Tuesday, April 4, 2023

The culture wars are not far from us during this week marking the time between Palm Sunday and Easter.  In response to a complaint about a 1998 Disney movie about Ruby Bridges, a six-year old Black child who went to a previously all white school in New Orleans, the Pinellas, Florida, school board pulled the movie.  Mustn’t upset children.

And on this day in 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated, resulting in riots of anger and destruction. I usually visited my parents in College Park, just outside D.C. during spring break.  Seeing tanks on the Capitol grounds where I had played as a child was deeply disturbing, a forerunner of the large cement planter boulders now there.

The deep divisions then are still with us now, and just as polarizing as such divisions must have been in Jerusalem during that first Holy Week when Jesus challenged the collaboration of religious leadership with the Roman occupiers. How we respond to the unwillingness of people to face history will form our ability to move into the future.

Prayer for the Day

Holy God, we call to you as our strength and shield,
    You call us and embrace us against our fears;
Forgive us our timidity in proclaiming your word
    Forgive us our reluctance to accept change.
May we have courage as others who proclaimed your name
    Teaching us how to live so we may complete your work
 In the name of the One who is our model,  
     Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.

Thoughts for the Day

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.
    Laurie Halse Anderson, American novelist

Information is the currency of democracy.
    Thomas Jefferson, patriot, president (1743-1826

Why do you boast, O mighty one, of mischief done against the godly?
   All day long you are plotting destruction.
Your tongue is like a sharp razor, you worker of treachery.
   You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking the truth.
You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue.  
   But God will break you down forever; you will be snatched torn from your tent.
God will uproot you from the land of the living,
   The righteous will see, and fear, and will laugh at the evildoer.
    Psalm 52: 1-6

“The Problem We All Live With” By Norman Rockwell - Ruby Bridges’ First Day at School