A Lenten Lament

a prayer for/of the privileged

Lord Jesus.

You returned to your friends in a locked upper room, hidden away from the government agents who executed you because you were a threat to their systems of exploitation and extraction. Your friends gathered in the shadows of empire, well-aware of the risks that your dream of justice and liberation for the world posed to the powerful – and how their participation in that dream risked their own safety and security. Many gave everything to bear that dream into the world – their safety, security, friends, and family, even their lives – to build a community where none go without. A beloved community where the hungry are filled, where the houseless are sheltered, where the naked are clothed, where the strangers are welcomed. A beloved community that turned the world on its head to proclaim allegiance to a new power, one greater than the politicians and their occupying forces. A beloved community built with the declaration for a treasonous love.

Lord Jesus.

Have we lost your dream? Have we reduced your Jubilee, a dream of collective salvation for all creation to a petty, personal promise of our own spiritual fulfillment? Have we sold out our siblings with nonconforming citizenship status, skin pigmentation, or sexual orientation to be hunted down by the most powerful government in the world, while we take comfort in the security of our everlasting souls? Have we rendered you a carnival caricature? A ringmaster who orchestrates a parade of dangerous and delightful entertainers, while your ticketmaster admits only the “chosen” who can afford the cost of a Golden Ticket to Paradise?

Lord Jesus.

I cannot bear the thought of strolling streets of gold while your children are devoured by worldly evils on the other side of a pearly gate. I can longer be content in a church pew indulging my own spiritual enlightenment, while from my neck dangles the implement of your government execution, gilded and glittering, as an emblem – not of the risks you took in resisting the powers and principalities of this world, nor of the risk you invite me to take in birthing your beloved community – but as a talisman of my own chosenness. An idol to my own self-justification.

Lord Jesus.

Pull me up from the depths of my own self-interest. Help me remember that there is no salvation for me without salvation for my most vulnerable neighbor. Teach me, again, that our salvation is all bound up together as part of one seamless web of life. That loving our neighbor is the same as loving our Creator. That feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger is our worship. And that resisting those powers that strip, starve, and oppress the most vulnerable is our vocation, our summoning, as a people called forth by the Spirit of Life to usher in this new world order, your beloved community of creation.

In the overcoming power of your Spirit, which makes all things new.