Whose Jesus is it anyway?

 

   “Shame on you!  Shame on you!... This is a house of Christ!  All this has nothing to do with Christ!... Read your Bible…!”

   The young man went on yelling as he walked slowly up the aisle with a couple children in tow.  Clearly, he was upset.  Clearly, this wasn’t what he was expecting on this Sunday morning at a church service. 

   Clearly, this wasn’t the right Sunday to be visiting this church seeking a Christ-centered message. 

   I visited the Claremont United Church of Christ this last Sunday, instead of going to Quaker meeting, for the performance of Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music.  As a story in the Claremont Courier noted, this was to be the piece’s West Coast premiere and only its third live performance, with the composer present, and the service was to be “unlike anything the church had done in the past.”

   This I had to see.

   The piece was definitely unique – eerie and very modern, supposedly giving a voice to entities that aren’t usually heard or given a voice.  Not only is the 20-minute work unusual, it is done in an unusual, site-specific way, with the musicians placed throughout the sanctuary, accompanied by the church’s massive organ (which I didn’t really hear).

   But it wasn’t the piece, which turned out to be performed in the second half of the service, that upset the man.  He didn’t even stay for it. 

   The man’s outburst came while Chacon, who is Native American (and the first Native American to be awarded the Pulitzer), was giving a homily or prayer with voice and electronics, a la Laurie Anderson.  It was addressed to “mother” and asked for forgiveness for causing so much destruction of the earth. Not your usual Christian, Sunday morning prayer. (It was so different, so advent-garde, that, at first, I thought the outburst was part of the presentation!)   

   Never mind that, up until that, there had been much focus on Dia de los Muertos and honoring the dead.  What’s more, on this day before Halloween, there were children dressed up as princesses, witches and goblins. 

   All this – never mind the Voiceless Mass performance – was too much for the man.  Clearly, this was, for him, not what Christ is about. 

   Clearly, his Jesus wasn’t one that encouraged openness – and most likely one that wouldn’t approve of me, a gay man, much less at a Sunday service.  His concept of Jesus was rigid and restrictive, not one that provides a safe space to explore and discuss different ideas, identities and views.  One of the ministers, who followed him out of the sanctuary, said later that the man was a first-time attender – oops! Wrong Sunday, maybe the wrong church, to visit! – and that his protest was a reminder of, “a testimony to,” the importance of having a loving, open community wherein all are embraced.

   When another man in the congregation shouted to the protesting man to “go home,” it certainly didn’t model this vision of radical inclusion.  But it definitely added to the drama – and the challenge – of this Sunday morning.