Kim
Panaro, ARCWP, and Jim Marsh, ARCWP, led the Upper Room’s Palm Sunday
Liturgical Celebration.
The community blessed the palms at the beginning of the
liturgy.
Blessing
of Palms For Palm Sunday
-from Circle of Grace by Jan Richardson
This
blessing can be heard coming from a long way off.
This
blessing is making its steady way up the road toward you.
This
blessing blooms in the throats of women,
springs from the hearts of men,
tumbles out of the mouths of
children.
This
blessing is stitched into the seams of the cloaks that line the road,
etched into the branches that trace the path,
echoes in the
breathing of the willing colt,
the click of the
donkey’s hoof against the stones.
Something
is rising beneath this blessing.
Something
will try to drown it out.
But
this blessing cannot be turned back,
cannot be made to still its voice,
cannot cease to
sing its praise of the One
who comes along
the way it makes.
The first reading was from the Gospel of the day. The response between the readings by Joyce Rupp and the second reading by Richard Rohr are printed below along with Jim Marsh’s reflection on the readings.
Response before 2nd
Reading
Response to each: I rest in the Peace-Giver’s Presence.
When inner turmoil
and conflict threaten my peace of mind and heart …
When my life is
overly full and I wonder how I will complete what is required …
When I enter into
the pain and suffering of the world’s lack of peace …
When I hurt for
friends, relatives, and others who are distressed …
When fear of the
future rises up and the way ahead is uncertain and unsettled …
When my life
appears empty and loneliness taunts me …
When I live with
concern and apprehension over unresolved issues …
When I feel a great
distance from the One who is the fullness of peace …
All: The peace of
the Life-Giver is with us. Amen!
-taken from Prayer Seeds by Joyce Rupp
Second
Reading - "Christ" Is Another Word for Everything
By Richard
Rohr, OFM
When
Christians defined Jesus in a small way—as a mere problem solver for sin—we
soon became preoccupied with sin itself, which is a largely negative
foundation. We became blind to much else going on in this world except sin and
its effects …. With such a negative anthropology
and without inherent human dignity, it is very hard for even a good theology to
succeed. We must start where the Bible begins in Genesis 1: “It was good,
it was good . . . it was very good” (Genesis 1:10-31).
Yet
many Christian leaders and churches focus on shame and guilt, atonement and
reparation, as if we were children frightened of an abusive father. Is there no
greater meaning to our individual lives and history than to be chastened,
corrected, and “saved” by God? Is there no implanted hope and goodness to first
celebrate? If we start with original sin, our worldview is scarcity rather than
abundance.
Didn’t
Paul tell us “There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything”
(Colossians 3:11), so that “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28)? What
cosmic hope and direction we were offered! But our calculating minds have a
very hard time knowing how to live inside such abundance. Grace is the
consummate threat to all self-hatred.
Christians
formally believed that somehow Jesus was “fully human and fully divine” at the
same time. But with dualistic thinking, the best most of us could do was to see
ourselves as only human, and Jesus, for all practical
purposes, as only divine. We thus missed the whole point,
which was to put the two together in him and then dare to discover
the same mystery in ourselves and in all of creation! That is how Jesus
“saves” us and shows himself as the “pioneer and perfector” of our faith (see
Hebrews 12:2)—and also the model, the guarantee, the promise, and the pledge,
to use some of Paul’s many fine metaphors for Jesus.
Christianity,
a religion based on the radically inclusive and compassionate vision of Jesus,
has had a very different philosophy and practice in its actual history.
Jesus was held hostage and misused by culture, nation-building, and prejudice,
I am afraid. He ended up being neither Jesus nor Christ!
Rather
than being taught that we can and should follow Jesus as “partners in his great
triumphal procession” (2 Corinthians 2:14), we were told to be grateful
spectators and admirers of what he once did. Instead of a totally “Inclusive
Savior” we made Jesus into an object of exclusive and exclusionary worship.
Then we argued and divided over what kind of worship he preferred. Jesus never
asked for worship, only that we “follow” him (Mark 1:18) as fellow attractors (“fishers of people”)
and partners in “his triumphal procession.”
These
are the inspired thoughts of Richard Rohr, OFM … Let the community respond
AMEN!
Palm Sunday Homily Starter – April 9,2017 jtm
Matthew wrote his Gospel some fifty
years after the crucifixion. His content
was certainly not historical since many of his followers/disciples fled. Like
his counterparts, Matthew was writing about the meaning and the message of
Jesus as his community understood it. Matthew’s Jewish-Christian community had
become convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed of God.
Scripture scholar and theologian John
Shelby Spong tells us that this Gospel is patterned after the Jewish liturgical
year of the synagogue. The passion,
death and resurrection of Jesus comes in the first month of the Jewish
calendar, the month in which they celebrate Passover.
Converts to Judaism were instructed
what it meant to be a Jew during the last months of their calendar year and
were inducted during the Passover celebration, the meal during which the
history of the Hebrew people was retold.
Is it any wonder how the season of Lent came to be – it’s the time of
instruction and preparation for baptism of new recruits and a time of renewal
for the whole believing community of Christians.
Let’s try to imagine the environment on
that day in this Gospel narrative. It was Passover and no doubt, pilgrims were
entering the city through all its gates in excitement, greeting one another, perhaps
even singing songs. Pilgrimages and
journeys are often times challenging and festive occasions. Think about the recent Women’s March on
Washington for those of you who attended…. I think back to 1987 when we first
unveiled the AIDS Memorial quilt on the Washington mall, and I also think about
the stories shared by several friends who have walked the Camino de Santiago (Compostela)
in Spain.
Matthew has Jesus riding into Jerusalem
on a donkey to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah about the coming of the
Messiah. Now think about the Roman
Imperial army arriving as well on their horses displaying their weapons of war.
Could Jesus’ arrival on a donkey mean
something more—perhaps a political statement proclaiming the end of imperial
violence and promoting “God’s new reality” of justice and peace, the kin-dom
which was Jesus’ life mission? Jesus
was committed to promoting a new and different reality—a more just, nonviolent
and human society. No wonder they wanted to kill him and his message.
This is a good week to recall the
wonderful stories we have heard these last five weeks of Lent beginning with
Jesus’s temptation. Was he tempted to
throw in the towel and give up on his mission?
Did he know his life would end so violently? The story of his
transfiguration/transformation and mindfulness that “He is God’s beloved.” His
encounter with a women at a well, a despised Samaritan, but nonetheless also God’s
beloved. His healing of a blind person
perhaps to see beyond gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and all
other biases. And finally, his bringing
forth Lazarus from a tomb of darkness into the light of life because there’s
work yet to be done for “God’s glory.”
My friends, Jesus, “the human being,
the beloved of God” is our model and mentor.
Whatever one human being can do, other human beings can also do; and Jesus
assures us we will do even greater things than he. We
Christians follow Jesus by embracing his spirit and adopting his passion. This
means bringing truth where there is deceit and lies, ending cruelty in all its
forms, and being compassionate to those who suffer and are the most vulnerable
among us.
This is a good week to ponder not just
the last events in the life of the historical Jesus, but all those
transforming, healing, resurrection moments in our lives. We are one people (whether Jew, Muslim,
Buddhist, Christian, …) with one Abba/Amma God, called to love one another no
matter what happens. How are we called,
you and I, to live on this planet with a generous, abundant, fearless spirit
that mirrors the Divine?
What did you hear? Thank you for being a model to me of
what it means to be a Christian—the face of God!
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