Where do we look for the sacred?

As I look out my apartment window in Romania, I can view the ongoing construction of a church amid the grey apartment complexes that line the narrow alley. Above the flat-roofed concrete buildings stands a beautiful ornate steeple with four minor steeples surrounding it. Last year before Easter, workers hung from the very top of the structure, laying down sheets of shiny copper to adorn the steeple. This year before Easter, a gigantic bell has been added which rings reminding us of the beginning of each new hour. The strange part of the whole affair is that below the steeples is a shell of a church under construction. There are no windows or doors. Scaffolding of weathered wood boards is tacked to the building here and there. Most of the time no workers can be seen, and certainly no worshippers.

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There she lay, cold and lonely. Life drifting from her body as all traces of promise drifted with it. The note revealed the final chapter in her ongoing struggle to make sense of life. With one final act of despair she made her loudest statement ever and everyone heard it. With a needle in her arm and a choice to overdose, a 2-year-old child is left abandoned, and a community is left to mourn. The fatherless child, now motherless, is left with a life that is seemingly hopeless.

She, a beautiful 23-year-old woman, was a previous resident of Joshua Station, our transitional housing facility for homeless families. Her story of arrival at our program was a miracle in and of itself, but the pain in her life was too much for her, which left her unable to continue the healing journey with us.

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I recently finished reading a beautifully painful story of someone very dear to my heart. It left me on my knees weeping and crying out to God. Each destructive choice was a cry for help, a cry that did not seem to be heard: “God’s church was more important than my petty problems.” A big part of the story was the individual’s personal relationship with God and experience growing up in a “Christian” home. This person’s unstable relationships with family, friends and church painted a very painful image of God, and the very thought of God seemed to torture this person’s soul: “I yearned for a God who gave a shit.” That is how deeply the scars of this life were affected.

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I don’t do talk radio, period. So my wife tells me that I’ve missed out on a great opportunity in the past week to become annoyed with the flood of callers expressing shock and outrage that Barack Obama has remained in a church where his pastor occasionally preached bitter denunciations against racial oppression in America.

While this is not a political blog per se (i.e. we don’t endorse – or denounce – candidates), the blend of religion, race, and social change in this conversation is right in the center of our sights.

I’m not writing this post to explain, much less justify, Jeremiah Wright’s more controversial sermons. Rev. Wright isn’t looking for my help, after all. And truthfully many of his words deeply offended my own patriotic sensibilities as I watched him deliver them on YouTube.
But I have had a thought over the last couple of days that might provide at least one small window into the tradition from which Rev. Wright speaks. White Christians, like me, need many such windows at this time to help shed light on that which, through ignorance, we do not understand.

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For the entire Christian world Easter Sunday marks a defining moment in the Jesus story. Over the last several weeks leading up to Easter I’ve heard various comments about what this day actually symbolizes for the Christian faith. To some it’s the promise of hope that someday we will also be resurrected from our own death. To others it’s the realization that we’ve already been resurrected from death. To many it’s the proof that Jesus was in fact God in the flesh risen to show His power over death.

While each of those finds it’s appropriate place in the Jesus story, I find myself searching for a different response these days. When it comes to the significance of the resurrection of Jesus, I find myself asking, “What does the resurrection have to say about life among the dying?”

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Colfax on the 16
Fernando on the move
Broken down car, broken dreams
Man with rotten teeth
Lady with a black eye
19 year old wrapping her 2 little kids
with blankets of struggles
Faces ruined by smoke
Hearts stabbed with broken dreams
What happened to my childlike smile and laugh that was once
full of Santa Claus and bags of candy
God can you use your broken vessels to heal the wounds

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Abba,

Before Jesus died,
the soldiers took charge
and led him out,
“just politics,”
they said.

Simon of Cyrene took the cross -
bearing him up for a while.

The women who cared for him,
followed,
wailing along the trail.

And still he carried the cross.

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I thought I saw
a sacrament
tonight
it spoke
in sacred ritual
cleansed the fuzz
from between our toes.

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Today was an important day in Barak Obama’s candidacy, and perhaps even in our nation’s collective conversation about race. Over the last week or so, the buzz has been all about the topic of race. Former VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984 and who works for Clinton now, said that Obama wouldn’t even be here if he wasn’t Black.

Of course not. After all, he wouldn’t be who he is if he wasn’t Black. Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be who she is if she weren’t a woman. I wouldn’t be who I am if I weren’t a white man. But Ferraro was suggesting something more: that we’re only taking him seriously as a candidate because he is Black.

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Came
first time in a dream
clear as day
true as sunbeam

Then,
you could see him,
him and his miracles,
beamed round the world
an electronic stream
sent to redeem.

Now he’s back
with frightening recurrence
the love in his eyes
mistook for hate,
as he stands,
waiting,
with the leper at the gate.

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