Competing rights against "discrimination"

The Washington Post recently reported on the clash between religious expression and civil rights of gays.

The Post notes, "Faith organizations and individuals who view homosexuality as sinful and refuse to provide services to gay people are losing a growing number of legal battles that they say are costing them their religious freedom."

As one might expect, advocates on both sides are pushing for more legislation to protect their positions. However, with all constitutional rights, no right is absolute, and there are often reasons for any particular right to give way to a greater purpose.

Holy Week and Easter

One of my pet peeves about Holy Week and Easter is the tendency (urge, perhaps?) of some factions of Christians to turn the commemorations of Jesus's last days into dramatic re-enactments. Recently, Slate.com noted the shortcomings of passion plays and similar dramas in conveying the full message of Jesus.

Why aim for verisimilitude in violence but not in other historical points? The typical Passion-play Jesus, grinning warmly in his bright white robe, doesn't tell us much about the first-century Jewish itinerant whose bold, sometimes bewildering stories and proclamations led him to the Passion path.

Churches should also consider other approaches to storytelling. Their ur-story should be not just epic but multiform. To quote writer and preacher Frederick Buechner, the Gospel is "tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale"—it happens on scales that are grand as well as domestic, historic, comic, mythic, realistic.

And there are also other Jesus stories to tell—including the ones Jesus shared. One famous Gospel phrase is (in the Latin Vulgate) compelle intrare, meaning "compel them to come in." The words come from a stirring parable Jesus told about a rich man who sends invitations for a fabulous dinner party, only to have no one accept. So the rich man has his servants round up "the poor and crippled and blind and lame," ending his pronouncement with a rhetorical flourish: "Compel them to come in." (St. Augustine co-opted the phrase, making it a theological basis for state-sponsored acts against heretics.)

It's Easter. Spring is here, though the calendar doesn't quite match the weather in many places. With the fast of Lent over, churches hoping to share their beliefs could take Jesus' parable as a suggestion: Throw a dinner. Make it lavish. "Go out to the highways and the hedges," as the rich man said, and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame. What kind of story would that tell?

In a related piece, Slate also looked at the history of "Why was Jesus Crucified?"