Listen to the Sermon.
Last year, the day before Palm Sunday was the March for our Lives against Gun Violence. In the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, Julien and I took our children to the rally and march. Led by the youth of our community, we joined 100,000 people of all ages and skin colors and religious backgrounds, including our bishop Greg Rickel and many Episcopalians. We carried signs, we chanted, we used our physical presence to make a statement about our hope for a future that is different than the one where there continues to be a school shooting every 12 days. [1]
We carried signs. We joined our voices with others. We chanted our protest, our lament, and our beliefs. We used our physical bodies to make a statement about our hope for the future.
What does it mean when we raise our palm branches and process across the lawn on Palm Sunday? Are we merely re-enacting Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Are we also holding that joy and triumph in tension with our knowledge of the betrayal and the grisly death we know await Jesus later this week? And/Or are we declaring the triumph of our own hope that God’s kingdom IS come, that death and fear will be redeemed forever by the power of Love?
In the Book of Common Prayer, this service is called the Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday (page 270). The title reflects that the prayer book service is actually two services, smashed together into one - the Palm gospel, blessing and procession are one service, and then there is an entire regular Sunday service focused around Jesus’ Passion or suffering. The very liturgy reflects the tension of our lives - that joy and hope are only known, and necessary, because we know the depths of death and despair.
The services of Holy Week engage us in the full range of emotions of Jesus’ final week of life. From dinner with his friends, including Judas’ departure from the supper table to betray him, to praying in the garden while his weary friends napped, to his arrest. Then Peter’s denial of Jesus, the trial with Pontius Pilate, Jesus’ brutal crucifixion and death, and finally his burial. This week invites us into Jesus’, and our, humanity as we love and laugh and cry together.
Holy Week services are listed on your bulletin insert. Please join us, for as many services as you can. Come to be present in body and mind and spirit with the story that is the story of each of us. Bring your signs, your chants of joy and lament, add your voice to our prayer, to our song. Rather than a weighty obligation, think of this as an invitation to hear parts of the story we may not pay much attention, or a chance for quiet time in the midst of a busy week.
William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a well-known 20th century preacher and social activist, said “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love.” [2]
The truth that we proclaim today, Palm Sunday - in our palm procession, in our experience of the Passion, as we gather around God’s table to remember together - is our hope, desire, and belief in a Love powerful enough to redeem us and our world.
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[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/us/school-shootings-since-parkland-trnd/index.html, accessed 14 April 2019.
[2] William Sloane Coffin, Jr, Quotes, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/226620.William_Sloane_Coffin_Jr_, accessed 25 March 2018.
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