John Morris
April 7, 2025
Fourth Sunday in Lent
This sermon is a bit of an improvisation, though I do have some things written down and I’ll try to keep it orderly and brief. I want to share some reflections that came to me after being at the Hands Off Rally on the Mall yesterday afternoon, and I want give others a chance to do the same. I put this together last night, so bear with me.
Katie and I ride the Metro down to the Mall with Sherri and Erin. I’m not sure what they’re thinking, but the train car is only moderately full, and it isn’t even clear that most of the riders are going to the march. I begin to worry – just about at the point I stop worrying about the weather – if this gathering is going to be a bust. We decide to get off at L’enfant Plaza and walk the rest of the way to the Washington Monument, avoiding crowd hassles and changing trains. On this route, there are plenty of folks with signs, but again, it doesn’t seem like a vast tsunami of righteous protest converging on the Mall.
That is, until we actually turned onto the Mall itself, a block from the Monument. I think each of us gasps at the sight. This . . . is . . . a whole truckload of people! The sea of banners, signs, chanting, and trudging seems endless, and as we join the throng and slowly make our way with them across 14th street, all I can think is: Well, thank God for that.
I don’t know what the crowd estimates are, as of this morning, but “way bigger than predicted” is surely correct.
So, back on Friday: Checking the weather forecast for Saturday feels a bit like trying to find out if God is on our side. If yes, sunshine! If no, rain! This is silly, but it speaks to something real. I want to believe that there is a harmony between the way the world is, and the ways of God. After all, what am I doing out in this crowd of protesters, anyway? Hand Off! we shout. Which is another way of saying, Stop taking what isn’t yours. This is not how the world is meant to be. You offend harmony and justice. You rape the Earth in the name of your own resentments and greed. Surely God doesn’t want this? Surely God will smile on our protests, even to the extent of . . . well, not to the extent of making sure we have nice weather. But we may find God’s blessings in other ways, today.
I ask myself that question repeatedly as tens of thousands of us rally together. Where is the voice of God in all this? How does God bless us today?
One of us in our little group has been talking about enemies. Do you feel like we’re here to confront an enemy? I ask. Yes, I do, they reply. I feel like this administration is my enemy. They are actively opposed to the common good, are in it only for themselves.
Jesus didn’t pretend there were no enemies. He didn’t say we should be friends with them, or let them do what they want. All he asked . . . is that we love them, and offer a blessing even as they aim to harm us. It’s funny, but merged with this joyous, energized, determined crowd, I feel more capable of love and blessing than I do on my own. When I face an enemy alone, I get scared, so I summon all my animal courage and work up some rage and aggression, at which point I really don’t care what happens to them spiritually. I just want to beat them. But with so much high spirits and solidarity surrounding me, I can almost – not quite, but almost – imagine saying to the rulers of our current Rome: Oh and by the way, when we’ve thrown you out of power, you can have my blessing, in the name of God. Go and sin no more.
And what are we hoping for, anyway, this afternoon? No one is getting thrown out of power today. I don’t know if this show of numbers even makes anything more difficult for Trump and Musk and company. But I know what I hope for: God, give me serenity to accept the things I can’t change, and the courage to change the things I can. And right now, that means business as usual for the United States of America. Together, we can change that, and I hope we do. Enough is enough.
I keep noticing how the many, many signs being waved by the crowd here run an enormous gamut. Hand Off! is the theme, and boy does that cover a lot of ground. Hands off democracy! Hands off Mother Earth! Hands off gays and women and trans people! Hands off immigrants! Hands off people of color! Hands off Social Security! Hands off our bodies and our schools and our libraries! We’ve all heard that word “intersectionality,” which is somewhat jargony but refers to the way our lives and politics are constructed by many different social pressures. Here is intersectionality right in front of us, as we take in the meaning of all those signs. Yes, all these diverse social identities have at least one thing in common: In the hands of anti-democrats and proto-fascists, they are weapons to bludgeon us with. As someone we know often says: We’re all in this together.
How many people does it take to make a community? Good question, here at Seekers, where we’ve learned that the answer is, Not all that many. The huge throng I’m trying to edge my way through is a community, sure, but there are little mini-communities too, and I enjoy finding some fellow Christians who don’t mind standing up and being counted. One sign merely reads, “James 5,” and I’m embarrassed to say I had to wait til I got home to look it up. But you know that one: It’s the one that starts, “Woe, you rich men, weep and howl, for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you.” Indeed. Here is the word of God for sure, if any of the billionaires happen to be listening. And another group of signs urge us, Create the beloved community! and ask, Who would Jesus deport? This reminds me that it’s not enough to be against evil, no matter how awful it is. We have to be for something to, we need that vision of peace and family and generosity that Jesus told us about.
Now we arrive at the bathroom portion of the afternoon. No doubt it’s Trump’s fault, but there are not even close to nearly enough restroom facilities for this crowd. We wait on a long line. It gets longer, behind us, and doesn’t seem to get any shorter in front of us. But ever so slowly, yes, it does. And one guy a little ahead of us shouts out: “See? We’re making progress!” Everyone cheers, because we know what he means. It’s not just about the long bathroom line. The revolution will not be televised, and nor will it be prodded beyond its snail-like pace.
Except . . . is it even progress? Some dark thoughts here, and I feel like shouting at God, Hey, it’s been 2000 years, are we really any closer to living the way Jesus wanted us to? How many of these damn DC leftwing rallies do I have to keep going to in my life? Katie points out she’s been doing this for almost 60 years. She doesn’t sound happy about it. And yet . . . here we are. OK, you want progress? In Jesus’ time, if the occupied Jews had tried this lark, the Romans would have nailed everybody to a tree and gone off whistling. And more or less the same thing still happens in plenty of countries today. We are not, in the US, thank God, quite there yet. We are more or less free to assemble and petition for redress of our grievances. And petition we do, loudly, sometimes obscenely, and mostly with courage and confidence that the past 75 days is not the end of the story.
That’s what I’ve got this morning. I’m going to stop now, after this very short word, because I want to ask others who were also downtown yesterday to stand up now and share one thing that they saw or heard yesterday that mattered most to them. At a suitable point, I’ll bring this to a close with a prayer, and we’ll have a special offertory performance.