Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday 2012

The Rev. Marguerite Alley

Frenzy…………..screaming, shouting…children running around, mothers scolding them, fathers chatting while trying to keep an eye on the family…….bumping for better line of sight…..palm waving, singing favorite temple songs…….all to get a glimpse of the one they believed would end their suffering at the hands of Rome.

The only one not effected by the frenzied and festive mood? The donkey.

As a young person…Palm Sunday felt like a dress rehearsal for Easter. Special music, new clothes…a party atmosphere.


As you no doubt know...things take a turn for the worse.  The change is almost unbearable. If you allow yourself, you can feel the anguish and the tragedy. There are few situations in our lives that could ever reflect the stark juxtaposition of the joy and anguish that occur during that 24 hour period. Maybe you could create a scenario to capture it. Like…witnessing the birth of your child and knowing it will mean the death of your spouse in the same day.

Today is the day when we confront the dark side of humanity as we get caught up in the mood, follow the crowd and find ourselves shouting “Crucify him”! along with the rest of the crowd. I would like to think that I could think for myself and not get sucked into mass hysteria. But who am I kidding? I suspect, knowing myself, that just like I did in Jr. high, and high school and last week, I would have followed the crowd and jeered at, looked down on, and scoffed at one whose message was so threatening to all I had known and believed before. It is sad, but true.

In a playful moment last week, the staff here spent some time considering what we should name our “dark passenger”. By the time we were done, we were introduced to Izzy, Camilla, Regina, Bubba, Jethro, Wanda and Chrissy. Each in someway, represents the part of ourselves we have to keep in check. While it was, as I said, a playful moment, it is also a necessary one. Being aware of our frailty, allows us to be more honest and authentic and to admit that we are in fact broken; each in a different way, and in need of the healing that is offered to us by our relationship with Jesus.

So..we have two very distinct moods today. They are incongruous, asymmetric and violently opposed to each other. If you could anthropomorphize, or ascribe human qualities to them for a second…they are Atilla the Hun and Mother Theresa. Adolf Hitler and Clara Barton. Napolean and Ghandi. They are joy and hatred. But in the end they are nothing but Love and Fear.

Most of us are drawn to love….like moths to light. We want to be close to it, to feel its warmth. Most of us are also drawn to fear…like when we rubber neck at an accident sight or choose to go to a horror movie. Our curiosity drives our behavior. We need to see what happened. To understand. Yet…we don’t stick around long enough to see the body dragged from the car. We get a taste of tragedy..and that is all we want.

This creates, if you will pardon the educationeese….”cognitive dissonance” for us. How can we be drawn to both? How can both even exist at the same time? So, because we are gifted with the ability to think, we try to solve the problem. The way we do this is to convince ourselves that one will cancel out the other. So we remove the ugliness of the second part of the story and save it for later. We hear it…but we don’t take it in. We take the palm fronds, but not crown of thorns.  For centuries the church has struggled with this, but we have found the solution. When we leave church on Palm Sunday….we don’t come back until Easter! It is the perfect solution….like closing your eyes in a horror movie. We use our own fast forward button to just skip ahead to when all the suffering and ugliness is over and Jesus is at home with God and being waited upon by all the angels. Sometimes, we even joke with ourselves and say “leave it to the church mice” the “worship junkies”…..those more spiritual than we are……leave it to them to sit with Jesus through the long night, leave to them to sit outside the tomb.

Well, friends…..I am going to be very direct with you this morning, and I apologize in advance if I offend anyone.  If you choose not to participate in Holy week liturgies you are missing the point of these liturgical observances. The point is not just another service, just another sermon, just another chance for an offering. The point is that, if you want to experience Easter for YOURSELF….(Jesus already has, you know!) then you must have your own night of betrayal and loneliness. You must have your own day of darkness. We are experiential beings. We cannot possibly understand the true meaning of this story if we don’t first allow ourselves to fully enter the landscape and participate. I can tell you that at the end of Maundy Thursday when the tabernacle is empty, the altar bare, and the crosses are draped in black, there is no escaping the feeling of absolute emptiness, loss and anguish. On Good Friday as we metaphorically wait and hope that Jesus will be delivered from the cross, there is no avoiding a personal inventory of the ways in which I have personally fallen short of the glory of God. On Saturday evening, when the first light enters the church and we hear the salvation story, baptize new members and celebrate again, but for the first time, the common meal that Jesus asks us to share, there is no way you can not feel filled with light and buoyancy and joy.

In each of our lives there have been and will be opportunities for us to let go of the things that hold us back, the things that keep us bound up in fear. By letting go of those things we can return to our true selves: we are children of a living God, children of a loving God. Union with God is our true home. To return we will have to choose between acting in love or out of fear. I challenge you this year to consider that choice. Or will you follow the crowd? Will you follow Jesus?