Palm Sunday, 2022
St. Paul's, Monroe
April 10, 2022
You know how the shtick works. We've been doing it for a few years now. We do it on the phone. We do it in the pharmacy. At the doctor's office. Whatever it is we're about to start, it all begins with someone asking us two things. The first is, “What is your name?” The second is, “What is your birthday?”
I was asked that the other day by the lab technician who was about to take my blood. I was trying to be lighthearted and I tried to make light of something utterly distinctive of me – like my name and birth date. I said after I gave my name and birth date that I was born in Arizona and the town I was born in doesn't exist anymore. She couldn't imagine such a thing. She asked me to repeat it in case she misheard it. Finally, she said, “Well I learn something everyday.”
I thought of this example, about the notion of distinctive narratives associated with a person. If there is one thing that is distinctive about Christian faith, one thing that is most identified with who we are as Christians, one thing that makes us Christians, it is the passion of Jesus. Today has the title “Passion Sunday.” Jesus’s death is most identified with this day and with the next 5 days of Holy Week.
Christianity is all about the death of Jesus on the cross and the experience of Christians that it is not the final story. I have often said that it seems surprising, given the centrality of the cross in our faith, that we only read the account of the passion on one Sunday a year.
From the very beginning Christians have tried to find words to describe or explain their experience of healing, of salvation, and of redemption through the cross of Jesus. Over the course of two millennia no single answer has been found to be adequate.
For half a century now in the Episcopal Church we have observed two seemingly diametrically opposed events on this day. On the one hand we begin the day by remembering the joyous celebration of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem. And on the other we tell in considerable detail of the sorrow and conflict at the end of that visit to Jerusalem, of the execution of the man who was ceremoniously brought into the city as a hero and a Messiah (anointed one).
We experience this day, then, as a juxtaposition or a reversal of fortunes. Jesus seemed to embrace that characteristic at a deep level. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Whoever would like to lead must be servant of all. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the humble.
This paradoxical “great reversal” seems utterly distinctive to Jesus’s ministry and even to God’s plan for humanity. 1
This is a day in which our narrative seems somehow discombobulated. Who are you? We are a people who celebrate the fact that we somehow much of the time get it wrong. We expect a winning formula and we get a failed Ministry. We wave our palms and kneel at the death of our teacher. The old Episcopal tradition of kneeling for a while then standing for a while then sitting for a while seems almost a description of this day.
The paradox
We generally like our proclamations to be one-sided. What we hear today – triumph and death by execution – is not one-sided. We want our sins to be plainly stated and clear to identify. We like our politics expressed as one of two extremes – the right way and the wrong way. We want our good guys (or gals) to be good and our bad guys (or gals) to be bad.
As Christians we are committed to proclaim the Gospel and to live it, by grace, as each of us is called. This thing we are committed and called to is inherently paradoxical -- not one-sided and not complicated. It is life and death held together at the same time.
Life understood through the death
My father died 34 years ago. Very often when I tell people, when I have occasion to tell something about my father, I talk about his death. I say, for example, that he died doing the things that he loved. His life was defined by being a Doctor and he loved the game of golf. Golf was one of those things that I’m grateful he taught me. When he died he was already at retirement age but had no sense, I think, that he would ever retire. His father had died with his boots on – as it were – a physician in a small rural town in Illinois. My father died with his boots on of a sudden heart attack while he was volunteering as a medic for the PGA Senior Open being played that year at a golf course in Castlerock, Colorado.
From a very early age I was intent on finding my own genuine way in the world. I wanted to be about the work that I was intended to do, and fairly early I understood that as -– what God had made me to be. But there’s a strong sense in which we won’t really know what that is until the whole of our life story can be told.
We cannot really tell the whole story of Jesus in a day. We will spend the next 5 days – through Good Friday – telling the story of the Passion, his death. Then beginning with Saturday night we begin to tell the rest of the story, that he is not dead but risen. That through his death we are saved.
But that story is the biggest story of all. For a week we call it Easter week. But for a week of weeks we tell it through the Easter season, culminating in Pentecost.
I once heard Tony Campolo make reference to a sermon by S.M. Lockridge, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in San Diego from 1953 to 1993. It gave me chicken skin at the time. Lockridge’s version is available on Youtube. Youtube video. You should listen to it. It begins,
It’s Friday
Jesus is praying
Peter’s a sleeping
Judas is betraying
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
Pilate’s struggling
The council is conspiring
The crowd is vilifying
They don’t even know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are running
Like sheep without a shepherd
Mary’s crying
Peter is denying
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s a comin’
…
And it goes on. Our lives are broken, fragmented, and we’re running away. It may feel like failure. It may feel like a cross to bear.
Well, yes, it is a cross.
But Sunday’s comin’.
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