Good Friday: A Meditation on the Eleventh Station of the Cross

I am always moved and inspired by the Stations of the Cross at St. Mary's House. (Yes, Episcopalians have Stations of the Cross, though not everywhere.) A different person offers a meditation for each of the 14 stations, many spoken, some sung, one or two visual. So much wisdom, talent, heart, and faith for one small congregation.

Here is my meditation on the eleventh station, "Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross."

Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross

Were you there?

Are you there?

Will you be there?

Were you there ******** [italics indicate Jane singing a cappella]
when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, oh…
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?

These stories come from the witness of Kelsey McNicholas,
a student at Guilford College and a volunteer
with the humanitarian organization No More Deaths
which seeks out migrants in the desert
to give them water, food, medical care,
and presence.

When undocumented immigrants are caught
by the U.S. border patrol,
they are
detained.
Manuel González told Kelsey
that while in detention
on the U.S. side of the border,
our side,
he'd only been given peanut butter to eat.

Ricardo Emilio Sánchez,
walking beside Manuel and Kelsey,
chimed in
that he had been given a tiny cold hamburger
and a small juice
for the whole day.

During Kelsey’s time in Nogales, Mexico,
across the border from Tucson, Arizona,
other people who had recently been detained
on the other side,
our side,
and then deported back to the Mexican side,
told her
that they weren't allowed to sleep.
Guards would come in and blare music
to keep them from sleeping.

Women described being stripped
to their last layer of clothing
in a highly air conditioned room.

Men described
having seventy people crammed into one room,
so packed that three had to sleep in the bathroom,
preventing anyone from using the facilities for three days.

Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?
Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?

During the dangerous crossing
from Mexico to the U.S.
and on occasion
in the other direction,
women, children, and men
driven by economic necessity,
risk their lives
there, in the heat and the rocks.

Some die.

The bodies of those who died in the desert,
if they are not found soon enough,
disappear.
The desert heat and dryness
eat them away
and they are gone.
Flesh, bones.
Clothes.

Sometimes
after they die
or
if they are lucky,
after they are caught, arrested, and detained,
in the desert
a child’s shoe remains,
or a backpack,
or a small shrine to La Virgen de Guadalupe
in a hole in a rock.

The volunteers find them:
the shoe,
the backpack,
the shrine.

Sometimes, too, the border patrol discovers
these traces of human lives,
of faith,
fear,
the drive to survive.

Far away
from the hot desert
in which the migrants
walk in the
in-between place
between there and here
we are busy
making laws.

Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?
Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?

Far away
from the hot desert of Arizona,
in the deserts of Australia
and Sudan
the droughts worsen.

In Alaska,
the caribou have changed their migration patterns
because the ice melts too soon.

In Japan,
some survivors of Hiroshima are still alive
while neighbors of Fukushima power plant wonder
whether they will become ill
next week
next month
or next year.

In Harlem and San Francisco.
Black and brown children,
God’s youngest
children,
are disproportionately represented
among children with asthma
wheezing and coughing in emergency rooms
with anxious parents at their side.

In fields and factories
on this continent north and south
workers labor amid chemicals
not fit for human consumption
so that we can have
our strawberries
and our t-shirts.

We have nailed the earth God made
to a cross of
heat and waste.

Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?
Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?

By the cross of Jesus the Christ
the soldiers of the Empire
mock
and taunt
and violate
the precious body
of God.

They leave.

And behind them,
at the place of shame and death,
in the open torture chamber in the hot sun
only a few, few friends remain,
witnessing.

Mary of Magdala.
Mary the mother of Jesus.
One or two other women.
The beloved disciple,
whose name
we may or may not know.

Only their presence protests.

But they are present.

It is dangerous in the Roman Empire
even to stay and watch
the crucified.
Even more dangerous
to take the body down
and bury it with care
rather than letting birds, animals,
the hot sun,
destroy it
and its remains.

Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?


Were you there?

Are you there?

If we do not cry out
The stones will cry out.

But must we leave it to the stones?

Jane Carol Redmont
Good Friday 2011
St. Mary's House, Greensboro

The Woman at the Well

'tis I, the delinquent blogger.

A deep and fresh Lent to those of you who observe it.

I will tell you in the next post (yes, there will be a next post) about my Lenten practice, but meanwhile, it is Year A for those Western Christians who live in lectionary-land, and Sunday is the day we hear about the woman at the well (a.k.a. the Samaritan woman) in the Gospel of John.

I am not preaching on Sunday (I'm on the following weekend with the story of the man born blind) but I did preach on this text many moons ago in the form of a kind of one-woman show, being the woman at the well several years after Jesus' visit, reminiscing. This was when I was a Catholic laywoman in full-time pastoral ministry, working as Social Justice Minister at Boston's Paulist Center. I posted the sermon on this blog three years ago, so here is the link if you want to read it or read it again. Enjoy.


"The Samaritan Woman at the Well" by He Qi

The oft-recycled Epiphany sermon (with asides on James Taylor, T.S. Eliot, Sadao Watanabe, and Masao Takanake)

Sadao Watanabe, The Magi's Dream

Bear in mind that I wrote this Epiphany sermon a little over a year after 9/11. It's from eight years ago, Epiphany 2003. I stand by what I said. Click here to read it.

I looked for artistic representations of Herod, since a good deal of the sermon focuses on him. What I found, for the most part, were representations of the consequences of Herod's actions: the slaughter of the innocents; the Magi returning home by another way; the flight into Egypt of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

Later on of course there is another Herod, Herod Antipas, who is the son of Herod the Great, and it is he who is involved in the deaths of both John the Baptizer and Jesus according to the Gospel stories.

The only scenes in which Herod shows up as a visible protagonist are, once in a while, Herod with the Magi, and, more often (at least in Western art), Herod's feast, but that one is Herod the son. The feast is the one at which which Herod Antipas's stepdaughter Salome dances and asks for the beheading of John.

In painted scenes of Jesus' infancy, even with Herod the Great's presence in the stories, artists tends to focus on the Holy Family, the shepherds, the animals, the angels, and the Magi. Makes sense. "But Herod's always out there. / He's got our cards on file," James Taylor's song notes. And... See the sermon for more.

Of course I also read --or listen to-- the T.S. Eliot poem "Journey of the Magi" every year, but I only cited a line or two of it in that sermon.

The link at the name of the poem will take you to the text of "Journey of the Magi" and to an audio of T.S. Eliot himself reading it. Well worth a listen.

Don't mix that with the sermon though -- very different animals. Read them separately, or just read one or the other.

Note: I never see the work of the Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe (see above) without thinking fondly of Dr. Masao Takanake, who during his time at Harvard introduced me and others to Watanabe's work. Watanabe's art graces the cover of at least one of Takenaka's books, The Bible Through Asian Eyes. A scholar of Christian ethics, Takenaka also wrote God Is Rice: Asian Culture and Christian Faith and other works. He was for many years the President of the Asian Christian Art Association.

An Open Letter to Anne Rice

My open letter to Anne Rice, an essay on the church, its flaws, and why you can't be a Jesus-person alone in a corner, is up at the Episcopal Café.

Feel free to circulate prn.

Cross-posted on Facebook.

Taking the long view

C.F. Beyers Naudé and Dorothee Sölle, at the end of a long interview-conversation in 1985.

(Published first in Dutch --the conversation took place in the Netherlands-- the interview came out in English as Hope for Faith: A Conversation, jointly published by Eerdmans and the World Council of Churches in 1986.)

Sölle:

I think Christ didn't promise us victory... Christ promised us life, and that includes death. Christ didn't tell us that we would win. Other people tell us that all the time... We hope to win; we fight to win; we give our blood and our lives... but I think we cannot understand our own struggle in terms of success and non-success.

Naudé:

Well, the question that I would like to put to you would be this: Do you, in yourself, have the strength to endure whatever may come to you by way of disappointment, by way of rejection, by way of non-recognition, by way of waiting, perhaps your whole life, without being able to participate in the victory of the truth that you are standing for? Do you believe that you will be able to sustain yourself through these years up to the very end?

Sölle:

I am thinking of a friend's answer to that when I was in a state of despair, and had this sense of meaninglessness and never reaching anything, and then he talked about the cathedrals which were built during the Middle Ages. Most of them were built over 200 years, some over 300 years even, and some of the workers in those cathedrals never saw the whole building, they never went to pray there, they never saw the glass and all the beautiful things they gave their life for. And then this friend said to me: "Listen, Dorothee, we who are building the cathedral of peace, maybe we won't see it either. We will die before it is complete, and yet we are going to build it. We are going on even if we won't live in that building." 

XXX

xxx

Pledging Allegiance: a reflection on Christian commitment and community on Independence Day weekend

Ann Fontaine of Episcopal Café fame asked on Facebook what we were planning to do for our churches tomorrow when Sunday falls on July 4.

When I was writing lectionary reflections (meditations to help people who are either preaching or reflecting on the readings assigned for the Sunday in question) a few years back for the late lamented magazine The Witness, I wrote this --and later preached a related sermon-- for the feast of All Saints.  

Though this was an All Saints' Day meditation, it may be apt for July 4 with its "Pledging Allegiance" theme and its reminder of the "Where do we place our security?" question of the 1980s religiously based disarmament movement and the question about who, what, is our primary community. 

Not to take away from love of country (for the record, I get misty-eyed at "America the Beautiful" -- and at "This Land Is Your Land" :-)) and struggle for independence -- just to put patriotism in perspective.

Cross-posted on Facebook

In anticipation of Trinity Sunday

Until a month or two ago I had forgotten that I'd written this piece! This is Year C in the lectionary, not Year A as it was when I wrote the essay highlighted in the previous sentence, but perhaps some of you will find this helpful as you prepare sermons for Trinity Sunday or as you prepare to celebrate the feast.

(Cross-posted on Facebook, but without the icon.) 

The Sermon to the Snakes

"What is the whole of our existence," said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, "but the sound of an appalling love?"

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

"What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don't mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given--children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps--we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes--those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God's love work in our lives? Or is God's love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

"Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

"Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

"Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

"Oh my friends..."

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

"I am like you," said Father Damien to the snakes, "curious and small." He dropped his arms. "Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved."

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

"If I am loved," Father Damien went on, "it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace."

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

Louise Erdrich

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

(c) 2001

2002 paperpack, HarperPerennial, pp. 226-227

Epiphany: we're in reruns again

Forgive us. We've been having what some would vaguely but appropriately refer to as "writing issues" here at Acts of Hope, or maybe that's "no-writing issues." Either way, we are being ecological again this year, as we were last Epiphany, and we are recycling. That's a more positive way of putting it than saying we are laggards. Well, +Maya Pavlova is no laggard. I am.

So, once again, here is an old sermon. Epiphany only comes once a year, so perhaps most of you had forgotten it by now. Blessed feast. Don't let Herod haunt you.

"The Magi," by He Qi

Last year's sermon for Advent I

In the process of working on Sunday's sermon, I looked back at last year's sermon for the First Sunday of Advent.

The theme of mindfulness will be there this year, too. Beyond that, well, we'll all have to wait till Sunday to see what else comes up. Still pondering.

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ... And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. (Mark 13:33, 37)

Greensboro and Triad area folks: you're always welcome to join us at St. Mary's House, 11 a.m. Sundays.

Icon: Our Lady of the New Advent, by William Hart McNichols

DO SOMETHING for health care reform every day: a series begins

Occasionally we have a series here at Acts of Hope, a mix of information, inspiration, and advocacy. We seem to do this roughly once a year, though not by design.

There was the fund-raising and Latin American theologies series. The beneficiary of our (and other blogs' - this was a group project) fund-raising was an Anglican parish in a very poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. By the way, I have an update on the parish of Cristo Rei from our friend Luiz which I have been meaning to post and which will go up this weekend.

Then there was the Obama election series.

I'm doing it again.


Some of you may have been involved, the last 48 hours, in the Facebook series that asked you to post to your daily updates the following message: No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

I didn't do it.

Not because I don't agree --I do and then some-- but because I felt that for the most part it would be preaching to the converted and that if my eyes were starting to glaze over from the message, other people's would. And mostly, because I think we need to DO something.

Like my other friends and colleague who want health care reform and who prefer either a public option or plain ol' single payer health care, I rant and complain, but more than half the time, I don't do anything. Meanwhile, there are lies and distortions all over the place, our local and national media don't get complaint letters when they spread those lies or when they fail to do their job as public educators, the noisy rude folk dominate the public forums (or maybe they don't, but they sure get the coverage), and our Congressfolk don't hear from us. A few of them have spines, but the others will not develop them till we remind them that we are the ones who will re-elect them -- or not. And that they work for us.

And we bitch and moan (pardon my language) about the President we worked hard to elect when he doesn't change massive systems with the wave of a magic wand. Then, of course, we will blame him for everything.

How do you think we got him elected?

HARD. WORK.

PUBLIC. INVOLVEMENT.

TIME. ENERGY.

It's our country, these are our bodies, this is our health care system we want to change. And we have no right to complain unless we act.

Thus, I am starting a series here. It's partly to get myself off my duff and have a place to be accountable and partly because besides I am at heart several things --artist, priest, and yes, organizer.

I don't have time for this either, but it's too important to leave alone.

I don't fully know what will be in this series, but I pledge to put something useful here every day. Information, education, ways to act, analysis, commentary, reporting. It won't all be mine. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. I will link to other sources and to people who know more than I.

And yes, I will write, this weekend, a short report on our Greensboro public forum on health care, with a little something on Teddy Kennedy.

I am also doing this in part in memory of Kennedy, who was my Senator for many years and was still, at the time of his death, my parents' Senator.

Feel free to send me (in the comments or via e-mail) information and links and suggestions.

Uncivil speech is not welcome; I will delete it; don't even try. Conversation is another matter. Conversation is good. Disagreement is fine if it is reasoned and polite. And lament is fine too: there is plenty to lament. But lament is the beginning of resistance and healing. Or can be.

Stay tuned. And thank you for reading this and for caring for the common good.

If you haven't see this video about the why of government-run health insurance, have a look.

P.S. I'll still post other things, too. This isn't turning into The Health Care Blog.

Mural "Community Caring, Community Healing" by David Fichter. Martha Eliot Health Center, Jamaica Plain, MA.

Words of theological wisdom from Ivone Gebara

From the Brazilian ecofeminist Catholic theologian Ivone Gebara:

I find myself in the grip of a strange feeling that will probably shock my readers. I should like to "rest" the earth I live on and the earth I am so that other things can be born. We live at a time when our life patterns, our paradigms, our theologies, and our spiritualities are tired. We are asking too much of our creativity in trying to deconstruct, re-create, redeem, and insert other traditions into ours. Would a time of pause not be an advantage, a time of personal and perhaps even collective silence? Would it not be a good idea to "rest" so that new ideas that could guide our steps, the fresh shoots that will feed our hopes, might in fact emerge? We live in a whirlwind of ideas, of difficult situations, of tribulations and violence of all sorts. It seems that no one is being understood in this vast Babel! It seems as though we are in a collective war, trying to survive at all costs by eliminating others.

This situation makes me think of the biblical story of the Flood. The raging waters have swallowed everything, but in the midst of them floats an "ark" preserving all different species of life. There had to be hope, perhaps hope over a long time, before the dove could fly out from the ark and return with a fresh branch, a green shoot, the sign that new things were happening. I take this myth in the form of a parable not in order to insist on the destructive nature of our actions in the century just ended, but to say that perhaps we have to keep quieter, perhaps we have to look for fewer "spiritualities," so that values that are truly vital can emerge in our lives. I fear that our anxiety to appropriate a feminist spirituality may be vitiated by so many events that destroy us physically and our cultures that we shall not be capable of actually touching the human roots that sustain our existence. Without realizing it, we are beginning to seek to appropriate in a feminist form the elements that mattered most in the masculine spiritual tradition: witness, martyrdom, holiness, imitation. All these still come very mixed in with the masculine models of a patriarchal Christianity of domination and conquest which, although it has helped thousands of people, has also been an instrument of oppression and destruction of as many others. I believe life is inviting us, for a time, to a certain "suspension" of new spiritualities, to a patient wait for what will come, to a voluntary silence or greater care with our words and our theories. We should not be in a hurry, or we shall find ourselves simply using the same discourse "feminized."

In this sort of "retreat" from theological babble, we should be preparing ourselves, I believe, for a strategy of accepting the newness that is being begotten in the depths of the earth, in the depths of ourselves, a newness full of surprises and still imperceptible to our reason. It is a sort of collective begetting, a hazardous pregnancy with no definite birth date. We are in a time of waiting, experiencing anxiety and even dread at what might arrive, intervening with care just so that life may be respected. All we can do is to protest, through organizations and outside them, at the massive destructiveness that continues to threaten our hopes of life. All we can do is be grateful for the chance to caress our daughters, sons and grandchildren, hoping that our longing for love and solidarity can be the food they receive from us today. But we still cannot even stammer the name of the new forms of hope waiting. There are just the things that sustain the humanity in us: friendship, affections, solidarity among all, waiting for the new day that will come.

I believe that this is the only possible way forward in a situation of flood and darkness. People need to feel in the first place that there are hands guiding ours, that there are hearts beating with ours and moving beyond the old divisions. We need to know that there are others dreaming with us of a better world. History has shown that this time of waiting in solidarity has in fact existed before and is still in existence. In the near future it will be capable of proclaiming that some fragile "green shoots" can now be glimpsed. And life, all forms of life, will be able to flourish in the farthest corners of the earth.

Ivone Gebara, "Feminist Spirituality: Risk and Resistance," trans. Paul Burns, in María Pilar Aquino and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In the Power of Wisdom (London: SCM Press / Concilium, 2000), 41-42.

Photo: Atlantic forest landscape at the REGUA Reserve, Brazil. Click to enlarge.

Cecilia's Sunday sermon

Read it.

This sermon is the Sunday worship follow-up to this and this.

I have two words in response: wow and amen.


Music for the occasion: Four movements from the same piece (Bach's Magnificat) from which I posted in the last two updates on Cecilia.

This is out of order since it is the 2d movement, but it is appropriate: Et exsultavit.

And the next two movements: Quia respexit and (especially) Omnes generationes.

And this, the 11th movement: Sic locutus.

Sheep

What in the world am I going to say in my sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday?

Photos: Rising Meadow Farm

On to the Abruzzi

The intrepid Parents of Acts of Hope have (if all has gone according to schedule) wrapped up their five day stay with the great-grandchildren (one boy, one girl) and their parents (Nephew the Elder and Lovely Spouse) and left for the third country in their semi-whirwind trip. Those of you who read my Italian earthquake update earlier this month may remember that Nephew the Younger and Lovely Partner live in the Abruzzi (a.k.a. Abruzzo), though not in the part of the province that had the earthquake. So Parents of Acts of Hope were due to fly into Rome and be picked up by Nephew the Younger and driven up to the hills an hour or so three hours away [edited 5/1 after getting accurate info] for a few days and nights in the Abruzzi, not too far from the Adriatic Sea. This will be their first time meeting Lovely Partner; I haven't met her yet either and look forward to doing so in the coming year.

Stay tuned and keep up the prayers. So far, so good. Brother of Acts of Hope and his Beloved spent the weekend in Portugal so four generations of the Acts of Hope family were together. I was the missing sibling in our generation. Nephew the Younger was the missing sibling in the next generation. It's already a wonder that so many in the far-flung family could be together at once. Hurrah for them. I am drooling in anticipation of the pictures and the stories.

Meanwhile, back at the funny farm here, classes have ended (my last one was last night) and I am spending the coming week writing and grading -and reading and grading and writing and reading and grading and writing. A small brown bunny had a leisurely lunch behind the house, nibbling away at the back yard while I washed dishes and watched out the window. +Maya Pavlova ignored the bunny. Squirrels and birds are another story.

I am also pondering images of the Good Shepherd along with the shepherd and sheep readings for this weekend. Beeeeeeeeehhhh.

The intensity of academe

There's a lot of it.

Three "final class of the semester" down, one to go.

Usually we teach three courses a semester at my school, but I had a fourth, or really a fraction of a fourth course, just a once a week, one-credit colloquium with our religious studies majors. The other three courses are four credit courses.

Tonight's class got out at 10:20 p.m.

One more tomorrow evening, not quite as long because I am going to let people out early.

Now begins the grading marathon. I am also on deadline for a Big Academic Tome I am writing. Not so great timing but there you have it. Maybe if I read and grade three hours a day from tomorrow on and write the rest of the day I won't have to pull any all-nighters next week when grades are due for seniors (May 6) and for everyone else (May 8). My birthday is May 7. It used to be well timed when I was younger and schools ended in June. Now it's always in the middle of finals!

Sorry to bore you with Facebook-like trivia (though, to be fair to Facebook, there are also great professional and personal conversations and reunions there) but I know some of you friends are not on FB, and I'm feeling the need to connect to the "outside world" a bit as the academic walls close in a little more this week and next.

I have to cook up a sermon for this coming weekend, too. One very anti-Jewish reading from Acts (yo, crucifixion was a Roman punishment!), the 23d Psalm, a request from the first Epistle of John that we love one another, and the Good Shepherd reading from the Gospel according to John. Ooookaaaayyy. Let us pray!

There are lilies of the valley blooming in my garden, though, or rather, the landlady's garden. It is a surprise garden. I moved in the first of September and I never know what is going to pop up. First it was daffodils and jonquils and narcissus. Then the dogwood tree bloomed deep pink against the silver grey-green bark. (It is now pale pink and growing leaves.) Then the rains came and produced green plants whose name I do not know and some of which are probably weeds, including poison ivy if I am not mistaken (I have started weeding - with gloves - and looking up plants online), flowers new to me here and there, and two rows of lily of the valley, just a touch early for le premier mai. Meanwhile, the rhododendron burst into red bloom. What the French call boules de neige (literally "snowballs") and is either viburnum or white hydrangea came out almost at the same time. The tall trees have been shedding yellow pollen. And who knows what's next?

Two meditations for Palm Sunday evening

Two meditations for Palm Sunday evening

********************

I wrote these meditations for tomorrow's Palm Sunday evening contemplative prayer at All Saints Episcopal Church, Greensboro, North Carolina. Someone (I can't be there as it turns out) will read these, slowly, on either side of a period of silence.

The meditations assume that those present will have been to the morning service and heard the gospel texts there, but perhaps they can speak to other people as well. You are welcome to use them privately or in public (with attribution if you use them publicly and have a printed worship leaflet, otherwise just use) and I would love to hear whether you make use of them or not.

I was going to wait till later to post the meditations, but since it is already morning in China and Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand I want our friends there to have them with plenty of time. Then on to European friends and then to these shores. Holy Week begins.

1.

Have you noticed that in the Gospels, in all those other stories we have heard, long before the Passion, Jesus doesn’t say “worship me?” Have you noticed?

Jesus doesn’t say, “worship me.” He says “follow me.”

Here we are in the gateway to Holy Week, on the Sunday of the Passion.

It is the Sunday when we remember that the people waved green branches to celebrate Jesus’ arrival into Jerusalem. It is the Sunday when we walk in procession and wave palms.

But when we enter the gate to this week we call Holy, we discover that if we want to honor this Jesus, we must listen to him, and watch him, and walk with him.

Walk with Jesus. Follow Jesus.

This is a week of listening, watching, walking.

We will follow Jesus this week. We will try to stay awake. We will become impatient. We will weep. We will lose hope. We will discover Jesus’ faithfulness to us and to our humanity. We will grow silent.

“Follow me.”

**********************************

2.

Only once a year do we remember the woman who appears in all four gospels and who anoints Jesus.

The story we heard this morning in the Gospel of Mark was probably the oldest of the four and thus the closest to the actual event.

The woman in this story has no name. We know her only as “a woman.”

Yet the Gospel author says, “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

We know the name of Jesus’ betrayer, Judas. We know the name of Peter, who fell asleep. We hear that this same Peter denied Jesus, not once but three times.

Yet we do not know the name of the woman who understood that Jesus’ life led to the cross, who knew that he was going to die, who demonstrated in her gesture the outrageous abundance of the love of God. This name we do not know.

“Wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

On our path of faith, on our walk with Jesus, whom have we forgotten? Whom do we need to remember? Whose actions, whose memory, will offer us a vision for living?

Taking up our cross: a meditation by Magdalene

Okay, back to Lent.

Magdalene, ever the fine preacher, theologian, and biblical interpreter, has a meditation on what the cross is which is a must-read. When you think of someone "having a cross to bear," what do you think? When Jesus says "take up your cross and follow me," what does he mean? Read Mags's thoughts on this here.

Also on "Talk of the Nation:" MLK's challenging words

If anyone still lives under the delusion that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. only spoke of holding hands and singing Kumbaya, that person would do well to listen to the final segment (twenty minutes before the hour, mas o menos) of "Talk of the Nation." The show mentioned below offers to us one of Dr. King's most eloquent speeches.

It is the "I Have a Dream" speech, but in full, with the criticism and prophecy -- not just the final few sentences everyone knows and quotes.

Listen. Listen.

The speech is also available here. It will be up at NPR via the link above (the green words) this evening.

From last year: an old Epiphany sermon

While the Canon to the Extraordinary is on blog break, I, Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire, bring you some bloggy flashbacks. This one is from last year at Epiphany. It is an old sermon, but not too old. Have a look.

Or have a nap.