Life Can Emerge from the Stench
Spices are used on the body of the dead. However, what do you do with your spices when there is not a body upon which to put them?
On Resurrection Sunday, we all took a hopeful look at the women who first gathered at the tomb with spices to care for Jesus’ body. Though Jesus told them that He would rise again in three days, they brought their spices on the third day to His tomb anyway. Those spices served two purposes in their context. It subdued the smell of a rotting corpse and anointed the body of a messianic figure.
For years, preachers have told us that “trouble don’t last always.” Preachers have promised that in due season, we will reap if we faint not. Too many of us have believed these preachers and attempted to speak new homes, a livable wage, and better physical health into existence. If you are the preacher who told those lies or the parishioner who believed them, then this note is for you: God never said those things.
Prosperity gospels that place primacy on an exchange between God and God’s children, where we must mindlessly put “down payments” on a life worth living are nothing short of theological malpractice. It negates the love God has for us and the life Jesus demonstrated as He lived a life of revolutionary love and radical community care. Jesus showed us that every person deserves to experience a life of health, wellness, and wholeness. For the millions living in poverty, prison, or under the constant threat of death by militarized police, God’s promise of life has been stolen. To deduce that thievery to a lack of faith demonstrated by praise on Sunday is to liken ourselves to the Roman rulership that lynched Jesus on Calvary’s hill. It is to become agents of the state. Our Sunday services will be a gathering to throw spices to cover the stench of death.
In the last few weeks, we have all had to take a deeper look at what it means to be the church. Who are we when we cannot gather together in physical spaces? Who are we when we cannot mirror the state’s power and control the masses? Who are we when there are no bodies upon which to throw spices?
The church and the rituals we engage are but a smokescreen that aids in the prosperity of the elite if we do not couple our practices with our faith in a God who came to show us what it means to embody a revolutionary love and radical community care at the expense of those in power. At its core, our church was defined by its will to fill the tangible gaps left by imperialist, American oppression in the lives of Black Americans and all of God’s children.
Our mission is “to provide [God’s children] with a well-ordered, spirit-filled, community oriented church committed to morality, justice, and racial equity.” This mission does not require a building. We exist as personified anti-capitalism, anti-poverty exploitation, and anti-imperialism. An extension of our African roots, our ubiquitous nature of religion and the corporate sense of identity is who we are and who we have always been. This season has exposed an opportunity for us to live into our God-given identity.
Instead of praising your way into prosperity, won’t you join with God in the co-mission of bringing about God’s kin-dom on Earth? Our hope lies not in the rituals we ordinarily practice on Sunday mornings but in our will to answer God’s call.
God has not called us to subdue the smells or engage in practices that affirm a divinity we don’t believe. God has called us to follow the example of Jesus in rejecting the order of the state because real lives depend on it. Do not let your rituals be found a waste of time, energy, and resources because you never believed.
We don’t need to throw spices on the stench of our reality. At this moment, we ought to see our reality and recognize that what is, is not all that there is. Our people are hungry. If ever we needed a church to feed families with children home from school that time is now. Our people are dying in prison and socially in their homes. If ever we needed to leverage our resources of lawyers, psychologists, therapists, and teachers to advocate and support the community around us, the time is now. Our people are being crucified by those who were elected to represent them. We need religious leaders who are unafraid to hold political leaders accountable for needless suffering. We must engage in real community asset and community health mapping, respond to the needs, and simultaneously pluck up the roots from which those needs grew.
Our people are unnecessarily dying. I invite you to be a part of God’s bringing forth life out of the stenches.
