Why Advent Should Be About Ending the World as We Know It
Reflections on Advent, Rev. Lenny Duncan’s book Dear Church, white supremacy, and capitalism.
As we enter the season of Advent — a future-oriented season, a season of anticipation — I’m looking back.
I’m reflecting on the punctuated equilibrium of viral police killings and lynchings of black people, the protests and outrage, the promises that this time will be different, and the all too predicable forgetting by white America that signals the restart of the cycle.
The COVID-19 crisis made for a bitter backdrop to the most recent run down that road. This time, though, the scales dropped from many peoples’ eyes. Years of work by abolition activists brought discussions of defunding the police into the mainstream.
The pandemic opened eyes to the cruel inadequacy and inequities of a world that ties the basic necessities of survival to work; laid bare in the reality of who gets to do that work from the safety of their home.
It all has me thinking back to a book I’ve read twice now in the last two years: Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US, by Rev. Lenny Duncan.
