Commentary

Observing Dr. King’s birthday as prelude to Lent

Might the church in the US have a new liturgical season,
beginning with the anniversary of King’s birth and extending to Ash Wednesday?

Processional. “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me.” —Fannie Lou Hamer, renowned civil rights leader from Mississippi, who persevered despite receiving unrelenting threats and endured brutal beatings by police

Invocation. “May God bless you with discomfort . . . so that you may live deep within your heart,” begins “A Franciscan Blessing”

Call to worship. “Who the hell is Diane Nash?” features a brief (2:04) interview with former Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler remembering his phone conversation with civil rights leader Diane Nash, trying to talk Black students from Nashville from carrying on the “freedom ride” after the original participants were brutally beaten when their bus arrived in Birmingham, Alabama

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The cultivation of gratitude and the practice of thanksgiving

Ken Sehested

Processional. “Give Thanks.” —Abyssinian Baptist Church choir, New York City

Invocation. “Come ye fearful people come / Cast your sighs to highest heav’n / Yet—though terror’s harvest spread, / Casting sorrow in its stead— / Still the Promise doth endure / Life abounding to secure / Come, ye thankful hearts, confess / Mercy’s lien o’er earth’s distress.” —Ken Sehested, new verse to “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come”

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Christ the King(?) Sunday

Ken Sehested

Invocation. “O King of the nations, and their desire, / the cornerstone who makes both one: / Come and save the human race / which you fashioned from clay.” —English translation of lyrics to “O Rex Gentium” (“O King of Nations”), performed by the monks of St. Meinrad

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Hope as the power to transcend the world-as-it-is and enact the new world as promised

Ken Sehested

Processional. “Tango,” featuring jazz songstress Dianne Reeves. When the Spirit transcends human language, and faith, hope, and love join in a brawl with all who would foreclose history’s predicted demise.

Invocation. “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

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Whither hope on the eve of an election?

by Ken Sehested

On the eve of an election that could return a scurrilous man to the Oval Office and unleash a befouled future. If not, should he lose, trouble is still brewing, with the prospect of a rising tide of political violence and a tempest of peril and turmoil, like a razor poised at hope’s throat.

Nevertheless, people of faith and conscience are steadied by eyes fixed on a larger horizon. As the ancients admonish: Return to your stronghold you prisoners of hope. (cf . Zechariah 9:12)

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