Crucifixion

Christ the King C: Amen

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Christ the KingOLD TESTAMENT:  Jeremiah 23: 1-6

Read the passage from Jeremiah

The “shepherds” here, as opposed to the ones to which we are accustomed to joining us at the stable in a few weeks, are probably Judah’s kings or other high-ranking leaders.  The indictment speaks indirectly to the royal houses of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, Israel’s last two kings.  Jeremiah says that neither shepherd called the sheep to account, so YHWH is calling them to account.  They are indicted for scattering the sheep in YHWH’s pasture by allowing injustices to exist and causing the people to drift away from their identity as God’s people.  So, the pastoral number will be reduced to a single branch, a “shoot” of the Davidic line, whose reign shall succeed as the reigns of Judah’s present kings have not done.  And under this new Davidic shoot, the future king will reign over a united Judah and Israel (such as existed under King David).  Finally, all will be one.

The prophet’s words sound harsh and full of lament.  The warning comes with an opportunity to learn from the failure of past leadership.  Their responsibility was to lead the people and the nation in their relationship with God.  They have failed.  But there’s another point to this.  The leader cannot lead without the gifts of the people.  The people, too, have failed.  They have not used their gifts; they have not been who God has called them to be.  The underlying implication is that the people had lost their relationship with God.  But with the new Davidic line, the “righteous Shepherd” will bring the people back to the God who wants to be in relationship with them.

The end of the church year has traditionally been a time to be confronted with the judgment of God, not so much to cower in fear, but rather to take stock of ourselves, to seek change, and to seek forgiveness and amendment of life.  We can’t help but ask the question, “Is it I, Lord?” when hearing this text.  No one is totally off the hook. While those with greater responsibility have greater accountability, all of us in democratic governments bear responsibility for the common good. All of us in a church, made up of the priesthood of all believers, bear responsibility for the well-being of all our brothers and sisters in Christ. Even more so than in the ancient world, this text becomes for us an equal-opportunity accuser.

But the good news applies to us too. There is a new reign that is coming to be as it sweeps through Creation.  The Kingdom of God has truly come near.  God is now the shepherd and will raise up faithful leaders, a “righteous branch” that will bring the reign to be.  It is a new beginning that will transform the world.

The reading fits well for Christ the King Sunday as we wrap up our Lectionary year.  We have been given everything and yet we are still not what we should be.  But God has not given up on us.  Emmanuel, God with us, is coming soon.

 

  1. What is your response to this passage?
  2. What does this say about leadership, even in our time?
  3. How does this speak to our own responsibility for bringing in the fullness of the Kingdom of God?

 

NEW TESTAMENT:  Colossians 1: 11-20

Read the passage from The Letter to the Colossians

Paul (or probably another teacher writing to the community with the same concerns) speaks to the church in Colossae, a community surrounded by a polytheistic culture that was terrified that if they didn’t appease these spirits that so many knew, they would be subject to disease and poverty and darkness.  So, their Christian teachings had to compete with the values and beliefs (even religious ones) that were swirling around the current culture. So the writer wants to make it abundantly clear that Christ is not just one among many competing approaches to life, not just the first among equals: Christ is at the very center of the meaning of everything, for all people. The question of Jesus Christ is of the most important thing in the lives of his followers.  It is not just something that we think about on Sunday morning, or when someone asks us what church we attend, but a question that shapes our whole life. For the early Christians, and for us today, following Jesus is a big-time “game-changer.” Or, to put it in ancient terms, as Neta Pringle does, the writer of this letter says that being a Christian “is not simply a matter of fitting Jesus into our present way of thinking. We are transferred, moved, deported, from one kingdom to another. Nothing is as we have known it” (Feasting on the Word).

We, too, have “unseen spirits”—the powers of greed and fear, of war and violence, of addiction and commercialism.  We live in a world of exaggerated individualism where we have forgotten about each other and excessive materialism where we have forgotten what is important.  The author of this letter is no harsh teacher but has the heart of a pastor. In response to the fears and confusion of the ancient Colossians, the writer is really kind and compassionate, bringing hope into what was a really scary world.  We are the same.  Christ is truly King over any powers that may come into your life.

In our individual experience, it seems that when a few things fall apart, the whole apparatus of life threatens to collapse. That’s what I see happening whenever people lose their center and forget the comforting quality of the Lord’s presence. It is amazing what a few days of poor test results or unresponsive medication will do. One’s whole world can seem to disintegrate. All coping mechanisms seem to go into hiding.

If I have one prayer for those who are entering critical surgery, it is this: That the peace of Christ will somehow hold the life of this patient and his or her loved ones together. Not physically together, as if no one in the family can afford to die, but spiritually together, as in that incomprehensible peace of Christ that can find its settling way into human hearts.

When chaos strikes, faith-filled people look for ways to quit idolizing their fears. They seek strategies for pulling life back together. The challenge for most of us is to make the priority of Christ more than mere words. Who needs more talk of making Christ first in our lives? The world is full of religious talk. We need instead to act, to live as if Christ were indeed the head of the body, and not some extra equipment we strap on when it’s “third and long.”

In Bibles that provide chapter headings, this section of Colossians may be titled “The Supremacy of Christ,” or something similar. This is the Christ in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Nothing of God is held back or left out of the person of Jesus. Though God once was content to dwell in places like Sinai, Zion or the Temple, now God is in a person. Everything that God is, and cares about, now resides in Jesus Christ. Christ is the face or the image of the invisible God.

Western culture has so thoroughly domesticated Christ that it takes some imagination to see the cosmic Christ of Colossians. We have whittled him down to the size of a pocket charm, confining him to the containers of our own ethnic, economic and political instincts. Chumminess is in; grandeur is out, We want a version of God that bears some resemblance to ourselves.

Fosteria, Ohio, made news in 1986 when a local resident saw an image of Christ on the rusting side of a soybean oil storage tank. Archer Daniels Midland was suddenly on the religion page. Hundreds of cars lined Route 12 on August evenings, full of curiosity seekers waiting to sneak a peek. As one local named Jimmy noted, “It’s real. The image looks like me, but I’ve always had long hair and a beard.” With more profundity than he may have ever realized, Jimmy spoke for all of us who unwittingly like to see Christ reflecting the image of our own lives.

The way to reorder jumbled lives and hold meaning together in the face of chaos, however, is not to see the fullness of ourselves in Christ. It is to cherish the fullness of God dwelling in Christ. He is the image of the invisible God, the one who holds all things together, the glue that makes Christ the King Sunday so important. (From “Super Glue”, by Peter W. Marty, in “The Christian Century”, November 16, 2004, available at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3105, accessed 17 November, 2010)

 

  1. What is your response to this passage?
  2. What are the “unseen powers” of our own world and our own lives?
  3. What, in light of this passage, does the Kingdom of God mean to you?

 

 

GOSPEL:  Luke 23: 33-43

Read the Passage from the Gospel According to Luke

Another difficult text…(Did I go to sleep and wake up on Good Friday?) This is the chapter of the story that some of us, rather than hearing the heartbreaking account again, would rather just check out and go get another popcorn and return when the story begins to become more palatable.  We are prepared to hear this story read on Good Friday but, here, this should be a happy Sunday.  After all, we are crowning Christ the King.  And here we read of what can only be characterized as a brutal defeat.  And yet, when you think about it, it’s the climax of Jesus’ ministry.  There on the cross, a rejected and defiled Jesus hangs bleeding and thirsting.  And, yet, the writer of this Gospel depicts Jesus with all of his wits about him.  And praying…praying not for salvation or even a relief in the surely unbearable pain that he was experiencing and definitely not for vengeance to be brought upon those who had inflicted it. At his lowest point, Jesus, rather than decreeing self-pity or anger or vengeance, showered unconditional forgiveness upon the world who had put him there.  All that Jesus had been born to be was in this moment of the most incredible self-giving, self-denying act that anyone could ever do.

And the writer known as Luke tells us that, in effigy, the inscription ordaining Jesus as King is placed over the spot where he hung.  For those who did not get it and for those who don’t today, it is a joke.  On the surface, it makes the story harder to read, as if our team has lost that game.  But at a much deeper level, there is a profound irony to it all.  Because this is truly Jesus’ crowning glory.

And then we are told of the thief hanging there with him that asked for mercy from this one who in this moment he truly knew was the Christ.  Jesus’ response did not include asking him what he had done with his life.  He did not demand either a confession or a profession.  There was no “if” attached to his answer—no condition of “if you clean up your life” or “if you promise to stop doing what you do or being who you are”.  None of that mattered.  Because in this moment, the man that history has never named anything but “Thief” entered the story that we call the Gospel and was promised eternal life.

You see, it’s not about what we do or who we are.  It’s about becoming the story, becoming the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.  It’s not about placing a crown on the head of our King but about becoming part of the Coronation, part of that image of Christ the King.  It’s not about proclaiming Christ as King but about being the presence of Christ in this world.  O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, God with Us.  And now we know that’s exactly where God is.  It’s about entering the story.

In 1741, a well-known German composer living in England received a letter from a friend of his.  The letter contained a compilation of Old Testament and New Testament passages.  The composer was so moved by the words and the story that they held that he locked himself in his study and spent the next 24 days composing the work that we know as “The Messiah”.  When speaking of those 24 days in Late Summer, 1741, one of Handel’s servants was said to have described him with these words:  “He was praying, or he was weeping, or he was staring into eternity.”

If you’ve had an opportunity to hear the whole thing, you know that it begins without words, drawing you into the story, as if reminding you that all of Creation began in silence until God spoke it into being.  And Creation continued through exile and deliverance, through destruction and recreation…and grew and struggled and desperately searched for renewal.  But God remained veiled in awe and mystery with the promise that God will come when God will come and shake things to their very core, ripping apart what we think is good, what we think is just, what we think is right and righteous, and, like a refiner’s fire, transforming everything in Creation’s path.  And, always waiting…waiting on a promise yet to be fulfilled.

We are told that darkness will come but that light is just over the horizon.  And then the announcement comes…the world is with child.  Emmanuel, God with us…no longer hidden, no longer veiled.  And the earth rang out.  And we are invited to follow.  The coming begins our going.  The work begins.  The child grows and shows us not merely what to do to gain a place in heaven, but the very Way to God, the way to usher in the fullness of being for all of Creation.  But it is sometimes hard for us to change.  God has not just come to show us how to live; Christ has come to take away the sin, the brokenness, the darkness of the world.  And then we hear the Gospel for today set to music and for a few bars following we live in requiem.  And then the stone is rolled back and our eternity begins.  We are drawn into sacred space.  Handel depicts it as a door in heaven opening as we are ushered into the throne room of God.  And God is there, veiled in awe and mystery.

And then there is a sound…The angels—angels upon angels, in Handel’s depiction, a “myriad”, as the NRSV puts it sing with full voice.  And all of Creation, even the thief,  is summoned into the story, to sing with highest praise…”Forever and ever and ever”…Amen.

“Amen” does not mean “the end”.  In Hebrew, it means “indeed, truly”.  Indeed truly, our lives have just begun as the glory of the Lord is revealed and Christ is crowned the King of glory.  You see…it’s more than a story…Handel had it right…it’s a glimpse into eternity.  And in our praying and in our weeping and in our staring right at it, God comes.  O Come, O Come Emmanuel. And with each passing season, we come a little bit closer to seeing that part that is ours to build and tell.  Amen, indeed!

 

  1. What is your response to this passage?
  2. What does the notion of “Christ the King” mean to you?
  3. What responsibility or part do you play in the coronation?
  4. What things do we let get in the way of the Christ having first place in our lives?

 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

We must remind ourselves that, though our lives are small and our acts seem insignificant, we are generative elements of this universe, and we create meaning with each act that we perform or fail to perform. (Kent Nerburn, Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace)

If the meaning could be put into a sentence, there would be no need of telling the story. (Henry Van Dyke)

 

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.  I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.  (Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

 

Closing

 

Waiting for the “when” keeps me from appreciating what I now have.  Longing for promises and dreaming dreams is not a harmful deed as long as the present moment is not overlooked, as long as gratitude rises for what is already here, as long as I do not base my happiness on what is still wanting.  Thankfulness for what has already been given is the foundation for hoping for what is not yet.

Today I am going to put aside my “when this happens” and my “if only this could be” and my “when things get better” and my “as soon as I have this.”  I am going to harvest what I now have, gather all the many gifts that are already mine.  I am going to observe what has been placed in the granary of my heart and marvel at the abundance.

I will stand before this heap of blessings and take a long, grateful look.  I will say farewell to my “when” and be thankful for what is.

 

May an abundance of gratitude burst forth as you reflect upon what you have received.

May thanksgiving overflow in your heart, and often be proclaimed in your prayer.

May you gather around the table of your heart the ardent faithfulness, kindness, and

goodness of each person who is true to you.

May the harvest of your good actions bring forth plentiful fruit each day.

May you discover a cache of hidden wisdom among the people and events that have

 brought you distress and sorrow.

May your basket of blessings surprise you with its rich diversity of gifts and its

            opportunities for growth.

May all that nourishes and resources your life bring you daily satisfaction and renewed

 hope.

May you slow your hurried pace of life so that you can be aware of, and enjoy, what you

            too easily take for granted.

May you always be open, willing, and ready to share your blessings with others.

May you never forget the Generous One who loves you lavishly and unconditionally.

 

(Joyce Rupp, “When” and “A Thanksgiving Blessing”, from Out of the Ordinary:  Prayers, Poems, and Reflections for Every Season, (Notre Dame, ID:  Ave Maria Press, 1999), 206-207.)

 

 

Palm/Passion A: At The Gate

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This week is a little different.  I did both the Palm Liturgy Gospel passage and the Passion Liturgy Old Testament and Epistle.  Rather than writing reflections for the Passion Gospel, I’ll post a separate post for the Holy Week lectionary.

Jerusalem Eastern Gate.pngLITURGY OF THE PALMS:

 

GOSPEL: Luke 19: 28-40

To read the Palm Sunday Gospel passage

It is interesting that half of this story is about getting the mode of transportation—where to go to find the animal, what to do, what to say. You can imagine what the disciples were thinking. For this we left our fishing nets? Surely they imagined a grander assignment. But this seems to be an important thing in every account of this story. Perhaps it is a reminder that sometimes following Jesus means doing mundane tasks that, alone, do not seem important, but in the grand scheme of things, are paramount to the story. There is some significance, though, to the idea of him riding a colt that has never been ridden. (Similar to coming into the world through a virgin womb.) Jesus is different. It has never been done this way before.

Here, though, Jesus is in the bustling capital city. He is no longer in the villages and open country of his home. The celebratory parade is also a protest march. The disciples should have known what was happening. Jesus had already laid it out for them. But they still did not comprehend what he had said. At this moment Jesus begins the sharp descent down the Mt. of Olives, winding his way toward Jerusalem. The road is a steep decline into the Garden of Gethsemane and then begins to ascend toward Mt. Moriah and the place of the temple.

At this moment, the crowd sees him as a king, as one who will get them out of where they are. So this is a parade that befits a king. “Hosanna”, “the Coming One”, the one who restores Jerusalem. He enters. This is the moment. This is it. What they didn’t recognize is that Jesus brought them something that they had never had before—peace, truth, justice, and love. What they didn’t recognize is that Jesus had indeed come to restore them not to what was but to what should’ve been all along.

But in this account, the ones who are the “religious ones”, the leaders, seem embarrassed at this show of affection. “Make them stop,” they order Jesus. (“Be quiet”, “mind your manners”, “act in a way befitting and acceptable of a rabbi”.) The response: “If they were silent, the stones themselves would shout out.” In other words, if we do not speak, if we do not change, the stones would bear marks of the result. (And they did. In the days when this Gospel would have been written, the stones of the temple and the courtyard would have borne the marks of its destruction.) It is a call to cry out, even when there are those in the world and those in the church who want to silence you.

The miracle of the Red Sea,” the rabbis taught, “is not the parting of the waters. The miracle of the Red Sea is that with a wall of water on each side of him, the first Jew walked through.” The implications are clear: God is not in this alone. Yes, God may be all-powerful and eternally unfailing, but that’s not the point. The real key to the coming of the reign of God on earth, the rabbis imply, is not God’s fidelity. The real determinant between what ought to be and what will be in this world is the mettle of our own unflagging faith that the God who leads us to a point of holy wakefulness stays with us through it to the end. The key to what happens on earth does not lie in God’s will. All God can do is part the waters. It lies in the courage we bring to the parting of them. It lies in deciding whether or not we will walk through the parting waters of our own lives today. Just as surely as there was need for courage at the Red Sea, just as surely as there was need for courage on Jesus’ last trip to Jerusalem, there is need for it here and now, as well.

The Waters part all around us, too, now. The road to Jerusalem is clear. We are surrounded by situations that have solutions without solvers with the political will to resolve them: The old cannot afford their prescriptions. The young have no food. The middle-aged work two jobs and slip silently into poverty whatever their efforts. The globe turns warmer and more vulnerable by the day…Racism, sexism and homophobia destroy families and poison relationships. The mighty buy more guns. The powerful pay fewer taxes. The national infrastructure slips into disrepair. Fundamentalist groups and governments everywhere seek to suppress opposition, to deny questions, to resist change, to block development. We are all on the road to Jerusalem again; some of us dedicated to restoring a long lost past; others committed to creating a better future…

But there are those others who keep on shouting, who keep on telling the story even to those with no ears to hear. Over and over again they cry out. But is it worth it? And does it work? Did the disciples on the road to Jerusalem make any difference at all? Well, look at it this way: It got our attention, didn’t it? So whose turn is it to cry out this time? ( Sr. Joan Chittister, “The Road to Jerusalem is Clear: Meditations on Lent”, National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2001, available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_22_37/ai_72960610/?tag=content;col1, accessed 24 March, 2010.)

 

  • What meaning does this hold for you?
  • Where would you have been in the parade?
  • What does Palm Sunday mean for you?
  • What do you think of the notion of this being a “protest march”?

 

 

LITURGY OF THE PASSION:

 

OLD TESTAMENT: Isaiah 50: 4-9

To read the Passion Liturgy Old Testament reading

Chapters 40-55 of the book that we know as Isaiah probably address a time late in the Babylonian exile, when the prophet proclaims that God wants the people to return to Jerusalem. Keep in mind, though, that it has been years since the beginning of the exile. Most of the older generation, those who remember the way it was before, are gone. The next generation had created a new life here. They were settled, comfortable, and many had established themselves and even grown their wealth. And now they’re being asked to return to a city that is in complete desolation. There is nothing there. There was really nothing to which they could return.

This passage is known as the third of the Servant Songs, declaring what the task of the servant should be. The servant speaks straight after God has made the claims that he has the power to deliver Israel from their unfaithfulness. In contradiction to the unfaithful and unhearing Israel, the servant declares that he is obedient and listens to the Lord. The servant is totally confident that God is with him despite all those who have been actively opposed to his ministry and the consequent adversity. This supreme confidence in the presence of God allows the servant to face any future adversity. The call of the servant is to make sense of what happened so that the people will again hear and return to faithfulness. There is a lot here about both teaching and hearing. They go together.

The prophet or servant has been faithful in teaching what has been transmitted to him and that teaching will sustain the weary. In spite of the fact that many insist that this is a precursor passage to the Christ event, we have no clear answers about the identity of the servant in Isaiah 40-55 and can only wonder if his message was so unpopular that he suffered because of it. Certainly other prophets, such as Jeremiah, suffered. His suffering and response is depicted in a different way – Jeremiah gets angry with God and wants his adversaries punished. Many Biblical scholars claim that the servant is the embodiment of Israel herself, both the land and the people; in other words, the servant is indicative of any servant of God (including, then, us). The servant, the people, in fact, WE, are called to confront the evil and suffering of the world rather than dismiss it as not “of God”. It is to these parts of Creation that we are called to help bring redemption and new life.

As we are celebrating Palm Sunday there is no doubt that we can identify Jesus with the words of the Isaiah 50:4-9 in which Jesus has had to face and will face his tormentors. He sets his face towards Jerusalem, riding in with the knowledge that the crowds could easily be fickle. Jesus has relied on God to sustain him and he continues to rely on the help of God. But even in the face of adversaries, God sustains him. It is not that God “fixes” it, but rather walks with us through it.

 

  • What is your response to this passage?
  • What vision of the future does that give for your own life?
  • How often do we really believe this or do we assume that God will “fix” it? What is the difference for our faith?
  • If you interpret the servant as the embodiment of all servants of God, what does that mean for you?

 

 

NEW TESTAMENT: Philippians 2: 5-11

To read the Passion Liturgy Epistle reading

On the surface, being of the “same mind” as Jesus would mean to be like Jesus, or to think like Jesus. But it means more than that. It is a call, rather, to enter the very essence that is Jesus. It is a call to pattern our lives after Christ.

It appears here that “being in the form of God” may be opposite from “being in the form of a slave”. Essentially, Jesus emptied himself and became dependent upon God, fully surrendered, a servant of God. He became fully human. He surrendered self-advancement and instead became fully human, fully made in God’s image.

This passage is the story of salvation in three parts—emptying and incarnation, obedience and death, exaltation and resurrection. Jesus sees his equality with God not as Lordship to be used over others, but as an offering for others. We are to have the same mind of Christ the humbled, Christ the crucified, rather than the crucifiers. We are to, once again, walk through shame and suffering knowing that the Lord is with us. And we are to do it with a rhythm that is unfamiliar to the world.

Our main problem is that surrender is really pretty foreign to us. We tend to equate it with losing and we never want to do that in our world of win-win. The notion of “surrender” is uncomfortable for us. Literally, it means to give up one’s self, to resign or yield to another. It could even mean to suffer. That is against our grain. That doesn’t fit in with our dreams of pursuing security and success. That doesn’t reconcile with a society driven by competition and power and “getting ahead”. Surrender…doesn’t that mean to lose control? What will happen then?

Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote that “what God requires of the soul is the essence of self-surrender…[and] what the soul desires to do is done as in the sight of God.” The 18th century mystic understood that one’s physical being and one’s spiritual being, indeed one’s body and one’s soul, could not be separated. The two were interminably intertwined and, then, the essence and status of one affected the other directly.

So what does that mean? We sing the old song “I Surrender All” with all of the harmonic gesture we can muster. And we truly do want to surrender to God—as long as we can hold on to the grain of our own individualism, to that which we think makes us who we are. But de Caussade is claiming that it is our soul that truly makes us who we are and that in order to be whole, our soul desires God with all of its being. So, in all truth, that must mean that most of us live our lives with a certain dissonance between our physical and spiritual being. We want to be with God. We love God. We need God. But total surrender? But that is what our soul desires and in order for there to be that harmony in our lives, our physical beings must follow suit.

Lent teaches us that. This season of emptying, of fasting, of stripping away those things that separate us from God, this season of turning around is the season that teaches us how to finally listen to our soul. It is the season that teaches us that surrendering to God is not out of weakness or last resignation, but out of desire for God and the realization that it is there that we belong. In an article entitled “Moving From Solitude to Community to Ministry”, Henri Nouwen tells the story of a river:

The little river said, “I can become a big river.” It worked hard, but there was a big rock. The river said, “I’m going to get around this rock.” The little river pushed and pushed, and since it had a lot of strength, it got itself around the rock. Soon the river faced a big wall, and the river kept pushing this wall. Eventually, the river made a canyon and carved a way through. The growing river said, “I can do it. I can push it. I am not going to let down for anything.” Then there was an enormous forest. The river said, “I’ll go ahead anyway and just force these trees down.” And the river did. The river, now powerful, stood on the edge of an enormous desert with the sun beating down. The river said, “I’m going to go through this desert.” But the hot sand soon began to soak up the whole river. The river said, “Oh, no. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get myself through this desert.” But the river soon had drained into the sand until it was only a small mud pool. Then the river heard a voice from above: “Just surrender. Let me lift you up. Let me take over.” The river said, “Here I am.” The sun then lifted up the river and made the river into a huge cloud. He carried the river right over the desert and let the cloud rain down and made the fields far away fruitful and rich.

There is a moment in our life when we stand before the desert and want to do it ourselves. But there is the voice that comes, “Let go. Surrender. I will make you fruitful. Yes, trust me. Give yourself to me.”  

  • What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  • What, for you, does it mean to assume the mind of Jesus?
  • What does it mean to surrender to God? Why is that so difficult for us?
  • What does this passage say to you about humility?
  • What does this passage say to you about power?

 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

 

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. (Bishop Desmond Tutu)

 

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. (Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.)

 

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. (Henri-Frederic Amiel, 19th cent.)

 

He drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win, We drew a circle that took him in. (Edward Markham)

 

Closing

 

We’re good at planning! Give us a task force and a project and we’re off and running! No trouble at all! Going to the village and finding the colt, even negotiating with the owners is right down our alley. And how we love a parade! In a frenzy of celebration we gladly focus on Jesus and generously throw our coats and palms in his path. And we can shout praise loudly enough to make the Pharisees complain. It’s all so good!

 

It’s between parades that we don’t do we well. From Sunday to Sunday we forget our hosannas. Between parades the stones will have to shout because we don’t. (“Between Parades”, Ann Weems, Kneeling in Jerusalem, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.), 69.)

 

Lord, forgive. Amen.