The Triumphant Entry

Searching indeed must have been the thoughts moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of the donkey on that fateful day which marks in the Christian calendar the Triumphant Entry. The experience must have been as strange and out of character for him as it was for the faithful animal on whose back he rode.

For more than two years, Jesus had been engaged in a public ministry. Once when there were those who wanted to make him a king, he had refused. “My kingdom is not of this world.” He had walked the countryside with his band of disciples, preaching, teaching, healing, and spreading a quality of radiance that could come only from one whose overwhelming enthusiasm was for God and his Kingdom. He had kept many lonely trysts in the late watches of the night, trueing his spirit and his whole life by the will of his Father. So close had he worked with God that the line of demarcation between his will and God's Will would fade and reappear, fade and reappear. Step by resolute step, he had come to the great city. Deep within his spirit there may have been a sense of foreboding, or the heightened quality of exhilaration that comes from knowing that there is no road back.

He had learned much. So sensitive had grown his spirit and the living quality of his being that he seemed more and more to stand inside of life, looking out upon it as a man who gazes from a window in a room out into the yard and beyond to the distant hills. He could feel the sparrowness of the Sparrow, the leprosy of the leper, the blindness of the blind, the crippledness of the cripple, and the frenzy of the mad. He had become joy, sorrow, hope, anguish, to the joyful, the sorrowful, the hopeful, the anguished. Could he feel his way into the mind and the mood of those who cast the palms and the flowers in his path? Was he in the cry of those who exclaimed their wild and unrestrained Hosannas? Did he mingle with the emotions that lay beneath the exultations ready to explode in the outburst of the mob screaming, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of the faithful donkey.

Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes, in his father's shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue, with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn as it sounded. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him the great necessity which sent him out on the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from the prophet Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to open the eyes of the blind, to unstop the ears of the deaf, to announce the acceptable year of the Lord.” I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of the faithful donkey.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 263-264
Originally published in The Inward Journey)

It may be that this weekend has been a kind of “triumphal entry.” Oscar Sinclair was installed as the Senior Minister of Unity Church—Unitarian in St. Paul, and I was blessed to deliver the Charge to the Minister. I can’t share all I think and feel about this opportunity for Oscar and for Unity—it felt so wonderful to be among them!—but I can share the words I used.

Charge to Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair

Dr. Sinclair, I greet you in the liberal religious tradition at a time when “liberal” has become, for some, an epithet. In English, the word has been used, for some seven centuries, to mean free, as in born free; as in being noble and thus having the capacity to be generous; as in magnanimous and admirable.

So my charge to you today is to be liberal. To enact in your life and your example the attitude of generosity
and the perspective that your ministry is about giving others access to their own freedom.

When Elphaba tries defying gravity, she sings, “And if I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free.”
None of us, Dr. Sinclair, is flying solo. This is hardly news to you. You find freedom in relationships. I have seen you step into any number of situations and offer a chance to get connected and go deep.

I’ve seen it in pastoral interactions, of course; and I’ve seen the pastor “show up” in committee meetings, and the pastor appear over a libation with a contemporary. You offer relationships that invite others in.
You offer opportunities for people to fly together and go deep.

Your doctoral project exhibits this. To get a congregation to enter into deep conversations with each other, to process their grief in living through a pandemic, to process what being part of a congregation means, to examine—in front of another congregant—questions of faith, and then to shared that connectionalism with the whole community—you asked them to go deep and for each to know that none of us is flying solo. All of us can be flying free.

[I went off-script here to add a few words about congregational polity, asking that we think beyond the question of the freedom of a congregation to vote to elect a minister; but to imagine that our congregationalism asserts that when a people declare the existence of a church, when they, formed and informed by study including the study with their minister, search their conscience, that they can in fact discern the will of God in a situation, can use that will to choose how they will be. I charged Oscar to continue to be a congregationalist.]

I charge you to imagine with Dr. Natalie Fenimore that you believe in the Unitarian Universalism that does not yet exist, and that your work with this people will be
to explore this faith together,
to expand this faith together,
to correct this faith together,
that we might bring the Unitarian Universalism that doesn’t yet exist ever closer.

I charge you, too, to listen to Mr. Channing who said, from a pulpit in Baltimore,

My friend and brother; — You are this day to take upon you important duties;
to be clothed with an office, which the Son of God did not disdain;
to devote yourself to that religion, which the most hallowed lips have preached, and the most precious blood sealed. . . .

You will remember, that good practice is the end of preaching,
and will labor to make your people holy livers, rather than skillful disputants.

I’ve surpassed my 400 word limit. I’ll conclude. Oscar, friend, brother, colleague, there is so much more to say. Life is long, and we are on this journey together.

I charge you to live boldly into our liberating and liberal faith, and never to imagine that you are flying solo.

Ashe, ashe. Blessed be. Peace, salaam, shalom. I love you. Amen.