Yesterday we had a funeral, for our beloved Jen. And shortly afterwards, our dear Dennis died. Oh friends, it feels like too much to bear. Death feels so close, so terrible. And here we are on Palm Sunday reenacting this joyous moment when Jesus is cheered as a savior, and king. And it feels a little disjoined to celebrate, almost like pretending.
But even though nobody else knew it, Jesus went into this parade knowing he would die. So there is something here today for us.Luke helps us out here. In Luke’s telling of this story, there are not even palm branches, and the crowd is not shouting. There may be onlookers watching and thinking the whole thing is bizarre, and some joining in by laying out cloaks, observing curiously, so this is the Jesus I have been hearing about. But the noise is coming from Jesus’ own followers, disciples and others who had heard his teachings, experienced his miracles, followed his message, were going through the streets and gathering on along the edges to join in their voices, testifying to who they have heard and experienced Jesus to be. They were sharing about their experience of God’s faithfulness in their lives through their encounter with Christ.
And there is not even Hosanna! In Luke. Instead, Luke puts into the mouths of Jesus’ followers the words sung out at Christ’s birth by angels to a hillside full of stunned shepherds, “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord, Glory to God in the Highest heaven!” Luke reminds us that this whole story begins in upset expectations and God’s weird way of saving us. God comes in weakness and vulnerability, determined to share this life from the inside, rather than rescue us out of it.
God’s way is so not about saving us from suffering, that a few days after this palm parade scene, Jesus, so freaked out and shaken up about what’s coming that he’s sweating blood, prays his own prayer asking God, begging God, to be saved from suffering and spared death. Then, from the cross as he is dying, Jesus accuses God of forsaking him. And in that moment, the experience of godforsakenness gets plunged right into the heart of God.
We need a savior. We don’t need our own notions of success and safety reinforced, our own sense of good and bad legitimated. We don’t need salvation as a good idea to believe in. And we don’t need Jesus as a fine example, or a wise teacher, or an inspiration for revolution. We are too far gone for all that. We need a complete overhaul, the death of death itself.
We need evil and sin eradicated from us. We need to be broken free from death’s rule, to be cleansed, to be released from sin’s grip on our minds and hearts, freed from the terror of dying that keeps us from risking and loving and hoping and living.
Death is too great, too destructive. It’s all around us and inside us. Sin has polluted everything, and there is no escaping it. And to be clear – what I mean by sin is serving death – estrangement from God and each other, denying our own humanity and degrading others’ humanity, violating the fundamental belonging and order of creation by behaving as though we are not made in God’s image, and God is not God.
Death gets played out in everyday unkindnesses and horrific atrocities. Even right now as we are sitting here, people not unlike you and me, are slaughtering other people, believing lies so completely that they stop seeing the people in front of them as people, beyond even enemy or threat, turning them into nonentities, nothings, obstacles. And in the process these people are succumbing to evil beyond imagination, losing their own humanity as well.
But it doesn’t even have to be that extreme. We take away each other’s humanity all the time and turn each other into objects – objects of derision and scorn, or objects of idolization, objects of our pity, or objects of our own self-betterment. Objects blocking our way. We crucify each other and ourselves in little ways all the time. We blame and punish, cut off relationship and hold onto resentment. We love imperfectly and hurt those we love. We so easily and so frequently forget our identity as beloved children of God who irrevocably belong to God and to all others. We trade that precious reality away for ease or peace of mind, for the illusion of contentment or safety, for getting more done in our day.
And God knows this. God listens past our strategies for salvation to the need at the very heart of us - for healing and wholeness, for reconciliation and forgiveness, for things to be made right, for death not to win, for life to prevail, which is what God is all about. The Holy Spirit hears our pain and our longing, and intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.
God has come, God is saving the world, these are fact and there is nothing more worthy of recognition and praise than this. So even though the cheering followers had their own ideas of what was happening, nevertheless and accidentally, they joined the song of heavenly angels and the rejoicing earth itself, announcing the good news of great joy for all the world. The enormity and significance of what is about to happen will not go unspoken. If human beings didn’t do it, the rocks themselves would have cried out.
But it means God-with-us is going to die. Death is part of God’s story now, just like it is each of ours. And all these things we bear: sorrow, shame, regret, hopelessness, despair, impossibility – these are God’s story now and God bears them all the way into death. With us. For us. As far as the east is from the west so far have you separated our sins from us…
So we are invited today to praise God. Praising God reminds us what is really real. It grounds us in the truth. When we simply lift our heads and acknowledge God in our midst, share with each other how we are experiencing God-with-us, let wonder and awe overtake us so that we are moved to lay down our coats, and raise our voices in gratitude, hope and longing to our God, it returns us to what is true. God is with us, is right in our midst, holding our pain, and redeeming this world from within.
We are a congregation in mourning. That’s who we are right now. That makes us awake, more open, more aware of the world’s pain, more attuned to the suffering of others. It also makes us a little raw and tender, in need of gentleness and care, more rest than we think we might need, extra space to grieve and adjust. But here is where Jesus meets us. In our suffering, in other’s suffering, in godforsakenness.
Next week is Easter, and we will celebrate that that death does not get the final word. We will rejoice in resurrection– even while we are all dying, and grieving death, we will proclaim that in Jesus Christ, death is not the end. So together we will continue to ask God for healing and hope, with all the honesty and longing of our hearts, and we will share joy and wonder defiantly and without hesitation, as we await the salvation of our God.
Amen.
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