Show me how to bleed (feat. Katniss and Rue)

Show me how to bleed

I’ll never forget the day when I knew I would have to bleed for you;
You said to take up your cross;
They never told me what a cross meant;
They made it the arithmetic of God’s judgment:
a simple plus sign to put in between my sin and God’s wrath
to cancel each side out – just simple math.
That’s what I thought the cross meant.

See, in our churches, the cross was always empty
because the tomb was empty 3 days later;
Blood is a metaphor we use in our songs;
Jesus only bled on his human side; he knew he’d resurrect all along;
And so we sing about the blood;
We dance in it;
We prance in it;
We close our eyes emphatically and put ourselves in a trance in it;
We make it into juice that we call wine
Because everything’s just fine
as long as it doesn’t stain the carpet.

But Michael Brown’s blood still cries out to God;
They had to repave that road, but the stain’s still there;
And of course you know he was no saint;
Hands up don’t shoot is all a lie;
The forensic experts have all testified.
And all the authorities have always been exonerated;
It’s always a tragedy when kids misbehave and God has to punish them.

Brown lives have never mattered;
Jesus’ life only mattered when his blood was splattered
Onto Roman shields to yield the victory;
And the Roman Empire became one flesh with the church
In holy matrimony
And the church submitted graciously to her husband
As he raped the entire world
and baptized every illegitimate child he fathered.

Brown lives have never mattered;
But Jesus was a brown man,
A Jewish Palestinian;
Today he’d be a Mexican named Jesús
And he wouldn’t have papers
Because the Son of Man had no place to lay his head.

Can you not see that your religion is dead
If Jesus has never bled on your carpet?
Not one drop of brown blood if you want to be white;
Which means not one drop of Jesus Christ is in your veins;
Don’t talk of real presence in an abstract sense;
If you have not discerned the wounds in Jesus’ flesh,
You drink your own judgment.

Examine yourself before you partake;
Because it’s a mistake to join a crucified body without counting the cost;
This isn’t about you getting to call other people lost;
Until everything you have is lost, you cannot say you’re bearing a cross.

When your neighbors have choked on second hand tear gas;
When you’ve stood eye to eye with stormtrooper masks;
When your life is filled with dark truths that don’t count as facts;
Then you can say that you have a cross.

I am not a disciple yet because I only go to marches that have permits;
I am not a disciple yet because I’ve never spent more than half an hour in jail;
I am not a disciple yet because I have not been found worthy
to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.

I’ll never forget the day when I knew I would have to bleed for you;
So many others have always bled;
I am not worthy to untie their sandals and wash their feet;
But give me courage to stand with them in the street;
Do not let me die without wounds in my pallid, sickly flesh;
Show me how to bleed so that my life will be eternal.