Dear friends:
I’ll miss waving palms with you this weekend on what is among my very favorite Sundays of the year. I think it’s the children, really, watching as they – dutifully and joyfully – sing, wave and walk their way around the sanctuary as we sing
All Glory Laud and Honor
.
After five weeks of Lent, Palm Sunday is a welcome – if brief – respite back to the joy of faith through a wonderfully chaotic enactment of Jesus’ palm parade.
And yet as much as we might enjoy the palm parade, as much as we love singing hosannas, some of us also might feel a bit disingenuous as we do it. Especially this year. We cannot celebrate Palm Sunday without being painfully aware of what’s happening around us: hospitals are filling, businesses are collapsing, and people’s lives are dramatically affected.
So, it’s worth remembering that every Palm Sunday, we also know what happens next: the shouts of hosanna turn into cries for crucifixion by Friday. The sounds of celebration and sights of palms waving will soon fade into the sounds of hammer and nails into wood, the sounds of groans and gasps of suffering. We cannot pretend that the cross does not loom just around the corner, with its smell of death that overpowers the smell of spring, and its sound of silence that swallows up our songs of praise.
It’s precisely that complicated emotional space and chaotic spiritual landscape we are invited to inhabit this Sunday and all next week. People of faith have never been able to skip from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the alleluias of Easter.
I’m always tempted to try – to overlook, ignore, or at least downplay -- the fact that the story of Palm Sunday shows Jesus making his way to the temple, ready to challenge those who were already plotting to get rid of him; the sharing of a last supper that leads to one disappearing into the night; the agony in the garden as temptation is fought once again; the desertion at the moment of arrest and all the denials around a fire; the trials and the eventual sentencing; the duplicitous washing of hands and the shouts of crucify from the crowd.
No, as much as we might like to do so—probably this year more than others—we simply cannot move immediately from hosanna to alleluia.
And yet, may I suggest that this is exactly the kind of savior our world needs right now, one who understands pain, one who has endured the death-dealing attitudes of the public; one who confronts duplicitous government and religious officials, and one who remains true to his mission to show that life is victorious over death, grace wins over revenge, and the way of self-sacrifice is the way of God.
One final invitation: Sometime today,
please send us a photo
of yourself and/or a loved one holding a branch or piece of greenery. We'll create a montage of photos to let us see each other's faces as part of a virtual palm processional during the opening hymn.
Peace,
