Gussying Up a Corpse on St. Luke's Day...

Andrew is on the right... 

I remember when I thought Weekend at Bernie's was an amazing movie. I saw it a few years ago and realized that, in reality, my fandom was based primarily on my preadolescent crush on Andrew McCarthy. Still the absurd concept of gussying up a corpse, pretending it's alive, and fooling an island full of party goers has a certain macabre appeal to it. It is this awkward appeal I find myself required to take up as we enter into the feast of St. Luke's this year. I find my ability to crush on Andrew McCarthy, however, lacking for the task.

The Gospel Lesson I am called to proclaim today simply seems hollow:

Jesus unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."  -Luke 4:16-21


Or, to clarify, the Gospel speaks as boldly and critically as it always has, but it rings through the halls of Christian history in an empty hollow manner. I am confronted not by story after story of populations finding freedom and healing at the hands of Christians seeking to spread this gospel but of Christians using the Gospel as a means to imprison and wound population after population over the past 2000 years.

I can only look at this text and see how we have systematically failed to enter into it as a faith. I can only look at this text and see how again and again we take it up more in the sense of keeping the illusion of Bernie alive and less in the sense of being in a relationship with a resurrected Jesus Christ. If Christianity is a farce, a lie some disciples made up about a resurrected god/man, the tellers of that lie are as likely to live out their lives amidst present history as they are to have been the initial twelve disciples.

Postcard Celebrating a Lynching in Duluth, MN

The reality is that if one looks at human history, takes into account the Doctrine of Discovery and its continued implication over the centuries since it was put forward... what we have is a Gospel of systematic imprisonment, wounding, and death. A Gospel that seeks not to bring about a year of jubilee where all systems of debt, indenture, and oppression are ended but a Gospel that seeks consistently to to privilege Christians and oppress and enslave, wound and kill, the non-Christian or the perceived dissident to Christian social and racial norms.

Centuries of such oppression, coinciding with physical and cultural genocide of the non-christian, followed by the break up of the Christian Empires and the faltering of Christendom throughout Western Countries have brought about negative responses to Christians, responses that do escalate to violence and the death of Christians. What must be noted, however, is that Christians started this cycle of violence. What must be noted, however, is that Christians are not the sole victims of this violence. What must be noted is that centuries of Christian violence have created a reality where minorities of every type, religious and other, are now being oppressed and martyred throughout the world.

This is the prison Christianity has created for itself, a prison of our own privilege whose walls are the gears grinding out a bloody cycle of violence. This is the addiction we have acquired as we pumped our veins with the drug of worldly power. This is the venereal disease disease we contracted raping the civilizations of the world.

There is a cure. The Gospel is as sure a cure as it ever has been, but it is a cure we continue to keep on the shelf. We have gone sick for so long that at points it is near impossible to see where healthy tissue begins and diseased tissue ends. Our call is to stop the cycle of violence, not seek to be at its top. Our call is to place aside worldly power, not to be addicted to holding it. Our call is to be chaste, not glut our passions in dominating other faiths and cultures.

So this St. Luke's day I wonder if we can do it... can we actually take ownership of how the prophesy recited by Christ from the scroll calls for ourselves to be laid low, calls for the healing of the wounds we have cut upon others, calls for the freeing of the very peoples we have imprisoned... or will the disease simply overtake us. Shall we continue to be a gussied up corpse carried about the party as we hope no one discovers the truth or shall we be the body of the resurrected Christ, with all the ramifications for our place and privilege in the world that implies.

I pray this St. Luke's Day that at its end Christian History will result to more than the plot of Weekend at Bernie's... because Andrew McCarthy is cute but not that cute. Its time to take off the tinted glasses and account for the fullness of the what we, christians, have done to the world... even if the glare hurts our eyes.