Holy Seasons Are a Call to Question the Unholiness of Society

From Repairers of the Breach (https://www.breachrepairers.org/):

Shared by Rev. Dr. William Barber

This is a powerful moment for faith and for religion. It is a powerful reflective moment. It is a time for us to use every tool we have available to us through social media to gather and to gather our strength so that we can exhibit these holy virtues in a time that it’s so needed, when we see so much public idolatry and self-worship and the viruses of greed and lies.

As tens of millions live under stay-at-home orders, we now call grocery workers, janitors in hospitals, fast food and other service workers “essential.” But our society does not ensure their paid sick leave, we deny them living wages, and we do not guarantee them access to healthcare if and when they do get sick. It’s one of the underlying conditions this pandemic is exposing, and it endangers all of us.

Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are holy observances that affirm the sacredness of life. Our religious traditions insist upon care for the vulnerable and outcast while affirming interconnection.

Sometimes in the midst of pain, something very unusual happens and that is the very moment that people get up and nothing is the same afterward.

This Holy Season requires a moral response to this pandemic. The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival partnered again with our MoveOn family yesterday, for an important conversation, “Moral Revolution: An Interfaith Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic,” with fellow Co-Chair, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis; Imam Omar Suleiman, Founder and President of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research; Rev. Terri Hord Owens, General Minister and President, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); Rabbi Michael Lerner, Founder, Tikkun Magazine and Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun; and facilitated by Reggie Hubbard from MoveOn. Watch here:

Thousands joined us online last evening for a special Good Friday “7 Last Sayings of Christ” service, featuring seven faith leaders from across the country, entitled “Christ’s Crucifixion and the Crises of Coronavirus,” Watch here:

Join me on Resurrection Sunday morning, April 12, for a special Easter sermon live from Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, NC. Watch here:

https://www.facebook.com/RevDrBarber/videos/639812170206623/?t=6

These holy seasons are a call to question the unholiness of society and to challenge us to do right by the least of these. This is a time of great repentance, so that we can have a resurrection of moral consciousness in this country and then apply that in our public policies.

Jesus challenged oppression and cared for the poor. We need a resurrection, not of false and derelict worship, but of care for the most vulnerable; a resurrection of the constitutional values that placed “we” before capitulation to corporate greed, and a resurrection of the conviction that we are all endowed by our Creator with the right to live.

P.S. Read the roundtable discussion that I participated in recently with The New York Times Magazine.