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Ken Sehested

Parade. Palestinian band escorting the Orthodox Patriarch on Palm Sunday from The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

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Kindred, we stand on the cusp of Jesus’ final, “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem; his rhetorical jousting with religious authorities; culminated by his inevitable confrontation with Rome’s rulers and the Temple’s bouncers.

Would that “getting right with God” were a more civil, reputation-enhancing, and less disruptive affair.

Instead, Lent beckons us to peer into the face of history’s tragedies, including those in our own hearts.

In response to Jesus’ provocative entry into Jerusalem, the crowds lining the street covered the road with cloaks and “branches,” probably palms, objects of public recognition for royalty and often symbols of military victory in Near Eastern cultures.

This clamor was an incendiary challenge to ruling elites and foreign occupation. Hosanna! More than entreaty for blessing and peace in the immortal bye-and-bye. This street theater evoked expectation of both spiritual redemption and national liberation. Hosanna! meant come and liberate from history’s constrictions.

Passover observance in Jerusalem brought extra garrisons of Roman soldiers to town to suppress outbreaks of Jewish nationalist agitation. On what the church has since named “Palm Sunday,” Jesus is riding on a lowly donkey, not something that a military leader would do. (But is, in fact, referenced in the prophet Zechariah (9:9) as a messianic sign.)

We know from other sources, that Judea’s collaborating King Herod also paraded into Jerusalem this same week, from the other side, and he is wearing his elaborate armor, displaying his deadly weapons, and riding a war horse. Jerusalem thus became the stage of paraded and competing claims on the nature of power.

The crowd proclaimed Jesus as “Son of David” or merely “King,” both references to Israel’s King David who personified the golden age of national splendor. These demonstrators did not comprehend the nuance of Jesus’ upside-down intervention.

Nor, as yet, did his disciples.

Nor, as yet, largely, do we.

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Passion. “If it be your will, that I speak no more / And my voice be still, as it was before / I will speak no more, I shall abide until / I am spoken for, if it be your will / If it be your will, that a voice be true / From this broken hill, I will sing to you / From this broken hill / All your praises they shall ring / If it be your will, to let me sing.” —“If It Be Your Will,” Leonard Cohen

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In the coming week, we face Maundy’s mandate and Friday’s calamity . . . and, well, Saturday’s betwixt-and-between daze and discomposure of Jesus’ disciples and revelers. Then and now, the dominant culture remained confident in the security of the tomb’s immovable stone and the legionnaires’ vigilance over its irrevocable seal.

Best not bank on resurrection’s circumvention of death’s ascendance and terror’s reign. Few doubt the market’s rule enforced by the sword’s regime.

Be clear about this: There is no bystanding in this drama. There is no skipping Maundy’s directive and Friday’s threat on the way to Sunday’s Uprising. No leap from crib to cross to Crown of Glory.

In prosperous cultures like ours, voyeurism is the great pretender as an agency of spiritual formation. Titillation substitutes for texture and substance. The quest for emotional novelties, intellectual baubles, and experiential souvenirs displacing incarnation’s fleshly ordeal.

In my native West Texas idiom, a pretend rancher would be described as “all hat and no cows.” You can dress the part without engaging the reality. “Spirituality” as levitation from history’s crucifying peril. The luxury of hope’s assurance severed from the context of threat. Singing the blues without paying the dues. The pretense of faith despite no back against any wall.

Holy Week epitomizes the story of history’s brutal affliction upended and overturned by Heaven’s insurgence. Good Friday is good not because of what it displays but because of what it foreshadows.

Easter’s eruption is our hymn of invitation to join this mutiny. There is no “getting right with God,” there’s only getting soaked. Only the passion opens onto the Spirit’s efficacy. In a suffering world, only a suffering God is believable. The Way is enjoined by imitating the One we adore.

Let this be our adoration. Let this be our testimony to Heaven’s insurrection for Earth’s reclamation. In the words of an old proverb, let this be our eulogy: They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.

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Promulgation. “I was there when they crucified my Lord / I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword / I threw the dice when they pierced his side / But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide / When love comes to town I’m gonna catch that train / When love comes to town I’m gonna catch that flame / Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down / But I did what I did before love came to town.” —“When Love Comes to Town,” U2 and B.B. King

9 April 2025 • On the occasion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s execution, eight days following Easter’s observance in 1945

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A bit of history and a meditation on the provocation of his witness
(on the anniversary of his assassination)

Ken Sehested

Invocation. “Early morning, April four / Shot rings out in the Memphis sky. / Free at last, they took your life / They could not take your pride. / In the name of love / What more in the name of love.” —“Pride (In the Name of Love),” U2, celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

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If I had the authority, I would institute a new liturgical season in the US—beginning with Dr. King’s 15 January birth anniversary, extending to Ash Wednesday—in preparation devoted to the gift of discomfort in spiritual formation.

It also provides a more visceral connection to the Lenten drama: the breathtaking breakthrough of hope, seemingly out of nowhere, for the prospect of a major advance of justice and human dignity (not unlike the disciples’ and other followers of Jesus experienced), followed by a cruel backlash and crackdown against the same (like the narrative of Jesus’ final days). Then prepping our attention to Jesus’ resurrection stories by attending Dr. King’s parting exhortation: “I’ve been to the mountaintop. I may not get to the promised land with you; but we as a people will get there!”

Dr. King hadn’t planned to speak that night in Memphis. He knew the threats to his life were getting closer by the day. The initial march in Memphis, in support of the striking sanitation workers, had turned violent. The international acclaim he received as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient two years previously had faded; his monumental “I Have a Dream” speech five years earlier seemed to have morphed into a nightmare, given the racial violence spreading across the country. President Johnson, who had granted King’s access to the White House, was enraged by King’s attacks of the war.

By now many of his white liberal friends in the press had abandoned him (as did some in the Black press and other civil rights organizations), all of whom feared he was strategically compromising the civil rights struggle with his condemnation of the war in Vietnam.

The Southern Christian Leadership staff and his close advisers all begged him not to go to Memphis because there was so much work to do preparing for the upcoming Poor People’s March on Washington (“A National Call for a Moral Revival”), scheduled to begin in three weeks, to demand a $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights; fuller employment; income for the disabled; and an end to housing discrimination.

All of this weighed on him so heavily that he decided not to attend the rally at Mason Temple that evening. He asked Ralph Abernathy to speak instead. The weather itself compounded his weariness, for there were serious thunder storms rolling through Memphis, and he wondered if anybody would show up.

As it turned out, despite the weather threat, Mason Temple’s massive sanctuary was packed, and the people wanted to hear from King. Abernathy called him and begged him to come and at least say a few words of encouragement.

So he did, and spoke extemporaneously for over 40 minutes. He confessed his weariness to the crowd, hinting at his sense of mortality, saying “I may not get there with you.” No doubt he knew well the story of Moses who, having led the Israelites out of slavery and wandered in wasteless tracts for 40 years before reaching the edge of the promised land, but could not go there with his people.

But as if a light in his mind spread like a fire in his heart, and with an animated face his voice began to rise, culminating in a vivid image: “But I’ve been to the mountain top, and seen the promised land.” Then came the throb of rising crescendo he shouted out, with tears in his eyes, “I may not get there with you. But we as a people will get there!” Then he nearly fainted and had to be led back to his seat on the podium. Pandemonium had broken out in the congregation.

I believe King was imagining his own demise. You could see the foreboding on his face, in his voice, even in his watering eyes as he spoke. Yet his imagination stretched beyond the shiver of mortal brink. The spiritual contour of his vision was fully aligned with Scripture’s insistence that death lacks final authority. His hope inhabited the great Apostle’s jubilant provocation: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Some insist this speech was the greatest of his life—fuller, more comprehensive even than his famous “Dream” speech. We forget that less than three weeks after his soaring oratory at the Lincoln Memorial—with a quarter million attending—he was summoned back to Alabama for the grisly task of burying four children violently murdered by a terrorist’s bomb at 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Now in Memphis, he was soberly aware that for too many the dream was still a nightmare.

Sure enough, the next day, on 4 April, an assassin’s bullet found his throat. His misgivings of the night before were well founded.

But his was a constellating light, one that transcended his own dire anxiety. He was telling his listeners—he is instructing us now, even from that distance—that the road to peace, rooted in justice, tempered with mercy, difficult and dangerous as it would yet be, would direct and sustain the people after his breathly life faded.

You could hear the echo of Dr. King’s speech in the recent record-setting 25-hour speech in the US Senate chamber, where Cory Booker valiantly predicted that “the power of the people” is greater than the power of racist extremists.

This, for people of faith in the Manner of Jesus, is Resurrection’s imprint on the content and character of our lives.

As preparation for Holy Week, I urge you to listen again to that speech. You can hear it (audio only, 43:14) in its entirety here; or you can listen to about half (22:14) of the speech along with photos, video clips and commentary from some of his colleagues at this link; or an abbreviated 2+ minute portion.

We are in great need of recovering this disconcerting history as an antidote to the way Dr. King’s legacy been homogenized and domesticated and usurped by consumer and patriotic forces wanting to forget that this subversive struggle continues, as does the resistance it engenders. As my mentor and friend Walker Knight insisted, “Peace, like war, is waged.”

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Penitential hymn. “Come Ye Disconsolate.” —Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway

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Ignite in us again the Word that stirs insurrection
against every imperial reign

Dr. King’s 4 April 1968 assassination contemporizes the trials of Lent and the context of Holy Week. His provocation remains.

Admiring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is not the same as being captured by it. Too many find it possible to respect the man but relinquish the mission. It has become too easy to revere the dreamer but renege on the dream. So let us now recall the deep roots of that vision as spoken in ages past:

We remember when Hannah praised God by saying: The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength.

We dream of the day when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

We long for the day when all shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord.

We eagerly await the day when the lame shall be restored, the outcast gathered, and the Blessed One will change their shame into praise.

On that coming day, says Mother Mary, God will pull down the mighty from their thrones and exalt those of low degree.

Our hearts ache for the time when the People of God will again be anointed with the power to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

We confess, O God, that the dream once unfurled with unmatched eloquence on our nation’s lawn has been tamed by pious sentiment and framed for commercial interests. The oratory that once sent shivers through the White House and big house and church house alike has been reduced to polite platitude, “race relations” Sundays and gushy, mushy reverie.

Hear this, O People of the Dream: It is good and right that you recall the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement which mobilized him. The journey to the Beloved Community is sometimes dark and desperate and dangerous, and we need constellating light to orient our hearts, a light that fires resolve, strengthening and directing our feet.

We still have a dream: of a new heaven and a new earth, when the Beloved will dry every tear and death itself will come undone.

For we know that creation itself, now groaning in travail, will be set free from its bondage to decay.

Ignite in us again the Word that stirs insurrection against every imperial reign, against every forecloser’s claim, against every slaver’s chain, until the Faith which death could not contain, the Hope which doubt could not constrain, and the Love which fear could not arraign lifts every voice to sing ’til earth and heaven ring!

“Let our rejoicing rise / High as the list’ning skies / Let it resound loud as the rolling sea!”

Ken Sehested, inspired by 1 Samuel 2:1–8; Isaiah 11:3–9; Joel 2:19–26; Zephaniah 3:19; Luke 1:51-53; Luke 4:18–19; Revelation 21:1-4; Romans 8:19-24. Final line from “Life Every Voice and Sing” (aka “The Negro National Anthem”) by James Weldon Johnson.

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Benediction. “Now the war is not over, victory isn’t won / And we’ll fight on to the finish, then when it’s all done / We’ll cry glory, oh glory (Glory, glory).” —John Legend and Common, “Glory,” theme song for the 2014 film “Selma” which portrays the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil rights march

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A meditation on faithful living in a land filled with frightful prospects

Ken Sehested

Note: I wrote an earlier version of this article (“Dueling spirits are loose in the land: A meditation on the pandemic and the outbreak of political infamy”) in June 2000 when the COVID-19 epidemic wrought infectious fear and trembling, coinciding with the pestilence of President Trump’s first term in office. Some copy has been edited and added in this updated version.

Processional. “Psalm 116: How can I repay the Lord.” —Poor Clares and Pauline Sisters, Lusaka, Zambia

Call to worship. “At the center of our pain, we glimpse a fairer world and hear a call. When we are able to keep company with our own fears and sorrows, we are shown the way to go, our parched lives are watered, and the earth becomes a greener place. Hope begins to grow, and we are summoned to the work that will give us a feeling of wellness and make possible that which we envision.” —Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope

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I will likely be considered antiquated, maybe maniacal, even apoplectic when I say we in the US (with derivative outbreaks elsewhere) are under the spell of the demonic, of those who worship retribution’s demand for sacrificial blood, specifically the silencing and vilifying of dissenters and the coercion of allies and demonizing of opponents.

It is characterized by the bullying of those who do not politically genuflect in our current administration’s presence, of any and all who stand in the way of their imperial designs. Who claim authority to divide the world into makers and takers, to shape all reality in service to the ruthless pursuit of the will to power, power being the elixir of indefinite, everlasting rule of the strong over the weak, the privileged over the disdained, the worthy over the sordid—and claiming that such logic is built into the grain of the universe.

Which, implicitly or explicitly, makes a theological claim: God made it this way.

Not just the claim to rule, but also a despising and revulsion of the frail, all of who are to be sacrificed as burnt offering to an unholy, odious, heinous god, a god who revels in caging children, who threatens fire from (nuclear) heavens, who shrugs at the sight of human suffering, pandemics, genocidal suppression, and ecological devastation, who laughs at every attempt of impeachment, whose word is less than worthless, whose every step is concealed in deceit, whose smiling face tells lies at every turn, whose law has become a license for infamy.

It’s the cost of doing business. Nothing personal. Agree to payola and, suddenly, you’re whole. Such have no friends, only interests. No allies, only exigent collaborators. Welcome to the politics of pandemonium and perfidy.

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Parenthesis: Yom HaShoah is the Holocaust remembrance day for the Jewish community, beginning this year at sunset on 23 April. In many quarters, the language of Yom HaShoah is used instead of “holocaust” because the latter is a Greek word indicating a sacrificial burnt offering as a gift to god. In our day and in our land, it is the disinherited who are designated for holocaust, as when shadow-president Elon Musk refers to the “parasite class” and others as the “takers” as distinguished from the morally upright “makers.”

When money rules, poverty is sin.

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But then, “The Word came to me, saying: ‘Mortal, say to this people: You are a land that is not cleansed. Your officials are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain. You have practiced extortion, committed robbery, oppressed the poor and needy, and extorted the immigrant’” (cf. Ezekiel 22).

Nevertheless, the rapacious laugh at the thought: “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” (Psalm 73:11) Which is to say, scream all you want; none hears the cries of the despoiled. Your God has hung a “do not disturb” sign on Heaven’s door.

You are left to your own retched destiny of grief. Pray only that your death be swift, your memory forgotten. In truth, as 20^th century philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand asserted, “altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism” and “the pursuit of happiness” (in “The Virtue of Selfishness”).

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Word. “The history of the world, my sweet / Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat.” —Sweeney Todd to Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler

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The Ancient of Days wails, “How long? How long will your priests barter righteous to the highest bidder? How long will your prophets pander lies and abide deceit?” (cf. Jeremiah 23:26) How long will you hoard what is not yours! (cf. Habakkuk 2:6).

Those used for target practice, as grist for the mill, as anglers’ bait and fodder for canons cry out, backed against the wall: “How long, O Lord? How long!” (Job 8:2, 18:2, 19:2; Psalm 4:2, 6:3, 13:1-2, 35:17, 62:3, 74:9-10, 74:22, 79:5, 80:4, 82:2, 89:46, 90:13, 94:3, 119:84; Isaiah 6:11; Jeremiah 4:21, 12:4; Habakkuk 1:2)

Judgment awaits those who “plunder many nations, because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth” (Habakkuk 3:6-8). For “I will speak against those who cheat employees of their wages, who oppress widows and orphans, or who deprive the foreigners living among you of justice, for these people do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty (Malachi 3:5).

Because “In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. . . . Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor” (Ezekiel 28:16-17).

“There are those,” writes the author of Proverbs, “whose teeth are swords, whose teeth are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth” (30:14).

Kindred, a cacophony of spirits is loose in the land. We must “Test the spirits to see which is from God” (1 John 4:1); and then loudly, vigorously announce your conclusions in the public square.

Within your assemblies, be persistent in considering how to incite one another—to provoke, stimulate, spur, encourage, stir up to love and good works, to fulfilling the demands of justice (Hebrews 10:24), the prerequisites of peace, all of which are mediated by the imperative of mercy.

Stand, O Mortal, in the watchtower and scan the horizon. “For there is still a vision which will eclipse the ways of the wicked. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come” (cf. Habakkuk 2:1-3).

In the midst of this present turmoil, seek out the quiet of your heart’s deepest region. A Sheltering Wing dwells there and a Guiding Hand—not to escort you from history’s bloody stage, but through it, through and to that far horizon foretold in our defining prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9-10); and Holy Writ’s final promise, of the coming day when all tears will be dried and death itself will be devoured (Revelation 21:4).

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Benediction. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” —character in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Recessional. “When I can’t run anymore, I will walk / When I can’t walk anymore, I may stumble / When I stumble sometimes, I might fall / And down on my knees, I will crawl / Yes down on my knees, I will crawl / I will walk in the light and in the darkness / I will walk in a crowd and all alone / I will walk in the sun, in the pouring rain / But I know I will find my way home / I know I will find my way home.”  — Eli “Paperboy” Reed, “My Way Home”

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Lent is the season to sort out the gods.

Ken Sehested
Text: Philippians 3:17-4:1

Invocation.  “Lovers of the world unite / bound to Creator’s vision, bright / that even these our darkest nights / become the light become the light.” — “Hope Beyond All Hope,” Alana Levandoski

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You may have seen this social media meme. It’s a painting, of a woman in Victorian style dress, and the caption reads: “These days most of my exercise comes from shaking my head.”

Any of you been doing this kind of exercise lately?

Without a doubt, we’re in a rough patch as citizens in this republic. Clearly moving toward an extreme autocratic (or oligarchic) federal government. Depending on your definition, you could also say fascist. Reminds me of Jeremiah’s scathing criticism in his age: “Were [the rulers] ashamed when they committed abomination? . . . (No) they did not know how to blush” (Jer. 6:15). Or recall the judgment of Amos, who complained that the rich sell the poor for silver, and barter the needy for a pair of shoes (8:6). We are millennia removed from the ages of these prophets, but their sharp accusations are as relevant as ever.

On the very day of his assassination in Memphis, Dr. King called his office at Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta to give them his coming Sunday’s sermon title. That sermon title was this: “Why America may be going to hell.” By the time of that fateful day, King’s popularly among the general public had tanked, particularly in the previous 12 months since his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City. After that speech, loudly condemning the war, most of his supporters among white liberals vanished. He was bitterly criticized by more than a few leaders in the civil rights movement. His clear linkage between domestic oppression and international aggression suddenly turned his fame into infamy. Dr. King recognized that the goals of voting rights, integrated schools and buses and lunch counters, were too tame. Something more fundamental was at stake. That’s when he began speaking more directly about predatory capitalism.

And when he did . . . well, you know the old aphorism: Now he done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’!

Just so, what is needed from the community of faith is that its preachin’ includes meddlin’—meddling in the ways money becomes the supreme arbiter of value, in which case the poor and the weak become expendable. What is at stake in this moment in history is more than our democratic norms, the rule of law, maybe the very soul of our nation. This is a profoundly spiritual struggle.

There have always been times when some in power have exercised cruelty and deceit. But never have the majority in all three branches of our government displayed such cold hearts, cruel minds, calloused hands and feet. A time when empathy, a vigilant attention to suffering, has been explicitly repudiated. As our shadow president, Elon Musk, said recently, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”

Many economists believe that the current state of our ruthless economy and politics of fraud are worse than it was in the Gilded Age, during the latter part of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when robber barons amassed their wealth at the expense of workers, when political corruption was rampant—or, as the title of my sermon says it, quoting Paul’s letter to the small Christian community in Philippi, “their god is their belly.” And I’m not just talking about stomachs or culinary habits—it was (and is) a gluttony of twisted desires and rapacious appetites, where might most certainly, and most ruthlessly, makes right.

I’m remembering, too, the Prophet Micah, who warned of the judgment to come of those, as he puts it, “who devise evil deeds on their beds!” And can’t wait until the sun rises to seize the property of others, who covet fields and oppress householders (2:1-2). Those who, like our golden-dyed hair-of-a-president, resurrects our nation’s colonial past by his intention to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, ethnically cleansing Gaza to establish it as a massive tourist resort—even to the point of annexing Canada, all to satisfy his insatiable quest for personal gain and coercive plunder.

We are witnessing as never before the transforming of common wealth into private equity. Filling his unquenchable belly, and those of his parasitic patrons.

Now, put on your seatbelt because I’m going to make a hair turn maneuver to ask what in the world does this have to do with Lent?

One of the unheralded theologians of the 20^th century was Charles Schultz and his serial “Peanuts” cartoons. In one day’s panel, Snoopy the dog declares he’s going on a hunger strike. The next day’s sequel has Snoopy banging at Charlie Brown’s back door, food bowl in mouth. Charlie Brown opens the door and says, “Your hunger strike didn’t last very long, did it?” To which Snoopy replied, “The brain may be important, but the stomach is still in charge.”

Though we’ve all recognized this fact over and over, we’re still surprised when our consciences are overruled by our exaggerated appetites. Long before Karl Marx’s claim that money is the prime factor in human decisions, Jesus said it much more concisely: “You cannot serve God and mammon.”

The brain may be important, but the stomach’s in charge.

Lent’s labor is designed to give devoted time to our own hearts and minds; to examine the work of our hands, the paths of our feet; to inquire into the orientation of our eyes and our ears; to audit our speech, whether we have been true and truthful, whether we have said too much—or too little; to scrutinize our longings and desires to see if any have breached their healthy boundaries, if some need retraining of retracting—or reviving.

But hear this! Lent is not for our self-absorption or flagellation, which can be yet another form of narcissism, of pride, of conceit. The work is not a spotlight on ourselves, much less a despairing obsession with our own failings. It is the work of triangulating our attention, in alignment with and yoked to the Work of the Spirit, in a world that has forgotten its origin, its promise, its purpose.

Lenten observance is simply the recognition, followed by corrective measures, that pipes can get clogged; moving parts need lubrication; bodies, in need of medical intervention; cracks exposed and rot replaced.

Remembering that you are dust is not an insult, for such is the very stuff of the universe, ordered and animated in God’s own delight. Do not grovel! Simply allow your compass to be adjusted, as needed.

When we do this, we begin to gravitate toward the most essential question, which Missy mentioned last Sunday: What does it mean to draw near to the heart of God?

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Prepping for Tenebrae. “My harp is turned to grieving / and my flute to the voice of those who weep.  / Spare me, O Lord, / for my days are as nothing.” —English translation of “Versa est in luctum” by Alonso Lobo, 16^th century composer, performed by Tenebrae Choir conducted by Nigel Short 

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And what, you may ask, does calling out dictators have to do with drawing near to the heart of God?

This juxtaposition seems senseless and contorted. Oil and water. Material and spiritual. Doesn’t this confuse piety and politics? And with today’s text, two things are connected in ways that seem preposterous: gods and bellies. Are you kidding me?! Gods and bellies! Can there be a more ridiculous pairing of words?

This is the very point where our piety has too frequently abandoned the very meaning of holiness. So let me see if I can clarify.

In short: To be holy is to be made whole. To draw near to the heart of God is to enter into God’s delight over the created order and into God’s pathos, God’s own grief over a world gone amok. On the one hand, we are called to recognize and proclaim the beauty of what God has created. On the other hand, to accompany the Spirit into God’s grief and anguish is to come alongside those afflicted by the business end of the gun barrel, the pointed end of the knife, the bludgeoning end of the billy club.

This kind of piety—which is rooted in beauty, not duty—prompts us to live in compassionate proximity with those who are shamed, disfigured, silenced, or abandoned. When we experience the loveliness of God—when we draw near to the heart of God—we become lovely, most expressly with those for whom love and care have been suspended.

There are limitless ways to do this, of course, some very ordinary and familiar and nearby; some more ambitious or dramatic or faraway. Integral to our work is to train our attention both to the earth’s beauty and the world’s disfigurement. Sometimes we are called to go beyond our comfort zones, to get ourselves in “good trouble,” to call out injustice or call in the wounded.

Hear this, you Little Flock of Jesus: Trouble is when we go with the people we love. The imposition of Ash Wednesday is not an act of subservience, like a supplicant to a monarch. It is to allow our appetites for fatty foods and sugary colas to be corrected.

In the so-called “real” world, the market insists that we are what we consume; that we are utterly alone, with no covenants, no lasting relationships, no communal bonds. The market’s propaganda says might makes right; that only the strong survive; that you keep what you can seize; that the rich take what they want and the poor suffer what they must.

Lent is our iconoclastic season, to sort out the gods. In particular, Lent’s interrogation is to examine the relationship between gods and bellies. To examine the ways our appetites are serving, or have been severed from, our relationship to the One who alone is worthy, the One who both delights in creation’s sacred status but also grieves over the ways humanity has been warped by inhumane loyalties, desecrated neighbors, and nature itself.

So, let me sum all this up as make our journey with Jesus to Jerusalem: In the immortal words of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “Carry on. Love is coming. Love is coming for us all.”

Live accordingly. Do the truth. In times of trouble, come what may, return again to the Love that will not let you go.

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Benediction. “All the pain that you have known  / All the violence in your soul  / All the ‘wrong’ things you have done  / I will take from you when I come.” —Sinéad O’Connor, “This Is to Mother You”

Recessional. “Verbovaya Doschechka.” —Ukrainian folk song, with 94 violinists from 29 countries collaborating on this rendition

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Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville NC, 16 March 2025, Lent 2

Ken Sehested

Invocation (on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). —“A City Under Siege,” in solidarity with Ukraine, composed by Elijah Culp, text from Psalm 31: 21-24

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In remembrance of Malcolm X
(He was assassinated on 21 February 1965.)

There was a period of years, decades ago, when I experienced a crippling sense of personal shame and social despair when realizing my own complicity in systemic racism. The shame wasn’t because I had enslaved anyone; or had committed blatant acts of racial animus.

It was because I realized how clueless I was. And if I was this clueless in this regard, chances are I was equally clueless about a whole range of other forms of unconscious bias.

Simultaneously I feared that the same applied to larger society, that we as a people were also structurally complicit, trapped in a naiveté that prevented us seeing the truth about our wounded history that continues to color current behavior.

There came a time, though, when, in quick succession, I came across quotes from three of my heroes that bore me up from the sloughs of shame and despair. Not to make me innocent, but to allow me to be responsible, able-to-respond, freed from humiliation’s disabling power to move forward with courage and perseverance for the work of repair.

The first liberating quote is from James Baldwin, writing in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis
whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.
The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean
that very seriously.  You must accept them and accept them with love.
For those innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect,
still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and
until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

 

The second quote is from Maya Angelou.

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it,”
and
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Finally, one from Malcolm X himself.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do,
or think as you think. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”

Each of these are grace notes, hopeful disclosures, stemming from the pivotal word embraced by people of faith: Repentance is not for punishment but for the power of beginning again. Not with a clean slate—we will ever bear our scars. And certainly not as a one-off occasion: Penitential living is a daily commitment and a lifelong process.

But the goodness of the Good News is that we can begin again, we can orient ourselves and our society toward the holiness which radiates neighborliness, restoring right relations and just kinship and social policies, knitting together the warp of Heaven with the woof of Earth.

Only by such grace-impelled, hope-provoked work—and it is laborious, sometimes sweaty, difficult, persevering, frustrating work—can we be saved.

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In Latin America, a common liturgical ritual is to name a salutary person who has passed but whose memory is a source of inspiration and resolve that animates the present, someone who is a guiding light and is seated among our “cloud of witnesses.”

Join me in saying Malcolm X: Presenté!

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Last week I drove several hours to attend the memorial service of a remarkable human being, one I never met. Rev. Nelson Johnson died earlier this month. His name is not listed in the familiar cast of renowned civil rights leaders. But in Greensboro, NC, and among a certain class of human rights activists, he is legendary.

The historic episode for which he is primarily known is the 3 September 1979 “Greensboro Massacre ,”a bloody confrontation between a group protesting the existence of the Ku Klux Klan. As those marchers were assembling, a gang of fully-armed Klan members arrived.

Within minutes the conflict escalated from shouting, to fist fighting, to gunfire. Five were killed and dozen others injured, including Johnson. He and his wife later founded the Beloved Community Center which, still today, engages in a wide variety of justice, peace, and human rights advocacy.

Importantly, after years of the city’s ignoring this brutal history (the police were present but did not intervene until the gunfire ended—Klan members were exonerated), Nelson formed a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to investigate the history, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and concluding that the Greensboro police bore the brunt of responsibility.

Rev. William Barber—some would say the best preacher in our country—gave the eulogy in the memorial service. It was more like a revival than a eulogy. You can watch Barber’s extraordinary homily at this link beginning at 2:32:54. I cannot commend it enough.

Join me in saying Nelson Johnson: Presenté!

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Hymn of resolve. “I only ask of God / That I am not indifferent to the pain, / That the dry death won’t find me / Empty and alone without having done enough.” —English translation, “Solo le Pido a Dios,” performed by Mercedes Sosa. Originally written and performed by Argentinian musician Leon Gieco in 1978, this song is an anthem that was widely used throughout the social and political hardships and civil wars across Latin America, particularly in Argentina and Chile.

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My Cuban friend Samuel Rodriguez Cabrera is not someone many here in the US know. And it’s a stretch for me to call him a friend; more like acquaintance, greeting each other in my several visits to Matanzas. It was 2016, after Trump was first elected as president, that he mentioned to my (very good) friend, Stan Dotson, that Trump would be our country’s chemotherapy: “Either it’s poison will kill you; or will remove the cancer with which your country suffers.” Or something close to that. With the next election, many thought, well, maybe we’re cured. But ’24 said otherwise.

Samuel was a deacon at his church, Primera Iglesia Bautista, a founding member of the Kairos Center, a ministry for the arts, liturgical renewal, and social service sponsored by the church, and served as its chief social worker in its poor neighborhood. His funeral was last week.

Join me in saying Samuel Rodriguez: “Presente!”

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Word. Before the end of Black History Month, watch “Backs Against The Wall: The Howard Thurman Story” (2019, 56-minute film).

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Call to the Table
Come now to this table, all who hunger and thirst for justice,
and all whose hungers are not so clear, but have still led you here.

Come all who weep now, as well as those who are numb and long to feel anything again.

Come all who love and trust in the goodness of God,
all who are leaning on the grace of Jesus Christ,
all who are saying a bold and willing Yes to communion in the Spirit . . .
and all those whose faith is shot through with doubt and fear and confusion.

Come and draw near to One who risked drawing near to us,
despite our own mixed up motivations and simmering hostility,
and even our smug self-righteousness.

When we draw near Jesus, we draw near one another
to live in thanksgiving, and to abide in forgiveness.
—Rev. Stan Wilson, co-pastor, Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville, NC

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Benediction. “In the midst of pain, I choose love / /In the midst of pain, sorrow falling down like rain, / I await the sun again / I choose love.” —“I Choose Love,” Lindy Thompson & Mark Miller, performed by Voces Aged. The song was written in response to the 17 June 2015 mass murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC.

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Including 35 questions for contemplative attention

Ken Sehested

Invocation. “Tempted and tried we’re oft made to wonder why it should be thus all the day long / While there are others living about us, never molested, though in the wrong. . . . / Farther along we’ll know all about it; farther along we’ll understand why / Cheer up, my brother; live in the sunshine, we’ll understand it all by and by.” —“Farther Along,” Dolly Parton

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Lent’s labor is designed as special time and attention to our own hearts and minds; to examine the work of our hands, the paths of our feet; to inquire into the ways and wherefores we give attention with our eyes and our ears; to audit our speech, whether we have been true and truthful, whether we have said too much—or too little; to scrutinize our longings and desires to see if any have breached their healthy boundaries, if some need retraining, retracting, refuting—or reviving.

But beware: Lent is not for our self-absorption or flagellation, which can be yet another form of narcissism, of pride, of conceit. The work is not a spotlight on ourselves, much less a despairing obsession with our own failings. It is the work of triangulating our attention, in alignment with and yoked to the Work of the Spirit, in a world that has forgotten its origin, its promise, its purpose.

Lenten observance is simply the recognition, followed by corrective measures, that pipes can get clogged; moving parts need lubrication; rust appear on metal; bodies, in need of medical intervention; cracks exposed and rot replaced.

Remembering that you are dust is not an insult, for such is the very stuff of the universe, ordered and animated in God’s own delight. Do not grovel! Simply allow your compass to be adjusted, as needed.

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Hymn of petition. “You who went before us, / furthest into the unease, / help us to find you, / Lord, in the darkness.” —English translation to the first stanza of the Swedish hymn, “Du som gick före oss, (Psalm 74)” performed by Voces8

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35 questions for contemplative attention

We all need helpful hints on how Lent’s labor can be carried out. There are many—none are foolproof. What follows are some suggested questions to ponder in your own solitude or in conversation with others. Asking the right question is often essential to arriving at the right answer. You may not find what you need here, but in considering them, you might formulate your own.

1. Can we be faithful without becoming arrogant
2. Can we be generous without recreating relations of control and manipulation on the one hand and dependency and servility on the other?
3. Can we be compassionate without seeking publicity?
4. Can we be patient without becoming passive?
5. Can we be angry without becoming vengeful?
6. Can we become agents of reform without becoming brokers of imposition?
7. Can we be hopeful without being sentimental?
8. Can we weep with those who weep while also rejoicing with those who rejoice
9. Can we offer mercy without ignoring the need for repairing harmed relations?
10. Can we act kindly without becoming passive aggressive?
11. Can we be prophetic without becoming merciless?
12. Can we publicly, even vociferously, demand public justice without becoming self-righteous?
13. Can we excavate the root causes of violence in the world while also doing that work in our own hearts and minds?
14. Can we be forgiving without collecting IOUs?
15. Can we perceive the connection between our efforts at disarming the nations with the work of disarming the human heart?
16. Can we be joyful without being triumphalist?
17. Can we tearfully express our grief and anguish without languishing in the solitude of lethargy and indolence?
18. Can we pledge ourselves to faithful communities without allowing such vows to be transfigured into mobbish, nativist, or insular conduct?
19. Can we recognize that in leaving “Egypt” behind, we also have to dethrone the lingering presence of “Pharaoh” within our own hearts.
20. Can we rediscover God’s passion for the flourishing of the natural world—see ourselves as located within, not dominating from without—thereby recognizing our need for repentance and turn toward repairing and protecting the created order?
21. Can we discern the different but connected needs of providing emergency aid to the suffering as well as the need for opposition to policies which make charity necessary? Engaging in the charitable work of binding wounds, providing shelter and adequate clothing and nutrition and health care—but also deconstructing and reconstructing structures and policies which are the root cause of such deprivations?
22. Can our hands and feet be deployed in the work of resistance to injustice without resorting to clinched fists or trampling boots? To guard against becoming beastly in our struggle with beasts?
23. Can we be “still”—embraced by grace that generates calmness in the midst of torrents—without becoming indifferent?
24. Can we affirm that God is more taken with the agony of the Earth than with the ecstasy of Heaven—employing that affirmation as a plumb line to appraise all that we do and say and think?
25. Can we think of ourselves less rather than thinking less of ourselves?
26. Acknowledging we all have blind spots, unexamined presumptions, privileges of which we are unaware (especially those of us in the majority caste), how can we open ourselves to experiences which might expose our privileges—not for punishment but for reparation, for the growth of our understanding and the stretching of our hearts?
27. Can we conceive of the “good life” for ourselves as that life extending to an ever-widening circle of kinship?
28. Can we imagine that in our revolt against an economic system, which centers human greed, we need to do the hard work of imagining and constructing a new system which centers human need?
29. Can we revive the conviction that faith in the Manner of Jesus entails a bet-your-assets commitment.
30. Can we get to the point of understanding there is no sacred and secular, only sacred and desecrated?
31. Do we have the needed imagination to affirm that one day all shall go out in joy and be led back in peace, the mountains bursting in song, the trees in applause? (cf. Isaiah 55:12).
32. How can we shape our communities of conviction so that pastoral work is not segregated from prophetic engagement (and vice versa)?
33. Is our faith buoyant enough to withstand squalls of doubt? (They will come.) Our hope, resilient enough to endure seasons of despair? (Those storms will arrive, sometimes without warning.) Our love, sufficiently robust to survive contagions of anger and resentment? (Infections are common.)
34. Can we be confessional without being colonial? Might digging deeper into our specific tradition of faith—its history, its language, its insights—be more successful than neutering ourselves? And can we do this without demanding that others, even our collaborators in the work toward a Beloved Community, adopt our identity?
35. How best can we adopt this pastoral advice from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. Just keep moving forward”? In the end, that all we are asked.

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Benediction. “All this pain / I wonder if I’ll ever find my way / I wonder if my life could really change at all / All this earth / Could all that is lost ever be found / Could a garden come up from this ground at all? / You make beautiful things / You make beautiful things out of the dust / You make beautiful things / You make beautiful things out of us.” —“Beautiful Things,” Gungor

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Ken Sehested

Mardi Gras processional. “Jubilee Stomp.” —Tuba Skinny

Ash Wednesday invocation. “When Love Meets Dust” —Alana Levandoski

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A couple years ago I had an email exchange with my friend, Phillip. He ended with:

And today we wear the ashes. I’m always humbled. Especially when I as pastor “impose the ashes” on people I love. (Impose? Really? Oh God)

And I replied:

Oh, great insight re. the word “imposition,” whose root meaning is “inflict, deceive.” It’s an unfortunate word to be associated with Ash Wednesday’s ritual.

Except . . . maybe . . . if the imposition is actually “the world’s” demand that we recognize the authority of and justification for crucifixion—and to be intentionally marked with ash is a sign of resistance to that imposition. It is a holy act of defiance: “I, too, am a follower of this Way! Take me if you dare, if you must; do your worst. I will not renounce. Your threat of imposition will not deter me.”

And then, in my imagination, we repeat these lines from Daniel 3, addressed to the Babylonian ruler, who threatened the non-compliant with being tossed into a fiery furnace:

“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter [of bowing down to worship your golden statue].  If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.’”

It is the great nevertheless of faith. The defiant come-what-may. The provocative we-shall-not-be-moved. . . except when our moving is out of Pharaoh’s bondage; moving out of Herod’s reach and Caesar’s interdiction; out of step with every royal assumption; and moving on in disobedience to every hierarchy of race and class, gender and caste; ever refusing to back down in the face of these pretenders claiming divine right or historical necessity.

All of these refutations accompany the great affirmation which is Ash Wednesday’s mark of rebellion against every despot who seeks to annul Heaven’s intention for Earth’s reclamation. Such is the terror of God sounding in the tyrannical ears of all who believe death has the last word.

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Biblical anthropology

Some in the community of faith are repulsed by the Ash Wednesday smudging. It’s not hard to imagine why, as if what God demands of us is self-abasement (if not self-mutilation—do a web search for images associated with the word penitence and a great many show people literally lacerating their own bodies).

No doubt a good bit of this theological mischief is due to notions like original sin or The Fall or its escalation in the Protestant Reformation to total depravity. You would think the sola scriptura folk would reject such language since none of these words appear as such in the Bible.

The history behind original sin theologizing is a labyrinthine jumble of complex conjugations piled this way and that, abstractions galore, tortured logic and hair splitting around every corner, littered with obscure, exotic rhetoric amid a cascade of mutual condemnations between its defenders. Shakespeare himself might apply his famous line of “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” to this hot mess of specious tomfoolery.

Nevertheless, it is true that Scripture doesn’t shy away from documenting the scale of brutality humans are capable of. Sometimes in grisly detail—read the story of the unnamed concubine in Judges 19 or the petitions in Psalm 139. And in the Newer Testament, one of Jesus’ closest confidants betrays him, and another, allegedly upon whom the church is built, flagrantly denied even knowing Jesus three times before breakfast.

We are a shaky lot. Rare the exemplar, common the culprit. Our collective, bloodstained trail of infamy goes all the way back to the first family in creation, when Cain slew his brother Abel. Scripture’s opinion on humanity’s character is tangled.

For sure, on the one hand, it is recorded that “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” and “for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth” (Genesis 6:5 & 8:21). On the other hand, “God created humankind in [God’s] own image” (Genesis 1:27).

On the one hand, it says “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5).  On the other, “I praise you [O God], because I am awesomely and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

On the one hand, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17:9)? On the other, “You have made [humans] a little lower than angels, and crowned them with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5).

On the one hand, “None are righteous; no, not one” (Romans 3:10, echoing Psalm 14:3). On the other, “The Lord your God rejoices over you . . . exults over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17) and “The dwelling place of God is among humankind (Revelation 21:3).

 Therefore, how, and in what way, are we to welcome our ashen mark as the inauguration of Lent’s observance?

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Consider these instructions for the onset of Lent’s journey

The work of Lent involves both how we allow ourselves to be shaped by, and how we participate with, the power of the Spirit in a world that has lost its way. The Lenten season is traditionally understood as our own metaphorical venture into the wilderness of our own hearts, where we wrestle with demons, and are waited on by angels.

The journey into and through our own heart circles back into the wilderness of history’s wayward affairs as agents of healing worldly wounds and wastrel dispositions. The foretaste of Love makes us lovers, and such belovedness thereby incrementally interrupts the spirals of disdain and violence that flow from inherited trauma, affliction, and misery.

The trek through Lenten practice is not comfy and may test our limits. It is not for our affliction but to clarity our affection. Our annunciation is that of Mary’s, whose exclamation of praise doubles as a denunciation and indictment of the present world’s disorder.

Jan Richardson writes a blessing based on Jesus being baptized, hearing God call him “Beloved,” and then the Holy Spirit immediately driving him into the wilderness for forty days. In her blessing, she reminds us that during this journey, it is crucial to remember our identity as God’s Beloved:

“If you would enter into the wilderness,
do not begin without a blessing.
Do not leave without hearing who you are:
Beloved, named by the One
who has traveled this path before you.”

Add to this a primordial memory: The first doctrine of Scripture is God’s absolute delight with Creation. That original blessing has certainly been obscured the first couple’s expulsion from the Garden and history’s subsequent wreckage; but the blessing has never been retracted. We are imago dei, made in the image of God.

So, find an honored place in your soul, where you pass by frequently, to display this admonition. Put a flashing neon light as its background. Enclose this reminder as in a mezuzah on your doorpost, touching it in your goings out and your comings in. Wear it around your neck as an amulet, pressed against your skin, leaching its reminder directly into your bloodstream: fear not, fear not!

Then lace your heart with its heavy-duty boots as you venture into this wild terrain of your own soul, unvexed at the prospect of danger and fear, hunger and thirst, scorching sun and the night’s dark threat. All the while, expect that you are being tracked by the Hound of Heaven who will guide you at the edge of every precipice, who will find you, and remind you, who and Whose you are.

Live in the bare nakedness of your incompleteness, reclothed by this assurance: The Loveliest One’s own heart palpitates with delight at the very sound of your name.

So let this Word be heard among you, the Word that was present from the beginning, who now awaits to be born anew in every human heart, whose promise of deliverance stretches across the cosmos, who journeys with you in the midst of tribulation, light’s eclipse, and hope’s frailty, even to and through death’s dominion, whose demise is sure, world without end. Amen. Amen.

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Benediction. “Jesus I trust in You, / I love You, have mercy. / Deep from Your wounded heart, Pour out Your grace and mercy.” —Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles “My Mercy: A Lenten meditation”

Recessional. “God Almighty here I am / Am I where I ought to be / I’ve begun to soon descend / Like the sun into the sea / And I thank my lucky stars / From here to eternity / For the artist that you are / And the man you made of me.” —Kris Kristofferson, “Feeling Mortal”

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