The Chicago Pride parade brings out the best in people for whom diversity and inclusion are not dirty words. Even though one can almost count on it being held on a day when my former pastor who hailed from the south used to say “was hotter than the tip of a burning match” people come and come by the thousands.
Parades are great and I say that as someone who has marched in more than a few myself.
As a below average clarinetist I boarded buses with my fellow Luther North band member to be forced marched in Chicago’s annual Christmas parade where the weather was always the exact opposite of the kind of weather we are experiencing today.
In spite of what some of you may be thinking to yourselves it wasn’t cold because my high school years were so long ago that the glaciers had just began their retreat northward. It was cold because it was December, and it was Chicago.
We also proudly marched in the Chicago Saint Patrick’s Day parade, too. This was probably because they needed some band that wasn’t from Mount Carmel, Leo Academy, Saint Patrick’s, or Notre Dame and we became the token non-Catholic religious school representative. I always thought we were chosen because Luther North, came before Luther South in the alphabet and parade organizers were never quite sure what a Walther Lutheran was or if they could be trusted.
I love the community parade that the Edgebrook/Wildwood Chamber of Commerce organizes every year. If you close your eyes you could be in any small town in America except that this small town had railroad tracks serving Metra, Amtrak, and Soo Line freight trains running right through the middle. So, without fail, even though the organizers tried to make sure to consult the train schedules for passenger service, a freight train with a couple of hundred cars, would blast its way through town leaving some of the parade on the west side of the tracks while the participants on the east side of the track were left to wonder where everybody was.
I even have a strange affinity for those parade extravaganzas that were put on by the old Soviet Union, (now mother Russia) and those massive spectacles put on by and for the dear leader of North Korea. Where do they find all these people who are willing to march in lockstep to show their loyalty? How much time does it take not only to teach these people how to march but how to whirl like dervishes in such perfect synchronization that it would put the Radio City Rockets to shame? How much do these spectacles cost?
These “show of force” parade always struck me as sadly humorous.
No, give me a community parade with children scrambling for candy thrown from the back of a truck, or the parades with the band I was in that hard a hard time keeping in step and marching in a straight line while at the same time playing something that resembled music, or a Pride parade like today’s that, knowingly or not, celebrates the message that all of God’s people are equal.
Loose site of this for one single second and there is going to trouble and that is what almost happens in today’s gospel
The disciples and Jesus are on their way to Jerusalem and, as luck would have it, they journey requires them to pass through a Samaritan village. Jesus’ advance team receives anything but a warm welcome because, to put it directly, they were Jews and the history of bad blood between the two peoples dated back for centuries.
Why these disciples would have expected a warm welcome is beyond me. The Samaritans were not going to jump on the Jesus bandwagon and join in his parade in an instant but the disciple's reaction to being told they were not welcome is more than troubling.
“When the disciples James and John learned of it, they said, ‘Master, do you want us to call a bolt of lightning down out of the sky and incinerate them?’”1
Luke never records what, or if, Jesus said anything to the two bomb throwers. Something like “Are you nuts!” would have been appropriate, I think.
You don’t have to be the Son of God but simply a child of God to know this kind of stuff doesn’t work. Blowing up the entire parade route because some people don’t want to join in is not the answer. It is the stuff of people who have seen one too many Superhero movies. One act of violence doesn’t put an end to violence. One act of violence only leads to another, and another, and another until you find yourself wondering if anybody on either side knows what they are doing. And so, wars start and rage on.
James and John have just proposed a recipe for disaster that nations seem to be following to this day but Jesus is not going to let their abject stupidity rain on his parade.
Neither is he going to let those who just aren’t sure if they want to join him or not put a damper on his mission.
At this point, as Debie Thomas points out, “Jesus is perfectly indifferent to the rules of good salesmanship.”
He doesn’t wrap his product in slick packaging. He doesn’t minimize costs to attract more customers. He doesn’t hide the hard stuff in fine print. He never rushes his pitch to close a deal. If anything, he does the bizarre opposite: he takes pains to push potential buyers away. “I’ll follow you!” an eager customer gushes. “Oh, good grief, no you won’t,” Jesus groans in response. “You have no clue what you’re talking about.”2
If we join his parade, you better know what you are getting ourselves into. If we join his parade we’d better be in it for the long haul. If we join his parade we better understand that life will not be all seashells and balloons.
There will be days that feel as emotionally cold as a City of Chicago Christmas parade. If we join Jesus’ parade life may feel like life is about to overcome us like the heat of a Pride Parade. There will be days when we feel like we want to bail out of the band and just quit.
However, those of us who have joined the parade and stayed in it for the long haul understand that following Jesus will lead us to a life that is more ambitious, more demanding, more risky, and more rewarding than anything we could come up with on our own.
All this talk of parades on a hot summer’s day has reminded me of the closing number of Act I of the musical Hello Dolly.
Cut me some slack here! It’s a musical, okay.
But after the loss of her beloved husband Horice, with the required musical comedy adventure and misadventures along the way, Dolly realizes that she is still mourning him, still missing him. In spite of all the clamour and excitement in her life, most of which has been caused by her, she and some friends go off to watch the 14th Street Association parade together.
The inclusiveness, the unbridled joy,
is like Christmas, and Pride, and Candy being throw from the back of cars. All the merriment, causes her to sing about how “she wants to feel her heart coming alive again.”
So, she resolves to “raise the roof, carry on” and not let the parade pass her by.
So, with that earworm floating around in your head go forth, follow Jesus no matter what, and “don’t let the parade,” his parade, Jesus’ parade “pass you by.”
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1. St. Luke 9:51–54. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).]
2. Debie Thomas, “Truth in Advertising,” Journey with Jesus, June 23, 2019, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2265-truth-in-advertising.
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