A Word from Laura: The Real New Normal
As we prepare for Holy Week, news coverage of recent mass shootings, describing the Atlanta and Boulder shootings as evidence of “return to normal” has left me sick to my stomach. No one wants this “normal.”
This week’s mission alert from the PC(USA) Office for Public Witness decries gun violence. We must continue to support policies, legislation, and corporate actions that limit accessibility to automatic weapons and other firearms. We must also remember that policies and legislation do not hold all the answers to the problems of this “normal.”
A lesser-celebrated but nevertheless central point of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem is to reveal that violence is not normal, not in God’s plan. Jesus’s entrance into the city, humble and riding on a donkey, is a direct contrast to conquerors returning home from war, victorious on a white steed.
As the crowning moment of Jesus’s ministry, Palm Sunday calls each of us to join the crowd who celebrate him. On this side of history, however, we cannot ignore what that crowd seemed not to understand: that Jesus called them to see, to question, and to resist anything that kept them part of a way of life that perpetuated violence.
Some of you remember how a dear friend of our congregation, Jim Atwood, talked of our cultural idolatry of guns – what he called “gundamentalism.” Behind that ideology lie hearts and minds who have failed to see what Jesus was about on the back of that donkey, on the lonely road with the cross at the end. This year, I hope you will pick up your palm on Saturday and join with us on Sunday, so that we might join our hearts and minds together in search of the real new normal, the one we celebrate with Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, palm branches waving in celebration of a deeper power than violence, a life stronger than death.
Laura