Christ hanging there outstretched cross.
Christ hanging here in shame and loss.

Christ unproductive just needs a job.
Christ no english only a nod.

Christ ever thirsting for next drink.
Christ turning tricks. Seductive wink.

Christ dandelion unsightly lawn.
Christ of the dark long before dawn.

Christ gang graffitti brick wall of church.
Christ annoying screams. Makes ears hurt.

Christ illegal. Christ detained.
Christ defeated soaked in rain.

Christ reservations unfit for farming.
Christ mouthing nothing profound nor alarming.

Christ causing distance smells so bad.
Christ twitching awake bad dreams had.

Christ will work for food and anything helps.
Christ needy intimacy. Lacking love felt.

Christ between thieves executed sinner.
Christ mentally ill always beginner.

Christ locked up then deported.
Christ knocked up had her aborted.

Christ chain smoking sucking a drag.
Christ in a name. Queer. Fag.

Overlooked. Irrelevant. Christ remains.
Walking from tombs of loss and shame.

Ryan Taylor is a Hoosier by birth but now lives in Denver and works with Mile High Ministries. He’s learning how to be incarnational with himself and others. Find more of his thoughts at his blog tall monastic guy  where this post was first published on March 8 2013.

As a kid I ran from brokenness. Whenever a fight broke out at school while some excitedly gravitated toward it I’d subtely turn tail and literally walk away in the opposite direction. I remember doing this often. Whenever I found myself in proximity to deep hurt, sickness, or wreckage my sensitive psyche wanted nothing to do with it so in my fear I’d flee.

“From dust you were created; to dust you shall return.”

With those words, ashes were smeared on my forehead in the shape of a cross. For some reason the phrase startled me all over again. Maybe I just forgot exactly what gets said at the key moment this day?

The vertical thumb stroke: “From dust you were created.” The little bit of intimacy surprised me too. Brown eyes meeting mine, the press of another’s skin, the whispered voice. I felt myself flinch, before I relaxed into the word “created.” It is awkward but good, this alive created-ness, this being-touched.

Then the horizontal stroke: “To dust you shall return.” This last bit typically is the flinch-inducer. Not only the image of myself someday being sprinkled out of a tin can onto my favorite mountain meadow, but the word “shall.” That little word just kicks the phrase up a level of grave certainty. Whatever else will or will not be in store for me, my dusty endshall come.

Yes I remember this phrase well now, from many Ash Wednesdays. I didn’t grow up in a liturgical tradition, so I experienced it first as a young man in a church that nearly threw the pastor out for introducing the rite one spring. What were these dirty Catholic ashes doing in a Wesleyan church? Why this talk of death in the days leading to Easter, our great celebration of life? The scandal threw everything into a mess that spring, and some people left. It strikes me now that if liturgical folk were paying attention, the ashes of Lent might put us all into more of a scandalized mess than actually happens. We have just been told we shall die, and we file back into our chairs and fiddle with our programs? If the same message had just been delivered over the airplane intercom, would we quietly return to our seats, minds wandering to trivial stuff?

So it’s got my attention, this smear of ashes. But this spring, most surprising of all, the ashes mean for me freedom.

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Early Easter morning, millions awaken before sunrise with a purpose. The dark skies give faint hint of the sunrise within the hour. A stretch of the arms, a wipe through the eyes, feet reaching downward for temporary covering against the floor terrain, and it is time to get moving. Slivers of remaining moonlight provide faint illumination through narrow openings above the bed. The millions have heard the call, and now respond! The time has come to join the line as men and women, even some boys and girls put their feet in the line to the appointed destination to which they are called this Easter Sunday. There they will see familiar faces, hear familiar sounds, and may even smell familiar odors. It is a dawn of a new day, and they are on their way.

Their destination?  “Chow call” in the prison refectory or “Meds up!” to the cart the nurse brings on the unit for those requiring morning medication. The stretch of the arms relieves some of the tension from the cell’s hard cot, the eyes crusted literally and figuratively by biology and monotony, the floor’s terrain cold on even the warmest day when one’s address is prison. We do not know how many millions go to church on Easter–but we know how many awaken in state and federal prisons: an excruciating 2.1 million men and women arise at Easter’s sunrise to another day when they seem oblivious to anyone on the other side of the prison walls. Another several million arise in county jails, many not physically far from home but incarnations of “out of sight, out of mind” even to those who are descendants of those to whom Jesus spoke just before his arrest and incarceration “I was in prison, and you visited me.”

Yes, millions have arisen with a purpose: count down the days, occupy the mind, anticipate a visit, and perhaps even attend chapel- purpose is a precious commodity for them. They are inmates, prisoners, convicts peopling America’s jails and prisons in record numbers–over two million in state and federal prison alone–and they arise every morning about the time the Easter Sunrise service crowd shakes the cobwebs from their consciousness to face their annual celebration.

The Easter lens well fits any view of incarceration. After all, when Jesus Christ died on the cross, he was an inmate. We celebrate the truth that God raised his only begotten son from the grave–we overlook the fact that the body which breathed its last before burial belonged to a prisoner. He hung between two thieve or malefactors, but “was numbered” with them as well.

Incarceration in America carries more than the punishment of “doing time.” Shame and stigmatization plague an inmate during incarceration and after release. Those twin maladies spread like a virus to relatives left behind, children separated from fathers and mothers, parents grieving for their children, grandparents serving as caretakers for a generation forty, fifty, and sixty years their junior while fathers stretch their arm in the cell and mothers wipe their eyes on the block. Shame and stigma, contagious and infectious as they manifest in symptoms of silence, rendering the affected loved one incapable of sharing the true hurt with anyone at the Sunrise service in celebration of the Risen Inmate!

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I’m sure everybody here knows what it means to play a game of dominoes. Nobody exactly agrees on the rules, of course, about things like whether you put the double six sideways at the beginning of the game or not, and whether you judge who comes second by the combined number of dots on the remaining pieces. But every single person in the whole wide world who has ever played a game of dominoes agrees on one single thing: there comes a point in every game when you lose interest in the regular rules and start to make a long snake by lining every piece up on its end about an inch apart and then watching them topple over. And YouTube gives us the proof: because there you will find thousands of people have deemed their efforts of lining up and then toppling over myriad upon countless myriad of dominoes in ever more elaborate cascades are worthy of viewing by the whole world.

Think about that cascade of dominoes for a moment. And think about its metaphorical power. On July 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was shot by a Serbian assassin in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary prepared for war with Serbia. Russia prepared to defend Serbia against Austria-Hungary. Germany prepared to defend Austria-Hungary against Russia. France prepared to defend Russia against Germany. Germany prepared to attack France through Belgium. Britain prepared to defend Belgium against Germany. The Turks rallied behind Germany. Japan rallied behind Britain. Within a month, all were at war. The first domino fell; and the rest came tumbling down. Four years later, 15 million people were dead.

Think about Rwanda. Before the Belgians came, the minority Tutsi had ruled over the majority Hutu. The colonial Belgians exacerbated the tensions between the peoples, and by the time they left, the Tutsis held almost all the political and economic power, while the Hutus were mostly landless and poor. In 1962 the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and instituted a Hutu republic. In 1990 Tutsis invaded from Uganda and started a civil war. In 1994 the Hutus assassinated their own president and initiated a genocide of Tutsis, killing 800,000 in 100 days. Years later the refugee Tutsis, now in north-eastern Congo, initiated a civil war in the Congo. Again, one domino fell, and then another, and another. And there seems no end to it, even today.

Holy Week tells a story of falling dominoes. One after another disciples, crowd, Pharisees, Romans, Sadducees, scribes, criminals, bystanders, pilgrims all fall down one after another. It’s a domino story. It’s a fall story. It’s a kind of multi-dimensional, violent re-enactment of the story of Adam and Eve. A mixture of temptation, short-sightedness, fear, panic, forgetfulness, stupidity, and rebellion leave practically every character sprawled on the ground like fallen dominoes.

Except one. That’s what we see in Holy Week. We see God, in human form, insert two hands into that cascade of falling dominoes, and say, “Stop.” The dominoes have been falling so fast for so long and so violently that those two hands that get in the way get overwhelmed, get crushed, get obliterated. They get nailed. Because they are divine hands, they have the power to stop even a rampaging torrent of plummeting dominoes. But because they are human hands, they hurt like hell. That’s what happens in the cross. The divinity of humankind says “Stop.” And the humanity of God gets crushed.

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When I took up the cross, I recognized its meaning….  The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on… And that’s the way I’ve decided to go.                          

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. May 22, 1967, Penn Community Center, Frogmore, South Carolina

Christ the Redeemer/Cristo Redentor - Brazil

In the preface to his book “Exclusion and Embrace, A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation,” theologian Miraslov Volf shares an encounter where he was asked by Jurgen Moltmann, “Can you embrace a Chetnik?”

The Chetniks were Serbian fighters who in the early 90’s had been devastating Volf’s homeland of Croatia, destroying cities, throwing people into concentration camps, raping women, and burning down churches.  Immediately prior to Moltmann’s question, Volf had been lecturing about the need to embrace ones enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. So, how serious was he willing to take this line of reasoning when it got really personal? Moltmann figured it all sounded good in theory but could Volf bring it home to the point where he would be able to embrace a Chetnik — the ultimate OTHER?

Volf replied, “No I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”

In the past weeks and months, there have been several ministries and individuals in the missional communities of grassroots leaders we serve in Central America who have found themselves up against their own Central American “Chetnik” groups. These groups of people have been sowing destruction and preying on the neighborhoods our friends love and in the very places where they are laying down their lives.

What does it mean to follow Jesus when he tells us we are to “love our enemies?” It is one thing to consider this as an objective “concept” or “principle,” but quite another when your life and that of your children are being threatened by “Chetniks” in Croatia or San Salvador. This is the reality that several of our friends in Central America have encountered in the past few months.  Volf shares his personal internal battle on the subject with gut wrenching honesty when he writes, “I felt that my very faith was at odds with itself, divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator.”

A call to embrace the perpetrator? Can that really be a call? How in the world am I supposed to embrace someone who is threatening to take my life and hurt and kill the people I love most in this world?

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St. Joseph, Patron Saint of Carpenters and Workers

A couple days ago, I saw a bumper sticker while I was walking on 9^th street. It said one of the cheesiest things that I’ve seen in a long time. “My boss is a Jewish Carpenter.” The first thing I thought was, “what a piece of crap!” I am not the kind of person who likes bumper sticker faith because I believe that the reductionism of the Scriptures takes us to a place where we live a ‘light’ gospel. But this bumper sticker really struck me a few days later. During the week after I saw the bumper sticker, I began working on the remodeling of the second floor of Urban Grace Church, where CTM’s office in Tacoma is located. I was doing some painting, cleaning and other activities that come with any reconditioning process. One of the hardest things was sanding floors, which can become extremely tedious and exhausting. But, as we say in the world of nonprofits: “It’s all part of the internship.”

While I was working on the hardwood floors I recalled that Jesus has been called by the Christian tradition, the ‘son of the carpenter.’ I assume that as the son of a carpenter he had some experience working with wood because it was his father’s occupation. As I have been studying the Scandal of the Cross recently, it suddenly seemed to me that there is a clear connection between who Jesus was, a carpenter, and what the cross is, a piece of wood. What an interesting thing, to be part of a religious tradition that has as its savior a simple carpenter who died hanging on a piece of wood. Couldn’t Jesus, being God, have chosen a different profession? I mean, the Messiah, a carpenter? Come on! How ironic!

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Oh what a difference a few months and a huge natural disaster can make in the mission of a theological seminary. Roughly a year ago, Mario Matos (Center for Transforming Mission Dominican Republic Director) and I sat around a table in Haiti with the leadership of a prominent seminary who called us into a meeting after a presentation we had been asked to make of the CTM training process for grassroots leaders to about 100 students and Haitian leaders. The seminary campus was surrounded by an ominous wall separating its tranquil learning environment from two expansive urban slums that literally sandwiched the campus on either side.

In an office with the seminary president and the rest of the executive team we learned about considerations of moving the seminary from its current location because of the rising delinquency and violence around them. In reference to our presentation on incarnational mission that we had just concluded, they held up their mission statement that said something about their call to train pastors and Christian leaders for community transformation and stated that if they indeed fled from their current location they would in effect be turning their backs on the very mission they had committed to instill in the students they served. They poignantly asked, “Can you help us learn how to engage and connect with the slums around us that are threatening to choke out our existence here?”

Shortly after that meeting, we received a tour of the beautiful seminary campus and were invited to visit a local pastor by passing into one of the two slums adjacent to the seminary. We entered the slum only after passing through a metal door painted red that was locked and guarded by a security guard.

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