Cannot Leave It Out
Palm Sunday 2023, RCL A, April 2, 2023
Each time we share the 7-Day creation story in Godly Play, we lay out cards for each of the seven days. And we ask, can we leave any of these days out? And after a bit of wondering, the reply is always, no. Some may ask the same question of Holy Week. We want to erase the discomfort, the interruption, but there is no Christianness without it. If Christianness were not a some-of-the-people some-of-the-time tradition, which it has been since shortly after the merger with Empire; if we were a most-of-the-people most-of-the-time religion, Holy Week would be different. Palm Sunday would tell of Jesus’ entrance and his first encounters with his adversaries, full stop. Then Monday and Tuesday could dive into all the wrongs of Cain and Abel, Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery, and Jesus’ parables of grace and judgment. On Wednesday we’d prick our hearts in the Shadows, And then Thursday we would, like we do, go with Jesus into the upper room. Then on Friday the arrest and crucifixion. Until Saturday night or Sunday morning, when we can be astonished at the empty tomb.
A whole week of observance could spell out in word and in bodily ritual the complex enormity and consistency of human hate and bloodshed and sin that hangs before us. And why only the One who brought something out of nothing, can possibly erase everything that is wrong. But, instead, of piece-by-piece, day-by-day, we recite the Passion twice, today and Good Friday. Today we meld the party with the horror, because we know who we are, and who does what, and the Cross cannot be the song we skip over. Everything that is wrong here is everything that’s been wrong since probably before we hunted mammoths. Given the gift of free will and the plausibility of choosing to thrive together, we twist the life-giving rules, into gruesome weapons against each other.
I have been in professional Ministry since about 1996. and it is inescapable and atrocious to look back through my notes and sermons throughout many Lents and Easters and notice just how often these weeks coincide with school shootings. I don’t think you have to be a Biblical scholar, or an advocate for nonviolence, to see the parallels between this Passion and the depravity and failures that lead to gun violence being the number one cause of death of teens and children here. The compounded tragedies – the actors, the victims, the silences, and the screams, its all there – allegorically metaphorically, maybe even mathematically. Today we are brought inside the collusion of principalities and powers, the inability to find middle ground, the fight or flight, the twisted misdirection and agonizing humiliation. The echoes resonate with the crowds who are convicted of our sins: and do nothing to stop it. The result is this shepherd, this beloved child becomes a grotesque scarecrow dangling over a garbage dump. We cannot erase the Passion from our dishonor, or our faithfulness. The cross changed everything but if we look at the world we live in and ignore its truth, it is a bloody silent scream forever.
This Holy Week I pray that you will make the time to not skip over what might make you uncomfortable. We offer ways to participate in the most crucial steps of Holy Week on-site, at home, online, or outside. We do this not because we like the marathon, but because it matters for the completeness of your discipleship, because more of the faithful more of the time is the only appropriate response to the crucified one.
God is here, hearing our deepest cries of despair, absorbing all of our hatred and duplicity and casual dismissal of painful shame and violence. and overcoming all of it with love. Jesus’s death was inevitable, not because of some magical cosmic formula but because WE ARE BELOVED and this is our utter gruesomeness THE PARADOX we are not able to SHRED on our own. So the One who was supposed to be erased in a method of torture and execution that was intended rip his pages out of the story, becomes the start of a new creation story instead. We cannot skip any of it. The only motivation for any of God’s activity this day, right from the beginning, can only be love. Oh, how he loves you and me.