Sunday’s Gospel and reading from Acts describe Jesus’ Ascension. He is encouraging disciples for their new life in the Spirit. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my living witnesses.” Jesus’ living witness is the peaceful “Kingdom of God.” He is encouraging their success in continuing to create peaceful communities here on earth, where warmaking kingdoms of rulers usually succeed.
Institutional Christianity does not always help Jesus’ living witness for peaceful communities to succeed. One reason is that it tends to center on Jesus’ death, both as a success and as a failure. It promotes the belief that Jesus’ dying on the cross is his success – he came to die as a sacrifice for sin. It fails to appreciate Jesus’ death is the successful culmination of rulers’ plot to murder him – precisely to kill his living witness. When institutional Christianity centers not on Jesus’ life but on Jesus’ death, yet not as a murder, and even to glorify it, it is as equally successful as his murderers in killing Jesus’ living witness of peaceful communities. James Cone (1936-2018), who recently passed away, was a successful living witness to Jesus’ peacemaking. He is regarded as a founding father of the groundbreaking Black Liberation Theology – a gospel or, good news, that stands up against slavery, segregation, and lynching. But Cone was unsuccessful in freeing himself from institutional Christianity’s centering on the cross and on failure, “Jesus is a Gospel of ultimate success through obvious failure. That’s why the cross is at the center of the Gospel….Jesus did not succeed. He failed.” However, in 2013 Cone wrote “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” which, while it still reflected a cross centric Gospel, also understood Jesus’ death as a murder. The inherent problem of concentrating on and glorifying the cross, as success or failure, becomes oddly apparent in Mr. Cone’s book. As we cannot under any circumstances glorify the lynching tree, we cannot under any circumstances glorify the cross. No weapon of the masters is at the center of any good news. Our lives are at the center. Bryan Stevenson, Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, is educating people on the master’s weapons against Black lives The Initiative has recently been successful in creating The National Memorial for Peace and Justice which includes a striking Legacy Museum that details the division, persecution, and murder, specifically lynching, forced on Blacks. It is one of the group’s many successful “challenges to racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people.” The Memorial is a successful living witness to peacemaking within a kingdom of rulers whose cross has morphed into the noose and the prison and the justified police shooting (walking, shopping, playing, living,…while Black).
Niccolo Machiavelli, explains the unconscionable nature of rulers’ success, “Whosoever desires success must change his conduct with the times.” White supremacist evangelicals want success in the kingdom of rulers and have presumed to change Jesus’ living peacemaker witness to their falsely anti-Christ-like warrior one. If success is to have any meaning for peacemakers it may lay in the origin of the word. Success means “to come close after,” “a good result.” As peacemakers, we can help create the “good result” of a resurrection “to come close after” every crucifixion, especially those caused by white supremacist evangelicals.
Prayer: Spirit of Peace, we are successful.
Question: What are our successes in peacemaking?
May 13, 2018 Gospel Mark 16:15-20 Ascension