It is Palm Sunday, 2024. I've just closed Fox News so that my two grandsons can watch "Sonics Minecraft" or "Godzilla versus King Kong", either of which can in a moment turn from creative innocence to PG+. Observe I must. Grandkids can make any day a plus, especially Palm Sunday.
Just before midnight, as Palm Sunday came into view, I was captured by the drama of thousands of Jesus believers filling Jerusalem with songs of ascent, parading from the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley, flooding into the narrow streets of David's city. At 11:20 AM, as I lifted my voice to the rock and roll rhythms of a spiritual song that could have described any Palm Sunday Jerusalem processional—ancient or modern:
"Rising from the African plain
It's the song of the forgiven
Drowning out the Amazon rain
The song of Asian believers
Filled with God's holy fire
It's every tribe, every tongue, every nation
A love song born of a grateful choir
It's all God's children singin'
"Glory, glory, hallelujah"
"He reigns, he reigns"
It's all God's children singin'
"Glory, glory, hallelujah"
"He reigns, he reigns"".
Within each syncopated harmony my heart exalted in the safety of living some 500 days of freedom from the hypocrisy that recently held me captive in addiction..
"And all the powers of darkness,
Tremble at what they've just heard
'Cause all their powers of darkness
Can't drown out a single word."
Yet, just moments earlier, my pastor insightfully described that first Palm Sunday procession so disappointing to the disciples and all gathered, really. Like those first followers I was transported into the faith crises that holds me still. As Jesus turned away from Romes seat of government and toward the Holy Temple he found himself alone, his supporting cast of hundreds either feeling betrayed, offended or simply stunned. It was the beginning of what would become a very bad week. Jesus? Even he wept. And that is exactly what I want to do in this sacred season.
As Easter 2024 approaches a three-way faith delimma pulls at my heart, as if torn by contradictions I cannot resolve.
One part is responsive love for God, awakened from my chosen and addictive sin into a new morning of peace mingled with pain-filled repentance.
Another part is the apocalyptic collapse of America's ability to manage the gathering state sponsored terrorist enemies of Israel, the emergent axis of evil in the Iranian, Russian, Chinese and North Korean alliance, the growing Russian threat to Europe (beyond Ukraine), China's immanent threat to Taiwan and world wide pestilences, illnesses—all finding their place like the pieces of a puzzle from ancient and prophetic times. It is a dark picture of a world under Divine judgment; Until ...
The gentle Nazarene whose Galilean life, passion, death, resurrection and ascension promises a renewed earth. Herein lies my hope.
It was only in recent decades that I began to get a clear picture of how Good God is and just how committed The Communal Trinity of God is in good outcomes for our world, the cosmos and each of us in it.
The questions had been growing ever more insistent. How could a popularized American and Calvinist world view focused as it is on salvation defined as personally being saved from God's wrath even to the point of being catapulted out of this planet about to suffer the full and deserved destruction from its turning from God's moral judgment be a good thing? It's salvation for me, not thee. In short, the world isn't saved, but damned and we by the skin of Jesus teeth are raptured away into an eternal paradise. How can heaven be heaven if 70-90% of the worlds billions are in a space of constant torment? It really doesn't matter whose fault it is. In any reasoned universe the Creator bears some responsibility for a wondrous idea going terribly wrong. 1
What captured my heart from 25 to 70 years of age was the inter-twining of my historical Wesleyan roots in a restorative salvation, the Biblical narrative that weaves through out the experience of God's people and Jesus.
The Biblical transition began in my senior year of college when, in two weeks, I had read the entire Old Testament. For the first time I saw The Word as a movie—a Story—woven in and through human time. Every narrative of the Old and New Testament, especially the judgments, are redemptive in purpose, God's patient initiative ever leaning toward healing, restoration, renewal.
There's the rub. My personal story with Jesus and the Biblical narrative keeps me grounded in "the renewal of all things"—personal, social, historical and cosmological restoration. Yet, the actual world events of my life marry all too well with the dispensational and Calvinist pessimism prevalent in popular 20th century Christianity, my birth heritage. Israel's re-birth, the Moscow, Teran, Demascus axis, State sponsored terrorism, Beijing and Pyongyang's' rise as Eastern powers with world reach, America's insecure presence, the European Union and NATO's projection of power, the emerging Sanhedrin, equipping and training a class of priests and the scheduled restoration of the red heifer sacrifice expose Jerusalem as the foci of international attention on the precipice of peace or Armageddon. It leaves this little boy wondering if "The Late Great Planet Earth" may in fact become tomorrow's headline. "Update: World at War IV", dateline, Jerusalem.
What am I to do? Call for the rocks to fall on my head or look up, knowing that if these events take place "my redeemer is near and coming in the clouds to begin the restoration of all things?" Our work has just begun!
Terry 03/25/2024
1 I explore God's culpability more fully in "Cross Purposes: Incarnational Atonement, Renewal & Communal Salvation", Chapter 3 "The Apology & Promise", pages #54-68.
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