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by Ken Sehested

We have entered Eastertide, the liturgical season beginning with Easter and ending 50 days later on Pentecost (aka Whitsunday). The formulation of this season parallels the period in Judaism between the first day of Pesach (Passover, marking their liberation from Egypt) and the feast of Shavu’ot (Feast of Weeks, both a harvest festival and a commemoration of the giving of Torah at Mount Sinai). Parallel resurrection moments, setting the stage for resulting resurrection movements.

Freedom’s announcement is not a spectator sport. Neither the parting of the sea, nor the rolling of tombstone, is part of some kind of divine service economy. God is not a personal attendant, working for tips (aka piety). God is the Ringleader, the Chief Inciter of the rebellion against the reign of every cruel and merciless force.

There is no resurrection by proxy.* It’s a bet your assets kind of involvement. The baptismal waters are troubled and troublesome.

Eastertide was the period when the early followers of Jesus were forced to recalibrate their messianic expectations. Good Friday’s execution was a crushing blow to their hopes. Despite Jesus’ repeated teachings to the contrary, the apostles still presumed Jesus would be the leader of a divinely-inaugurated coup d’état that would expel Roman occupiers and restore King David’s regal dynasty.

Hadn’t the Hebrew prophets predicted this messianic outcome—confirmed in Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives?

We, even today, are not exempt from the same kind of disorientation caused by the resurrection’s disarranging announcement.

Eastertide as cognitive dissonance

Eastertide is the season for Jesus’ followers to undergo a complete reimagining of the nature of power. It demands a decolonization of the mind and a regeneration of the heart: conception, conviction, and practice operating in tandem, each shaping, correcting, and reinforcing the other. A certain deconstruction is at work, and it is often discomfiting, for we are being stretched and refitted to become suitable couriers of the news that is disturbing before it is good.

Near the very end of Luke’s Gospel, the text records this odd command from Jesus as he prepares to end his resurrectionary appearances to ascend to the Abba.

“I am going to send you what my Father has promised [i.e., the paraclete or Holy Spirit]; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high” (24:49, emphasis added).

Before the community of the resurrection could mobilize, before its power could be unleashed, it first had to undergo formation and instruction—something parallel to the Israelites’ confused wandering prior to receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai.

Why? Because cognitive dissonance—the attempt to hold on to two opposing ideas at the same time—is a very real thing. One conviction has your heart (which means, in biblical terms, your pocked book); the other is just for public relations.

Former Senate Majority Trent Lott, a faithful, lifetime Southern Baptist, was asked in 2004 about the breaking news of brutal torturing of Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. He responded, “This is not Sunday school . . . this is rough stuff.” The Jesus story has no real traction in public life.

Two decades before, in the U.S. Supreme Court Lynch v. Donnelly decision, Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled that a city-sponsored Christmas nativity display is “a passive symbol,” that it “engenders a friendly community spirit,” and “serves the commercial interests” of merchants.

Eastertide as reorientation

In “the world” (the disordered condition of creation), we are constantly being offered counterfeit assurances: You get what you deserve; you are what you own; only the strong survive; eat or be eaten. The assertions of the Beatitudes are contradicted at every turn: the poor are shamed; the mourners are taunted; the meek are mocked; the merciful are victimized; the peacemakers are disparaged.

The thing that must be rectified before power “from on high” (i.e., not susceptible to manipulative human authority) can be granted, the discrepancy between what our eyes have been trained to see, our ears schooled to hear, must be retrained. In other words, we have been brainwashed. Or to use another metaphor: Before we can be comprehend the beatific vision by which we have been called, the warped neural pathways in our brains need to be disentangled in order to see where the Spirit is breaking out, to hear what the Spirit’s is declaring, to understand our marching orders.

As Mark Twain put it, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

Like all of the church’s liturgical seasons, Eastertide is not one and done. As with the formation of our faith, we learn bit by bit, by repetitive effort, a process that is not judged by achievement but by perseverance.

In Luke’s story, after Jesus was baptized, the Divine Breath descended on him “as a dove” and as a “voice from heaven.” Then the text offers a lengthy genealogy, tracing Jesus’ lineage and career back to Creation’s story of origin. In his storyline, something distinctive is occurring; but it is not novel. The narrative traces back to “in the beginning,” when the first Breath of God “swept over the face of the waters.”

After that came the desert’s confirmation class, where assumptions about power were clarified. The wilderness was his catechesis. Not until those lessons were learned was Jesus’ anointment completed with his being “filled with the power of the spirit”—a power contradicting every earthly supremacist claim.

That indwelling led to Jesus’ inaugural sermon. The congregation’s initial response was pride over a hometown boy made good, who recited venerated lines from the revered Prophet Isaiah. In his commentary, however—in bringing the text to bear on history’s details—Jesus veered from assumed Israel-first piety by telling a story of God’s privileging the needs of those in sh*thole countries. Hearing that, the crowd’s mood got ugly, and they were “filled with rage.” It was an affront—then as now—to hear that being chosen does not entail hoarding Heaven’s affection.

Pentecostal preparation

Eastertide is the season when we learn to tell a different story about a different configuration of power, inside out, upside down, the envisioning of a commonwealth that flips the script of every predatory claim of entitlement. Jesus’ lordship upends and overthrows lording of every sort.

Pentecost is when we take Easter to the streets, and the streets are still mean. But the Apostles’ power—with the granting of fiery nerve and inspired breath upon earth’s turbid disorder—inaugurates the Spirit’s incursion against every affront to Creation’s intent and the Beloved Community’s surety.

Eastertide’s preparation is for the Spirit’s outing of the church at Pentecost. There will be scandal; indeed the world’s current innkeepers will declare “no room” and will demand that we keep our noses out of its business.

The Way of the Cross still leads home, sisters and brothers; but we are not left bereft. Attend to Eastertide’s tutoring. The tomb’s seal has been broken. The Comforter is present to sustain, to animate, to inform, and to incite the little flock of Jesus—not for exclusionary claim to the Beloved’s deference but for extravagant announcement of Mercy’s mending power, restoring the maimed and shamed (and all who find no “home” in the world’s present ordering), readying the table of refuge and bounty for the age to come.

Alas, sorrow’s governance remains. In the ordinary days that follow in the wake of Pentecost’s tide, the names of additional martyrs will be added to our All Saints’ Day recitals. The rule of terror continues, by state and statute and commercial decree and collateral damage. Zion’s true songs of praise are heard as threat since angels’ good tidings and joy’s insurgence cannot be brokered or patented or rationed.

If left to our own resolve, the weight of woe would overwhelm even the strongest. But the Spirit has smuggled provisions through enemy lines. The attentive will spot clues of their whereabouts. The virtue of hope and the victual of sustenance have been readied. The supply chain, though constantly harried, has not been broken.

The facts on the ground do not have the last word, though this cannot be verified by existing calculus. Cheating death is what we do—not from moral heroism but because joy’s embrace is more resilient than grief’s restraint.

Be joyful, friends, though you have considered the facts.** Come out. Be seen. Pitch your tent in compassionate proximity to the disdained. In learning their names you will discover your own; and from their voices, discern what needs doing.

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*the phrase is from Vincent Harding
**line from Wendell Berry

by Ken Sehested

I can almost smell the acrid, thick smoke of diesel engines powering Russian tanks, personnel carriers, and trucks hauling heavy artillery into two eastern provinces of Ukraine’s border with Russia. This afternoon Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the two provinces as “independent states,” and that he was sending in “peacekeeper” troops to protect ethnic Russians in the region.

It’s likely the halls of the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon will stay on all night with a company of aides following up-to-the-minute news and crafting President Biden’s response. The same goes for European and Russian leaders. Dawn is already breaking for many of them.

Ash Wednesday came early for the Roman Catholics in Ukraine. Most Orthodox communions do not observe Ash Wednesday. Their Lenten season, starting this year with a “Forgiveness” vesper service on Sunday evening, 6 March, which is followed by “Clean Monday,” whose liturgical functions is similar to Ash Wednesday.

The Scriptural text for Clean Monday is the memorable lines from Isaiah 1, which begins with YAHWEH’s denouncing religious posturing. “I have had enough of burnt offerings . . . your incense is an abomination to me . . . . I cannot endure your solemn assemblies . . . even though you say many prayers.”

Why? Because “your hands are full of blood.”

Those of vigorous piety love verse 18 of this chapter: “Come, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” Growing up I never heard the preceding lines: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, plead for the widow.”

The prelude to God’s beautiful salvific offer is ignored.

So, yet again the elaborate rituals inaugurating Lent will be staged with bloody hands. The penitential promise will again be ignored. Sacred music will compete with the loud recoil of guns. Sackcloth and ashes will be replaced with body armor. Ukrainian and Russians will offer competing prayers for safety and victory. The gods of redemptive violence will receive all the offerings.

Who indeed can save us from this body of death?

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by Ken Sehested

The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, commonly referred to as Christ the King Sunday (aka Reign of Christ Sunday) is among the newer observances in the church’s lectionary calendar. It was promulgated by Roman Catholic Pope Pius XI in 1925, as a reaction to the perceived growth of secularism, escalating nationalism, and surging anti-clericalism. As it now stands, it is the final Sunday in the lectionary calendar, ushering in a new “year” beginning with Advent.

Numerous other denominations, which follow the Revised Common Lectionary, also observe the day as the culmination of the annual narrative of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection.

As is the case with most every liturgical observance, this Sunday’s focus has both redemptive and reactionary overtones and implications.

Obviously, all kingly and lordly language is problematic because of inherent misogyny, upholding the historic subjugation of and indignity toward women. In addition, such language upholds the legitimacy of feudal rule in human affairs. The absolute rule of kings and assorted other potentates is said to be divinely patterned and codified according to heavenly precedent.

As in heaven, so on earth. By implication, the notion that “outside the church there is no salvation” became sanction for the church’s exclusive, domineering authority.

This intertwining of heavenly and earthly rule is explicitly asserted by Scottish-English King James I when, in responding to dissident pastor Thomas Helwys’ rejection of the royal religious authority, the king responded “It would be only half a king who controlled his subjects’ bodies but not their souls.”

It would take many generations of discrimination, oppression, exile, torture, and martyrdom to bring about a democratizing of access to the Holy.

Nevertheless, Pius XI’s stipulation of a “Christ the King” observance can also be interpreted in a way that bolsters, rather than hinders, resistance to monarchal privilege and virulent nationalisms of every kind. We can rightfully say that Jesus’ “lordship” undermines and destabilizes every form of lording. And the nature of such lordship highlights the Gospel of nonviolent resistance to all oligarchic pretenders.

In her recent article in Sojourners magazine, T. Denise Anderson reminds that in 1925, Adolf Hitler published the first volume of his manifesto, Mein Kampf, where he lays the foundation of his racially supremacist views. Also in 1925, 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, DC. Thought at that time to be the largest fraternal organization in the country, they were already using their “America First” slogan.

In this same period Benito Mussolini assumed power as the fascist dictator of Italy. Joseph Stalin had succeeded Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union. Francisco Franco was rising through the ranks of the Spanish military, on his way to establishing his militaristic dictatorship.

Nationalism was contagious, and authoritarian leadership was in epidemic, prompted in part by the chaos and industrialized belligerence of World War I.

In John’s Gospel, when Pilate asks him about his kingship, Jesus replies “My kingdom is not of this world” (18:36). The “world” to which he referred was not the earth. Rather, the world is that complex web of relationships built on exploitation, jealousy, fraud, and violence. Adding, if it were (based on this world order), “my followers would fight” and violently resist arrest.

A few verses prior, Jesus rebukes Peter’s act of violent resistance. In Matthew’s telling of Peter’s impulsive reaction and Jesus’ rebuke, Jesus says he could, if he chose, easily mobilize 12 legions of angels to assure his rescue.

The rejection of every myth of redemptive violence is already underscored in this Sunday’s lectionary reading from Psalms, including the claim that God breaks bows, shatters spears, and makes wars to cease,(46); and in Luke’s testimony, redemption comes by way of mercy rather than martial prowess, to “guide our feet into the path of peace” (1:77-79).

“In him,” the author of Colossians insists, “all things hold together” (1:17). Only under the Way of Jesus/Sway of Christ and its beatific vision of a Beloved Community can the grisly rule of imperial power and dynastic reign be rescinded and displaced. Such is our eschatological confession over the coherence of all creation: no sovereign but the Abba of Jesus.

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by Ken Sehested

At sunset tonight, Muslims around the world begin their observance of Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, which entails fasting (during daylight hours), a renewed focus on prayer and meditation on the Qur’an, and communal generosity. These behavioral admonitions broadly resemble the Christian emphases of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving during Lent.

Such ascetic practices are sometimes understood as a condemnation of all human desiring, as if “spiritual” life and “fleshly” are polar opposites.

Such is not the case. What is the case is that human desiring often disorients and confuses spiritual life. Instead of fostering neighborliness, disorderly desires encourage antagonism, greed, and acrimony.

Creation’s abundant blessing—”May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine” (Genesis 27:28)—devolves into a curse—”[P]ride is the necklace [of the wicked]; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression (Psalm 73:6-8).

Yes, ascetic practices can themselves become twisted and tortuous. As if God is a sadist and in need of appeasement by means of masochistic acts of human self-denial. As if faith is a surrender to torture. As if spiritual growth is accomplished by bodily distress. As if penitence is reduced to self-flagellation.

In the end, it is a party, not a purge, to which we are oriented. Doing so requires that we humans regularly find ways to check our appetites. In the end, none of us enter Paradise alone but only in the company of those previously deemed unwelcomed or unworthy to sit at the Table of Plenty.

Gloria Dei est vivens homo! (“The glory of God is the human fully alive.”) —St. Irenaeus, 2nd century church leader, in “Against Heresies, c. 185 CE

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by Ken Sehested

I have a vivid memory of the exact moment. I was in seminary, having fled my native South to New York City to finish college and seminary, embarrassed at being a Baptist, at being a white Southerner, and not entirely sure if I was a believer. But the God question wouldn’t go away.

A mighty wrestling match was underway in my soul, trying to come to terms with my adolescent “youth revival” preacher days. Neither the Civil Rights nor the anti-Vietnam War movements had disturbed my piously-furrowed brow.

One Saturday in high school, starting a Saturday 12-hour shift pumping gas and washing cars, I was transferring product displays and stacks of new tires outside as we prepared to open shortly before dawn. I overheard the radio saying something about Martin Luther King Jr.

That Martin Luther King, he ain’t no Christian,” the station owner muttered toward the radio. Everywhere he go there’s trouble.

It would be years before it occurred to me the same was likely said about Jesus.

Entering seminary, I became a voracious reader of the history, details and figures of the Civil Rights Movement era.

Then came that vivid moment. I had purchased one of those over-sized books of photos of Dr. King and other civil rights moments and luminaries. Flipping through, I turned to a photo showing Dr. King and his wife Coretta sitting at a piano, their infant daughter Yolanda perched on Martin’s lap as he and Coretta sang from an open hymnal.

The cover title was clear. It was the Broadman Hymnal. The hymnal I grew up with. Published by the Southern Baptist Convention (the same body whose Executive Committee voted down a resolution of sympathy to members of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, one day after the terrorist bombing in 1963 that killed four young children).

At one time I could quote from memory the page number of dozens of titles in that hymnal. As I came to discover, a good many churches that hosted Civil Rights Movement mass meetings—churches that were threatened by cross-burning Klan torches—did their singing from the Broadman. And I also learned that terrorism on American soil has a long history.

That moment—that photo—stands among my life’s greatest epiphanies. I came to realize that the language of faith can have many different, even competing meanings, just as any chemical compound, minus even one element, turns into something else altogether.

The annual commemoration of Dr. King’s birthday provides a perennial occasion to remember the dream that still beckons both church and civil society. And not just in the US: I’ve listened to children in Baghdad sing “We Shall Overcome” in Arabic, and read similar accounts from the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, to South Africa’s Soweto Township. A comic book-style telling of the Montgomery bus boycott, first published in 1958, was translated into Arabic in 2008 and circulated widely during the “Arab Spring” democracy movement in North Africa.

Yet Dr. King was not assassinated because he was a dreamer, though the national holiday-makers have largely domesticated and smoothed over the threat he represented. (“The most dangerous negro in the country,” according to the FBI’s assessment.)

We forget that by the time he was assassinated, his favorable public opinion polling had plummeted to 33%. We forget that his last major speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” when he openly condemned the U.S. war in Vietnam, he charged that our nation was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

After prophets die, we mold their memory to suit our purposes. We ladle praise on them and put them on pedestals—as a way to distance ourselves from them. There is some truth in that old canard: “A conservative is someone who admires a dead radical.”

Admiring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is not the same as being captured by it. It is not only possible but common to respect the man but relinquish the mission, to revere the dreamer but renege on the dream . . . such that it turns into something else entirely.

The biggest mistake we make is using the King Birthday observance as the occasion to heap accolades on his memory. Diane Nash, one of the many unheralded leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, says it well:

“If people think that it was Martin Luther King’s movement, then today they—young people—are more likely to say, ‘gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us.’ If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, “What can I do?’”

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by Ken Sehested

Advent is the Christian season when the threat of terror and the prospect of trust collide, both competing for our attention regarding prospects for the future. Will it be more of the same; only intensified?

In all times and places the dominant cultural voices (secular and religious) have denied that history will ever break free of its orbit of pain, suffering, and loss—as if history has its own unbreakable sway of gravity. They are called the “realists,” and they champion charity to suppress the demands of justice. Though the church will occasionally read the Beatitudes in public, few put much stock in such a future.

There’s no better summary of such popular wisdom than by the cheeky comment of Countess Violet Crawly (played by Maggie Smith) in the television show, “Downton Abby.”

“Hope,” the Countess insisted, “is a tease to keep us from accepting reality.”

Famously, the Apostle Paul confronted what the realists called “foolishness” with his affirmation that God’s foolishness can be trusted. According to him (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18-30), the Gospel announcement is that another world is not only possible but is in fact on its way—present already in those with open rather than grasping hands—as the aperitif of an era beyond scorched time.

In Latin, there are two words for the future. Futurus suggests a future constructed out of the past and present. Futurologists are those who rely on extrapolations from present trends, indicators that lean toward sustaining present patterns of power and suppressing alternative visions.

The word adventus, on the other hand, suggests the arrival of the new. Certainly for Christians, the season of Advent brings us to the edge of our chairs, straining for the sound of the announcement of annulment for earth’s agony. This waiting and watching is neither neutral nor passive. It is sustained by a bias, one that governing authorities fear, who want only futurus, more of the same.

Advent is the seasonal marking of adventus faith, formed by the beatific vision of a future beyond all currently available calculations, one that can be receiving only by those with unclenched fists and unclasped hearts, one that does not obliterate creatureliness but arises from its compost.

The stories we tell and songs we sing in our sanctuaries remind us that buoyancy emerges from unseen places, at unknowing moments, in unpredictable ways, beyond present reckoning and prognostication.

The present world’s futurus rulers always want to limit what is possible to what is available. Adventus people instinctively know that reality will not be bridled by apparent history and its imperial champions.

Advent is the invitation to attentiveness even when the sap isn’t running, in the face of a howling cold wind and the frightful dark night.

So, kindred, carpe noctem—sieze the night.

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by Ken Sehested

Easter is God’s resurrection moment; Pentecost is God’s resurrection movement, the birthday of the church, the shock troops of the Kingdom. On Easter God declares divine intention; on Pentecost God deploys divine insurgents. On Easter God announces the invasion; Pentecost is when God establishes a beachhead. At Easter God announces, “I Have a Dream.” On Pentecost Sunday, the marchers line up, the police close in, the first tear gas canisters fly, the first arrests are made. But the people of God keep on marching, heading for the courthouse, headed for the White House, headed for the jail house, headed for the school house, headed for the big house. Headed for every house that’s not built on the solid rock of God’s righteousness, God’s justice; headed for every house that’s been stolen from the hands that built it; headed for every house in every segregated neighborhood; headed for every house that shelters oppression, every house that welcomes bigotry, every house that schemes violence.

“For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,” said Isaiah, “and the Lord looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry! Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land” (5:7-8).

“Therefore,” says Amos, “because you trample upon the poor and take from them exactions of wheat, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not dwell in them” (5:11)

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus warned, “for you devour widows houses and for a pretense you make long prayers” (Matt. 23:14).

But at Pentecost, the stolen house, the segregated housed, the house of oppression, even the big house is slated for redemption. Recall this description of the houses of the first Pentecostal powered community: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34).

Pentecostal power is an assault on segregation; Pentecostal power is antagonistic to apartheid; Pentecostal power extinguishes ethnic cleansing; Pentecostal power negates nationalism; Pentecostal power wreaks havoc on racism; Pentecostal power triumphs over tribalisms of every kind.

Now, notice here—and this is very important—the Pentecost story in Acts doesn’t say everyone suddenly started speaking the same language. Pentecost does not destroy the various distinctives between and among people. But the story does affirm that these differences are brought under the binding power of the Holy Spirit. They can no longer claim autonomy. They are no longer barriers to community. They are now in the service of God—the very God who repeatedly, time after time after time, has acted to nudge creation back to its purpose in Genesis.

Pentecostal power is the power to overcome ancient hostility, to gather the excluded, to scale the walls of social, racial, even class divisions. Between gay and straight.

I’m convinced that Pentecost is now the most important season for us as Christians. The true energy of Easter is more than, is fundamentally different from the “sugar high” you get from eating chocolate Easter bunnies. That kind of energy burns off within hours, leaving us weary, exhausted. That kind of energy is quickly dissipated. Within a week the Body of Christ is dragging its sparse remnants to a half-hearted post-Easter Sunday service. The resurrection moment is producing very little movement.

A cynical journalist once wrote that a conservative is someone who worships a dead radical. Dead radicals can’t bother us anymore. We quickly domesticate their memories, kind of like the way we do with Dr. King. Of course, we don’t think of Jesus as dead; but he does seem to be safely tucked away in heaven. And from a lot of the preaching I hear, you’d think our job is simply to convince people they need to start making payments on a ticket to join him there when they die. No threatening movement seems to occur when Pentecostal power is preached from our pulpits.

By and large the believing community has become strangers to the power Jesus promised. The subversive character of his life has been entombed in memorial societies we call churches. We revere his memory but we renege on his mission. The proclamation of the Gospel no longer threatens the new world order our leaders envision for us. The erupting, disrupting flow of Pentecostal power has been pacified, rendered harmless, packaged for television broadcast.

There was a time when the redemptive power activated at Pentecost was the power to mend the rips within our social fabric, to restore splintered relationships, to repair broken communities. Pentecostal power once indicated the power to stand in the cracks, to face the hostilities without fear, to confess, repent and repair.

Among the names for God in Scripture is one that means “Advocate.” Or, you could say, “Counsel for the Defense.” In other words, someone who is For Us, a Divine Protagonist—not to get us or trap us or force us into embrace. But One who is in the process of turning us all toward each other, even to our enemies. A Protagonist who lets us in on the divine secret: the world is headed for a party, not a purge. A Protagonist who assures us that we can risk much because we are safe, that nothing—not even death—can forestall the divine purpose of redemption.

This Protagonist, the Holy Spirit, this wind and fire, is taking us into the very heart of God’s and God’s purposes, aligning us with divine intention for creation. In the Pentecostal movement, God is pitching a tent in our midst.

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by Ken Sehested

There was a period of years, decades ago, when I experienced a crippling sense of personal shame and social despair when realizing my own complicity in systemic racism. The shame wasn’t because I had enslaved anyone; or had committed blatant acts of discrimination.

It was because I realized how clueless I was. And if I was this clueless in this regard, chances were I was equally clueless about a whole range of other forms of unconscious bias.

Simultaneously I feared that the same applied to larger society, that we as a people were also structurally complicit, trapped in a naiveté that prevented us seeing the truth about our wounded history that continues to color current behavior.

There came a time, though, when, in quick succession, I came across quotes from three of my heroes that bore me up from the sloughs of shame and despair. Not to make me innocent, but to allow me to be responsible, able-to-respond, freed from humiliation’s disabling power to move forward with courage and perseverance for the work of repair.

The first liberating quote is from James Baldwin, writing in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For those innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

The second quote is from Maya Angelou.

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it,” and “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Finally, one from Malcolm X himself.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”

Each of these are grace notes, hopeful disclosures, stemming from the pivotal word embraced by people of faith: Repentance is not for punishment but for the power of beginning again. Not with a clean slate—we will ever bear our scars. And certainly not as a one-off occasion: Penitential living is a daily commitment and a life long process.

But the goodness of the Good News is that we can begin again, we can orient ourselves and our society toward the holiness which radiates neighborliness, restoring right relations and just kinship and social policies, knitting together the warp of Heaven with the woof of Earth.

Only by such grace-impelled, hope-provoked work—and it is laborious, sometimes sweaty, difficult, persevering, frustrating work—can we be saved.

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by Ken Sehested

 Advent is a season of great longing, specifically for those longing “from below” of history’s malignant dominion.

The longing is a revolutionary one, however, and frightening to those in charge, who have much to lose if existing hierarchies are breached. Such anxiety is what fueled Herod’s terror against male infants in and around Bethlehem.

This narrative parallels the ancient scene in Egypt when Pharaoh, sensing an internal threat, orders the Hebrew midwives to kill Israelite baby boys.

That narrative is the first case of civil disobedience recorded in Scripture, though the names of the two who conned Pharaoh – Shiphrah and Puah – are rarely invoked.

Those in power long for continuity; and, given the current state of the U.S., that longing is more like an anxiety.

Yet, the promise is made specifically and only to “those that sit in darkness.”

Both Herod, and previously Pharaoh, were terrified by this longing, as were all who aligned with their respective regimes.

In 2020, the U.S. admitted only 12,000 refugees, down from 207,000 welcomed in 1980, when the formal U.S. Refugee Act was initially approved.

To those in power now, undocumented immigrants are the ones to fear; though large sectors of our economy are dependent on immigrants’ cheap labor.

I spent several years laboring as a stonemason, for $10 per hour doing very strenuous work. Then my boss found out he could hire an undocumented laborer from Mexico for $8 per hour.

“Nothing personal,” he told me.

Foreign governments haven’t stolen our jobs. Business leaders in the U.S. have simply obeyed the logic of predatory capitalism.

I recently purchased new undergarments manufactured by a major U.S. brand name. The briefs were made in Vietnam; the t-shirts, in Haiti.

And I finally joined the cellphone age, with an iPhone assembled in China. Much of the world knows that much of the cobalt needed for lithium batteries is mined under harsh conditions in war-torn parts of Africa.

The Christmas story in the Gospels is a story of terrorism. And the Gospel authors are clear that competing claims are being made.

Consider this background to the language surrounding Jesus’ birth, which describes the ideological conflict being played out.

We sometimes forget the backdrop to the nativity story, particularly of the great Caesar Augustus who ruled much of the known world. Many inscriptions describing Caesar’s divine status can still be found.

There you can read about the “gospel” – literally, euangelion, the same root word in Greek we Christians use when we speak of evangelism.

In Rome’s imperial world, gospel was the good news of Caesar’s having established “peace and security for the world.”

Before Jesus, Caesar was described as a “savior” who brought “salvation” to the world. Because of this, citizens were to have “faith” in their “lord.” The words “faith” and “lord” are the same ones in the Jesus story.

Elsewhere, Caesar is referred to as the “redeemer” who has “saved the world” from war and established “peace on the earth.”

Do you see where this is going? Can you feel the sharp relief of those nativity stories rising from the ornamental rendering we give them each Christmas?

The birth narratives are more than sweet lullabies. These are incendiary stories. They are bold contradictions to Roman imperial authority.

No wonder Herod was troubled when the magi told him of the birth of a new king!

All of which is to say, Advent and Christmas are dangerous seasons, when competing visions and loyalties go head-to-head.

Jesus’ birth was considered a subversion of present arrangements. It is no less so now — though Christmas itself has been thoroughly domesticated to serve reigning economic and political purposes.

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