A tool to help “implement the Great Commandment in a manner consistent with the Great Commandment”
I’m talking about Jeremy Del Rio’s A Campus Ministry Primer for Cities. Check it out this excerpt:
“There’s this teenage boy I know. He appears ordinary enough, with nothing much to distinguish himself except that he’s studious and works with his step dad in construction. Like many teens he’s struggling to find his place and feels like a curiosity.
Living in the ghetto is hard, especially since he just immigrated to the neighborhood in the last few years. Try as he might, he hasn’t mastered the accent and local customs. And forget the slang; that’s like learning a third language. Worse, the old-timers all seem to know something about him that he hasn’t figured out yet. He gets the distinct impression they’re always talking about his family, reinforced by the overheard name-calling. A few of his schoolmates have teased him to his face, and one punched him in the nose after school. The soldiers occupying the streets find the bullying funny.
Sometimes the mocking gets to him. He wants desperately to fight back, but mom forbids it, promising that someday the rejection will all make sense. He tries to take comfort in her words, but for now his heart just hurts, and the injustice makes him angry.
So he sneaks off to the outskirts of town and hides behind an old sycamore tree. There he remembers what it was like in the refugee camp, and recollects vague memories of a midnight flight from the small town where he spent his childhood. The details are sketchy, but he remembers stories of bloodshed and murder that he barely escaped. Not fitting in has been a recurring theme for him.
Then his memories fade, and he hears the echo of mom’s voice telling him about his birth. No way would his schoolmates ever find out he was born in a barn. The ammunition that would give them! They already call him choice animal names.But really, why did he have to be born in a barn? And why did it matter that Joseph wasn’t his real dad? And why did the gossips congregating at the stoop down the street call him a bastard and his mother a whore? Even if that was true, what business was it of theirs? And why did they disdain him as if he should be dead?
Perhaps you know this friend of mine. No longer a nameless and faceless teenager, his name is revered and reviled around the world, and artists have imagined his likeness for centuries.”
Jeremy kindly calls this “re-imagining” Jesus. I wonder if it is more far to describe this as unveiling Jesus - unveiling him from all of the fancy, but ill-fitting images we’ve come to accept about Jesus.
In any case, this primer looks excellent. It’s not just the image of Jesus that it calls us back to that inspires, but the reality that it challenges & refocuses:
“Moreover, having been an at-risk youth himself, city kids are especially dear to Jesus’ heart. Consider those 1.1 million public school students. Although the city spends over $12 billion educating them, six in ten high school students will not receive a high school diploma; six in ten elementary school students cannot read at grade level and almost seven in ten cannot perform basic math computations. Of the city’s overall youth population, three in ten are trapped below the poverty line in generational poverty, and 72% of Latino and 61% of African American children live in poor families.”
Check it out