Jesus, you are the one we name, in our fanciful pageants, in our solemn rites. You have become a commodity, an idea, a stock figure in the grand play that is our culture. You are used to justify nationalism, division, oppression.
Blessed Savior, we believe that this named Jesus, this Jesus of ceremony and grandeur, is false. And so we ask you this morning, be with us. Be real. Remind us of dirty aching feet that walked paths of love, of hardened hands that brought healing and hope, remind us that you ate and laughed and drank like us, that you lost your temper, like us.
Jesus, be present with us, be real with us, that we might be real with one another, might drop our masks and step out of the stories in which we pretend to live. As you were both messy human and Messiah, God-with-us and God-for-us, may we be in you and for you, made holy, sanctified, not by your myth, but by your reality. Amen.