Let the cracking open continue: Believing in kenosis,practicing solidarity for the common good

Reflecting amid a global pandemic, severe economic downturn, and a racial justice reckoning, Stephanie Spellers’ The Church Cracked Open offers a compelling critique of the Episcopal Church, and much of dominant American Christianity and the society from which it emerges, for its complicity with empire, white supremacy, and perpetual ties with power and privilege. Grounding her reflections theologically in the gospel story of the woman with the alabaster jar, who breaks the jar open and pours the costly ointment on Jesus’ head, thereby engaging in a powerful and scandalous moment of disruption, Spellers makes sense of this moment to call attention to the deeper ways in which the church, people of faith, and much of the world have been cracked open in an extended pandemic season when our trusted institutions and the ways in which we have engaged with them have been ruptured.

But as much as The Church Cracked Open is a critique of the church as it has formed and currently operates, it is also a love letter. It is an urgent call to faithful action from a deep believer in the liberative essence of Christianity, and in the many possibilities for the Episcopal Church to truly become a Jesus Movement through intentional, consistent praxis—theological reflection and action through kenosis, solidarity, and discipleship. The “cracking open” of the church and of our lives, however painful and traumatic, can be leveraged for the good, as it allows for the structural injustices and spiritual wounds aided and abetted by dominant forms of church to be uncovered, examined, and possibly healed and transformed in the liberating way of Jesus.

As an Episcopal priest, community and labor organizer, and a theologian, I find Spellers’ work to be a wonderful and essential combination of the prophetic and the pastoral—a beautiful example of the kind of authentic, soul-searching, and justice-seeking practical theology and ministry work that our church needs. In this reflection, I will focus on two of the core spiritual and ethical practices that Spellers proposes in the culmination of her book—kenosis and solidarity—asking questions and offering examples of how these practices might show up in our church polity, our places of worship, and in the broader communities in which we minister.

Kenosis is tough in real life

Kenosis is serious business. Jesus modeled a life of kenosis, of self-emptying love for the sake of others and died in an ultimate act of kenosis. This is not cakewalk Christianity that Spellers is calling us to traverse. If this is the model, where does this leave us today? If we are serious about practicing kenosis as a way of being and doing church, then it must be practiced at all levels—personal and interpersonal, individual and collective, and at all levels of the institutional church. As Spellers notes, kenosis means different things for different sectors of our community and church. The recent work of reparations that affluent Episcopal institutions that benefited from the practice of slavery are engaging in is an important step toward practicing kenosis in concrete, material ways. But for black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian (and in particular women, queer, immigrant, and working-class members from communities of color) within the Episcopal Church that have long suffered under oppressive systems that privilege wealthy white, male, and heterosexual members of our community over everyone else, kenosis will play out differently. Attending to the diverse realities of our faith communities will be a key component of concretizing the work of kenosis in our church. For this reason, we need to speak not only of white supremacy but of what writer and activist bell hooks has called “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” ¹ Those are a lot of words put together, but it points to the need for kenotic theology and spirituality to be attuned to the interlocking systems of oppression in lived experience across race, class, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity in our U.S. context.

So what does kenosis look like for those of us who are minoritized members of the Episcopal Church; how do we engage in this self-emptying way of Jesus? I cannot offer a blanket prescription for everyone, but I can share what this has meant for me as a Chicano-Latinx Episcopal priest with Mexican immigrant roots. My work of kenosis has been greatly informed by the philosophy and practice of nonviolent direct action and organizing embodied by the Black and Latinx freedom struggles as modeled by the Rev. James Lawson, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Dolores Huerta, and César Chávez, and the countless unsung heroes who comprised the grassroots movements that they cultivated. From the six principles of nonviolence as taught by Dr. King, I learned to explore the challenging notion (informed by kenosis) that “voluntary suffering can educate and transform.” ²

As part of a community of interfaith leaders, labor, and immigrant rights organizers, we engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience by blocking immigration detention centers that were deporting migrants or transporting them to long-term detention prisons. In community, I experienced the collective power of putting my body on the line for the sake of others by risking arrest and spending time in jail; it was a temporary suffering that paled in comparison to what people faced in the height of the civil rights and liberation struggles of the 1960s, but hopefully it pointed to the need for deeper systems change in our immigration system to alleviate the suffering of immigrant families.

While this kind of action is likely not to appeal to everyone and not possible for everyone, I would argue that our church needs to invest more time, talent, and treasure in training people in community organizing and the philosophy, theology, and practice of nonviolence. What if larger numbers of our denomination, from lay leaders to Bishops, were engaged in spiritually grounded and disciplined nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience at strategic moments and in escalating fashion, as part of a long-haul organizing effort with ecumenical, interfaith, and community partners to challenge the most oppressive forces of our day and create tangible alternatives? This is a growing edge for the Episcopal Church and the kind of kenosis that can lead to real solidarity.

Solidarity: there’s no them, only us

Spellers describes solidarity as “love crossing the borders drawn by self-centrism, in order to enter into the situation of the other, for the purpose of mutual relationship and struggle that heals us all and enacts God’s beloved community.” ³ As she notes with several powerful examples from Vida Scudder to Paul Washington, solidarity in a faith context flows from the initial belief in and practice of kenosis. The notion that kenosis and solidarity are deeply interconnected is a powerful one, and one that I share. Most of my experiences of solidarity have occurred outside of formal church contexts: as a college activist participating in a multiracial movement where white students joined students of color in marches and sit-ins to fight for educational access and equity for underrepresented students of color; as a young labor organizer participating in my first prolonged strike, where I witnessed registered nurses and doctors walk the picket line in support of striking nursing assistants, janitors, and other health care workers; as a lay leader participating in an informal ecumenical faith committee supporting an immigrant family taking sanctuary in a church. The tenet that I learned early on from these examples was the labor movement adage “an injury to one is an injury to all.” This means that if something happens to you, then it also happens to me.

In my view, practicing solidarity requires that we go beyond the idea that kenosis means giving our privilege and power away. It means that we do our own discernment, reflection, and analysis work (as individuals, ministries, parishes, Dioceses, etc.) to understand the places where we have privilege and power, and then leveraging that power and privilege to challenge, disrupt, dismantle, and transform unjust situations and oppressive systems. This is not merely because it is morally the right thing to do but because solidarity also implies that I too am impacted by this injustice in some way, whether directly or indirectly. This is where adding class analysis and intersectional thinking more intently to our conversations and strategizing about challenging white supremacy really matters because it helps us understand that in our present profit-driven economic system (i.e., capitalism), most of us are only a few paychecks away from a financial crisis, and housing and food insecurity as a result. ⁴ The economic downturn that accompanied the pandemic made this quite clear, and the current struggle with inflation in the cost of food, gas, and housing continues to remind us as such.

Solidarity teaches us that despite whatever advanced education and professional titles we may have, we have more in common with the Amazon warehouse worker than with Jeff Bezos or other billionaire CEOs. Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx interpreted God’s very name (I am who I am, or I am concerned with you, Exodus 3:14) as “Solidarity with the People.” ⁵ This is the solidarity of loving our neighbor as ourselves, because we are our neighbor, and they are us. Practically speaking, the way to ensure that solidarity becomes commonplace in our church is to create a relational, organizing-based culture throughout our denominational structures, beginning with the people in our pews. Through a deeper understanding of our common lived material realities, we can come to understand the truths of our interconnected spiritual life.

Stephanie Spellers’ The Church Cracked Open should be required reading for every Episcopalian and Christian who seeks to follow the liberative, loving, compassionate, pastoral, and prophetic way of Jesus. To deepen our commitment to practicing kenosis and solidarity more intently, my sense is that Episcopal communities and entities need to be cracked further open from the bottom up to the top down. We must remain “creatively maladjusted” to injustice as Dr. King called us to and refuse to act as if things have returned to “normal” since the early days of the pandemic. ⁶ Normalcy, or the status quo way of doing and being church, was a key part of the problem. The urgent call now is for us as a denomination to believe in the radical possibility of embodying a self-emptying love that leverages our collective power and privilege for the common good beyond our church, and to practice daily the everlasting solidarity of God, in Jesus’ name.