Every family has stories that it keeps telling … stories that are passed down
through the generations … stories that are seeded in history … in things that may have really happened (in time and space) but blossom and bloom best in the world of storytelling … because the story is what matters …
Every tradition has stories that it keeps telling … that it keeps re-enacting … This weekend, our Jewish brothers and sisters are telling an ancient story of liberation … eating symbolic foods as a way of re-telling a legendary story of survival as they celebrate the festival of Passover … It is an ancient story about a road to freedom … a journey of escape from economic, social and racial injustice … It’s a story about finding a way out of no way.
In the Christian tradition, we have our fair share of pageantry as well … each year, near the winter solstice, we place a pregnant woman on a donkey to make a long journey from Nazareth to her ancestral village to register in a census. We give her a manger in a stranger’s stable to serve as a crib for her newborn. And we bring shepherds to celebrate, angels to sing and magi of offer exotic gifts.
And on the last Sunday before the first full moon after spring equinox … (on the Sunday before the festival of Easter), we place that grown up child on another donkey and have him ride down the road from the village of Bethany into the streets of Jerusalem. We line the streets with joyful pilgrims welcoming this rider as a liberating hero. But we usually have the cast of characters wave palm branches and sing hosanna and stop the story right there on the road. But this is how one of the four first century story tellers completes the journey:
Luke 19:41-48
41 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it 42 and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. 43 The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. 44 They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”
45 When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. 46 “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be a house of prayer’[a]; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’[b]”
47 Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him. 48 Yet they could not find any way to do it, because all the people hung on his words.
This is a story that gives us the complex geography of a heart … a heart that is broken open by grief and anger … a heart that has travelled lonely roads, navigated confusing intersections and is well acquainted with the terrain of tragedy, violence, inequity and fear … it is a heart that follows the curve of its passion by taking to the streets and weeping.
In our march toward easter we come to this day each year with palms and hosannas but the story doesn’t let us off that easily. Despite how we have named this day and this story in our tradition, there is no triumphal entry into the city to witness. There are tears to be shed and shared. There is no confrontation with the occupying army … There is no threat of insurrection … the homegrown ticker tape parade with the borrowed ass and its rider goes straight to the temple … But Jesus and his friends don’t exploit that stage to incite the soldiers by burning an effigy of Pilate or Caesar …In the world of the story, he doesn’t ascend the steps at the temple and make a speech rallying the peasants into confrontation with the military … he doesn’t try to stage a riot … he has brilliantly mocked the power of the empire and of its religious collaborators without saying a word.
Over the next few festival days those peasants who ought to be protected by the institution of the temple will be making a pilgrimage there to offer their sacrifice before celebrating the feast of Passover. They will be forced to pay their temple tithes and Roman taxes and then to ante up a little more again to line the pockets of the temple elite … Ironically, they will be forced to participate in this system of exploitation as they come to re-enact their liberation from an earlier domination system. So naturally the target of this passionate protest is the temple which is making an ass of itself.
This clever piece of street theatre demonstrates that the power of taking to the streets … the power of revolutionary protest is not found in shouting sound bytes of hatred or raging death threats … There is no point to stand there and make all the right points … a rant won’t change anything … It is not enough to be angry … Unless rage leads to engagement, the street will be the scene of a moment not the birthplace of a movement…
In the world of this story, the street was not a geography in which to incite violence … it was the place to critique and envision … to deconstruct and reconstruct … to imagine and articulate another way … to offer an alternative … another possibility … The story doesn’t end on the road with the cheers … it doesn’t end with the critique of their leaders and institutions … the story says he stayed there in the temple and taught … and the people were spell bound by what they heard … and the authorities were powerless to silence him.
The street is where we build brave spaces together … where we have the courage to find the intersections where we can meet opposing opinions, conflicting interest, contrary values, competing claims with the power of the tears that took us there … motivated by what breaks hearts … by the failure of possibility … the places where we can listen rather than make noise … the places where we can build a new road brick by brick …
As Valarie Kaur reminds us, “revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way of being. We birth the beloved community by becoming the beloved community”
Our tradition gives us a story that invites us to engage our dissent … a story that calls us into confrontation with whatever temples of corruption and collusion oppress our most vulnerable citizens … the temples, the institutions and systems of our time, that exploit the vulnerable or widen the gap between the rich and the poor … the temples, the policies and priorities, that exploit the air, soil and water upon which all life depends ….
We tell this story not for its palms (which if you read closely … not one of the four accounts we have gives us any palm branches … they lay down their coats … and in last account to be written (in John’s gospel) they wave green leafy branches) … we tell this story for its passion … for its peaceful protest … for its power of imagination … for its invitation to make our way with our tears and our rage, to the brave spaces of hard places in our selves, to the conflicted streets in our families, in our workplaces, in our communities, in our world …
Ours is a time that calls for unprecedented creativity … a time in which we need fewer soldiers and more artists … more teachers … more visionaries … more builders … more community makers … a time for imagination and ingenuity … a time to expose injustice and envision justice with a cleverness that disarms … like the fist in the velvet glove ….
If our creativity were to take to the streets, imagine the conversations we could provoke? Imagine the alternatives we might see to terror and violence… imagine the peace we might see to be possible … imagine the bridges we might build …
-Nancy Steeves
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