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The Story of Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday, March 24, 2002
©
The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith
Readings:
Palm Sunday is a remembrance of the story of Jesus’
entrance into Jerusalem as Jewish religious pilgrims did to celebrate
Passover. It is an important story, not because it happened; but because
it takes a category that we see, experience, and move in within our existing
(i.e. time) and places our deepest yearnings about that category (i.e.
our hopes for its fulfillment) into a story. That’s what makes it
a religious story, instead of a cultural fable or legend. We exist within
this story, as well as within many other stories.
Jesus’ ministry was one of healing and hope. He had proclaimed the
presence of God in the everyday lives of those for whom the culture had
despised and the prevailing religion had pronounced a damning judgment.
He took those who had been ostracized from their fellow men and women
by virtue of their sickness, and restored them to health by delivering
God’s forgiveness and everlasting care for them. He told stories
and taught lessons that characterized the covenant between God and the
world to be that of a loving and forgiving Father and his children. And
he proclaimed that by simply loving God and one’s neighbor as oneself,
all of the ancient Hebrew law could be fulfilled.
His following was substantial, and it was the hope of his following, Jew
and Gentile, that his ministry would triumph over the oppressions of government
and religion. And, that Jesus would establish a true fellowship among
men and women that would fulfill the covenant of God and humanity that
yielded the spirit of love. So it was with this anticipation and this
hope and this prospect that, in the story, the crowd greeted Jesus as
he entered the city of Jerusalem to observe the Jewish festival of Passover.
The storyteller has the crowd wave palm leaves and shouting, "Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!"
This is a symbolic element in the story since there are no leaves on the
trees during the spring Passover festival. It harkens back to the autumn
Jewish festival of Sukkot, the Booths, when leaves are waved and praises
are shouted. And the storyteller has Jesus instruct his followers to secure
a colt that he might ride into Jerusalem on it. This is a symbolic element
in the story that in the Jewish mind harkens to the prophet Zecharaiah,
who called his people to a new covenant with their God. Thus the story
of Palm Sunday introduces the idea that within a week, between Palm Sunday
to Passover and to Easter, there is contained the entire year from autumn
to spring and, starting with the next week, back to autumn again. The
entire year in a week; the entirety of time in a year. And every moment
of that time is filled with the prospect and possibility of fulfillment,
"Hosanna, blessed is the coming kingdom."
So they bring the colt to Jesus, and they throw their cloaks over it;
then he got on it. And many people spread their cloaks on the road, while
others cut leafy branches from the fields. Those leading the way and those
following kept shouting,
Hosanna! Blessed is the one
Who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!
Hosanna in the highest!
And he went into Jerusalem…
The Story of Passover
The story of Passover is a remembrance of the story of the deliverance
of the Jews from out of slavery in Egypt into the freedom of the Promised
Land. It, too, is an important story, not because it happened; but because
it takes a quality that we see, experience, and move in within our existing
(i.e., freedom) and proclaims that quality to be the central quality of
the divine that can be fulfilled in existence. The story and its retelling
are the fruits of an imagination that seeks the existence of hope in the
world; and it is the product of that imagination as well! That’s
what makes it a religious story, instead of a cultural fable or legend.
We exist within this story, too, as well as within many other stories.
The ancient Hebrews had found themselves slaves in Egypt. For generation
after generation they were in servitude to their masters, the Egyptians,
until one Hebrew, who had been raised an Egyptian and was mistakenly thought
to be Egyptian, arose as one of Pharoah’s adopted sons. Moses was
this man’s name, and when he discovered his true identity, he became
the spokesman for the Hebrews before Pharoah, delivering the message that
the God of the Hebrews had instructed him to deliver to Pharoah, "Let
my people go." But Pharoah’s heart was hardened and he would
not give the order to release the Hebrews from slavery. So, Moses warned
that the God of the Hebrews would send plagues to Egypt. And the many
plagues came like locust, frogs, fire from the sky, until the final one,
a horrendous plague brought upon those who insisted they were the masters
of other human beings. Moses told Pharoah that unless he set the Hebrews
free the Lord would bring death upon the first born of every household
in Egypt. But, the Lord told Moses to tell the Hebrews to take the blood
of a dead lamb and wipe that across the doorways of their homes, so that
the Angel of Death would Passover their houses and their first-born would
be spared. So, all the Hebrews did that, and when night came, they huddled
in their homes and heard the cries of grief from the Egyptians. That’s
what makes the night of Passover something to remember. Pharoah let the
Hebrews go free, and they gathered all their belongings and left hastily
out of Egypt and towards the Promised Land of freedom.
But when the fleeing Hebrews reached the Red Sea, which they needed to
cross to leave Egypt, Pharoah changed his mind and led his charioteers
to the encampment in order to slaughter his former slaves, the Hebrews.
The Hebrews saw Pharoah coming, and shouted to Moses that it would have
been better for them to remain slaves in Egypt then to perish seeking
a place where they could be free. But Moses said that the Lord would not
forsake them, and turned to the waters of the Red Sea, as the waters receded
enough for the Hebrews to cross over. When Pharoah and his soldiers tried
to cross, in order to catch the Hebrews and slaughter them, the waters
returned in a flash flood that swept away Pharoah and his army, and the
Hebrews had, with the help of God, completed their exodus from slavery
and their entrance into a land where they could be free.
PRAYER (adapted from Jane Rzepka)
O God, we have wintered enough, oppressed ourselves enough.
Our souls are too long buried by the snow, enslaved by the wind and cold,
our dreams all but forgotten, our hopes unheard. We are waiting to rise
from the dead. We are waiting for our exodus into freedom. In this, the
season of steady rebirth and the freedom of life to blossom, we awaken
to the power so abundant, so holy, which returns each year through earth
and sky. We will find our hearts again, and our good spirits unfettered
and free. We will love, and believe, and give and wonder, and feel again
the eternal powers. The flow of life moves ever onward through one faithful
spring, and another, and now another. May we be forever grateful.AMEN.
Sermon
It is appropriate that on a Sunday remembering the Palm
Sunday story and ending with a Passover meal, that we begin the morning
waving palms and shouting "Hosanna," (symbolizing Sukkot) at
children. Were Jesus with us this morning I could not imagine he would
want them waved at him, but at those who to him symbolized the Kingdom
of God.
Several years ago in one of my former churches we took our Children’s
Choir on a tour of England, and it was the first time that my children
had a chance to experience another culture. England is a strange land.
We are, said Winston Churchill, two different cultures separated by a
common language! England is so old compared to us. History and the march
of time are chronicled everywhere. We saw Stonehenge, the Roman Baths
at Bath, the Tower of London, and Warwick Castle, one of the best examples
of a medieval castle, with huge towers on the corners of the walls, a
drawbridge, a ditch for a moat, and part of the wall built by William
the Conqueror in 1066. It was an impenetrable fortress. The armies that
were foolish enough to attack it were often beaten back, with untold losses
of life and prisoners unfortunate enough to be captured. They would be
taken beneath the castle into a dungeon where inhuman tortures took place;
men suspended in body irons and left hanging until their organs and bones
dropped almost to the floor. Neck rings with pointed iron edges would
be strapped on. And the rack; unbelievable horror. Prisoners would be
placed into the dungeon never again to see the light of day. They couldn’t
comprehend the passage of time. They would soon forget where on earth
they were. But for the most dangerous prisoners there was something inconceivable.
Tucked away in the corner of the dungeon was a small hole that looked
like a well. On closer examination it had a cage like covering, where
prisoners would be dropped down into a room only slightly bigger than
the human body. It was 3 feet by 3 feet, and 6 feet deep, and was called
the noublette, the place of the forgotten. Human beings were placed there
and forgotten. No one had memory of them. They would literally have no
freedom to move from place to place. They were no longer creatures of
either time or space.
We imagine that the past hundred years have been characterized by our
denial of human evil, and when the atrocities in the West Bank and the
Twin Tower attacks bombard us with humanity’s capacity for evil,
we imagine our time to be peculiar for its denial of evil. But, think
back to the time when the noublette at Warwick Castle held a person suspended
in time and in no place, with his mortality having no meaning. Forgotten.
During the season of Lent we have spent our time together in this place
engaging the different ways that religion proposes a kind of unseen order
that is contained in existence. We’ve talked about the way we human
beings shape from our reality a meaning and purpose to our time here on
earth, as an act of reason. When we shape meaning and purpose from our
reality we confront what one theologian called the categories that form
existence; that is, we confront the way existence itself is structured
and we can’t help but engage these categories because to do so defines
what it means to exist. Time and space are two of these, which are uniquely
confronted in the stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which will
end with the Easter story next Sunday.
We exist within space. We can’t avoid it or deny it or ignore it.
There is no one who will witness more directly to you that to exist as
a human being is to deal with space, because my wife and I have moved
over 20 times in our marriage, and we know as much as any the issues of
space and place. Where is home? Our hometown, Richmond, Indiana? Nashville,
Tennessee, Chicago, Seattle, Milwaukee, Tulsa, Grand Rapids? The writer
says you can’t go home again, and those who have lived in one place
all their lives, do they escape the contingencies of space and place?
I don’t think so. Because to exist is to confront the reality that
we will lose this space sometime. It is a contingency of being alive.
When our 20 year-old daughter was 5 her fish died, and we had a memorial
service for it and buried it in the ground. An hour later she wanted to
dig it up to see if the body was still there! We had to dig it up two
more times. A pre-schooler’s curiosity is evidence of the fundamental
anxieties we have about our space. "Absence is the greatest presence,"
wrote the poet May Sarton, and the void of a person’s presence, this
nothingness, is such a powerful thing; maybe even more powerful than when
we share their presence. Later on this week in the Christian story of
the death and resurrection of Jesus, women go to his grave and confront
an empty tomb. Centuries of Christianity up to our own day would interpret
this as the sign that Jesus’ body, his space, has left this earthly
space and made a place in heaven for believers in him. That is, that the
anxieties we have about losing space are illusory, for we can gain a space
in another world after this one. Instead, I think the empty tomb metaphor
is about confronting the nothingness of having no space anywhere. It is
the irony of absence being the greatest presence, and the fact that we
know and feel it!
We exist within time. We can’t avoid it or deny it or ignore it.
In fact modern science says that time and space form a continuum, so intricately
interwoven are they in the fabric of existence. We exist because we are
born on a certain day and cease to exist because we die on a certain day.
In the time of our life we experience moment after moment, each moment
containing the accumulations of the past and carrying them forward into
a future. We know there was a time before we existed and we know there
will be a time after our demise, and it is this knowledge that is integral
to human consciousness and is what raises us above all other living things
on the earth. Time is a category of existence and we know it, and know
the way we are subject to its contingencies. We usually don’t have
enough of it, although there are rare circumstances when a human being
has just had too much of it and seeks to end time. Some religious viewpoints
suggest that the moment we are now living in is not only fleeting but
is something to escape from. Life is like a horse race, and to some the
moments the horses are racing, from the gate opening to the finish line,
are illusory and are not what is real. And so a religion will suggest
the unseen order of things points to the past as "real time,"
when things were better, the divine was manifest, giants walked the earth,
and all was right with the world. Or religions will suggest the unseen
order of existence points to the future, a time after this one, when all
this time will be transformed out of the sufferings we tend to endure
in time. Religions will often proclaim this moment as somehow illusory
and something from which to escape.
But, I think the moments within the horse race itself are the only things
that are truly real! I would suggest that we exist within time and space,
and that the purpose of religion is to reveal an unseen order to this
existence that invites us into this moment and this place as we are, but
with courage and purpose and hope. The sum of our lives is in this moment,
and the meager space we occupy is not an isolated thing from all other
spaces. We know we lose time and place, that they will pass away. And
we shout "Hosannas" and wave palm leaves to life’s promise
and possibility as the means to pass over from its contingencies to its
freedom. It is how to exist in a new way, a New Being built out of gratitude
and aimed towards love.
One of the sanctuary spaces and sacred times for my son and me is driving
in our car, because we spend so much time there and some of it is quite
profound. Two days ago we were driving and saw a billboard about the
Shriners,
and Josh asked if they were a religion and I told him about their work
in providing hospitals for burn patients. "Like Emma?" he asked
and I nodded. Emma was a church school classmate of Josh’s in Tulsa.
Oftentimes in our culture the time from Christmas to Easter is a movement
from joy to grief, but this story is the reverse. At 3 AM Christmas morning
I was called to the hospital because Emma and her mother were there. Their
home caught fire and burned to the ground. I stood next to Emma’s
mother as she took her last breath, her body burned almost beyond recognition.
A few moments before I had whispered to her that the church would take
care of her mother, Barbara, and her daughter, Emma. Emma had burns over
70% of her body and that same morning was flown from Tulsa to the Shriner’s
burn hospital in Galveston, Texas. She had lost her home. She had lost
her mother. She nearly lost all time and all space, and in reality had
lost much of both.
Her church rallied around her remaining family, including her father who
lived in Dallas. And the entire church school of over 700 children signed
this huge card to her, which I delivered a few weeks later to her in her
hospital room. Immobile, the whole bed shook with delight as I could see
beneath the gauze, two eyes that sparkled and a broad, toothy grin. Time
passed until Easter, by which time Emma was out of the hospital and living
with her father in Dallas. She returned that Sunday morning to her church
in Tulsa and to the flat ground not far from the church where her home
once was. By Mother’s Day she returned again, but this time to march
into the sanctuary with the other children and to sing with the Children’s
Choir an anthem of praise for mothers everywhere. She nearly lost all
time and all space, and had stared into a nothingness that many of us
rarely encounter even unto old age. And she returned to the time of her
life and to the places wherein she belongs, she sang praises and she was
free! Whosoever is as a child, of such is the Kingdom of God!
Until the last thirty or forty years history had obscured the time and
place of Jesus’ latter days on this earth, and especially obscured
the earliest communities that form themselves as his followers. They were
not like the Christians of the two and three hundred years later, and
bore no resemblance religiously to the exclusively Gentile Christians
of today in their foundational beliefs. These communities were made up
of Jews and Gentiles who, as best we can tell, took the time from Jesus’
entry into the place of Jerusalem, until his death a short time later,
to be representative of all time and all places. That’s why hidden
in the Passion story is the Jewish festival of Sukkot in the autumn and
Passover in the spring, a spiral of time that begins, ends, and begins
again each week. But it is a new time and the places we occupy are new
spaces. And Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God is at hand, is
not to say it is only in a sanctuary or is to be found in some past or
future life, or in some realm beyond this one. It is the divine, unseen
order that breaks forth into our lives in rare but profound moments. Here
and now. Amid the contingencies of time and place. Amid the reality and
knowledge that both are so elusive to us that they pass away even in the
time we call the season of joy and in a place we call home. Do not seek
to escape who we are as human beings, but seek to pass over and through
these contingencies that exist because we exist, to praise life in all
time and in all places. Jesus announced the presence of God everywhere
and in all time. This is the reality of living in a new way, a new being,
built out of gratitude and aimed towards love. The triumph of tomorrow.
Wrote the poet,
I know the past was great and the future will be great
And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time
And that where I am or you are,
There is the center of all days and [all souls].
-Walt Whitman
To this let us sing praises and be free!
AMEN.
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