A.R. Bernard: What were you thinking inviting Chuck Schumer to your church on Easter Sunday?

In case you missed it, Chuck Schumer recently spoke–on Easter Sunday–at A.R. Bernard’s Christian Cultural Center, a megachurch in Brooklyn.

Some of you may remember A.R. Bernard. He was one of the original Trump court evangelicals, but quickly left the president’s faith-based advisory council after he realized that the said council was about little more than photo-ops.

One might think that Bernard’s experience with Trump taught him a lesson or two about mixing Christianity and electoral politics.

Nope.

Instead, Bernard invited Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to speak on the most important day on the Christian calendar. In other words, on the day that Christians celebrate Jesus’s resurrection of the dead, an event that we believe initiated a new political order known as the Kingdom of God, Bernard invited the leader of another kingdom to hold forth from the stage. Chuck Schumer’s kingdom–the kingdom of the United States–will ultimately bend a knee to the King who conquered death.

I do not believe electoral politics ever belongs in the church, but when it happens on Easter Sunday it is a true sacrilege.

Watch:

I am happy that Ketanji Brown Jackson is on the Supreme Court. (Anyone who read this blogs knows that it is likely I disagree with the “Woke Preacher Clips” Twitter feed on this front). No, my criticism of Schumer has nothing to do with political partisanship, race, or the makeup of the Supreme Court. This is about U.S. politicians using words like “the stone has been rolled away” to describe a Supreme Court nominee. And on Easter Sunday nonetheless! In a church!

Now granted, I think that a Christian’s membership in the Kingdom of God, the kingdom initiated by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, will be a kingdom characterized by justice and equality for all of God’s children. But something tells me that Schumer did not have this in mind when he invoked the empty tomb. I don’t think he is that theologically astute.

At least Bernard’s sermon that day was in the ballpark:

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