Palm Sunday, and indeed, all of holy week, redefines power. During Passover, as Jesus entered Jerusalem, the Romans would have summoned an extra military presence to be on hand to keep things calm as an occupied and oppressed people observed their festival of liberation from slavery. Jesus seized this moment to play with the symbolism of a triumphant military processional. Generally such a pageant was a show of force celebrating deeds of violence and domination. Jesus, however, turned this ritual on its head. Instead of a war horse, he sat astride a colt, a young animal that was untamed. He brought no weapons, wore no armor. In place of a royal carpet, ordinary people spread their cloaks.

And then, Luke says, “the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen.” Throughout Jesus’ ministry, his followers had witnessed, again and again, that he was filled with power, the power of the Spirit—the power to heal broken bodies, restore distressed minds, the power to liberate, enlighten, and connect. In a society that sought to rule through the power of fear, division, and exploitation, Jesus modeled another sort of power—the power to bring people together for the common good.

Recently I attended a talk by Sarah Augustine, an activist who is both indigenous and Christian. She is the cofounder and executive director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. Sarah is one of those people whose speaking, and way of being, holds incredible power, the power to move hearts and change lives. You can listen to her talk on YouTube. Her focus was on being kin. She said that we live in a closed system of mutual dependence. There’s no new water or air. Things like toxic waste and plastic don’t go away; once we create it, it’s always with us. The systems that support life have a carrying capacity that we cannot exceed. 

Sarah always prays at sunrise in the way of her people, the Tewa people. And she always says this prayer: “Thank you for this land, our body.” She pointed out how different this prayer is from prayers that thank God for the bounty we have extracted from the land. She said, “I am the land, the land is me. We are not separate. We depend on each other.” The “Doctrine of Discovery” describes the body of law and policy adopted by the Supreme Court in 1823, that drives our society’s extractive logic, that assumes the divinely ordained supremacy of white people’s ways and the subordination of indigenous people’s ways.

I was amazed to learn that the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery has a plan to organize over the next 100 years to liberate earth from colonialism. The heart of this work is to build a base of people of faith, and specifically Christians, who will commit to follow the leadership of indigenous people. In this way, the church can begin to reverse our own history of domination. We can harness our power, the same power that created the extractive system we have, to bring into being a different future. I think investing in this long arc of organizing and change could give us perspective and hope that reaches beyond the sensational headlines of today and the confines of the next election cycle. Sarah emphasized that, as an indigenous Christian, the Jesus she follows embodies the power to make peace by challenging the status quo. Being peacemakers and healers in our own time, she said, means that we are provoking conflict, and that when there is strife, we are stepping deeper into relationship because we are grounded in what is real. We are all kin. We live in a closed system of mutual dependence. “The antidote to despair,” she said, “is knowing you’re not alone, in a system designed to make us feel alone.”  

Friends, this Holy Week, may we take our cue from Jesus, who, in the face of empire’s murderous power embodies the power of life itself—the power of healing, liberating love, the transformational power of kinship and community. Amen.