WALLS

I’m writing this on my lunch hour, since I didn’t have time to write it last night. I feel that the Spirit is prompting me to share a meditation that I read this week from our Bishop. This week I’ve been talking about getting back to work, and showing Flat Madelyn around town, but that’s not all that has been on my mind. I also want to talk about the fact that for us Christians, this is a special week. It is Holy Week; it’s the week during Lent that leads up to Good Friday and Easter. It is an important and special week for us. Today is Maundy Thursday, we remember when Jesus had his Last Supper with his disciples. I will be attending church this evening for Maundy Thursday Service. Tomorrow is Good Friday, and Sunday is Easter, the day we rejoice that Jesus was not in the tomb when his friends came on that Sunday morning. (Our pastor’s message on Sunday will be “He is Not Here”)

A friend sent me an article that our United Methodist’s Bishop Sally Dyck wrote about this week. It’s titled “But Not So With You”. She talks about walls, and how we build walls that separate us from each other. Her article was a good “Holy Week Reflection”, and was good to meditate on. I received permission from her to quote her thoughts on walls, she had been to Israel/Palestine in February and saw the wall that is being built there to cut off the Palestinians.

This from our Bishop Sally Dyck's Reflection:
“Walls just don't seem like the answer to the problems that keep people from peace. It was just a decade or two ago when we celebrated the tearing down of the Berlin wall. What makes another wall the answer? As far as I could see, the Wall only made people more hostile and angry. How they act out on that hostility and anger remains to be seen.

We build walls, too. They separate us from each other in many ways. The Wall is a visual reminder of how ugly and insulting walls can be. No one likes being pushed out or trapped in by walls. Walls are controlling and excluding, not peacemaking or community-building. Walls defy loving, forgiving, caring for and praying for one another--or even seeing each other as human beings.

In this Holy Week I am reminded of the various ways Jesus responded to people who, we might say, were "walling" other people. Even on the night in which Jesus was arrested, the disciples came into the Passover celebration fighting with each other. They were arguing about who would be the greatest among them. As the Gospels of Matthew and Mark say, they were wondering who would be at Jesus' left and right hands when he came into his kingdom. They were imagining a kingdom of power, like that of Rome, and not a kingdom of love and grace. They were walling themselves in and others out. Jesus says to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them . . . but not so with you" (Luke 22:25-26a, emphasis mine). Jesus tells them that the greatest must be as the youngest and the leader as one who serves. "Walling" reflects the desire to control or lord over others; to solve disputes in angry ways. "But not so with you," Jesus said. Let it not be so in the ways in which you treat each other.

But not so with you. I keep thinking of those words of Jesus. Holy Week moves from a way of life that "lords it over us" to making the Lord our way of life. Easter comes--no matter what the calendar says or the weather is--when walls come tumbling down. As Paul later writes, "For [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us" (Eph. 2:14).

Jesus expects us to live a different way than to build walls between ourselves and others. He expects us to receive forgiveness and grace, which comes to us through the cross, so that we can surprise the world (and ourselves as well) with loving, gracious, new ways of dealing with old conflict, anger, and hostility."

"Christ the Lord is risen indeed . . . and the walls come a-tumblin' down! Are they coming down where you are?”

Bishop Sally Dyck
Minnesota Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church122 W. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55404
bishop@mumac.orgRead Bishop Dyck's column online and see her photographs of the Wall by
visiting www.minnesotaumc.org and clicking on "Bishop's Corner."