Pick your Psalm Branch Sunday

For members of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) Jos, Nigeria, has always meant one thing: missions. On March 17, 2010, the world learned that Jos is a place of conflict, a community where the Muslim descendants of Ishmael killed about 500 and burned 75 houses of the Christian descendants of Isaac. In other villages children and pregnant woman were among the dead. The sectarian violence has a long history.

Thousands of women marched with branches protesting the slaughter of Christian villagers in Jos. Will their government hear them? Will the Christian vice-president of Nigeria do anything? Can he stop this violence? Who will end this violence (Gen. 16:21)? Where is God in all this?

That first Palm Sunday was misunderstood by many. Humble, seated on the foal of a donkey, Jesus was anything but a conquering hero. Well, not like a conquering Roman general. Nevertheless, the road to his cross was paved with the laments and cries of distress of the people Christ came to save; the cross itself was a battlefield. Will the risen Christ, seated at the right hand of the God the Father Almighty, respond to the cries of his people in Jos, Darfur, or in parts of Indonesia where certain forces of Islam oppose Christianity with military and political power?

When brandishing branches in churches this Palm Sunday, may Nigerian Christians, should Nigerian Christians, sing Psalm 68:1 and 2? Should their ministers preach from Psalm 79? May the congregations recite all the verses of Psalm 137, ending with the scandalous: “O Daughter if Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us—he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks”? Are only some Psalms appropriate for Christian liturgy? Is any Psalm which petitions God to do justice by his might, right for Palm Sunday?

Fifth Sunday in Lent: Learning to Die

“We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. AS children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and heath, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word ‘good’ should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

“Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

“Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die everyday, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn one day closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.’ Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.”
John Richard Neuhaus, As I Lay Dying. Meditations upon Returning (New York: Basic, 2002), 3-4.

“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam we all die, so in Christ will all be made alive.” (1 Cor. 15:20-22)

Fourth Sunday in Lent: Humility

“Have the mind of Christ Jesus
Who, being in very nature God ,
did not consider equality with God something
to be grasped
but made himself nothing,
taking the very form of a servant.” (Phil 2:5-7)

Perform an act of humility this week.

Third Sunday in Lent: Following Jesus, after Easter

“Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matt. 26-025). There is something cruel in the way that this last phrase reiterates almost word for word the narrative of the initial scenes of vocation. ‘They left everything and followed him’ (Luke 5:11). In St. Luke’s account, after the arrest, those who accompanied Jesus are not called ‘disciples’ (mathetai); later they are called by another name (the Eleven and their companions), and in the Acts of the Apostles, the expression mathetai belongs to the Church.

“The disruption of the disciples at the moment of the Passion is of decisive importance. Between Christ and his first disciples yawns the unbridgeable abyss of the Cross. There the disciples cannot follow. The end of the earthly way of Jesus is the Cross; it is his specific vocation. He alone can submit to it, solitary, bearing the burden of all. The idea of following Jesus is not to be understood as if it were a question of imitating a great man such as we might take as a model for our own life, a Ghandi, a Socrates, for example; Christ and his disciples are not on the same plane. The Cross is unique. Even if the believer of today has in some way the possibility of walking the road that took Jesus to the Cross and resurrection it is still uniquely thanks to the grace of the One risen and glorified.

“It is only after Easter that the disciples are able to follow Jesus to the end, because following Christ reveals itself as being much more profound than a simple invitation of an ethical order, or something merely exterior.”

A Carthusian, The Call of Silent Love (Gracewing 2006), 51-52.

Second Sunday of Lent: The Habit of Faith

“Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamour of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so, as I well remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe.

“Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality; disbelieve in Him and you face must hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all. No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all this fifth-columnist in the soul. Only the practice of Faith resulting in the habit of Faith will gradually do that.”

C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Eerdmans, 1995), 41-42.

First Sunday in Lent: Priorities

There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began “Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.” This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer be sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.

C. S. Lewis, The Quotable Lewis, 497