Saturday, July 19, 2008

Preparing for Sunday - A Reflection on "White" - For the Rosebud Reservation - Day 14

Holy Scripture exhorts us to examine ourselves before receiving Holy Communion. As we pray with special intention for an end to suicide on the Rosebud Reservation, I offer these penitential thoughts:

Father, we have brought the wrong shade of "White" to the Lakota people and the Rosebud Reservation:

  • We've brought trappings of White culture
  • We've brought subservience to our sense of White superiority and entitlement

Help us, Father, to repent of this kind of "Whiteness" and bring instead the whiteness of the saints:

Father, those of us in the White culture have been tricked by Abaddon, the Destroyer, and helped him rain affliction, poverty and frustration on the Lakota people and the Rosebud Reservation. Help us to repent of this and make us new people. We ask this for the sake of Jesus Christ, who was sacrificed for us:

Your boasting about this is terrible. Don’t you realize that this sin is like a little yeast that spreads through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old “yeast” by removing this wicked person from among you. Then you will be like a fresh batch of dough made without yeast, which is what you really are. Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. So let us celebrate the festival, not with the old bread of wickedness and evil, but with the new bread of sincerity and truth.

I Corinthians 5:6-8, NLT

This morning, I had a flash of insight, though. Blood is the key. When blood is shed in sin, it does more than give Satan a foothold. It gives him a doorway.
The only thing that can counteract that is confession, repentance, and the blood of the Lamb. That closes the doorway.
Like the Israelites applying blood to the doorposts and lintels so that the angel of death would pass them by, so it is with us. To keep those doors closed, the blood of the Lamb must be applied.
Jill Woodliff

No comments: