are we?
29 May 2008 - 25 אייר 5768 by Huw
As I offered last week, we (Americans) are the Romans in the Gospel. And the man who introduced me to this concept, Cam Miller, preached a sermon about it on Sunday (and blogged it):
We are the Romans. We live far away from the margins of our empire. We live far away from the sources of our wealth and affluence. We live far away from the sweatshops where people make our clothing or the fields where migrants harvest our food or the factories where our drugs are produced or even the phone banks from where our credit cards are monitored.
We have no idea that, right now, Jesus and his buddies are being abused…exploited, even tortured and killed for our benefit.
That is who we are in the Gospel story. That is our story line. We need to read the story from our point of view rather than pretending that we can read it from the point of view of Jesus and his buddies.
Do read the whole thing…
No matter the sins and deficits of this country and of myself, I found extraordinary power, not in the invitation to identify with the “bad” people or even with Christ’s clueless friends, but in identifying with Christ and with God. For me this, and only this, was revolutionary and life-changing. **I** am Christ. **I** say, eat, **I** ask, forgive them. Now what?
For me, the traditional (in my tradition) practice of having the people read the part of the crucifying crowd just fed my useless, dis-empowering guilt. But to see myself as the body of Christ — this is revolutionary.
I know the good side of what you share - the constant use of guilt being one of the more distasteful aspects of traditional religion. The way of reading the Passion that you describe - the people reading the voice of Christ - is one of the most powerful tools I know for learning sacrifice, love, forgiveness (and not guilt).
But I think it’s important to realise that some things are, in fact, wrong: among them the inequitable distribution of wealth and power in this global empire we’ve built. And it is important to see where we are in the eyes of the Gospel writers not to feel guilty about it, but to find more ways to do justice.