IN HIS 2013 book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It, Timothy Noah notes that the personal income of the top 1 percent in the United States began to increase exponentially beginning in 1979, a peak year in what economists call the “Great Inflation” (1965-1982). While there has always been economic stratification in the U.S., the “great divergence” in American’s incomes began at the end of the 1970s, and the wealth gap has continued to grow. In 2019, people in the top 1 percent of income distribution held more than 33 percent of the total U.S. wealth — up from 27 percent in 1989, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. Families in the bottom half held only 2 percent of the total wealth. The U.S. has policies that protect wealth and others that depress wages and hinder affordable housing. This combination increases poverty. Unfortunately, false narratives still circulate about the causes of poverty, blaming the poor and pitting communities against each other.

From another point of view, acceptance of wealth disparity, and the policies that cause it, is a result of failed imagination: We accept increasing wealth disparity because we cannot envision another way. As people of faith, we are called to be God’s prophets and seers — to see the possibilities of God where others cannot. The church’s task is to challenge empire’s narratives about what is possible, to actively cultivate what biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls a “prophetic imagination” for a different reality and empower communities to embrace it.

RARELY DO YOU see powerful people advocate for the benefit of others outside their “own” political or economic group. There is a tendency on the part of the elite to leverage their privilege for their own benefit while disguising it as public good, as the concept of “elite capture” has exposed. And the state is often complicit in reinforcing policies and practices that concentrate resources into the hands of those who already have enough. In a 1962 sermon titled “A Knock at Midnight” (see Luke 11:5-6), Martin Luther King Jr. diagnosed the state of the nation and church saying, “It is midnight in the social order.” He urged the church to respond to the oppressed who “knock on the door,” even when it’s inconvenient. “How often has the church left [people] disappointed at midnight, while it slept quietly in a chamber of pious irrelevancy,” preached King.

Despite decreasing numbers, the U.S. church wields enormous political and economic power. This month’s readings showcase people — the powerful and the not so powerful — who exercise their agency for the good of those who seemingly have little to offer in return. The texts highlight the church’s moral and theological imperative to employ its power to open the door to the ones who desperately knock. Will the church that gathers in the name of Jesus ignore the state’s complicity in oppressive structures or will it act as the “conscience of the state,” as Dr. King urged? Does the church privilege its own comfort or does it attend to the vulnerable, even at the risk of its own interests? King concluded, “the greatest challenge facing the church today is to keep the bread fresh and remain a Friend to [humanity] at midnight.”

IN FALL 2014, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performed Brahms’ Requiem on a Saturday evening two months after the murder of Michael Brown Jr., at a concert hall about 10 miles from Canfield Green, where Brown was killed and his adolescent body left out in the Missouri August sun for four and a half hours.

That summer and fall, people in the city and county of St. Louis lived in the tension of waiting — we were waiting for a grand jury to make a decision. Not a verdict about the officer’s guilt: The grand jury was tasked with deciding whether this murder was even a murder at all — whether anything happened on Aug. 9 that could even be considered maybe a crime. Maybe worth investigating. Or whether it was just a regular day’s work.

As intermission was ending and folks were back in their seats, just as the orchestra was regathered and the conductor was raising his baton, a small group of ticketholders in the audience stood up and sang. In singing, they asked the audience, made up largely of people who could choose whether or not they were impacted by the grand jury’s decision that loomed over the city like the shadow of death, to make a decision of their own. They stood up, one by one, and joined their voices in an old labor song: “Which side are you on, friend, which side are you on?” they sang. “Justice for Mike Brown is justice for us all. Which side are you on, friend, which side are you on?” They hung banners made of bedsheets over the balcony; one that echoed the piece being performed that evening was painted: “Requiem for Mike Brown, 1996-2014.”

These protesters brought this question — this disruption — into a space that could’ve kept it to business as usual. They sang the two refrains in repetition, almost like a Taizé chant, for several minutes, then they left the hall together, chanting a chant that at the time was still brand-new to most Americans: Black Lives Matter.

The disrupters left to a mix of silence and applause from the audience and the musicians. The concert continued, but the question hung in the air. It’s the same question that hangs in the air of many of Jesus’ disciple-calling stories, and it’s certainly the question that pervades Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ good news.

HBO’S BIGGEST POST-APOCALYPTIC SHOW, The Last of Us, imagines a brutal world — and the mushroom zombies are only occasionally the source of danger. The first season followed Joel (Pedro Pascal), as he escorted teen Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who is immune to the zombie infection, to a hospital that can turn her immunity into a cure. In the final episode [SPOILERS], Joel and Ellie reach their destination. But when Joel learns they can only manufacture the cure by killing Ellie, he kills the doctor who was set to operate on Ellie. Joel’s decision raises the question: If the world can only be saved by sacrificing the innocent, is it a world we want to save? The Last of Us, itself an adaptation of a beloved video game, is far from the first show that employs apocalypse to interrogate our morality. Our end-time imaginings can show us who we are ... and who we could be.

The Greek title of the last book in the New Testament canon is Apokalypsis (“apocalypse”), the best English rendering of which is “revelation.” Revelation isn’t about the end of the world. It’s about a revelation — an unveiling. Revelation is one example from the genre of books we call apocalyptic literature. The genre, popular among Jews and Christians for hundreds of years before and after Jesus’ life, usually features a human receiving a message from some sort of divine messenger. The messenger wants to show the listener some deeper truth about the world — something that helps the audience participate more faithfully in the new world God is bringing forth.

A STORM BLOWS through Weyes Blood’s fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. A cold front of disillusionment meets the swirling tones of songwriter Natalie Mering. The effect is gorgeous and staggering.

Sounding both in and out of their time, these songs fuse darkly majestic orchestral arrangements with pop elements such as drum machines, synthesizers, and the occasional guitar. If history took a later start, this could be our classical music. Weyes Blood (pronounced “Wise Blood,” a nod to Flannery O’Connor’s novel set in the “Christ-haunted” South) has said that she craves sanctuary acoustics.

Billowing and hymn-like, “God Turn Me Into a Flower” is the album’s truest prayer. “It’s good to be soft when they push you down,” Mering sings. She sings to stand firm, but never aspires to twist into bramble: “... it’s such a curse to be so hard / You shatter easily and can’t pick up all those shards.”

REVELATION IS AN intimidating book of the Bible to understand, let alone apply to everyday life. Dense with symbolic imagery and metaphors, it has been subject to innumerable interpretations and far-flung theories. But what are we to make of startling moments in the text, like when Jesus regurgitates a sword or John eats a scroll? In Upside-Down Apocalypse: Grounding Revelation in the Gospel of Peace, author Jeremy Duncan walks readers through Revelation by drawing parallels between the genres and figures of speech of John’s day and ours, lending clarity to how John’s apocalypse is deeply steeped in Jewish literary tradition and Roman culture. When we ignore this context, we miss the point of the final book of the New Testament: Revelation is not the wrathful reckoning of a conquering king; rather, as Duncan writes, it’s a testament to “how the Prince of Peace turns violence on its head once and for all.”

With each chapter, Duncan decenters “chrono-centric” approaches to Revelation, encouraging readers to avoid reading the text as “a story about me and my world and my time exclusively.” As the perfect, timeless witness of God, Jesus must be the guiding principle by which we understand all of scripture. Only then can we appreciate how God’s kingdom in Revelation contrasts with earthly kingdoms fueled by oppression. “[E]very time you awaken to how empire is trying to steal your imagination and make you believe in violence,” Duncan writes, “you have rightly interpreted Revelation regardless of the time period in which you awake.” Revelation asks us to watch for injustice, wherever and whenever it appears.

I FIND MYSELF thinking about the significance of “firsts,” the role of faith in the morality of the nation, and the place of race and gender in that project. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascent to one of the highest seats of political power is historic, unprecedented, and awe-inspiring. Like Barack Obama before her, it is a first that has ushered in, for many, a renewed faith in the nation. Multiply the emotional impact of that first by whatever number captures the firestorm of the past four years, and that faith easily transforms into a belief that “morality” has been secured and that things are going to be, basically, okay.

This train of thought is, I believe, dangerous and wrong. I do not discount the feelings Harris evokes. The emotional impact of Harris’ election registers for me very personally as a Black woman. When I initially heard that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the election, my first thought was exhilarated shock at Trump’s defeat. Then, as that fact sunk in, I realized that this outcome meant the election of a woman of color—a Black woman, a woman of South Asian descent—to the vice presidency of the United States. Weeks later, the words still seemed somewhat strange, as if my brain was having trouble wrapping itself around the reality. My inability to readily speak her new position reflects to me the depth of her significance, and the change it portends for how I and future generations of Black and brown girls and women will be able to envision and speak of ourselves. I pause, however, at the unexamined triumphal connections being made between Harris, morality, and political futures.

Partisans use Romans 13 to baptize their politics as being “ordained by God.” But Christians who reference Romans 13 typically do so using an us vs. government relationship. But unlike the first century when Roman rulers were mainly determined by heredity, lineage, or brute force, today we are the government. There is no us vs. them because we play an active role in how our government works and is run.

My obsessive inner nerd rose to attention. You couldn’t have seen resurrection in Jesus Christ Superstar because there was no resurrection in Jesus Christ Superstar. That was the point! [I online shouted.] That’s why some considered it scandalous — a very human Jesus, a Judas who makes a lot of sense if you listen to him, and no Jesus rising from the dead. It doesn’t deny the resurrection. It just stops beforehand