Sometimes I think that we will never achieve real progress on gun control. We have been fighting this battle for decades, and our nation’s destructive love affair with weapons of war has only accelerated and intensified. We lose more and more of our precious children every year to senseless gun violence. 

And then, there are moments when I am humbled by my own lack of faith. 8000 protesters, led by high school students, poured into the streets of Salt Lake City on March 24, to demand a halt to the exchange of blood money for false freedoms. 8000 Utahns said they won’t be afraid anymore, and they wouldn’t let their elected officials make fearful excuses anymore. 

That morning, I lined up with other progressive clergy from our city, all of us wearing the vestments of our faith traditions, and marched toward the Capitol beside them. As we marched, we chatted about our Holy Week plans, noting the irony that this march was taking place the day before Palm Sunday will be celebrated in many Christian churches. 

In the Palm Sunday narrative, Jesus and his students approach the city of Jerusalem for the Passover festival, a time in which the Jewish people celebrated their liberation from Egyptian oppression. During Jesus’ time, of course, the Jewish people were occupied by another oppressive regime – that of the Romans. In fact, at around the same time Jesus was approaching Jerusalem, the Roman governor was also making a grand entrance of his own, on the other side of the city. A festival of liberation was often a ripe moment for insurrection, and the governor would have wanted to make his military presence known in order to suppress revolt. 

How could he have known what real revolt would look like: a band of peasants with their illiterate teacher, riding not on a war horse but on an unbroken donkey. Scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg say of that moment:

“Jesus’ procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’ procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God.” That is a beautiful description of the kingdom of God: an alternative vision of the world, in which the world is ordered not by money and power but by love and justice. 

Marching toward the Capitol that day, I got a glimpse of the kingdom of God riding to the halls of power on a donkey, led by children. I hope you did too. We can – we MUST – imagine a world without gun violence, in which swords are beaten into plowshares and we study war no more. True freedom is not the power to kill, but the power to heal and to be healed. If we cannot imagine it, we cannot bring it into being. I urge you not to lose hope, but to let these young people lead us toward the best that we can imagine. 

Yours in faith,

Rev. Monica