Dear Friends... tomorrow is Palm Sunday, the beginning of what our tradition calls Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter.  Many church services will highlight Jesus' fateful entrance into Jerusalem, a visit that is the beginning of events that will lead to his death.

Lent culminates in this week, and for years, the words that have cut to the heart of the matter for me have come from a friend and mentor, the Rev. William Dols, the former editor of a wonderful resource called The Bible Workbench.   What I love about this approach is that it brings the story home, and asks us to look in the mirror, and encourages us not to keep these potent stories at arm's length. 

I think Bill captures the invitation to us all in this acute time, and I pass it on, with gratitude:

"Jesus has been on his way to Jerusalem from the beginning--circling it, approaching and retreating. 

Jerusalem is where Jesus dies and his purpose is born.  In Jerusalem everything ends and also begins.  It is the fearful and guarded city he must enter on the way to the cross upon which we will hang and from which he will arise. 

His story is, in this sense, our story.  When we choose to follow rather than simply worship Jesus, we too end up in our Jerusalem and there, surrounded by terror and darkness as was he, discover a kind of life that can be lived only on the other side of dying.  It is a resurrection experience that is possible daily, time and time and time again.

Everyone in this room has a Jerusalem.  Jerusalem is the place or person or part of yourself you fear the most--over the years have avoided, denied, tried to ignore--worked hard to forget or outgrow or get over or leave behind or cast out or sedate or drown or outrun or cover up or camouflage or cure or blame on somebody else.  Jerusalem is the city you are that you have circled for a lifetime and awaits your return.  Nobody can tell you what it is or where.  Only you know that.  Nobody can make you go there.  It's your call.  Nobody can tell you when to step through its gates.  You must decide.

But when you finally go there--if you do, and my guess is that we have all been there once or twice--when you do you will die.  You die just as did Jesus to the illusion of being saved by temple or messiah.  You die to fond dreams of a peaceable kingdom in church or marriage or self.  You die to being the center-calling the shots-being forever in control, becoming perfect, even adequate.  And that kind of dying includes earthquakes and tribulation.
 
Outside Jerusalem you can do lots of fine stuff--fresh starts, new resolves, promises and pledges and good works.  But only in Jerusalem will you become re-invented, re-created, transformed.

There are those of you who walked in here today well aware of your Jerusalem and the cost and promise of going there.  For others it may not be quite so apparent." 

May we all know something in the coming days about Jerusalem, and all that lies beyond it.