Devotional by Rev. Paul Clark

I can picture my mother-in-law wrinkling her eyebrows in discomfort as she harrumphs the brazenly offensive lyrics of this song. How dare a chocolate confection be compared to the Savior? What a mockery of Jesus!

For many Christians like her, faith is a battle. Christ calls on us to defend him from the secular world. Following Jesus then becomes the work of building walls around, and imposing false binaries on, everything from gender identities, to marriage, to Jesus himself.

Thanks be to God, Jesus is bigger and better than this. He cannot be contained by any walls. And he certainly can handle the absurdity, irreverence, and whimsy of Chocolate Jesus.

This song, in its own silly way, reminds me that no walls or labels imposed by others can change the fact that I belong to Christ. And he most certainly can handle the absurdity, irreverence, and whimsy of a person like me.

There is more than enough room for all of our fabulous selves, literal and figurative chocolate Jesuses in hand, at Christ’s table.

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Rev. Paul Clark ( he/him/his) was unwillingly dragged by the tenacious Holy Spirit from Minnesota to California, where he served in Lutheran Campus Ministry for five years. He currently lives in Bakersfield with his husband, and spends his time preaching at Episcopalian congregations, making coffee with his Chemex, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.