The Challenge Of Death And Dying
Sermon
The Challenge of Starting All Over Again
A Sermon Series
Object:
And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
-- Philippians 2:8
Everyone loves a parade. Whether it's the Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, or the veterans on Memorial Day, or the fantastic bands and floats at the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, everyone loves a parade. Who has not felt shivers up the spine with the beat of the drums, the triumphal tone of the trumpets, and the powerful reassurance of the 76 trombones? Everyone loves a parade.
Perhaps in the ancient world parades were loved even more. With no movies to watch, no television to observe, and few books to read, a parade could be a momentous event in the life of a city or nation.
If in our time the British excel at pomp and circumstance in ceremonies and parades, in Jesus' time the Romans took the prize. Oh yes, Alexander the Great had his triumphal processions three centuries before Christ's birth. And Genghis Khan had his endless processions centuries later, but the Romans were masters at it.
In the last movement of his beautiful symphonic tone poem, The Pines of Rome, Respighi successfully elicits powerful images of the conquering Emperor's triumphant return to Rome. As the piece begins, we hear the rustling of the wind, the delicate bird songs, and the faint hint of a drumbeat in the distance.
We sense it now, and with the citizens of Rome we are alerted to the trumpets and the cadences with their powerful rhythms surging out and above the marching throngs. Our pulses race, excitement mounts, anticipation soars, as at last the piercing trumpets and powerful drums break through the city gates in the glory of an epiphany.
Climbing to a high spot we look down the Appian Way as far as the eye can see to behold an endless line of bronzed, muscled soldiers, rank on rank, proud and even brazened, ready to claim their rewards in the Eternal City. And in the center of it all, coming at last into the Circus Maximus amid the trumpets, the drums and the roaring crowd, is the Emperor himself.
Glory of glories, wonder of wonders, grandeur of grandeurs, the Caesar was as a god to the fiercely loyal soldiers and the victory-intoxicated throngs. "Glory to Caesar. Praise to his genius. The gods have smiled on him. Caesar is invincible. Caesar is Lord. Caesar is Lord. Caesar is Lord." So shouted endlessly the crowds.
The Emperor rode proudly round the circuit of the Circus Maximus, 300,000 people inside cheering his victory with thousands more outside. But legend has it that with him in the chariot was the Emperor's servant, who had one duty. And that duty amid all this frenzied adulation was to say to the Emperor, "Remember, thou art but a man ... Remember, thou art but a man... Remember, thou art but a man."
But the Palm Sunday parade down the slopes of the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Brook to ascend into the Temple Mount to the glory of the shouting throngs -- that parade was strangely different. Oh yes, in pomp and circumstance, it could not match that of the Romans, even though a hundred thousand might have been cheering on this day. And yes, there were no trumpets or drums or majestic chariots, even though there were the waving palms and the coats and cloaks strewn on the road as a "red carpet" for royalty.
Even so, this parade was strangely different. Different, yes, because Jesus was not riding in a chariot, but upon a donkey. Different, yes, because unlike the Emperor, no one was riding with him, no one was speaking in his ear, "Remember, thou art but a man." Different, yes, different even more, because of the voice he heard.
It wasn't the voice of the servant reminding him he was but a man; it was instead the familiar voice of the Tempter again. The Tempter had once shown him all the kingdoms of the world, his for the taking. Now, on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the capital, the Holy City, he heard the Tempter's voice saying, whispering in his inner ear, "You are the Son of God. The world belongs to you. The Kingdom is yours for the taking. This is your moment of destiny. Carpe diem. Seize the day, seize the world. Become the Messianic King you were destined to be. You will be immortalized, famous forever." Everyone loves a parade. Parades challenge death and dying.
I.
The first challenge in death and dying is to ignore the Tempter's voice, whispering in our ears as in Christ's, you shall be as god. You are a god. Carpe diem. Seize the day.
I know something of parades firsthand. It was a new and exciting experience as a youngster in a new Boy Scout uniform to march in the Memorial Day parade with the cheers and applause of the crowd. From my youthful days I have vivid memories of our 100-piece, repeatedly award-winning high school band marching smartly and proudly before the cheering thousands in another city. And I'll not forget marching in another city, with our popular City Band, the trumpets and drums reverberating off the steel and glass buildings accompanied by the cheering, enthusiastic throngs. Oh, I loved those parades!
Parades have a way of enhancing our pride and strengthening our resolve. They can suggest, with the resplendent troops and majestic floats, that all is well with our civilization, that things are under control and that we are marching upward and onward to a grand finale.
That's what Palm Sunday was supposed to be centuries ago -- a grand triumph of Jewish hopes and dreams, a kind of eternal declaration that God was with them in full power once again, a divine reassurance that their moment in history had arrived. "Seize it, Jesus! Seize the moment. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. For God's sake, step up to the moment and take it. 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!' "
There is a sense in which each of us wishes to make his or her triumphal entry into the capital cities of this world. There is a sense in which each of us longs for the praise and adulation of the crowds, or at least the applause of our peers. There is a desperate urge within most all hearts to be famous for at least fifteen minutes.
Not long ago, Time magazine had a feature story on nursery schools. The story featured the tremendous anxiety of upwardly mobile parents about getting their little ones in the right nursery schools.
If it is true that some mothers and fathers talk to their babies and play music to them while yet in the womb so as to incline them toward success; and if it is true that other parents carefully select environments and playmates and nannies for their infants to ensure no early impairments to success; many, many parents see the right nursery school as the key to the entrance to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, and that as the key to entrance to the right medical or law school, and that as the key to the right law firm or medical practice, and that as the key to success, success, success, and that as the key to ... well, key to ... well, key to immortality.
Did we say immortality? Is that the ancient tempter's voice again that Adam and Eve heard in Eden when he said, "You shall be as gods"? Is that the voice whispering in Jesus' ear in the loneliness of the Judean wilderness and now again amid the frenzied throngs as he approaches Jerusalem? "You shall be as god. You are the Son of God. Seize the day. Make yourself immortal."
Many of us see life as a launch at Cape Canaveral. If we can just choose the right parents, the right prenatal nurturance and stimulation, the right postnatal bonding and nannying, the right nursery school, the right prep school or school district, the right graduate school and corporation, the right wedding and spouse, and the right connections and rewards, we will go into "orbit" and we will be ... well ... immortal.
And we will have answered our deepest of deepest fears -- the fear of death and dying. We will challenge it, by God, with money and power, sex and success, bravado and fame. We are sons and daughters of God. We have made it. We are immortal. "Hosanna in the highest. Blessed are they who succeed in the name of the Lord." They shall be immortal.
So whispered the voice in Jesus' ear and in ours.
II.
The second challenge of death and dying is to heed the voice in the triumphant Emperor's ear, the voice which said, "Remember, thou art but a man. Remember, thou art but a human being."
In 1964-65, at the New York World's Fair, the Protestant and Orthodox Pavilion featured a controversial film called The Parable. Many will recall the circus theme of the film with the parade of gaudily painted circus wagons with the name of a nation painted on. Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and others went by, suggesting to the inner eye that the parade of the glory of nations is little more than gaudy circus wagons eventually coming to ruin.
And yes, there was Magnus the Great, the puppeteer, with his living marionettes suspended on his ropes. To the inner eye, Magnus represented all the dictators, potentates, emperors, caesars, and messiahs who would maintain power by manipulating the masses, keeping them in bondage and servitude -- Magnus the Great, exploiting them to assure himself of power and glory and immortality.
And then there was the clown in whiteface, in an off-white robe riding on an off-white donkey amid the gaudy glory of the nations of the world. Through his humble antics he ignored the glory, liberated the workers, released the living marionettes from their bondage to Magnus the Great manipulator. The clown was a fool, of course, wrong, dead wrong, for confronting the powers-that-be, so he was killed by Magnus, crucified within the very powers of bondage and death which once held the living marionettes. And in his death the clown gave out a dying shriek which raced across the landscape, across the centuries of time like Jesus' dying shriek on the cross.
"Remember, thou art but a man. Remember, thou art but a human being," the knowing voice whispers in our ear. And hearing it, the dying clown knew more than all the Magnuses of the world. He knew that the challenge of death and dying is the challenge to accept death into oneself and to deny oneself and to die to the self and its futile pretensions toward immortality, so as to come alive to God, to come alive to true immortality.
That was exactly what a university professor at Berkeley had to do some years ago. He had to come to terms with his own death, because at a young age, he was dying of cancer. Already a successful author, it was, nevertheless, the pressure of his impending death which produced his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. The author, Ernest Becker, died at age fifty, just a year after it was published, but not before he read the New York Times Book Review accolades which described his book as a "brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion, optimistic and revolutionary ... one of the most challenging books of the decade."
It was challenging because Becker persuaded us to listen to the voice in our would-be Emperor's chariots in the parade toward death-denying success and immortality. "Remember, thou art but a man. Remember, thou art but a human being." We have two basic anxieties, said Becker, the anxiety of living and the anxiety of dying. And to answer them, we erect immortality systems of money, fame, power, prestige, pleasure, institutions, corporations, and nations, to give some defense against death.
Few of us have avoided the real terror of death. Have you, like I, awakened late in the night, cold with sweat, trembling with the terrible realization of personal death, devastated by the thought of no loving embrace from my wife; no tender, endearing hug from my children; and no grandchildren on my lap listening to a story, turning to give me a big hug and a kiss and heartfelt, "Papa, I love you"? The agony of not being able to look out upon this fair world to be intoxicated with fragrances and bedazzled with the riot of color and nature's splendid majesty, unable to hear bird songs and symphonies and winds in the sails and trees.
Oh yes, I have known the late night terrors of death, the tremors of the soul on the precipice of nothingness, the mind gazing at the dark, yawning abyss. It was what Jesus saw, ironically in the Palm Sunday parade, the futility of the shouting throngs and the transiency of the world's parades of glory. It was what he felt in the Garden of Gethsemane (Gethsemane, which means "olive press"), where oil was squeezed out of olives, and where all hopes of worldly glory and immortality were squeezed out of the deepest reaches of his soul. And on the ground, agonizing in the dust, sweating, as it were, great drops of blood, he cried, "Abba, Father, if possible let this cup of suffering, this death pass by me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will."
No frantic effort to escape here. No over-scheduling, no devotion to trivial pursuits, no avoidance through incessant sports and entertainment in this dark night of the soul. No last minute leering of that lingering voice, "You are the Son of God. Seize the moment." No heeding of the vital lie. No grasping after the age-old illusion. No denial of the terror by mere cynicism or skepticism or Stoicism.
Instead, in ultimate faith, he denies himself and all efforts at self-salvation and opens himself to the Ultimate Power and thus throws himself open to the unlimited possibility of real freedom, says Becker (p. 90). Shedding his messianic hopes and dreams, Jesus descends, like most of us, into the sheer terror of death. But when he rose from prayer, he knew that in the acceptance of his mortality, he had opened himself "to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God" (Ibid., p. 91).
Oh, those voices are whispering, whispering, whispering -- "You shall be as gods. Seize the day. Make a name for yourself."
Yes, those voices are whispering, whispering, "Remember, thou art but a man, but a man."
But on Palm and Passion Sunday, Jesus the Son of God says to us, "Take death into yourself, humble yourself, deny yourself, and you will be exalted. For he who saves his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will find it. For what shall it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole temporal world and loses the eternal one?"
Prayer
Almighty God, who has brought us into this world of miraculous life and terrifying death, and who has placed within us the potential for both great achievement and humiliating failure, we thank you that you have taken the risks of freedom in our creation and that even in our failings as well as in our successes you are patient and forgiving.
Remembering the grand day of Jesus' triumphal entry into the Holy City, we acknowledge our longings someday to triumph over all that would defeat us, and to enter into the precincts of paradise. Give us a perceptive eye, we pray, so that like Jesus we may distinguish between the ephemeral praise of the masses and the eternal commendation you give to souls who love you more than fame.
If in our longing for success we have been willing to storm the bastions of ethics and holiness, cause us again to serve you and your principles more than the fleeting follies of time and sense. If in our anxiety of nothingness, we have been tempted to make ourselves something at any cost, turn our hearts and minds again to behold your affirmation of us as your sons and daughters and your assurance that we belong to you forever.
O loving Father, even as Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it did not know the things which make for its peace, so too we weep over the cities of the world where crime and terror prevail. May our Lord, the Prince of Peace, influence leaders and peoples everywhere toward justice, equality and peaceful living.
And now, O God, infuse your peace which passes understanding into our hearts -- into the heart anxious with disease and despair, into the heart grieving the beloved's death and our own death; into the family torn in hostility and strife; into our business and professional relationships where animosity prevails; in communities and neighborhoods where stressed-out people forget to be civil. O God, may we this day, unlike Jerusalem of old, know the things which make for our peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-- Philippians 2:8
Everyone loves a parade. Whether it's the Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, or the veterans on Memorial Day, or the fantastic bands and floats at the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, everyone loves a parade. Who has not felt shivers up the spine with the beat of the drums, the triumphal tone of the trumpets, and the powerful reassurance of the 76 trombones? Everyone loves a parade.
Perhaps in the ancient world parades were loved even more. With no movies to watch, no television to observe, and few books to read, a parade could be a momentous event in the life of a city or nation.
If in our time the British excel at pomp and circumstance in ceremonies and parades, in Jesus' time the Romans took the prize. Oh yes, Alexander the Great had his triumphal processions three centuries before Christ's birth. And Genghis Khan had his endless processions centuries later, but the Romans were masters at it.
In the last movement of his beautiful symphonic tone poem, The Pines of Rome, Respighi successfully elicits powerful images of the conquering Emperor's triumphant return to Rome. As the piece begins, we hear the rustling of the wind, the delicate bird songs, and the faint hint of a drumbeat in the distance.
We sense it now, and with the citizens of Rome we are alerted to the trumpets and the cadences with their powerful rhythms surging out and above the marching throngs. Our pulses race, excitement mounts, anticipation soars, as at last the piercing trumpets and powerful drums break through the city gates in the glory of an epiphany.
Climbing to a high spot we look down the Appian Way as far as the eye can see to behold an endless line of bronzed, muscled soldiers, rank on rank, proud and even brazened, ready to claim their rewards in the Eternal City. And in the center of it all, coming at last into the Circus Maximus amid the trumpets, the drums and the roaring crowd, is the Emperor himself.
Glory of glories, wonder of wonders, grandeur of grandeurs, the Caesar was as a god to the fiercely loyal soldiers and the victory-intoxicated throngs. "Glory to Caesar. Praise to his genius. The gods have smiled on him. Caesar is invincible. Caesar is Lord. Caesar is Lord. Caesar is Lord." So shouted endlessly the crowds.
The Emperor rode proudly round the circuit of the Circus Maximus, 300,000 people inside cheering his victory with thousands more outside. But legend has it that with him in the chariot was the Emperor's servant, who had one duty. And that duty amid all this frenzied adulation was to say to the Emperor, "Remember, thou art but a man ... Remember, thou art but a man... Remember, thou art but a man."
But the Palm Sunday parade down the slopes of the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Brook to ascend into the Temple Mount to the glory of the shouting throngs -- that parade was strangely different. Oh yes, in pomp and circumstance, it could not match that of the Romans, even though a hundred thousand might have been cheering on this day. And yes, there were no trumpets or drums or majestic chariots, even though there were the waving palms and the coats and cloaks strewn on the road as a "red carpet" for royalty.
Even so, this parade was strangely different. Different, yes, because Jesus was not riding in a chariot, but upon a donkey. Different, yes, because unlike the Emperor, no one was riding with him, no one was speaking in his ear, "Remember, thou art but a man." Different, yes, different even more, because of the voice he heard.
It wasn't the voice of the servant reminding him he was but a man; it was instead the familiar voice of the Tempter again. The Tempter had once shown him all the kingdoms of the world, his for the taking. Now, on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the capital, the Holy City, he heard the Tempter's voice saying, whispering in his inner ear, "You are the Son of God. The world belongs to you. The Kingdom is yours for the taking. This is your moment of destiny. Carpe diem. Seize the day, seize the world. Become the Messianic King you were destined to be. You will be immortalized, famous forever." Everyone loves a parade. Parades challenge death and dying.
I.
The first challenge in death and dying is to ignore the Tempter's voice, whispering in our ears as in Christ's, you shall be as god. You are a god. Carpe diem. Seize the day.
I know something of parades firsthand. It was a new and exciting experience as a youngster in a new Boy Scout uniform to march in the Memorial Day parade with the cheers and applause of the crowd. From my youthful days I have vivid memories of our 100-piece, repeatedly award-winning high school band marching smartly and proudly before the cheering thousands in another city. And I'll not forget marching in another city, with our popular City Band, the trumpets and drums reverberating off the steel and glass buildings accompanied by the cheering, enthusiastic throngs. Oh, I loved those parades!
Parades have a way of enhancing our pride and strengthening our resolve. They can suggest, with the resplendent troops and majestic floats, that all is well with our civilization, that things are under control and that we are marching upward and onward to a grand finale.
That's what Palm Sunday was supposed to be centuries ago -- a grand triumph of Jewish hopes and dreams, a kind of eternal declaration that God was with them in full power once again, a divine reassurance that their moment in history had arrived. "Seize it, Jesus! Seize the moment. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. For God's sake, step up to the moment and take it. 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!' "
There is a sense in which each of us wishes to make his or her triumphal entry into the capital cities of this world. There is a sense in which each of us longs for the praise and adulation of the crowds, or at least the applause of our peers. There is a desperate urge within most all hearts to be famous for at least fifteen minutes.
Not long ago, Time magazine had a feature story on nursery schools. The story featured the tremendous anxiety of upwardly mobile parents about getting their little ones in the right nursery schools.
If it is true that some mothers and fathers talk to their babies and play music to them while yet in the womb so as to incline them toward success; and if it is true that other parents carefully select environments and playmates and nannies for their infants to ensure no early impairments to success; many, many parents see the right nursery school as the key to the entrance to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, and that as the key to entrance to the right medical or law school, and that as the key to the right law firm or medical practice, and that as the key to success, success, success, and that as the key to ... well, key to ... well, key to immortality.
Did we say immortality? Is that the ancient tempter's voice again that Adam and Eve heard in Eden when he said, "You shall be as gods"? Is that the voice whispering in Jesus' ear in the loneliness of the Judean wilderness and now again amid the frenzied throngs as he approaches Jerusalem? "You shall be as god. You are the Son of God. Seize the day. Make yourself immortal."
Many of us see life as a launch at Cape Canaveral. If we can just choose the right parents, the right prenatal nurturance and stimulation, the right postnatal bonding and nannying, the right nursery school, the right prep school or school district, the right graduate school and corporation, the right wedding and spouse, and the right connections and rewards, we will go into "orbit" and we will be ... well ... immortal.
And we will have answered our deepest of deepest fears -- the fear of death and dying. We will challenge it, by God, with money and power, sex and success, bravado and fame. We are sons and daughters of God. We have made it. We are immortal. "Hosanna in the highest. Blessed are they who succeed in the name of the Lord." They shall be immortal.
So whispered the voice in Jesus' ear and in ours.
II.
The second challenge of death and dying is to heed the voice in the triumphant Emperor's ear, the voice which said, "Remember, thou art but a man. Remember, thou art but a human being."
In 1964-65, at the New York World's Fair, the Protestant and Orthodox Pavilion featured a controversial film called The Parable. Many will recall the circus theme of the film with the parade of gaudily painted circus wagons with the name of a nation painted on. Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and others went by, suggesting to the inner eye that the parade of the glory of nations is little more than gaudy circus wagons eventually coming to ruin.
And yes, there was Magnus the Great, the puppeteer, with his living marionettes suspended on his ropes. To the inner eye, Magnus represented all the dictators, potentates, emperors, caesars, and messiahs who would maintain power by manipulating the masses, keeping them in bondage and servitude -- Magnus the Great, exploiting them to assure himself of power and glory and immortality.
And then there was the clown in whiteface, in an off-white robe riding on an off-white donkey amid the gaudy glory of the nations of the world. Through his humble antics he ignored the glory, liberated the workers, released the living marionettes from their bondage to Magnus the Great manipulator. The clown was a fool, of course, wrong, dead wrong, for confronting the powers-that-be, so he was killed by Magnus, crucified within the very powers of bondage and death which once held the living marionettes. And in his death the clown gave out a dying shriek which raced across the landscape, across the centuries of time like Jesus' dying shriek on the cross.
"Remember, thou art but a man. Remember, thou art but a human being," the knowing voice whispers in our ear. And hearing it, the dying clown knew more than all the Magnuses of the world. He knew that the challenge of death and dying is the challenge to accept death into oneself and to deny oneself and to die to the self and its futile pretensions toward immortality, so as to come alive to God, to come alive to true immortality.
That was exactly what a university professor at Berkeley had to do some years ago. He had to come to terms with his own death, because at a young age, he was dying of cancer. Already a successful author, it was, nevertheless, the pressure of his impending death which produced his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. The author, Ernest Becker, died at age fifty, just a year after it was published, but not before he read the New York Times Book Review accolades which described his book as a "brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion, optimistic and revolutionary ... one of the most challenging books of the decade."
It was challenging because Becker persuaded us to listen to the voice in our would-be Emperor's chariots in the parade toward death-denying success and immortality. "Remember, thou art but a man. Remember, thou art but a human being." We have two basic anxieties, said Becker, the anxiety of living and the anxiety of dying. And to answer them, we erect immortality systems of money, fame, power, prestige, pleasure, institutions, corporations, and nations, to give some defense against death.
Few of us have avoided the real terror of death. Have you, like I, awakened late in the night, cold with sweat, trembling with the terrible realization of personal death, devastated by the thought of no loving embrace from my wife; no tender, endearing hug from my children; and no grandchildren on my lap listening to a story, turning to give me a big hug and a kiss and heartfelt, "Papa, I love you"? The agony of not being able to look out upon this fair world to be intoxicated with fragrances and bedazzled with the riot of color and nature's splendid majesty, unable to hear bird songs and symphonies and winds in the sails and trees.
Oh yes, I have known the late night terrors of death, the tremors of the soul on the precipice of nothingness, the mind gazing at the dark, yawning abyss. It was what Jesus saw, ironically in the Palm Sunday parade, the futility of the shouting throngs and the transiency of the world's parades of glory. It was what he felt in the Garden of Gethsemane (Gethsemane, which means "olive press"), where oil was squeezed out of olives, and where all hopes of worldly glory and immortality were squeezed out of the deepest reaches of his soul. And on the ground, agonizing in the dust, sweating, as it were, great drops of blood, he cried, "Abba, Father, if possible let this cup of suffering, this death pass by me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will."
No frantic effort to escape here. No over-scheduling, no devotion to trivial pursuits, no avoidance through incessant sports and entertainment in this dark night of the soul. No last minute leering of that lingering voice, "You are the Son of God. Seize the moment." No heeding of the vital lie. No grasping after the age-old illusion. No denial of the terror by mere cynicism or skepticism or Stoicism.
Instead, in ultimate faith, he denies himself and all efforts at self-salvation and opens himself to the Ultimate Power and thus throws himself open to the unlimited possibility of real freedom, says Becker (p. 90). Shedding his messianic hopes and dreams, Jesus descends, like most of us, into the sheer terror of death. But when he rose from prayer, he knew that in the acceptance of his mortality, he had opened himself "to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God" (Ibid., p. 91).
Oh, those voices are whispering, whispering, whispering -- "You shall be as gods. Seize the day. Make a name for yourself."
Yes, those voices are whispering, whispering, "Remember, thou art but a man, but a man."
But on Palm and Passion Sunday, Jesus the Son of God says to us, "Take death into yourself, humble yourself, deny yourself, and you will be exalted. For he who saves his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will find it. For what shall it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole temporal world and loses the eternal one?"
Prayer
Almighty God, who has brought us into this world of miraculous life and terrifying death, and who has placed within us the potential for both great achievement and humiliating failure, we thank you that you have taken the risks of freedom in our creation and that even in our failings as well as in our successes you are patient and forgiving.
Remembering the grand day of Jesus' triumphal entry into the Holy City, we acknowledge our longings someday to triumph over all that would defeat us, and to enter into the precincts of paradise. Give us a perceptive eye, we pray, so that like Jesus we may distinguish between the ephemeral praise of the masses and the eternal commendation you give to souls who love you more than fame.
If in our longing for success we have been willing to storm the bastions of ethics and holiness, cause us again to serve you and your principles more than the fleeting follies of time and sense. If in our anxiety of nothingness, we have been tempted to make ourselves something at any cost, turn our hearts and minds again to behold your affirmation of us as your sons and daughters and your assurance that we belong to you forever.
O loving Father, even as Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it did not know the things which make for its peace, so too we weep over the cities of the world where crime and terror prevail. May our Lord, the Prince of Peace, influence leaders and peoples everywhere toward justice, equality and peaceful living.
And now, O God, infuse your peace which passes understanding into our hearts -- into the heart anxious with disease and despair, into the heart grieving the beloved's death and our own death; into the family torn in hostility and strife; into our business and professional relationships where animosity prevails; in communities and neighborhoods where stressed-out people forget to be civil. O God, may we this day, unlike Jerusalem of old, know the things which make for our peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
