Monday Morning Musing: Being a Prisoner

For those who keep time by the Church’s calendar, this week will walk us toward Palm Sunday.  I still vastly prefer, for reasons theological, pastoral, and liturgical, to observe Palm Sunday as a day unto itself rather than folding Maundy Thursday and Good Friday into it as well.  I understand the very practical thinking that people are too busy to come to the additional worship services marking these days, but rather than acquiesce to such frantic neglect, I suggest we offer other ways for people to observe and exist in those spaces.  But that is another post for another time….maybe. 

So it is that I find myself resting in the readings that point to Palm Sunday as I plan for worship and sermons and prayers.  (If you aren’t a church type, thanks for reading this far and hang in for a bit longer…). One of those readings is from the ninth chapter of the writings of the prophet Zechariah, (9: 9-12).  The prophet writes “ Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope…”

Friends, I am captured by this phrase….prisoners of hope.  Oh, I will pull out all the stops to do the study that preaching requires.  I will exegete and do word studies and look at context and do my seminary professors proud. 

But in this moment, in this morning, I’m thinking about what it means to be a prisoner of hope. 

On Saturday I was one of the millions of people who rallied to say that the stripping away of the rights of Americans by a vengeful and greedy administration is not okay.  Hands Off!  Hands Off ! We chanted in refrain. 

Being a prisoner of hope means being very hands on in working for justice and freedom and peace.  It means remembering that when the voices of many join together, it is possible to inhabit a land that believes in our shared and common good.  This is our stronghold…..that because of the way we believe, we are captive to hope….we don’t have a choice but to continue to be hopeful, to continue to believe that this present shadow of shame will not continue to be cast over us. 

What would change if we saw ourselves as prisoners of hope, shackled to the notion that no matter how bad things look in the present, we will be better in what is to come?  How would it make a difference, not only in what is possible together, but in the condition of our spirits? 

This is my prayer, my desire, my pleading, my resting, my longing : O make us prisoners, not of stingy, self centeredness, but, make us prisoners of hope.