I was the guest preacher Tuesday night at St. John's Episcopal Church, our neighboring faith just a few blocks to the southwest. It was an honor to be invited to be part of their Holy Week services. We need allies in this community – and we need to be in community with people who believe and practice differently than we do. It keeps us honest. We Unitarian Universalists can approach faith with a sort of smorgasbord approach, taking what we like and ignoring the dishes we don't like. But I believe that to the extent we approach faith this way, we do so to our own detriment. There is a lot in the world that it might be nice to ignore. It would be nice to live in a world where anti-semitic white supremacists don't exist, but they do, and we must contend with that. And when it comes to religious scripture and difficult stories, those stories and how they've been interpreted have played a significant role in shaping the world in which we find ourselves. We must contend with them. So I asked our friends at St. John's not to shy away from the difficult story of the passion of Jesus. That story and its legacies we must contend with.
You can read my remarks here.
By the way, the most compelling way I know of to read the story of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus is by way of some of the theories of René Girard, a anthropological philosopher. He reads the story as revealing the violence at the center of a strategy for founding community. It equips us with the ability to see when that dynamic is at work, and so to be able to call it out and commit ourselves to a new way to create community based in love and justice. I was introduced to his ideas in seminary, but recently ran across an excellent presentation of those ideas by a UU minister. If you'd like to learn more, read a sermon called “The Jesus Mystery” by the UU minister Tom Schade.
You can read my remarks here.
By the way, the most compelling way I know of to read the story of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus is by way of some of the theories of René Girard, a anthropological philosopher. He reads the story as revealing the violence at the center of a strategy for founding community. It equips us with the ability to see when that dynamic is at work, and so to be able to call it out and commit ourselves to a new way to create community based in love and justice. I was introduced to his ideas in seminary, but recently ran across an excellent presentation of those ideas by a UU minister. If you'd like to learn more, read a sermon called “The Jesus Mystery” by the UU minister Tom Schade.
