Take Off Your Shoes Podcast By Marie Duquette
Website: https://marinawell.com/
Pr. Marie Duquette, with 20 years of sound theological preaching, brings the Bible into current events in this podcast. FROM HER LINKED-IN PROFILE - "I've been a progressive pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) for twenty years, including leading four separate congregations in three states, each with a different emphasis. In that time I've lead a rural congregation through building a church, which included a summer in which several young children died and the community was wracked with grief; a small community through extensive grief; a beachside congregation through a merger with a large cathedral on the mainland; and a diverse congregation in a college town through the pandemic. My writing experience includes liturgical content for Augsburg Fortress (Minneapolis, MI); feature articles for Crazy Wisdom (Ann Arbor, MI); editorials for the Observer-Eccentric (Farmington, MI) as well as creative non-fiction for my BLOG, Take Off Your Shoes, since 2010."
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@MarieNDuquette
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Take Off Your Shoes Podcast By Marie Duquette
3-24-2024 Crucifixion All Over by Rev. Marie Duquette
For those of you who kept track of the numbers, were you surprised of how many numbers were in it?
Anyone?
It's an interesting exercise.
Numbers throughout the Bible have particular meanings.
The number seven and the number 12 are considered foundational, significant numbers, numbers of fulfillment, numbers of completion, numbers to pay attention to throughout the Bible.
I did an exercise with this text this week in which I looked at every seventh verse, and I found that for the first seven, sets of seven, the seventh verse was Jesus talking. After that it switches, in the seventh verse, were other people; the crowds, the people who persecuted him, Judas, Pilate, other people. I just thought it was interesting. It's interesting sometimes to pay attention to numbers. There is a story that has been attributed to multiple people, uh, that is said that there was a time in the world when there was a place where children were being crucified, and a bystander mocked someone who was crying, much as the soldiers mocked Jesus in the passion story, and said, 'Where is your God now?' And the person who was crying said, 'Right there, in that child whom you have crucified.' That's the point of the Passion Story and the reason we read it and the reason we look so closely at our faith today. Is that when we sing Were You There we might think we weren't there, but we are here, and we see people crucified every day. Do we not? Anytime you turn on the news, you look, look at the news on your phone, you see more and more and more of people suffering. People wrongly persecuted. People betrayed. People unjustly accused, convicted, imprisoned, left in prisons to rot. People killed. People torn from their families. We, now, are just beginning to grapple with and talk about the 7 million people worldwide who died from Covid in the last four years. 7 million people. We saw that. And we saw people who killed themselves. Who worked themselves to death to save lives, did we not? And we saw people who flippantly mocked the virus and refused to so much as wear a piece of cloth across their mouth.
In the United States right now, firearms are the leading cause of death
of children and teenagers.
Do we not see crucifixions happening all the time in this shameful reality.
Black and brown people are being killed. And their killers are walking free because it's of an unholy brotherhood of silence. Only the wealthy can afford health care.
And the poor are the ones who need it most.
And, oh, it makes me wonder.
Were you there? Are you here?
It's teachers and nurses,
sanitation workers and those who care for the disabled
are the least respected and the most needed. They are making a pittance to live on and they work long hours doing work no one else wants to do.
Were you there? Are you here?
It's the rich harming our planet
casually laughing about climate change.
While the poor continue to reuse and recycle and repurpose everything because God has called us to protect Creation in this beautiful Earth God has given us.
It's trans people being beaten to death in their high school bathrooms.
It's genocide in Gaza and its violence in Haiti and its corruption in the highest court of the land.
Were you there? Are you here?
We see
unholy