April 9, 2017 - Holy Week: Sunday of the Passion - Those With Ears to Hear and the Sleeping Disciples

In last year's entry about Palm Sunday the question on my mind was, "Is an insight, a new sensation, or a deep revelation necessary to make worship meaningful?".  Is there an insatiable "something that's different" that needs to be experienced in each Sunday worship? I ran across an interesting Brian McLaren quote "It's not about the church meeting your needs; it's about joining the mission of God's people to meet the world's needs."

Today Matt led the choir singing a heartfelt On Humble Beast Now Rides the King. Katie, Annie, Pastor Michelle, Suzi, Craig, Karen, Gary and Robert read from Matthew's account of the Passion.

We at Creator, like most Christians, treasure the narratives of all the events of the last days of Jesus and share them during Holy Week worship. Many of us have heard these words and stories throughout our lives. Last year my feelings did not match my expectations during the Palm Sunday worship readings. I reasoned that this year-after-year familiarity with the text was the reason why. Last year I approached that Passion recitation for some deep meaning evoked in that particular reading at that particular moment.

Trinity Cathedral, Zimbabwe

Less than a year ago I encountered the Karl Barth observation, "The Bible is the book that reads me" which gave me a new perspective , together with the Passion narrative itself. When you question what you are reading in the Bible you find that the Bible is also questioning you. When you ask "What is this book?" you find you are also implicitly being asked in response "Who is this that reads it?"

Many times I read the Bible only to find my eyes dragging across the page and becoming lost in an overall feeling of being unreceptive.  These are the times I could and have fallen asleep while I was reading scripture. For that reason, I feel empathy for the disciples when they sleep in Gethsemane. Their inability to stay awake was not only understandable to me but I connected with the story because of it today.

Staying spiritually awake is not easy. The news of the world numbs us. Egypt's president called for a three-month state of emergency this Sunday after at least 44 people were killed and more than 100 more were injured in two Palm Sunday suicide attacks at Coptic Christian churches, each carried out by the ISIS terror group.

Another Karl Barth passage came to mind as I read about those suicide attacks “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”

From Thursday to now the national conversation has centered on Syria and the Tomahawk missile attack on the Syrian airbase where the chemical weapon attack that killed civilians was presumably launched. What I saw on the news was disheartening. Most news commentators fell into a strange talking point of Trump doing something when Obama, when he was President, did nothing about the chemical weapons attacks.

The Obama administration first attempted to ask congress to vote for the authorized use of military force in Syria since an attack on a sovereign nation fell outside the 9/11 AUMF. When that didn't happen they shepherded Syria to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013. The Russians were guarantors that Syria would submit to inspections and removal of what it said were stores of chemical weapons in 2014. The Syrian government would now appear to have violated that agreement and so many commentators now conclude this will be a stain on the Obama legacy. My question is how can all those efforts be categorized as having done nothing?

Interpreting this from my Biblical reading draws me to a sad conclusion about what has worth and true value for most people and what does not. When I heard praise for this attack, and some declaring Trump became President at this moment, I was reminded of a scene in The American President where this fictional President orders an airstrike (this came to mind to others as well):

President Andrew Shepherd: What I did tonight was not about political gain, Leon
Kodak: Yes sir. But it can be, sir. What you did tonight was very presidential.
President Andrew Shepherd: Leon, somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor's working the night shift at Libyan Intelligence headquarters. He's going about doing his job... because he has no idea that in about an hour he's going to die in a massive explosion. He's just going about his job, because he has no idea that about an hour ago I gave an order to have him killed. You've just seen me do the least presidential thing I do.

How do we hold what we hear all around us in our hearts, and do what we must, without falling asleep?

This is the ten year anniversary of the first blog entry I made for Creator worship.