Coronavirus Pandemic Saturday Readings and reflections

Saturday April 4   by Rev. Jerry Eve

 

Psalm 31:9-16; Lamentations 3:55-66; Mark 10:32-34

 

Our readings for today, on first glance, don’t look too promising. If I was to choose readings myself at this time, I’d go for something a lot cheerier (these are from the Revised Common Lectionary). And yet, the date jumps out at me, and it all seems to make sense. Because April 4th was the day of which Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. He was only 39 years old.

 

He’s someone who would have totally identified with all three of these passages of Scripture. The first, from Psalms, is an anguished plea. Blinded by tears, the vocabulary is extreme – troubles, exhaustion, contempt, forgotten, terror and plots.

 

The second is from Lamentations, which is a continuation of (a sequel to) Jeremiah. It’s a cry, ‘from the bottom of the pit,’ as beset by ‘enemies’, Jeremiah ‘begs’ God to ‘punish them.’ As with much of the Prophets (Isaiah – Malachi) in the Old Testament, Christian theologians have often plundered it as prophetic of Christ; and so we have, ‘they make fun of me,’ in Lamentations often cited as then popping up purposefully in Mark 10:34 (‘who will make fun of him’).

 

The third passage, from Mark, is the third time Jesus explains to his disciples on their way up to Jerusalem what is about to happen during that coming period we call Holy Week.

 

The personal risks of Christianity experienced by those active in the Civil Rights Movement in 1960s America are ones I’ve thankfully never had to be exposed to, and yet I do believe in King’s maxim that,

 

“If you haven’t found something worth dying for, you’re not fit to live.”

 

As a preacher and orator, what I really love about MLK is the way – whether from the pulpit or some civil platform – he always had such a command of Scripture, and no hesitation whatsoever quoting freely from it.

 

Let us pray:

 

Thou, Dear God, we thank you for your church, founded upon your Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon you. Help us to realize that humanity was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity. Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace. Help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all God's children -- Black, White, Red, Brown and Yellow -- will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.

 

(Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr.)

 

[Pride (In The Name of Love)

 

Song by U2

 

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One man come he to justify
One man to overthrow

 

In the name of love
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love
What more in the name of love?

 

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed up on an empty beach
One man betrayed with a kiss

 

Early morning, April four
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride]

 

 

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