Saturday, April 11, 2015

Palm Sunday, 2015

“A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of Jesus and that followed were shouting, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’”
“At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”

From Palm Sunday to the cross. We are in for quite a ride this week, as we move from the celebration of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem at the height of his ministry to his last moments with his disciples on Maundy Thursday to his betrayal and arrest and crucifixion on Good Friday. We move from reenacting the crowds who welcomed him today to embodying the last few disciples who were with him the night before his arrest to recalling our own actions that betray and abandon Jesus as he dies on a cross. This is going to be a difficult week. Moving from the celebration of Palm Sunday to the crucifixion and tomb of Good Friday is an intense journey to experience, even when we know how it all ends.

But then again isn’t all of life like that? From celebration to cemetery, that’s how our lives go. From crowds who throng around us during our moments of greatest achievement to the small handful that accompany us on our last day of life (if that) to our lonely grave in which we lie completely alone, this is the story of existence, from the individual scale to the global scale. Whether we are talking about a single life or the life of an institution or even the life of a nation, life always moves from celebration to cemetery, from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. 
This year, I have been particularly struck by this move as it is happening in Western Christianity, and in this congregation. Right now, the church - both the larger religious institution in Europe and North America and this local congregation - is experiencing a kind of Holy Week of its own. It is moving from celebration to cemetery, from its own Palm Sunday to its own Good Friday. If we were to trace the development of the Western Church, we would see it move from its early roots of persecution to a gradual tolerance and then acceptance by the Roman powers, to Constantine taking up Christianity as a tool for imperial success, growing to become the required religion of Europe in the Middle Ages, and even through the fracturing of the Reformation, the Church still grew, growing to a peak in the last few centuries. At the height of Christianity, the churches were packed, everybody was a Christian, nobody did any work on Sundays, and Easter and Christmas were celebrations of the highest magnitude. Everyone was a Christian, and those who weren’t lived by the rules of those who were. Christianity was the celebrated religion, and entire cities sang praises and hosannas. It is a story that mirrors Jesus’ own rise from a nobody in Galilee to being followed by crowds.

This is the story not only of the larger church, but of this congregation, too. Who here doesn’t remember a time when these pews were packed? On the Palm Sunday of this congregation’s life, you had to come to church early to get a seat, there were several choirs, the Sunday school rooms were bursting at the seams, and the crowds’ praise and Hosannas were deafening. 

And then our Palm Sunday was over. The church’s time of celebration came to an end. People started questioning the legitimacy of the church (rightly so, in many cases), and stopped coming, and turned away. The crowds thinned out and only a few disciples were left. Christianity  today looks almost nothing like it did during its heyday. And here we are now, on what I would call the Maundy Thursday of this congregation’s life. The crowds are gone, and only the few, most dedicated disciples are left. We are facing our own Good Friday and our own imminent death. Our life as a Christian community appears to mirror the story of Jesus that we follow this week. We, as a larger Church and as a particular congregation, are moving from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. From celebration to cemetery.

The challenge of this isn’t so much that it’s happening at all - death is the inevitable conclusion to life. All of creation dies - people, institutions, congregations. Even Jesus died. The only thing that never dies is God, and God only promises new life to us after we’ve died, not before. So that we die is not the tough part to accept. It’s how we die - how we move from celebration to cemetery that is hard. Specifically, what’s hard is the way we feel abandoned as it happens. The move from crowds to a small group to being alone - from Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday to the cry on Good Friday - this is what’s hard to accept. The move from packed pews to only a few filled pews to empty pews - this is what upsets us. The verses from Psalm 31 that we just read say it all: “I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbours, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. I have passed out of mind like one who is dead.” 

The hardest part of dying is feeling like we’ve been completely abandoned in that death. The hardest part of facing death is the prospect that we will go through it alone. It wasn’t until Jesus was on the cross, abandoned by his disciples, no crowd in sight, that he felt his most human and his most alone and cried out the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is completely human to feel entirely forsaken at our moment of death - by friends, by family, and by God. At the moment when the celebration dies and we face entry into the cemetery, even Jesus wondered if God was there.

Yet despite Jesus’ cry, God does not, in fact, abandon us. We are never completely alone. God is always with us. Jesus knew this. Psalm 22 that he quoted ends with the proclamation that even the dead shall find themselves in the presence of God, and that God shall act amongst the generations to come, being present even to those who are as yet unborn. The Psalm says, “When they cry out, the Lord hears them.” God heard Jesus cry out on the cross - Jesus was not forsaken, no matter what he felt. Luther talks about the hidden God, God who is present precisely in those moments when God seems completely absent. God who is there when the celebration is over. God who is there, acting in the cemetery. God’s presence is the reason we call Good Friday good - the reason this week ends in Easter Sunday. Without God, we would be stuck in Good Friday forever, and it would no longer be good. But without Good Friday, we would never know that the promise of God of new life on Easter Sunday actually comes true. We can’t experience new life without death. We must move from celebration to cemetery in order to move beyond, but God is with us as we do, so that we can.


This week, this year, and in this century, we are moving from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, from celebration to cemetery, through the story of Jesus–as individuals, as a big-C Church, and as a congregation. Jesus’ story is our story. The crowds are thinning out, the disciples are turning away, and we are left on our own. But we are not alone. God is with us, just as God was with Jesus on the cross. God accompanies us through this painful time, through the last night of Maundy Thursday and through our death on Good Friday. This what we cling to this week, following Jesus, and relying on God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

No comments: