Mark 11:1-11,
Mark
14:3-9
We come once again, as we do every
year, to Palm Sunday. We know the basic
message of Palm Sunday: the people expected a military king who would overthrow
Roman Tyranny and restore Israel to its former glory. Instead they were greeted by a humble king, a
king of peace rather than violence, a king who called us to work for change in
a different way, through the power of love rather than through the power of
anger and hate. The people didn’t
understand this, didn’t want this and by the end of the week were so outraged
that they killed him. We know this story
and it is important that we remember it.
But today I want to change the focus a little bit and instead talk about
where you are, where we are, where the world is today, in light of the Palm
Sunday message.
How has this been for you as a Palm
Sunday service? There are no crowds
processing into the church, there have been no large groups shouting
“Hosanna! Hosanna!” and waving their
palm fronds. There is no choir to
celebrate this high holy day. There are
five of us in this sanctuary and we are not in a celebratory place in our
lives. We stand apart from one another,
distant from each other, keeping space.
We are standing in the unknown, in a place and time of “social
distancing”.
At the same time, I think the
similarities between Palm Sunday and where we were before March of 2020 are
striking. When the people welcomed Jesus
into Jerusalem, they had high expectations of one kind. They had expectations and hopes for that day
and frankly for the rest of their lives.
They believed that Jesus would make everything better. They threw their cloaks on the road before
him and shouted “Hosanna!” or “Lord save
us!” and they blessed him and honored him.
They set their hopes on Jesus that he would free them from government
tyranny (by the Romans) and that they would then be free. They expected that he would return Jerusalem
to Jewish control, that he would renew their strength and power. But Jesus wasn’t who they expected. He was a leader who led by an example of love
and grace rather than rage, violence and judgement. He accepted those that the people rejected
and he uplifted those others oppressed.
He focused his attention on the poorest of the poor, and called all of
us to the task and the work of treating the least of these like the worthy
humans that they are, caring for them, loving them.
We are given a glimpse of this reality in the second gospel
reading for this morning. Jesus’ kindness
and care for the woman who came to honor him with the perfume bottle was
upsetting and disturbing to those who wanted him to act in a very different
way. It was upsetting because it was
confronting the status quo, but not in the way those around him hoped. He didn’t confront the Romans, but he did
confront Jesus’ own religious leaders. He
didn’t lift up the Israel Elites into a position of even higher status, instead
he confronted their leadership by challenging the ways in which they behaved towards
their own people. He confronted their
values: throwing out the money changers from the temple, talking to women,
Samaritans, those who were sick and damaged.
In the span of a week, the beliefs and hopes of all those who were
hearing and seeing Jesus were flipped on their heads. Their expectations for the future were completely
destroyed and their reaction was much more than disappointment. It was rage.
It was fear. It was anxiety. It became a desire for nothing less than his
death, his crucifixion.
And us? You and I?
Is this how we expected to spend our Palm Sunday? Is this how we envisioned we would be at the
beginning of Holy Week? No. Our expectations and hopes for our own future
also looked different. We were looking
forward to time with our families, time with our friends, time to travel, time
to gather for parties or festivals or even just to worship together. We looked forward to eating out, going to the
theater, walking together and gathering together for book groups, golf outings
and bocce. We looked forward to weddings,
anniversary gatherings and birthdays together.
We were excited about graduations and time with kids or grandkids and
theater events.
We planned, we dreamed, we
celebrated as they did on Palm Sunday.
We welcomed in each new day with hope and we looked towards the future
with anticipation.
But we are no longer in that Palm
Sunday place. We have moved into the
rest of Holy Week much more quickly than we would like. Now things are different. Things have changed; unexpectedly, quickly,
and dramatically. They continue to
change. What looked like a short time of
isolation and social distancing is now increasing in length. What looked like a potentially low risk and
low mortality rate is now looking like a disease that spreads much more quickly
and easily and has a much higher mortality rate than we at first believed. Every day, it seems our disappointment with
the current situation deepens, our anticipation of time together is pushed
farther into the future, our hopes for a “return to normal” recede further and
further away. For this time, and for who
knows how long, all of those things that we looked forward to have been put on
hold, have been put into “wait and see” mode.
I think about my own daughter.
Her birthday was two weeks ago.
And instead of going to see Hamilton (her birthday present from us), she
stayed at home (the theater closed the day we were supposed to go). And instead of the party we had planned for
her and her friends at the trampoline place, she stayed at home. And instead of spending time with her family,
she was laid up in bed, sick, with a 102 degree temperature. With what?
We don’t know. And again, I
realize this is a very small loss. Whatever she was sick with, it has passed and
she is back to being our healthy girl.
But that was her birthday. One of
pain, one of grief, one of fear… Her anticipatory
time of hopes and expectations and celebration was brief.
For the rest of us, for those of us who really understand the
situation and how serious and potentially dangerous it is, it is much more than
disappointment that we are facing. There
is also fear. Fear for our own health,
fear for the health of loved ones; fear about the loss of work, for ourselves
or our loved ones; fear for a future that is unknown. We don’t know what is coming, and the fear
that we have is real, is there for a reason.
That combination of disappointment and fear, that combination of
rage and anxiety is dangerous for us, because it can lead us to become the Good
Friday people searching for someone to blame and lashing out with our anger. It can cause us to turn 180 degrees from
people who are celebrating life to people who are enraged and acting out our
fear with violence and unkindness. But
we are always called to something better.
Yes, we need to confront problems, but baying for blood, turning to
retaliation and damage of our neighbors is not the same thing as confronting
problems in a helpful and positive way.
On NextDoor last week from a person posted that when he went to
the local Safeway, he was standing behind a woman in line who turned and yelled
“back off! It’s the law!” He responded
with, “Actually, it isn’t the law, but it is a kind thing to do, so I will step
back to make you feel more comfortable.”
Apparently the woman who told him to back off became completely
outraged, and was screaming obscenities, so the man chose not to engage it,
left the line altogether, checked out somewhere else and walked to his
car. Then when he tried to back out of
his parking spot, he found that the outraged woman had parked behind him and
was still screaming obscenities at him.
Fortunately, he could pull forward out of his spot, but he soon found
that this woman was following him home and at every stop sign and light was
continuing to curse him out. Finally, he
called the police because he was afraid of this woman’s rage and even more
afraid to drive all the way home and have this person learn where he lived.
We do not handle change well.
We do not handle our fears well.
We don’t know what to do with our anxiety or our discomfort. We don’t know what to do with our
disappointments and our grief for what was, what we hoped would be, what we
envisioned our lives to be, for our hopes.
And the bigger the disappointment, the fear, the grief, the anxiety, the
more we tend to act out, to lash out, to behave badly. We do not handle humiliation and humbling
well. And yet we are given the example
of Jesus, who’s integrity mitigated all humiliation. He did not fight with violence or resistance
against the powers that would destroy him and wanted to destroy him. He did not turn to hate as a weapon, even
against those who hated him. He allowed
them to do what he knew they would do and he kept his integrity, was not
persuaded or pushed into becoming anything less that the godly man he was. He chose to continue to be a person of love
and forgiveness, of healing and grace, even when they beat him, even when they
killed him, even when they spit on him and destroyed his body. He knew that love would win, not in the way
they expected, and not that day, but that it would win.
In his latest book, Finding Chika: A little Girl, an earthquake
and the making of a family (New York: Random House Pub., 2019) Mitch Albom
tells the story with this book of the little girl, Chika, who has a brain
disease that eventually claims her life.
But before it claims her life, it takes from her, slowly over time,
everything that she has: her ability to walk, her ability to talk, her ability
to play and laugh and function as others do.
It takes her hair and her body shape and everything that makes Chika
Chika. At one point while Chika was
still able to walk but her abilities were beginning to fail, Albom describes a
scene where Chika was walking towards a doll and fell, and because she did not
have the strength in that moment to get up and walk again, she simply crawled
over to the doll and picked it up. As Albom
wrote, “As you played on the floor, accepting the new rules, your toughness far
exceeded mine, and gave us comfort, even as we were trying to comfort you.”
(page 133) Chika did not let her
impending death rob her of her grace, of her love of life, of her joy.
Martin Luther King Jr similarly took a stand for non-violence
against the oppressive systems of power that had robbed African Americans of
every shred of their dignity. He would
not allow them to damage his soul by forcing him to resort to violence or
hate. Instead, he chose actions that
confronted the systems violence by showing a different way, a way of justice
that was direct, but did not strip others of their humanity. When threatened, MLK and his African American
community stood without retaliation and chose something better. When beaten, they stood, choosing love and
grace and forgiveness over violence and rage.
When attacked again and again he chose his soul, and his faith, and his
integrity, and was determined that those things would never be taken from him
or his people.
To be clear, we should never choose to tolerate injustice, we
should never allow oppression or cruelty.
I am not saying that we should be passive in the face of what is
wrong. What I am saying is that one of
the gifts of Palm Sunday is that Jesus demonstrated for us with all of his
behaviors during Holy Week, that while people may take your body, that while
people may inflict cruelty beyond measure onto your person, that it is up to us
whether or not we allow the other to also take our souls. We choose how we will react. And while it is likely that no one would blame
us for reacting to the disappointments, fears, griefs and angers of today with
rage, with hatred, with violence, the choice to be moved into an action of hate
in response to our suffering is a decision to give up all of who you are to the
situations that would harm you. That
choice is a decision to allow whatever is happening to damage our spirits as
well as our bodies.
As we begin the Palm Sunday journey
towards the cross, my invitation to you is to reflect on what makes you you,
what are your true core values, and if they are the values Jesus asks you to
hold, of Love, of peace, of grace, then how will you hold on to them in the
face of this crisis or the next crisis or the one after that? How will you respond in the face of other’s
anger and rage and fear? How will you
react when your body is being threatened and you feel helpless and
fearful? How will you deal with this
time of trial? Will you still choose
love? Faith? Grace?
My prayer for all of us is that as we walk towards the cross, we may
understand the gifts of Jesus’ choices and choose to follow him in love. For it is in Love that we will find our
strength and overcome whatever it is that we are facing.
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