Palm Sunday

When we are going through difficult times we want to talk to someone who has been through what we are going through. We want someone who understands.

Christ, through his passion, knows; he truly understands – and offers hope.

Palm Sunday Sermon

2012

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 15:1-39

I have found that when we are going through difficult times in our lives we want to talk to someone whose been through that themselves. When my husband was in a bad motorcycle accident he wanted to talk someone else who had been in a body cast and broken a leg. Someone who had gone through that. When I found out I was going to have brain surgery I wanted to find someone who had experienced that. I didn’t want to listen to anyone else.

When we are going through difficult times, like when we are grieving the death of someone we love, we get comfort from those who have experienced it already. Or when we are trying to lose weight we want to have the person who is helping us show us a picture of when they were grossly overweight. We don’t want some slim thing that has never known what it means to count calories. We want someone who understands. That is part of the beauty and power of the alcoholic anonymous program, and other 12 step programs. They realize that when you are struggling with something the best person to help is someone who has been through that themselves. That’s who we want to talk to. That is who we want to get support from.

Today we are reminded that Jesus has been through all of it. He knows all of human experience. At the beginning of the service we celebrate him coming into Jerusalem like a super star. People were cheering and throwing things on the path in front of him. What a glorious thing. How many of us fantasize sometime in our lives being in a position like that?

We also know that when Lazarus died Jesus wept. He knew what it meant to grieve.

And in his passion we see all of human experience in one day. He knows what it is like to be betrayed by a friend, to have those you rely upon disappear and not be there to help you, to find that the religion and the community that you supported and cared about and cared for you your whole life turns on you, condemns you, to have false accusations made about you, to have people spit on you, to be tortured, abused, mocked, nailed naked to a cross to die. And at the end Jesus says, “My God, my God why have abandoned me?” Jesus even knew what it was like to feel abandoned by God.

He knew fear; he knew hurt; he knew pain. He knows it all. That’s what Paul is alluding to as he tries to describe the nature of this Christ, this Jesus, when he writes, “Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born into human likeness.” Here he is alluding to and trying to describe the great mystery of the Christian faith, that somehow God Almighty, God the creator of the universe, the source and ground of all being, that in which everything else exists, that somehow, some way that God came into human form to experience all of what it meant to be a human being - birth, childhood, adolescence, teaching, struggle, friendship, pain, abandonment. All of it.

In John’s gospel it says, “He was with God, and he was God.” In the creeds we say that he was of one being with the father. Those are all trying to use human language to describe something that is beyond what we can quite comprehend. This great mystery that somehow God came into human form to experience all that human beings experience.

Because of that we can go to Christ, we can speak to God of our pain, and our fears, and our abandonment. Christ understands, he experienced it, he knows what it was like. We are not communicating with a being that has no idea of what we have been through, but to one who has walked there, who has suffered, and even knows what it feels like to be abandoned. To be totally alone.

We have that kind of a friend who has walked there before us and therefore can help us through whatever it is, whether it be grief, or physical pain, or emotional lose or questioning even the presence of God, because he knows, he knows.

In addition to that, the reason we want to talk to someone who has walked through the journey we are on is because we want to see that there is something ahead, that there is something beyond the struggle right now, that there is hope, that what we are going through at this moment is not the final word. And that is what we are offered through Christ, because even though his last words on the cross were “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” his last word was his resurrection. And the final word is always, always God’s abounding love.

Palm/Passion Sunday year A

We start the service with shouts of Hosanna and minutes later are shouting "Crucify him!" We get to experience the power of the crowd, especially in its desire for blood, for a sacrifice, for someone to blame. This sermon I gave in 1996 is just as relevant today as it reflects on our desire to find a powerless someone to blame.

Palm Sunday – A

Transcribed from a sermon given

3/31/96

At St. Alban’s Brentwood

By Rev. Valerie A Hart

         This service on Palm/Passion Sunday is such an emotional roller coaster. We begin in celebration. Rejoicing, as did the people of Jerusalem with the arrival of Jesus. We say and sing “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” We play out the role the crowd that acknowledged Jesus as the Christ.

         And then, only a few minutes later, we participate in reading the Passion Narrative. We the congregation once again play the role of the crowd, but this time, instead of “Hosanna” we shout “Crucify him!” “Crucify him!”

         How could the crowd have changed it’s mind so quickly? In less then a week they went from celebrating Jesus as the savior to calling for his death. There were such high expectations on his arrival. Somehow he let them down. Or was it a different crowd that clamored for his death? But if so, what happened to the people who had so loved him? Did they just stay home that fateful Friday?

         How is it that the crowd that was there would call for an innocent man’s death? Why would they be so blood thirsty? It seems so heartless, so foreign to us, as civilized people. But is it really so foreign?

         Jesus’s death was a religiously and politically motivated sacrificial death. Even the high priest had acknowledged that it was better for one to die to save the whole nation. This practice of sacrifice has been part of most religious observances throughout human history. The Aztecs were not the only society that sacrificed their fellow humans. The story of Abraham and his almost sacrifice of his son Isaac, and God’s intervention to substitute an animal represented how Judaism would be different from the cultures around it. Throughout the Old Testament the prophets refer to the practice of offering children to the fire.

         One writer, René Girard, suggests that the use of human sacrifice was important in maintaining the cohesion of society. In the sacrificial rituals for which we have information, we almost always see a unanimous act of the crowd. When the society is under pressure, when there is drought, or pestilence, or epidemics, or general economic and political upheaval, in other words when the people feel that things are out of control, what appears to be the automatic solution is to control the situation by agreeing to kill somebody who can absorb the blame for the crisis. We find a sense of bonding, cohesion, by having a common enemy. And we find a sense of power and control by destroying that enemy.

         Who becomes the victim? Sometimes it is chosen at random but mostly it is someone at the fringe of society - usually the most powerless, such as children or captives from a neighboring tribe. It was someone whose full humanity could be denied. Jesus was from Galilee, Jesus was seen as powerless because his was not a power of this world, Jesus was seen as expendable. What a rush it was for the crowd, to stand together, putting all their frustration with Rome, with their life, onto that weak looking, helpless man. They had a sense of unity with the leadership of their nation, a sense of belonging to the community that was united in getting rid of this blasphemous outrage. They enjoyed mocking him. They felt powerful to see him so weak.

         Of course the social and psychological drives that lead a community to find a sacrificial person did not go away with Christ’s awful death. The history of Christianity is full of finding an enemy to blame and then destroy. There were the heretics of the early church who were sometimes stoned by the crowds. The crowds cheered as the powerless old women accused of being witches burned. And when Christianity came to the New World, the Native Americans were the other, the sacrificial victims of “progress.”

         Our century has seen it’s sacrificial deaths. The lynchings of blacks brought cohesion and a sense of power to the economically outcast white community of the south. The crowds cheered Hitler as he laid the blame on the Jews and looked for a final solution.

         But we are different now, right? Who could get joy from watching someone die, yet every time there is an execution, the crowd outside the prison is mostly there to cheer, not to protest. And the families of the victims of the crime are allowed to watch, with some sense that seeing a person die will take the blame and the pain away.

         And our community, our “crowd” still looks for someone to blame. Someone who we can see as the reason for our problems. Someone we can get rid of. And the illegal alien fits that role so well. They are powerless, they are different, they can be seen as less that human. It is not the big companies that have laid us off from work, it is not the rich CEO’s, it is not the economic system, it is not our own poor training or unwillingness to work, it is THEM who are the source of our problem. If we just got rid of THEM we would be fine. The crowd no longer gathers in front of the Pilate to yell crucify him, it gathers in front of radios, and calls in with anger and blame.

         Our society continues to seek for cohesion by finding someone to blame. We still look to dehumanize people so that we can get rid of them.

         But each year we remember the crucifixion of Jesus. Each year we contemplate the agony of this victim’s death. And as we remember we are called to compassion. Compassion for his suffering, for the pain of the innocent victim. We feel the grief that anyone could have done this to him. But Jesus calls us to remember that whatever we do for “the least of these” we have done for him. Our compassion for Jesus must expand to compassion for all victims. To realize that we cannot, we must not, dehumanize anyone, for all are children of the one loving God. No one is expendable.

         When we join the crowd, when we feel that rush of being part of the community that has focused its anger and frustration on a sacrificial victim, we are yelling “crucify him” and we are hammering another painful nail into Christ’s precious flesh.

         But you may say to yourself, I don’t join in that kind of thing. I deplore that sort of hatred.

         I’ve often tried to imagine what I would have been doing had I lived in Jerusalem at the time of Christ. I might have cheered his entry, but I can’t imagine myself yelling for anyone to be crucified. I think I would probably have stayed at home that day, not wanting to become involved. I would not have yelled “crucify him” but I also would not have been there to say “No this is wrong.” I would have assented by my absence, by my silence.

         Most German’s did not actively participate in the holocaust, most just were silent. Most Southerners did not join in the lynch mobs. They stayed safe in their homes. Most of us do not get involved in the anger and hate spoken today. We don’t get involved, and we assent by our silence.

         Today we spoke the words “crucify him.” to remind ourselves of our own complicity in Christ’s death. Let us also remember the complicity of those who are silent and let the crowd destroy another victim.

Palm/Passion Sunday

Each year we begin Holy Week with the emotional roller of Palm/Passion Sunday. I posted this sermon back in 2014, but still like it the best of the ones I have given on Palm/Passion Sunday so I decided to repost it today.

Passion/Palm Sunday

March 28, 1999

St. Alban’s, Brentwood, CA

The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Passion According to St. Matthew

         What an emotional roller coaster this Sunday is. We move from the emotional high and joy of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem to his death on the cross in less than an hour. What an emotional roller coaster it was for Jesus’ followers during that week of the Passover so many years ago. The service this morning is designed to encourage us to feel these emotions, to get a taste of the experience of that fateful week. We are asked to speak the words that represent so much of the story.

We cheer, “Hosanna in the highest”

And quickly, before we know it, we shout “Let him be crucified!”

We mock “He saved others; he cannot save himself”

and we speak those words from the psalm “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”

         Let us think about this incredible week from the perspective of Jesus’ followers. What a high, what a rush it must have been for them when Jesus was welcomed to Jerusalem. All Jesus’ talk of death must have been easily forgotten in all the excitement. Finally he was being acknowledged. Finally all the wandering and sacrificing was coming to fruition. Finally he was being hailed as the savior, as the new king, everything was going to be wonderful from now on. Such joy they must have felt. Such confidence in God. Such a sense that everything was fine now and would always be fine. A joy that they were sure would last forever. A total faith in this man who was being celebrated. There were no doubts then, no questions, no fear, just unbridled joy.

         Most of us have felt like that at some point in our spiritual lives. Perhaps after we first were introduced to Christ, or came back to the church. Perhaps during or after a spiritual retreat, where we felt Christ’s presence so clearly, so totally, that all the questions were gone. Perhaps after having a particularly profound personal experience where we knew, we knew deep in our hearts, that Christ was there with us. At such times there is a deep joy. Not the sort of superficial joy that we might get when things go right in our lives, but a deep joyousness that wells up from the depths of our beings. A joyousness that fills our lives. A joy that makes us want to shout “Thank You.” A joy that burst from us in songs of praise. When we feel this, when we experience this, we feel that it will never end. We feel a sureness in our faith, and unquestioning confidence in the truth of our Lord. And we really feel that this will never end, that finally we have found the answer, that all our questions all our doubts have been swept away. We sing Hosanna, Hosanna in our hearts and feel that if we did not sing it, the very rocks would shout out.

         But that high, that spiritual high, does not last forever. The spiritual journey is not that simple, that straight forward. We discover that we must come down from the mountain top. And sometimes the climb down is steep, as it was for Jesus’ disciples. In less than a week, everything had changed. What should have been a triumphant conclusion to the story, quickly turned to tragedy. The hopes and dreams that had been put on the carpenter from Nazareth were being shattered at an alarming rate. And the followers self concepts were also being shattered. All that is the worst in human beings was coming up.

         Betrayal. With the news about Judas, the others must have though, “How could one of us betray him? Could I have betrayed him?” 

         Cowardice. All the disciples fled and hid. No one stayed and stood beside him. What had happened to the fearlessness they had felt just a few days before when the crowds were on their side?

         Denial. Peter, his closest disciple, denies he even knew him. “Would I have denied him if I were in Peter’s position?”

         Hatred. “How could the same crowd that had cheered him as messiah now be calling for his death?” “Do I have inside me the hidden hatred that could want to see someone dead?”

         Arrogance. Did Pilate really think he could wash his hands of this choice? Jesus’ followers must have wondered whether they too might have had some responsibility that they wanted to deny.

         Cruelty. Mocking a dying man. Mocking a gentle man dying in great agony. The worst of human cruelty emerged that day, that horrible and dark day.

         And hopelessness. That stark cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” The anguish of feeling forsaken by God. Jesus spoke not just for himself, but undoubtedly echoed the feelings of his followers. They had lost their leader, they had lost their dreams, they had lost their hope, they too felt forsaken by God.

         And what of us? What of our spiritual journeys? Most of us, I believe, have known all of those emotions. What happens when we no longer feel the presence of God? What happens inside us when we are no longer on the mountain top, praising God, but find ourselves suddenly in the valley?

         We have known betrayal. Most of us have felt betrayed at some point in our lives, sometimes by a close friend or relative. And, when we look at ourselves honestly, we have betrayed others, or certainly betrayed God when we have not acted as we know we could have.

         Cowardice. We all know cowardice. We all have experienced the horrible feeling of knowing that we have not stood with a friend in need. We all have wondered inside if we would have the courage that we read about in the saints who were willing to die for their beliefs, and, if you are like me, you suspect that you would have run away when the soldiers came.

         We have known denial. Who among us has not at some point chosen not to acknowledge their Christian beliefs because it would be too uncomfortable? The story of Peter’s denial lives on so clearly because we can all identify with it. We all know what it is like to take the easy way out.

         Hatred. We all like to believe that we are beyond hatred. That we would not be among the crowd yelling crucify him. But are we? I’m not sure about myself. If someone hurt or killed one of my children, would my broken heart cry out to have him killed? Is it that hard for us to assent to capital punishment when the crime is particularly ghastly? Who among us could be sure that with the right provocation we would not know hatred?

         Arrogance. If we can deny that we would know hatred, we certainly have to accept that we have all felt arrogant. In fact we even use our religiosity to feel better than others. I’m not like them, I’m purer, holier, more in tune with God. Arrogance, that we can wash our hands of what is happening around us, that we can deny responsibility for the acts of the crowd, as if we were not part of the crowd. As if we had done all in our power to stop it. We indeed can easily fall into arrogance, washing our hands of all the pain and suffering around us. Oh, yes, we do know arrogance.

         Cruelty. We hope and pray that we are not cruel, but sometimes our cruelty comes out. Every now and then we find ourselves saying or doing something that we know to be cruel. We find ourselves caught up in the crowd, in the teasing, in the mocking. We have all known cruelty.

         And finally hopelessness. We can easily identify with the ring of those words, those powerfully mournful words “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” We sometimes find ourselves unable to experience the presence of God. We discover that somehow we are no longer on the mountain top with God, but deep in a crevasse where we are unable to find God. Perhaps we find ourselves there because of grief, the loss of a loved one, of a job, of a position. Perhaps we find ourselves there because of illness. Perhaps there is nothing different in the outside world, but something has happened inside us, and we cannot find God. That joy, that love, that peace that we felt not so long ago is but a memory and we begin to wonder if it had been real at all. We all go through on our spiritual journeys times of hopelessness, times when we feel forsaken by God. The writer of the psalm, felt it, felt it so strongly that he was able to express it eloquently. Even Jesus felt it, Jesus who had lived his life fully in the presence of God, felt it gone, felt forsaken, felt that anguish.

         When we are deep in the experience of God’s presence it is hard to imagine or remember when we didn’t feel that wonderful love surrounding us. And when we feel forsaken, when it has gone away, it is hard to imagine or remember what it felt like to know God’s presence. We have all felt at times forsaken, hopeless. We have all had times when our hearts have cried out “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

         We have all known times when even that is too much for our hearts to say, and all we can express is a deep and painful question “Why?”

         And sometimes we are left in the dark stillness of that question - waiting.

         Waiting for the first sliver of sunrise. Waiting for the dawn.  Waiting for the resurrection that transforms the darkness into light and our sorrow into joy. Waiting to know, to really know that even in the darkest tomb, in the most forsaken moment, God is still present and working.