Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_schaperd/)
Jesus is not what many people think he is. As a cradle Christian, ordained for nearly forty years in the United Church of Christ, it pains me to see how many people at the gate in need of a healing touch have been driven away from that touch by his identity theft.
Worship should astonish us. That’s why Judson Memorial Church invited a performance artist to play the part of Jesus on Easter Sunday—in the nude.
Does life in our debt-driven political economy make your faith feel fraudulent? Debt cancellation is the biblical norm. We need a jubilee to release us from our shame.
Self-definition is that glorious arrangement of you being you. “Interfaith” is not something a marriage or a person can be. We are still in the twenty-first century and we have parochial homes. A cradle Christian doesn’t stop being a Christian because she marries a Jew nor vice versa. Self-definition is normal, possible, obvious—and intimately necessary.
Occupy has unseated the pragmatic from its throne and replaced it with a mighty emptiness. That emptiness is as pregnant as any womb before fertilization, any wound before its healing, any glass before its filling.
Here I tell you what little I know. I have studied Jesus and preached Jesus and misunderstood Jesus and re-understood Jesus. I have demythologized Jesus and applied “critical theory” to his words.