Sunday is Passion Sunday, another Holy Week begun. And I am more than usually skeptical about the certainties of Easter. The week’s collection of news stories complicates my skepticism for me — why do I keep at it, I ask myself, when the core beliefs no longer matter to me and the faith has come to seem a system of pale negations, as it did for Emerson. Part of the answer is simply that I do what I do. What I believe has come to be embedded in the ordinary round of my life, my religion more and more a set of qualifications I fully expect to become meaningless upon my death, closer to me now than it once was. The week’s news doesn’t help me much, but here are some stories that, for one reason or another, stand out.

This week the House of Bishops of my church formally consented to the deposition of John-David Schofield and William Cox. The background of both depositions is the complex of disputes about sex and gender in the present-day Episcopal Church. The House of Bishops also this week reacted to news that an invitation to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops is not possible for Bishop Gene Robinson. More sexual politics. In the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis two women who were ordained Roman Catholic Womenpriests were excommunicated, and Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke continued his efforts to remove Fr. Marek Bozek from his position as Pastor at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church.

I’m in the curious position of supporting the deposition of the two former bishops of the Episcopal Church and deploring the attempts of Archbishop Burke to discipline various members of his flock. If I had to play gotcha with some media type, I’d be caught in a drop-dead contradiction; but my two–let’s call them inclinations rather than positions–are embedded in two different histories that only accidentally come together in my experience. And apropos of one of those histories, I am not awaiting the new Pope’s promised challenge to Catholic educators, expected during his trip to the U. S. next month, with any pleasure. Benedict doesn’t have a good record with respect to academic freedom, and recent events adjacent to the SLU campus, here in St. Louis, don’t give me great comfort either.

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was in the news a couple of times this week. First, this video, which Ben Smith calls “deeply racially confrontational,” traveled around the .net, apparently first posted by Fox News. Obama says he “vehemently condemn[s]” the statements in the video in an essay at Huffington Post. They certainly won’t help him get elected or help the United Church of Christ defend itself against the IRS. Funny, the Ferraro comments barely fade from the news and here’s this. It isn’t new, by the way, as Obama points out.

Then there’s this sermon, which I also have from Ben Smith, the sermon from which Obama borrowed the title for his second book, The Audacity of Hope. Smith seems to think the sermon shows a different side of Wright than the one on display in the video, saying the sermon is “much more about private despair and hope than about public life.”

I think The Audacity to Hope has a public dimension, and I also think the sermon fragment I see in the video could be a legitimate prophetic sermon about racism. It isn’t the fact that it is confrontational that is disturbing–it’s the personal attack and the too simple black vs. white argument about Jesus. Still, I share the hope that God knows what it is like to be black in a world run by rich white people, and I share the view that white privilege needs to confront itself. This isn’t a view promulgated just by the United Church of Christ. My own church devotes a special initiative to Dismantling Racism. Many of the materials we use were developed by Mennonites.

So, on Sunday I’ll help read the passion gospel and mark again how the prophetic message has been blunted in Jesus’ sermons and life story, starting with the gospel writers, been rendered “more about private despair and hope than about public life” — for a world that has never liked to be confronted with it’s hypocrisy and injustice. Afterwards I’ll collect my palm and go home, where I’ll put it away on top of the bookshelf.