in 2024 America and in much of Europe, if you hear "Christianity" it ain't Christ they're talking about

Jacob Did More Than He Knew - A Mid-Lent post

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 66; Genesis 48:8-22; Romams 8:11-25; John 6:27-40

Spirit of God, who stirs beyond our safe categories and our usual assumptions, give us attentiveness to your surging newness, that we may receive your stunning emancipation that moves in and through our practiced futility.  In his name. Amen

The aged Jacob transmits the blessing to his grandsons Manasseh and Ephraim.  He does so by laying on hands.  At the last moment, however, he inexplicably crosses his hands so that his right hand (of power) is laid on the head of his younger grandson.  The crossing of his hands to reverse the blessing is unexplained.  We do not know if it was luck or providence or the puckish way of an old man.  When Joseph protests this reversal, father Jacob only affirms the outcome of the blessing for the future.  Jacob's act was revolutionary.  It violated all the old habits that protected the privilege of the firstborn.  This overthrow of conventional privilege by a puckish act offers a harbinger of the acts of freedom that are characteristic of the gospel.

In Paul's wondrous lyric, it is as though the creation is hemmed in in futile ways, but the glorious liberty given by God will prepare creation permit an emancipation of all creation, including our bodies.  In the Gospel narrative, Jesus, in elusive working breaks free of all old "bread routines" to assert that he himself is "the true bread from heaven" that violates all conventional categories.

In the church's run-up to Easter, it is worthwhile to ponder how it is that that the creation - and our daily experience of it -is so much an enterprise of futility in which we regularly make all the conventional moves of coercion, fear, frustration, anxiety, and alienation.  This is the daily truth of our lives that is abruptly and deeply interrupted by the power of God.  Jacob did more than he knew.  He exemplified the opening of the world to new possibility that in the Gospel is termed "eternal life."  

Walter Brueggemann, Gift and Task

I had been doing a series of online Lent "retreats" for 2024 that started out good and then went into a rather pedestrian bunch of daily posts on the series of "mysteries" latterly attached to the rosary, which I found entirely uninspired.  

Instead, and off line most of the past couple of weeks, I've turned to the book by Brueggemann in which he has daily short prayers and sermons for everyday, using the Episcopal lectionary for "year 2".  I don't know where the Episcopalians are in their lectionary cycle this year but I figure that doesn't need to concern me.

This particular one for yesterday really struck a cord for me so I decided to type it out and post it in full.

The idea that the act of putting the last first by the father of the Children of Israel is a precedent for the gospel of Jesus which over and over again turns the expected world upside down, for its time and, when rightly used, today, is something that the world needs Christianity to recover and hold as its most important practice as well as belief.  And, over and over again, in the established churches, it is exactly what is expected, what is set down as the "right" way to do things, what has become embedded in Catholicism or Southern Baptist or "mainline Protestantism" and, especially, the anti-Christ of the television hallelujah peddlers and the Trumpzi-christofascists, the only hope for the Gospel of Jesus, the teaching of Paul and James, etc. is turning the expected world upside down. That is what not only the Gospel and Epistles, Acts and Revelation are about, it is essential to the Hebrew Scriptures.  Over and over again it is the younger as opposed to the older son who is "chosen" it is the upending and disturbing Prophet who criticizes the Temple and the anointed king and gets himself killed.  It is the Commandment to do justice to the destitute, the lower-class, the alien living among you and, in the Gospel and Epistles, to universalize those obligatory acts against personal advantage, the real religion is found and there is nothing more subversive in human literature and history than when that is taught and that is done.  

And contemporary American Christianity As Seen On TV couldn't be anywhere farther from that than it is.  

The old Zen quip that if you see the Buddha you should kill him could be said in 2024 America and in much of Europe, "If you hear "Christianity" it ain't Christ they're talking about."  It's the Christ killers.