Storm

Yesterday a winter storm socked the East Coast. It wasn't too bad at church during the day (we keep the building fairly cold when it's not occupied) , although I put my coat before going in to the sanctuary to pray and meditate on the Stations of the Cross. It's a good thing I did, by the time I was done, I was pretty chilled. I prayed the stations by myself (it's not a well-established Lutheran practice), so, rather than use one of the many pre-written liturgies we've collected, I felt free to craft my own prayers around the things touching my heart that day.

The stations at UniLu are mounted at the ends of the pews, on pieces of copper pipe fitted into our pew torch holders. They are not as carefully mounted as I would like them to be this year, some lean one way or another, but I have come to accept that I can't have everything my way and it's more important to encourage other people to participate than it is to have everything perfect.

The first station, attached to the pipe by a wire through a loop on the back of the casting listed strongly to the left. A wire wrapped around the base to the pole would straighten the whole thing out...I fought the urge to go to the sacristy and get a piece of wire, and began my devotion instead

The first station: Jeus is condemed to death. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

I began to meditate on the crooked station. I noticed how the weight of the much heavier figure of Pilate shifted the icon all out of allignment. A small child is at Pilate's ear, adding to the weight of the left side of th icon. Is the child representing us, pleading for Jesus' life to be spared?

It's the weight of power, power over life and death, I conclude, that makes this station sit there so offesively to my senses. I still want to stop what I'm doing and go back andget the tools to straighten it out. But then I notice what I was too blind to see, that in all the worldly representation being weighted on the left side of the icon, the figure of Christ is lifted up.

I thought about the people who come to our Tuesday night meal Feast Incarnate, a meal for people are homeless and affected/infected with HIV/AIDS. I thought about how much the system is stacked against them, in their access to adequate health care, their difficulty in finding employment paying a livable wage, the difficulties they experience in their relationships with their families, and most of all, in a legal system they are often unable to access or navigate.

It struck me that these were all of those difficulties missor what Christ says in Matthew 25:40 "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."

And then I thought, if we are that little child, and we are pleading in Pilate's ear for justice for the oppressed, we can change the balance of power, and we can elevate Jesus who is the Christ among us.

Amen