Dear friends,

Ash Wednesday is coming soon, February 25, so I just wanted to share
with you Lenten resources which are available from Pax Christi USA. For
a complete list of everything available, you can click on
PaxChristiLentenResources and you'll be
directed right to a list of all things Lent-related.

I know that for myself, Lent is usually the most "reflective" time of
the year. One item that I'd like to highly recommend for individual or
group use is this year's Lenten reflection booklet, "Transforming
Encounter, Radical Discipleship: A Lenten Journey," by Wes Howard-Brook
and Sue Ferguson Johnson. It cites the readings for each day and
employs reflections from Wes and Sue. Wes is a longtime friend to the
Forum and an excellent scripture scholar. Sue brings a wisdom drawn from
her years as a spiritual guide and retreat leader. You can order the
booklet (only $2.50) from PCUSA, or if you want to get multiple copies
for your parish, group or Newman Center, there's a bulk discount.

The other thing I wanted to mention was the Good Friday Way of the
Cross. Good Friday is an excellent time to plan public witnesses,
actions, vigils and the like, and doing a public Good Friday Way of the
Cross (based on the Stations of the Cross), praying at sites in your own
communities where Christ is still crucified today can be a powerful and
reflective experience. PCUSA has at least two versions "Stations of the
Cross" in booklet form available and there is also a service listed in
"Our Prayers Rise Like Incense: Liturgies for Peace." If you want to
plan a Way of the Cross and need help, feel free to contact me.

Blessings to each of you.

Peace---Johnny

Among the things I added to our church web site this week was a prayer I wrote for our Good Friday liturgy a couple of years ago, adapted from the Orthodox vespers liturgy:

Our feet are washed,
and our souls have been nourished at your festival table, O God.
Yet, at the end of our journey to Jerusalem,
we encounter a fearful sight.
(read more)

Something emailed to me today:

Dear friends,

Two weeks ago I had just sent the NEW FREEDOM SEDER to a printer, and then I saw "The Passion" film. (The SEDER is ready now. Time is short. Email us at
Shalomctr@aol.com RIGHT AWAY that you are sending a check TODAY for $37 to The Shalom Center, 6711 Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia PA 19119 and we'll send you a copy without waiting for the check to arrive. Trust and honor!)

Since seeing "The Passion," I have seen the NEW FREEDOM SEDER in a new light. Now I see it as the beginning of a deep "response" to "The Passion" -- because it connects what "The Passion" film sets in violent conflict: Holy Week (from Palm Sunday to Easter) vs. Passover.

Why do I think this connection matters? Because it is not accidental that "The Passion" film, like the Gospel descriptions of Jesus' last days, is set at Passover time.

Passover was and is about the overthrow of a tyrannical
empire -- ancient Egypt under the Pharaohs -- and the
last days of Jesus were focused on what might be called
"the Passover Protest Movement," protesting against the
Roman Empire, the Pharaoh of that generation.

"The Passion" film drives a wedge of fear and anger
between the two religious communities over the meaning
of Holy Week and Passover. Our NEW FREEDOM
SEDER connects them instead.

This issue of The Shalom Report will explore this
connection in greater depth. We will also include a few
passages from the NEW FREEDOM SEDER that we
invite you to use in your own Sedarim. And you can find
the entire text of the NEW FREEDOM SEDER on our
Website, beginning at the Home Page
www.shalomctr.org

Two additional ways of making the Seder not only a call
to topple Pharaohs, but an active step in the process:

Invite (ahead of time) everyone to bring a physical item
that symbolizes their own sense of becoming free. Put
these on a special Freedom Plate next to the traditional
Seder plate. Invite the participants to lift their own item
whenever it seems appropriate, or at a specific point in
the service. Each person then explains how this object
speaks from or to a moment of liberation.

Have the younger people at the table hunt for the
Afikoman (the hidden portion of matzah) as a cooperative
group, rather than as competitors. When they find it, invite
them to agree on a social-justice organization where they
would like the "ransom" -- some tzedakah money -- to be
sent. The grown-ups who are present then pledge to
send their "ransom money" to that group.

Back to the relationship between "The Passion" and
Passover/ Holy Week:

It is not accidental that Holy Week begins with Palm
Sunday, commemorating the moment when the very
Jewish Jesus and his very Jewish followers came to
Jerusalem just before Passover, waving palm branches
as a symbol of resistance to Roman oppression.

It is not accidental that out of the Passover seder that the
Gospels describe as Jesus' Last Supper came a
ceremony of matzah and wine that has continued at the
heart of much Christian practice and spirituality.

So the questions of facing imperial power lie at the heart
of both Jewish and Christian religious life. I think that
under the surface of the debate about "The Passion" is
the fact that today all our religious traditions and all the
peoples of the world are facing a new kind of world
empire, a new Pharaoh, a new Rome: the amalgam of
US military might and the economic power of global
corporations.

In such a crisis, what do deep spiritual and political
values require of us? What does it mean to face
"Pharaoh"?

The Gospels hint at the culpability of Rome in executing
Jesus, but some strands of the Gospels -- especially
John, the latest written -- place more responsibility on the
Jewish people.

Many modern scholars - Christian and Jewish - have
suggested this stance may have been a revision of the
original history in hopes of becoming acceptable in the
Roman empire (hopes finally crowned by establishment
of Christianity as the Empire's religion).

Drawing on this line of thought, many Jewish leaders
have suggested that no Jews of the time can be
considered responsible for Jesus' execution.

But think about modern Great Powers and their
interventions in small countries. Think, for example, of the
relation in the 1970s between the Soviet Union and the
Polish government and people, or the United States and
the Chilean government and people.

In those cases, some local leaders and the Soviet or
American governments cooperated in ruling against the
will of the people and in smashing dissident movements.

Behind the scenes, the Great Power pulled the strings --
but pushed the local puppet or client government out front
to be the fall guys.

In the same mode, one can easily imagine in Chile, in
1973, an American diplomat -- like Pontius Pilate --
washing his hands of responsibility for murdering
President Allende, folk-singer Victor Jara, and thousands
of others.

In Poland, one can easily imagine a Soviet ambassador
doing the same thing, chuckling into his mustache as he
did.

Yet no one accused "the Poles" or "the Chileans" of these
murders. They accused SOME Poles and SOME
Chileans of serving the interests of the Soviet Union, or
the USA.

In the Gospel of John and even more in "The Passion"
film, the execution of Jesus is laid upon "the Jews" -- not
on SOME Jews, serving Imperial Rome.

And so the film presents Pontius Pilate as a noble ruler
forced by Jewish pressure into having Jesus crucified,
rather than a despicable hypocrite who held all power
while pretending not to.

The "Passion" film looks backward to restore the old-time
religion - the Passion plays that crystallized one version
of Christianity in their expression of contempt or hatred
for Judaism and their deflection of attention from the
Roman Empire's responsibility.

(In Europe, the Passion plays and Easter sermons may
have similarly deflected poor people's anger at various
governments onto the Jews.)

Most of the Jewish response to "The Passion" today has
been a defensive one -- "None of us had any hand
whatsoever in killing your Christ. Hinting we did will
stimulate anti-Semitism; so stop and we had better
stiffen our guard."

This response also looks backward, toward a world in
which Jews kept their distance from a dangerous
Christian community.

And both backward-looking responses also express a
deeper spiritual problem: "If we are right, you must be
totally wrong. If you are wrong, we must be TOTALLY
right."

Some Christians have been willing to look historically at
the Gospels, and some have said that in any case, no
matter how one reads the Gospels, Jews today must not
be attacked as the Gospel and the Passion plays have
encouraged in the past.

That is a step forward, but it still leaves the two
communities at arm's length, in an anxiety-ridden "non-
aggression" pact.

But we might ask, what is a RENEWAL and
PROGRESSIVE response, rooted in both a renewed
vision of Judaism and a renewed vision of Christianity?
What might be a new way of facing contemporary
"Pharaohs" and "Caesars"?
Can the two traditions go beyond a non-aggression pact
to a deeper cooperation?

One piece of such a response might be what The Shalom Center has tried to do in creating the NEW FREEDOM SEDER, connecting Palm Sunday (April 4 this
year) with Passover (April 5) and both with Martin Luther King's April 4, 1967, critique of American racism, militarism, and materialism.

That approaches brings us together as allies in resisting our contemporary Pharaoh, the Rome of today: the new US military machine, first-strike war, and top-down globalization.

If we read the film as a kind of allegory about how to deal
with an Empire, then today as well it has the effect of
deflecting the growing US public unease and gathering
resistance to globalization/ empire. (If Gibson had made
"the Jews" look like Arabs, the sleight-of-hand would
have worked even better in America today.)

As it stands, the film encourages those right-wing
Christians (and some right-wing Jews) who want to work
closely with the new US government -- "New Rome" --
and support its program of overseas military and
economic dominance.

The Palm Sunday/ NEW FREEDOM SEDER connection
is intended to ally progressive Jewish and Christian
energies in a profound struggle against the new empire,
as the People Israel resisted Pharaoh and as both early
Jewish followers of Jesus and the early Rabbis resisted
Rome.

The very fact that two different ways of seeing the
Passover story have evolved in the two traditions may
offer both difficulty and possibility for transcending the
collision into creating an alliance for spiritual and political
decency.

Here are some passages from the NEW FREEDOM SEDER that make the point. Remember, you can get the whole SEDER by sending a check by earth-mail and
lettting us know by Email.

Shalom, Arthur

********************
" Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it
seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of
callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The
liturgical movement must become a revolutionary
movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue
to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision."
--- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1970

"When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than
people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered. Our only
hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world
declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and
militarism."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

"My thinking had been opened wide in Mecca. I'm for truth,
no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is
for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and
as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity
as a whole."
-- El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, in The Autobiography of
Malcolm X

What is the depth of the American soul if we can allow
destruction to be done in our name and the name of
"liberation" and never even demand an accounting of its
costs, both personal and public, when it is over?
Proverbs warns us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips;
they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is
clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen,
there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts
precipitously and the people say nothing, something is
wrong with the people.
-- Sister Joan Chitister, OSB

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the
glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous
indignation, it will look across the seas and see
individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of
money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the
profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the
countries, and say: "This is not just."
Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world
order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is
not just." This business of burning human beings with
napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and
widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of
people normally humane, of sending men home from
dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with
wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than
on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.
Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

Peace & Justice oriented Liturgies for Ash Wednesday
http://www.oslcdenver.org/ashwednesday.htm