Reimagining Conquest

A Mountain of Crumbs, by novelist Elena Gorokhova, is her memoir of life growing up in Soviet Russia, life in a world so different from our own experience growing up here. Having become a proficient student and then teacher of English, “Lena” taught summer students from the United States who came to Leningrad (now, St. Petersburg) to study Russian. One young man, Robert, pursued getting to know her outside the classroom, against all the rules of course.When he returned to the U.S. he began writing her and discussing ways to get together again. At one point she writes, “So it was at this point that I realized the futility of my argument, the futility of every argument, present or future, Robert and I might have. The problem we face is that under his un-Russian curly hair presides an American brain, which is fundamentally different from my Russian brain…. The fact that we can speak each other’s language is… irrelevant to our mutual understanding….”Jesus came to earth from heaven. His vision of life, under His Jewish hair, inside His heaven-infected brain, is so fundamentally different than our brains that “the fact that we can speak each other’s language is irrelevant to our mutual understanding.”Join us in worship this Sunday, Palm Sunday, and we will explore a story in which Jesus acted out an “absurd” little play, as it were, in order to change our imaginations so that we could understand what He is talking about.