Jesus Walks: A Kanye West Lenten Devotional by Kenji Kuramitsu

Jesus Walks:
A Kanye West Lenten Devotional

Kenji Kuramitsu

Day 1 of 5: Back to the Dirt — “No Church in the Wild”

“No Church in the Wild” (Watch the Throne):

“Human beings in a mob. What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a nonbeliever that don’t believe in anything?”

Psalm 8: 5-9 (CEB)

You’ve made them only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
putting everything under their feet—
all sheep and all cattle,
the wild animals too,
the birds in the sky,
the fish of the ocean,
everything that travels the pathways of the sea.
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth!

The creation stories in scripture tell us that the breath of God infuses every human life. There is a holiness to our flesh—and beyond us, all of Creation sparkles with divinity. Depending on where you live and where you’ve been, you may have seen sights that have simply snatched your breath: canyons, caverns, crops and crags… Mystery, beauty, and wonder soak the canvas of the natural world and have inspired creativity across the ages.

In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, the writers of the Psalms creatively recount the rhythms of the weather and the land, pointing to the ways that God is glorified through the intensity, goodness, and even brutality raging in the daily spectacle of the earth around us—a spectacle that grows more dire and pronounced in our day, in light of existential threats posed by climate change.

Today’s Psalm observes that humans have divine characteristics, but are also in direct relationship with the things of the earth: “you’ve made them only slightly less than divine.” Some theologians interpret texts like this to sanction a strictly-ordered Great Chain of being—just as rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper, God and angels trump humans, who in turn rule over animals, who, themselves are at least higher than the dirt. Indeed, many Christians have historically argued that human “stewardship” of the universe justifies the subjugation and exploitation of the rest of creation, and we’ve set up all sorts of human hierarchies (such as monarchies and modern corporations) in accordance with this belief.

In “No Church in the Wild,” Kanye West and Jay-Z pose an important question to a world insisting on maintaining these traditional structures of power, even as we face unprecedented environmental catastrophe. In the world we have created, a King takes precedence over a subject; a CEO over a day laborer; and, likewise, humanity rules over the voices of creaturekind. Riffing on the oppressive ranking systems that humans create in the name of the holy, these artist-theologians ask us to consider in what ways our church upholds, rather than disrupts, everyday systems of power. Particularly as the world grinds to a halt around us during the current pandemic, this Lenten season may present us with an opportunity to subvert expectation, through the upside-down ordering of Jesus Christ.

I work in a hospital, where I spent most of Ash Wednesday applying ashes to the foreheads of hundreds of colleagues and strangers. Patients, doctors, food service and cleaning staff, nurses, chaplains, phlebotomists—gathering, for a moment, outside of the rigid classed and racialized roles that rank the halls of medicine—to receive a mark of soil, the lowest thing, as a reminder of our origins and our ends.

The world, and even some of our interpretations of scripture, tell us that dirt is supposed to be at the bottom: worthless, stepped upon, forgotten at the bottom of the ladder. Yet this substance is the saving force of all life. As the food journalist Michael Pollan has argued, the prophet Isaiah was not so far off when he declared that all flesh is grass: all that exists begins with energy that originates “with a particular plant growing in a particular patch of soil… somewhere on earth.”

Church must be a place where we can go down the ladder, down into the dirt. Lent is meant to be a season of confession and repentance. We practice this not only in relation to our own faults and failings, but also alongside our neighbors and all the earth. By faithfully confessing our own complicity in patterns of domination, we may yet be able to more effectively resist all forms of oppression. In an age of rising seas and increasing ecological peril, the call for the church to honor the wild is more urgent than ever.

God, we thank you for hearing us in prayer. Thank you for showing up in the cracks and crevices of our lives. We thank you for your prophets, your artists, all those who point us more towards your Wisdom and Mercy. Unleash a love in us for our earth, for our neighbors, for our fellow creatures. Help us to reject and deconstruct all hierarchies of oppression—especially when they purport to represent you. Amen.

Day 1 of 5: Back to the Dirt — “No Church in the Wild”

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