Deja vu
One reason the narrative is on repeat.
Any preaching program that utilizes the Revised Common Lectionary inevitably includes deja vu. This coming Sunday begins Year C. Again. Advent, again.
Last Sunday, November 21, marked the end of Year B. Christ the King Sunday, again.
Planning last Sunday’s sermon led me to look up the history of Christ the King, or Reign of Christ, Sunday. According to Catholic News Agency,
The feast was introduced in the Western liturgical calendar in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, via the encyclical "Quas Primas." Pope Pius XI was about to close the Jubilee year of 1925 in the context of the growing secularist nationalism that followed the fall of European kingdoms after World War I, and decided to establish the solemnity to point to a king "of whose kingdom there shall be no end.”
Seven months before the first celebration of the Feast of Christ the King was observed, the Butler Act was passed making it against the law to teach evolution in Tennessee public schools. Teachers could not teach anything that denied the Biblical account of creation. Two months later John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in public schools on May 9, 1925.
Five days later the Southern Baptist Convention passed its first iteration of the Baptist Faith and Message on May 14, 1925. Prior to 1925 many Southern Baptists utilized the New Hampshire Confession of Faith of 1833.
Two months later Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Scopes was ordered to pay $100 after losing the case before Judge Raulston. One interesting note: Raulston disallowed expert testimony on the scientific theory as he posited that it was Scopes who was on trial and not the theory. The highly publicized, even staged, case exposed the depths of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. Few denominations escaped the effects of this growing division. Modernists did not believe evolution incompatible with the Bible while Fundamentalists did. Divide they did and continue we do.
Deja vu.
Nearly 100 years later State legislatures around the United States are passing laws against Critical Race Theory. One could argue the parallels. Fear drove the Butler Act and fear is driving ongoing legislative efforts. I would dare say many, if not most, legislators care little about what is critical race theory. What is on trial is their loyalty to a form of nation-ism. In other words in the same way Raulston ruled that Scopes was on trial and not a theory, so today legislators are on trial rather than a theory.
Instead of learning with a view to understanding, most have followed a fellow who publicly announced his aim to make critical race theory a tar baby to which any idea he is against sticks. His goal? A new bogeyman to use in service to advancing an ideology that will keep things as they are.
Deja vu.
Pope Pious XI’s introduction of the Feast of Christ the King seems as relevant today as in 1925. We need an ongoing, again, deja vu, rupture that keeps us always looking back to what God reveals about Godself in Jesus and a living forward into that Story that points human beings to their realized humanity in the Way of Jesus and the liberation from all social constructs that diminish God’s self-giving, other-directed love for all.
Here’s to getting to the start of the Story of God, again.