Holy Disruption: Black Bodies as Sacraments of Transformation
摘要
The centrality of disruption as a graced moment of awakening social imagination to a new dawn where human flourishing becomes a possibility ought to be the focus of the church’s praxes of sacramental rituals. In fact, Christianity is itself a religion of disruption. The God-human reality that manifests itself in Jesus Christ is itself a graced-disruption. God chooses to disrupt the familiar world of fallenness and thus offers God-self as a mediating gift that reorients creation to a new way of being that transcends the familiar orientation toward sin. Disruption as an existential phenomenon is not alien to the human condition. In fact, all aspects of human life are saturated with disruption. In fact, grace is itself God’s disruptive intervention in human history. Since creation embodies the goodness of God, creation can be said to be a sacramental symbol of disruption. In a social world where racism and other structures of marginality operate, victims of such marginalities embody in their existence the disruptive grace that can transform such a society. Black bodies are loci for encountering the disruptive grace intended to end the vice of racism. They also serve as the loci for the church to imagine a new way of being a sacrament of disruption in the world because of their existential proximity to the historical realities defining the life of Jesus Christ as a victim of the hegemony of empire. This chapter shows how black bodies can help foster a new imagination of the human in our contemporary world where systems of marginalization continue to shape human life in general.