SABBATICAL 2: "Take, Eat"

The day begins with news of a missle launched by Houtis in Yemen and landing (without casualties) near the Tel Aviv airport.  In a post to X, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a response to Iran: “Israel will respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport AND, at a time and place of our choosing, to their Iranian terror masters.”  Later, among Armenian Orthodox friends at the Cathedral of Saint Jacob, we're welcomed by the Patriarch who reminds us that American solidarity is critical to the cessation of genocide and beginning of repair. 

Sunday Afternoon

On that last day, Roman violence haunting his beloved community, Jesus sends Peter and John (Luke 22) to the market to prepare the Passover meal.  And later, at the appointed hour, they all gather, thirteen friends (who've committed their lives to his path of nonviolence, mercy and abundance), in a room upstairs, identified strangely by a woman bearing a jar of water home for others.  The room is already furnished, the food is prepared, and they all settle into an open circle, celebrating God's passion for liberation and their partnership, friendship and discipleship.

According to the customs of the day, they recline around this open space, where the feast is spread and candles set.  John sits to Jesus' right, as his dear confidant; Judas sits to Jesus' left, as the meal's provider.  Peter, the poorest of them all, sits at the far end opposite, again, according to custom.

Figure 1

Habit and decency require the washing of feet, before such a significant meal, and ordinarily it would be the poorest and last called upon to perform this duty (Figure 1).  But Jesus, always conscious of flipping customs upside down and revealing divine intention, takes off his outer robe, ties the servant's towel around his waist, pours water into a broad bowl and begins to wash their feet (John 13).  All of them.  Starting with John and Judas on his right and his left (Figure 2). 

Figure 1

Jesus knows what Judas is up to.  He knows that one of his own has tired of the routine, soured on the discipline of loving enemies, and redistributing meager resources again and again, and praying for the Kingdom on earth as in heaven.  He may even be tempted to pull Judas out of the circle; beg him to reconsider, repent; maybe even shame him for his cowardice.  In the fourth gospel, this moment is hidden, between the lines.  We're left to imagine, to wonder, to encounter the radical practice of Jesus on an evening of intense hope, and even deeper angst.  And in this wondering, often, lies the power of the sacred word.

What surely happens is this: Jesus kneels at Judas' side and with his own tired hands--the same hands that'll be nailed to a Roman cross within hours--his works the water into Judas' feet.  I imagine that this is not a routine splashing, a nervous and brief brushing of flesh on flesh.  I imagine Jesus lingers there, washing Judas' dusty feet, rubbing life into them, loving them--with his hands, with his heart, with his flesh.  Made in the image of God.  Both of them.

When at last he gets all the way around to Peter, Peter is equal parts humbled, embarrassed and verklempt.  "You will never wash my feet," he says.  And of course Jesus does--in the same steady, loving, gentle way he's done for all the others.  "You call me Teacher and Lord," he says to the whole group, "and you are right...So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's."

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We're standing in a quiet room just outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.  Our guide Rafi Ghattas is mapping this "last" supper--which may have been here, or a room like it, or just nearby.

Rafi notes that the thirteen of them were undoubtedly "reclining" in a way commonplace in that time and place: leaning on the left elbow, left hip on the floor, reaching with the right hand for food spread before them in the center of an open circle.  He notes, then, that their feet were extended behind them, toes like hands of a compass pointing to the many corners of the world.

And what he suggests--about Jesus and Judas, and Jesus' merciful care for Judas in a moment of disturbing betrayal--strikes me hard and tears something open within me.

The Bread: Cathedral of St. Jacob

Could it be that the sharing of the bread/body, the pouring out of wine, the remembering itself, is communion that evening (and since) is as much about the washing of their feet as anything else?  Could it be that it's not possible to grasp the eucharist, or its power and promise, apart from how it is that Jesus reaches--with his hands--into the bowl of water to wash and caress their feet?  Even Judas'.  Especially Judas'!

The body that is "broken" is first bravely offered--lovinging shared, even sacrificially shared, with friend and foe.  And with the foe is also a friend.  And communion then is no simple transaction--as if faith can be that simple, or God that calculating.  Instead it's the radical blessing of God's presence in our communities, in our lives--and Jesus' grace in inviting in us the kind of human, enfleshed transformation that moves to care (intimately, generously, justly) for one another.  And this includes the feared, the weaponized, the despised and the resented.  Especially them.

And receiving this bread, and offering it to another, is a way of consenting to the transforming intentions of Jesus, the transforming gifts of his gospel, even the transforming spirit of his sacrifice: that I might go from that sacramental moment to a sacrificial life--reconciling with my neighbor with hands of love, pursuing justice in coalitions with all kinds of friends and allies, and building beloved community where tenderness and mercy (not grievance and cruelty) are both sustenance and purpose.

Sunday Evening

Dalia Qumsieh, LLM

Yesterday, outside of Bethlehem, we met Dalia Qumsieh, LL M, Founder and Director of the Balasan Initative for Human Rights - Palestine.  She shared Balasan's work to protect Bethlehem and surrounding Palestinian land from annexation and the "annexation wall"--all of whiich carves apart that land and attaches more and more of it to Israel itself.   Interestingly, "Balasan" is the Arabic name for a native tree that has existed in Palestine for thousands of years, which leaves were used to extract a healing balm to cure wounds and illnesses. The name is inspired by the vision that respect for human rights and justice is the cure needed to end violence and suffering, and restore the humanity and dignity of all people in the region.

Dalia told us how quickly things are changing, how drastically they've changed, and how urgently we must all work together to protect Palestinian culture and community (and lives).  She noted that her Christian grandmother can remember a stunning kind of trust, a dense and generous kind of community with Jewish and Muslim friends: that included (maybe sixty years ago) breastfeeding one another's children!  Jews and Palestinians together!

There's no hint of that any longer, not in the West Bank, of course; and not really anywhere to be honest.  But isn't this the kind of community Jesus imagines at supper that "last" night?  Isn't it the kind of community transfigured by love and mercy--so transfigured that justice is not only their desire, not only their intention, but their joy?  Mothers gratefully nursing one another's children, Jewish friends and Palestinian friends building businesses and civic institutions and imagining shared schools and governments?  Muslims and Jews and Christians singing one another's songs and praying one another's prayers--and celebrating even the strange and puzzling differences between them?

As for us, as for those of us still moved to follow the Peacemaker from Nazareth--I think he lays down his life right there in the upper room.  In a way that's clearly and compellingly available to us--to every little congregation in every hamlet, to all the larger congregattions in all the cities--he says: "Take a deep breath, work up the nerve, and wash one another's feet."  And then he says: "Be sincere about it; be bold and boldly patient; and dare to imagine a world healed and redeemed by justice and love."  And then he says: "Put away your weapons and rage.  Tear down the walls that separate flesh from flesh.  Rewrite the apartheid laws that divide brother from brother and sister from sister."  And then he says: "Be reconciled to one another in peace."

This is my body.  Take, eat.

SABBATICAL 1: "Desperate Exasperation"

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.  If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.

Karl Jaspers, 1945

Thursday Morning / East Jerusalem

Budour Hassan

When Budour Hassan is asked to describe what she hears from Gazans in the weeks since the collapse of the recent ceasefire, she leans forward and breathes deeply.  She does her work from home, by phone, making calls into the catastrophe that is the Gazan genocide.  "I talk to parents who are standing over the rubble, and sifting through to find the remains of their loved ones."  She takes another breath.  "I talk to young mothers, who should be breastfeeding but can't; because starvation denies their bodies the ability to produce milk."  And these are the survivors.  So far.

Though that ceasefire was tenuous and brief, it allowed the women and men she interviewed to "plan for something other than their own deaths."  Just a little.  Some version of a future.  "Something other than their own deaths."  And that phrase hits me hard.  I see those around me wince too.  That planning for their own destruction has been, and is again, a way of life for Gaza's people.  Made in the image of God--but reduced to roaming bombed out streets anticipating their own demise.  And of course, in the violent weeks since the collapse of that ceasefire, this is the daily round for so many, the strange way forward that is no way at all.

Budour joins us this morning in East Jerusalem, reflecting on this terrible moment and her work with Amnesty International, documenting that genocide, listening carefully to its victims and survivors, marking (in real time) to collapse of systems and institutions once trusted: international law, organized religion, even nonviolence to some degree.  "My people are steadfast in our commitment to nonviolence," she says, "but we are justified in asking, 'Has it worked?'"  Trained in international law herself, she lives and works out of Ramallah for Amnesty, rising every day to listen to the unimaginable, to chronicle the obscene.  Though she is blind herself, it's clear to us all that she has seen more than we ever will, and understands realities most of us would rather not.  When asked, late in the hour, what she does with the pain she is witnessing day after day, she replies simply, but sadly: "I will never recover from this."

Thursday Afternoon 

If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless, then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.

Czeslaw Miloscz, 1960s

Bishop Younan

Today's itinerary included that visit with Budour and others with Father David Neuheus, SJ; and Munib Younan, a Palestinian and Bishop Emeritus of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL).  Each was sober, generous beyond reason and clearly enraged: by all that's happening in Gaza and West Bank, by the global community's inaction, and by the church's skittishness.  "We Palestinians," said Bishop Younan (while still settling into his seat), "feel that we are alone."  He lamented Israel's deliberate bombing, raiding and depopulating of Palestinian refugee camps--in Gaza and the West Bank.  Refugees, he insisted, remind Israel and the world of 1948, forced displacement, the nakba then, apartheid since.  It's Israel's intention to rid these lands of refugees permanently--so as to erase that narrative from global consciousness and moral urgency once and for all.  His pace picked up, and there was a touch of fire in his eye as he said: "Don't just come and visit.  Go and act!  The time for action is not tomorrow; it's today!"

I'd heard words very much like these on previous trips, with other delegations.  "We cherish your visits; but go back and do something about the politics at home.  See our suffering.  Beat your own damn swords into plowshares.  We're counting on American leadership."  I'm humbled to realize it's been, maybe, 15 years since I heard them first.  

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On my long sabbatical flight from New York to Amman, Jordan, I picked up Pankaj Mishra's The World After Gaza, a thoughtful and even piercing reflection on the events of October 7, 2023 and the genocidal war following.  An Indian writing from his own context of rising Hindu nationalism, dangerous and near, Mishra begins with his own concern for nationalist rhetoric, racial hierarchies and the "moral perversion" that follows.  Germany, our United States, this Israel.

As Indian voters succumbed to Hindu supremacists, I found myself turning to Indian critics of the nation state, such as Rabindranath Tagore, who denounced nationalist Asians as 'callow schoolboys of the East': they, he argued, had fallen for a Western idea with 'high-sounding distinction' but which was actually 'one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented', under whose influence people can carry out a 'systematic porgramme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion -- in fact feeling dangerously resentful if it is pointed out'.

I found Tagore's critique--that 'the people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation, and emulate other machines in their collective worldliness'--echoed in the writings of Ahad Ha'am, the pioneering Hebrew writer and opponent of Herzl who likewise deplored the nationalist 'tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion.'

Mishra, The World After Gaza

Much like Mishra, each of today's speakers insisted that what is happening here is similar to what's happened in these other places: the dream of a inpenetrable nation state ("a machine of power"), willing and able to brutalize another people for security's sake, thereby justifying its own excesses and cruelty.  And everytime...racial hatred stirs and rages at the heart of the project.  What's especially clear here--but should be in other settings--is that the "machine" is destroying lives, families and whole communities.  And faith requires our response: our love, yes; but our loving, active, resisting response.   "If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent [these crimes]," said Jaspers in 1945, "I too am guilty."

I'll need more time to reflect on these last two paragraphs (Mishra's and my own)--so stunningly do they implicate my own country's "nervous desire to turn [itself] into a machine of power" (MAGA again) in 2025. 

Thursday Evening 

In our conversation this morning, Budour Hassan noted that her own academic background includes studies in the history of the Shoah, the 20th century genocide in Europe.  And she said that it is particularly painful, especially difficult to see that genocide "weaponized" (her word) to justify and perpetuate this one in Gaza.  How is it, she asks, that the oppressed become oppressors, again and again through human history?  And yet, to suggest that this too--all that's happening in Gaza now--is genocidal is to face a vicious backlash and accusations of antisemitism.  It strikes her as cruel and inhumane.  There's no doubt, she added this morning, that Israel is imposing conditions on Gaza that are "calculated" (her word) to bring about a whole people's destruction and erasure.  

Fr. David Neuhaus

All three of today's speakers have spoken powerfully to the Palestinian yearning for justice, peace and equality.  Father David (a Jewish Israeli citizen, and a Jesuit priest!) urged us to insist on equality as a key piece: that all the peoples of these lands, whatever the political arrangement of states, must experience fullness of life and the protection afforded by basic human rights.  The same human rights for all.  Peace comes only when we can agree on this, he insisted.  Then he noted the "venomous binding of Shoah and the nation state"--and how that coupling is destroying not only Palestinian life and culture, but Jewish practice and culture too.  He quickly added that many in his own family had been slaughtered by Nazis in Europe.  But radical nationalism in Europe and radical nationalism in Israel are equally pernicious, and deadly. 

Like Father David, Pankaj Mishra worries that the violence of the past hundred years is not only catching up with us, but compromising our capacity for human "being" and human collaboration in a world frought with animosity and distrust.

These events (the Shoah, Vietnam, Iraq) which took place in living memory undermined the basic assumption of both religious traditions and the secular enlightenment: that human beings have a fundamentally 'moral' nature.

The corrosive suspicion that they don't is now widespread.  Many more poeple have closely witnessed death and mutilation, under regimes of callousness, timidity and censorship; they recognize with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.

          Mishra, The World After Gaza 

"Remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present."  In fact--reducing one people's wellness to a pattern of victimhood rehearsed and vulnerability defended only betrays democratic possibilities.  Institutions for mutual support and community life cannot withstand the fear, the scapegoating, the rage passed on from generation to generation.

St. George's in East Jerusalem

There was something urgent but almost subtle in the way Budour Hassan revealed her pain to us this morning.  This afternoon, Munib Younan was more explicit.  For the sake of the world--for the sake of those who've died in genocides past--the church cannot be silent and cannot risk inaction.  He described with gratitude our United Church of Christ's willingness to risk truthful witness to apartheid, genocide and (beyond these terrors) a world of reconciliation and restorative justice for all peoples of this land.  But he noted that other denominational leaders have been here, left here and done nothing at all.  Said nothing at all.  

Lives are at stake now, he said: Jewish lives and Palestinian lives, Israeli lives and American lives, and our moral capacity to do good by one another.  And the church that follows the Lord of Love can only respond.  In love.  In courage.  In respect for the sanctity of all life.  All lives.  "Go and act."

POETRY: "Think of Others"

EASTER HOMILY: "Jesus Among the Living"

A Meditation on the Resurrection of Christ (Luke 24)
Sunday, April 20, 2025

1.

Bagong Kussudiardja (Indonesian, 1928–2004), Ascension, 1983.

If his body is not there where they’d laid it to rest, if his body is missing from Joseph’s tomb, where in the world is it? What have they done with it? The great mystery at the heart of this Easter story is not where do our spirits go when we die; and it’s not who wins and who loses God’s favor in eternity. To reduce the gospel to just this is to sacrifice our spiritual lives at the altar of fear and anxiety. As if life is a test and there’s a very real chance we could fail it. But if there’s one really clear message in Jesus’ life it’s this: that fear is not the currency of spiritual life. Angst does not a beloved community make.

No, the women find no body at all in the tomb that morning: but two witnesses instead, maybe martyrs in dazzling clothes. And their question flips religion itself upside down. Their question frees us from the shackles of our fear. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” No, the great mystery today is not about spirits fleeing the madness of earth and rising to heaven. It’s not about a winning formula for salvation either. It's about this body now missing from the tomb, and what’s become of it, and what becomes of us when we look for Jesus among the living.

So maybe that’s my question this morning.

What becomes of us when we look for Jesus among the living?

A couple of weeks ago, I received a short email from a woman who’d recently joined us for worship downstairs at the Table. And she described her experience of communion that day: of joining the line, watching others, approaching the pair of servers with the bread and the cup. She described the feelings in her body as the band played, as the rhythm swelled, as those in front of her began to sway a little, and then rock a little more, and then dance their way to communion itself. “And I had to set free the eight-year-old inside me,” she wrote, “who learned from the nuns back in the day that you don’t sway, and you certainly don’t rock, and for God’s sake you don’t dance your way to communion.” And she finished by telling me that the bread she broke that day was holy in ways she’d never imagined it could be; and that in her body the body of Christ had come alive. How about that? Dancing. Feasting. Joining the resistance with delight and abundance. In her body the body of Christ had come alive.

Christ in Prison, Phil Davydov

To sense—in our bodies—this mystery, this resurrection, is to know ourselves connected by grace to a community of siblings that defies despair at every turn. Ruth and Naomi, Miriam and Moses, Mother Mary and the Risen Christ. To dance into communion, and through communion into worlds of fragile wonder, is to find ourselves implicated in the struggle for liberation that joins us as one human family. Extending in every direction and across hundreds of generations. What that means to us here, right here in Durham, is advocacy and protection for trans kids and queer members. Not because it’s politically correct—but because we’re one human family. What that means to us here is an evolving network of members ready to respond in body and spirit when ICE agents show up, at any number of homes across the state, seeking to detain or deport our immigrant friends. Not because it’s the latest trend—but because we’re one human family. What that means to us here is a generous partnership with a dynamic ministry in Liberia, and another in Palestine. When I travel to the West Bank next month, I’ll have in hand a collection of $6,000 from this congregation—for programs offering encouragement and counseling to kids traumatized by violence in that region. How about that? That $6,000 represents abundance and love, and a fierce and tender kind of solidarity. With a community ravaged by war and genocide.

You see, to dance into communion, through communion, is not to settle for tombs and wars and fascism in high places. It is, instead, to embody the love of God—to know God’s passion coursing through our hearts and arteries, making strong our tired flesh and inspiring new songs of praise and wonder for the moment at hand. When the martyrs greet the women in the story with news of Jesus’ rising, the women quickly and confidently remember his stories and teaching. They remember. How he gathered their resources to feed the hungry. How he challenged the rich to divest and share it all with the poor. How he insisted on mercy and forgiveness. Surely his rising doesn’t mean fixing the world’s wrongs in a day or a season or even a lifetime. Instead it means investing our days with joy and courage, and dancing to the rhythm of ‘sumud’ and ‘shalom’, ‘ahimsa’ and ‘agape’. For the love of God. And in all this we too become witnesses, witnesses to this stunning and soul-stretching resurrection. We are the ones with stories to tell.

2.

But as we know love requires a kind of truthfulness that is quite dangerous these days. Our witness to love can even break our hearts. On this side of the resurrection, even this side of the resurrection, the challenge is still about the cross, the way of the cross, life together shaped and informed by the love revealed so radically on the cross. “It is to the Cross,” says the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, “it is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow the Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.” The Lord of the Dance takes up the cross not as punishment, not as self-defeat—but as a soulful and shared practice that looks violence and contempt straight on and chooses love and mercy instead. Counting the cost. Doing it anyway.

Like so many of you, I was saddened this week, no, more like enraged this week, to see pictures of an American Cabinet Secretary standing proudly in front of a crowded cell at a Salvadoran prison. Mocking the many bodies behind her. Celebrating her power and ours (frankly) over them. Threatening immigrants here and elsewhere with a similar fate. Her government has decided that some bodies are undeserving of dignity, poorly suited for freedom; they’ve decided that most black and brown bodies are merely pawns to be played in a maddening game for power. And they’ve decided—stunningly—that the rule of law itself is somehow beneath them. And how I wish, how we all wish, this was just hyperbole. But you’ve seen the pictures. And heard the stories.

The thing is, and Secretary Noem might be shocked to hear this: the thing is that Jesus himself is shackled to a wall in that same crowded Salvadoran cell. If his resurrection means anything, anything at all in 2025, it has to mean this. That Jesus is crying out from the cells of that god-forsaken prison (and others) for dignity and freedom, for a return to his family in Maryland, or his lover in Manhattan, or his classroom at Tufts. Christian faith, then, is something like our willingness to hear his cry for freedom. Christian faith, then, is something like our resistance to any and all notions of our own powerlessness.

My friend Ched Myers suggests that the collaboration of Roman and religious leaders in crucifying Jesus on Golgotha marks the culmination, the realization of a so-called “crucifixion economy.” It’s an appalling notion, and still prescient in a contemporary kind of way. This idea of a “crucifixion economy.” That is, in nailing Jesus to the cross—as it had done to so many other rabble rousers of that era—the empire sought once and for all to erase his vision of abundance and mutual aid, to silence his cry for forgiveness of debt and jubilee in the land. There’s something terribly familiar in all this. Right? For this “crucifixion economy” claims that scarcity is creation’s one and only natural law. Claims that poverty is a tragic necessity, a price to be paid for progress among the deserving. Claims that state violence itself protects the just from the unjust, and the wise from the foolish, and the keepers of the peace from the rabble rousers themselves.

So Jesus is executed then. His friends—though not the women in our story this morning—scattered. His practice of plenty for the poor and forgiveness for the indebted, snuffed out. For the common good. To Make America Great Again.

It's impossible, of course, to watch what Elon Musk and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are doing this spring and not make a connection. When they brazenly defund foreign aid, and HIV prevention programs in Africa, and peace initiatives here and abroad—while cloaking all of it in messianic language—isn’t this something very much like a “crucifixion economy”? And when they continue funneling billions of dollars to CEOs at Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems for Israel’s renewed and genocidal assault on Gaza—isn’t this something akin to a “crucifixion economy”? And when they float the possibility of paying El Salvador to incarcerate American citizens, American dissidents, American academics in dank and desolate dungeons—isn’t this their version of a “crucifixion economy”?

But discipleship takes another road. Discipleship is about joining hands and hearts and marching forward; it’s about building relationships and coalitions to fight hatred with love, to resist racism with steadfast courage and consequential action. Counting the cost. Doing it anyway. Because Jesus isn’t to be found in that tomb, my friends; Jesus is risen and walks again among the brokenhearted and hungry. And in the church that serves them.

STYMIED FRIDAY: "At the Cross"

Kreg Yingst Art

Friday, 2 pm

I've spent a good bit of the morning preparing my heart, and some space at the church, for a Good Friday gathering this evening.  Outside, a party's been in full swing since about 11--a house full of undergraduates next door--and the dissonance is jarring, puzzling, sad even.  On small cards, I've written the names we'll hold in prayer tonight: Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mawsawi, Kilmer Abrego Garcia--sisters, brothers, sons, daughters detained, slammed into Louisiana cells, used as pawns in Pilate's awful game.  Do my beer-guzzling neighbors know these names?  Do they care?

This year, Golgotha could be anywhere.  The car pulled over, its windows smashed in New Bedford.  Masked men in the streets of Somerville.  Queer kids bullied by their classmates' parents.  HIV programs defunded at the whim of a tyrant.  Maybe even a quiet and lonely kid in one of those bedrooms next door, uninvited to the party downstairs.

It's possible that whatever Easter offers, the only way to assess that gift is through this sad and awful day, this day of detentions and bitter deportations, this day of blame and scapegoating, this day of genocide unleashed and voices silenced.  Will we keep watch?  Will we sit together at the cross?  Are we faithful enough to weep?

When the women arrive to anoint Jesus' bloodied body, the text says they are 'stymied' in their task, unable to do what they'd hoped, because the stone's been rolled back.  Only there, face to face with all that stymies, all that rages within us, all that is just plain wrong--might be catch a glimpse of One whose power is beyond ours, One whose love is not contrained by narcissism and greed.  Easter begins in their 'stymied' hearts--and ours.

SPEAK UP: "Francesca Albanese on Genocide"

HOMILY: "Shake Up the Space"

A Meditation on the Procession of the Christ with Palms (Luke 19)
Sunday, April 13, 2025

1.

Where there is nothing left to lose,
There may be nothing left to do
But shake up the space and make it new.

(Micah Posey, A Table-Flipping Prayer)

I found myself in an argument of sorts this week, with a group of colleagues I love and respect; and this ongoing argument revolves around our varied understandings of power. Power. Simple word, complicated concept. Is the church comfortable with generating and building power for action, advocacy, resistance even, in the public square? Is power itself consistent with our faith, with the gospel, with the beatitudes of Jesus? Or are we to work on an entirely different plane: trusting that loving service alone will transform unjust systems of violence and privilege? Is the church called to promote mercy and kindness in human relations, and to leave notions of power and advocacy to secular players and institutions?

It was a lively argument on a gray day. And surely not resolved. All of it unfolding on a Zoom screen in a dozen boxes. But I confess to being surprised, again, by colleagues who seem almost allergic to the notion of power in and around the Christian church. Or even progressive interfaith coalitions. Power is the province of the callous, apparently; charity is the calling of the church.

Well, respectfully, I think I’d like to disagree. Faith has nothing to do with coercion, of course, or intimidation or political bullying. But over and again in the Gospels, Jesus embraces and then extends power in and then through communities of care and resistance. Power-with-others; not power-over-others. But power nonetheless. When the curious ask Jesus if God is at work in his circle, he says, “The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poorest of the poor see the glory of God.” Nothing passive about all that. So, yes, Jesus embraces power, builds it among his followers, and empowers them to be changemakers too.

In this Palm Sunday story, for example, the waving of palms, the spreading of cloaks, the rejoicing of crowds—it’s all about the “display of power” they’ve all seen in and around Jesus. That language is right there in the text, by the way. The “display of power” they’ve witnessed in his ministry. Clearly, Jesus himself is not allergic to the notion and practice of power. And his disciples have noticed this, have trained with him for this, have discovered in his mercy and love a new and generative kind of power. And we can’t understand this procession of palms and praise, this wildly wonderful ascent to Jerusalem, apart from that project. The power they have built together. The power they have manifested along the way. The power Jesus has insisted they use for the good. To bring down destructive empires. And build up the kin-dom of God.

“Blessed is the One who comes in the name of our God!” That’s the cry in the streets, right? “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of our God!” This isn’t just sanctimonious liturgy, friends; this is joyous praise on the lips of those with nothing left to lose, raucous thanksgiving in a crowd made bold by Jesus’ particular kind of power, made brave by his particular kind of movement, made aware of their own capacity for godly play and social change. “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of our God!”

Remember, for example, that in the days prior, they’ve encountered massive crowds of hungry, impoverished neighbors crushed by an economic system that degrades them. Remember that in that moment the disciples are ready to send the crowds away, overwhelmed by their pain and the challenge of meeting it; but Jesus insists that they take control of the moment, that they invite God’s partnership in the moment, that they organize the poor, and then assess the resources in hand, and then feed them with whatever bread, whatever fish, whatever at all they can find. Power, Jesus says, is something we cultivate in ministry. Power, Jesus says, is something we build together. Power is ours not to subjugate and intimidate, but to organize and feed and celebrate. “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of our God!”

And then, maybe the day before this rowdy procession of palms, Jesus has called Zacchaeus out of the sycamore tree. Remember this story?  Remember the song?

Zacchaeus is some kind of tax-collector and the story says he’s very rich, maybe Elon Musk rich or Jeff Bezos rich or maybe just you and me rich. But he’s curious, just the same, about Jesus and this movement he’s building along the way. And he leaps from that sycamore tree, and Jesus says: “I’m staying at your house tonight. We’re hanging out at your house tonight. Let’s break bread at your house tonight.”

And again, the power of Jesus’ attention, the power of the community he’s gathered, the power of human relationship is such—that Zacchaeus is transformed by their time together, his life radically rearranged, his commitments reconfigured. Not just in some vague way—but tangibly, concretely, even financially. Half of his possessions he gives to the poor, that same night, on the spot. “And if I’ve defrauded anyone of anything,” he says, “I will pay back four times as much.” The power of conversion, right? The power of righteousness resurrected, right? Not just warm and fuzzy power—but consequential power. The kind of power that redistributes resources, opportunities and does right by human community. And Jesus says to the whole house that night: “Tonight salvation has come to this house.” Power. Power in communion. Power in conversation. Power to change the world. “Salvation has come to this house.”

And this, all this is what’s happening on the road, in the movement, within this beloved community of believers and dreamers and broken souls Jesus has gathered. This is why the crowds on the outskirts of Jerusalem are hopeful and glad; this is why they’ve pulled palms from the trees to wave and celebrate; this is why they’ve taken their own precious cloaks and laid them on the roadway as Jesus rides past. “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of our God!”

2.

Now there are—in my very basic understanding of New Testament Greek—there are two words used to describe power in relationship to Jesus. “Exousia” and “Dunameis.” The first (‘exousia’) suggests the energy and purpose that derive from his special calling, his particular relationship to God and God’s dream. But the second (‘dunameis’)—and this shows up in today’s reading—the second refers to the kind of power generated in human relationships, in faithful partnerships, in collaborative and covenantal action.

“Dunameis”—in fact—shows up in the English language as ‘dynamism’: it’s the ancient root of our English word, ‘dynamism.’ And this then is the word Luke uses and Mark uses, the Gospels use again and again, as Jesus builds a movement with folks like Zacchaeus and the Syro-Phoenician woman, as Jesus invites creativity among them in addressing the hunger of the poor or the needs of children or the bigotry that divides neighbor from neighbor. “Dunameis” is power-with, power-together, power-deepening-in-community, power-extending-to-make-us-whole.

Sec. Kristi Noem in El Salvador (April)

In first century Jerusalem, as in 21st century America, there are all kinds of signs that coercive power is the name of the game, that political bullying gets things done. They had the Roman legion parading through the city at the Passover festival, buffed up on giant war horses. We see ICE agents in masks kidnapping grad students in Somerville and whisking them off in plain sight to kangaroo courts in Louisiana. They had purity codes back then, restricting the poor from full participation in community life, and the disabled from being counted as fully human, and women and slaves from speaking freely in court. We see Congress voting cynically just this week to restrict voting rights for immigrants, for people of color, for trans neighbors and perhaps eventually even for women.

But “dunameis”: “dunameis” involves both the nurturing of new imagination and the building up of relational power. It’s everything Jesus is modeling out there in the desert with the hungry thousands; and it’s everything he’s asking of Zacchaeus face to face over supper. When we offer our energies to God in prayer, when we turn to Jesus for instruction and inspiration, when we turn our own desires over to the kin-dom of God—then, then, then the Spirit breathes fresh life into the church and empowers us in bringing hope, healing and even justice—maybe even justice—into our communities. Not the justice of bullies, but the justice of God.

For example, on Friday night, our high school youth spent a cold night on the street, in cardboard boxes, learning something significant, something sacred—about the lives and needs and hopes of those who live among us without homes, without safe spaces in their lives. That kind of immersion, that kind of commitment—shaped by Kristin Forselius and other youth leaders: it nurtures in our youth a kind of power for action, the kind of power that gets into their bones, and into their relationships, and into their hearts. That’s “dunameis,” right? That’s the power the crowds on the Mount of Olives are celebrating in Jesus, the power that offers hope for a renewed community in a redeemed future.

Or how about the organized ways our immigration team is preparing for whatever comes next on that front? Because of our love for one another, because of our commitment to one another, because of the immigrants who’ve changed our lives for the better—we are moved to do brave things; we are motivated to persist; we will work together as long as it takes, and we will protest together whenever we have to, and we will organize within communities, congressional delegations and city governments in every way possible. Because “dunameis” is the gift and promise we claim in faith. Because “dunameis” moves us to assert our vision, and (yes) God’s vision, for a beloved community where hatred is no more and bigotry is dissolved once and for all, and all God’s children are fed generously and abundantly at the table of creation. “History belongs to the intercessors,” said the wonderful Walter Wink. “History belongs to the intercessors, those who believe and pray the future into being.”

PASSION SUNDAY: "The Violence of the Righteous"

Violence is the sickness, the communicable disease, that occupies the souls of peoples, churches, whole nations.  Whether it's a well-funded and U.S.-bankrolled army bombing Gazan hospitals (over and over again) or an antisemitic terrorist setting fire to a Governor's mansion in Pennsylvania, the temptation comes for us all, inviting fear and not mercy to rule our hearts.

Until we set our hearts on justice, on shared wellness and collective liberation, until we tell the truth about war's many lies--violence will all too easily leap from crisis to crisis, from grievance to grievance, from one broken heart to the next.  This particular disease is only to be eradicated by spiritual practice, prayer and confession, repentance and broken bread.  An eye for an eye is a failed project.  Only love--embodied and brave--will save us now.  Gaza's resurrection has everything to do with purging our many hearts of antisemitism once and for all; and the vitality and freedom of Jewish communities (there and here) depend on a reckoning with an occupation unchecked for far, far, far too long.  And a genocide fueled by religious pride.

In the end what Josh Shapiro and his family need is precisely and always what every Palestinian family needs: lands (and neighborhoods) made holy by covenants of justice and mutual aid, governments devoted to human rights (and voting rights) in their fullest expression, and a shared sense of wellness and purpose.  Violence is our common enemy.  War is the spirit chewing through our spirits and hearts.  It fails us now in a thousand terrible ways.

We must beat our many swords into plowshares, as the prophet says, one ghastly weapon system at time, and then study war no more.  

RESISTANCE: "First They Came For..."

PROFILE IN COURAGE: "Ibtihal"