Turning Our Palms into Crosses

       What an incredible day Palm Sunday is.  As a kid, I remember going to church and bringing home a palm cross that had been made for me by somebody else, that I put in a drawer in my room.  I really didn’t know what it was all about, except that next week would be Easter and  I could look forward to my Easter basket, some candy and eggs.

After I was ordained and had a church of my own, Palm Sunday became a much more complicated day.  I had learned how to make a palm cross and I would teach everyone how to do it at announcement time.  Taking that long frond of palm and slowly fashioning it into a cross was a great way to dramatize what the day was all about.  How Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and people laid palms before him on the road, those same long fronds that they held in their hands, but it didn’t take long for them to turn on him and cheer as the high priests turned him over to Pilate and the Romans then put him on a cross and killed him. In the same way that we turned our fronds into crosses to take home with us.

The long gospel of the day was also something that we did differently than I remember as a child.  Most years, we would divide it up and take parts, sometimes even in costume and dramatize it.  I would usually be Pilate because of my ecclesiastical robes and we would act out the whole thing.  Bob Lord, our fabulous organist would create grand music at the time of the earthquake and thunder.  We were always deeply moved by the whole production.

Palm Sunday is much more than the beginning of Holy Week.  It is a day to summarize the whole of the meaning of the coming of the Christ to us; his humanness, his divinity and the incredible compassion that he had for all of us.  He willingly went to the cross to die for us and to show us the depth of God’s love for all of humanity.  We don’t always understand that.  We get caught up in the day to day details of our   lives and we often miss the presence of God all around us.  That is what Palm Sunday is trying to drive home.  Sometimes we are tempted to skip on to Easter to make a happy ending out of it all.  Holy Week ought to short-circuit that.  We need to go through the week, experience the pain and the loss before we get to the resurrection.  That is what we all do in our lives.  Death and loss are human experiences.  We all have them and we suffer from them.  It is incredibly important to understand that our God loves us through this experience, and has experienced it also.  This is why Jesus death is important to us.  Without having the loss, the resurrection loses its meaning.  We too will rise.  Those whom we have lost have risen.  We will see them all again.  But without knowing about death, how can God help us with our rising?  That is the meaning of Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

The Power of Psalm 51

       Legend has it that Psalm 51 was written by David after that remarkable encounter with the high priest Nathan when he was caught in his adultery with Bathsheba.  This is when Nathan told him the story of the man with the little ewe lamb that he had nursed from birth, who had to give it up to his master to be the center of the feast when a guest came for dinner, although the master had a whole herd of sheep of his own.  When David said that terrible things ought to happen to that cruel master, Nathan pointed his finger and said to David: You are the man! (2 Samuel 12: 1-12) Supposedly the great king then went back to his room and wrote this incredible psalm that we have used every Ash Wednesday and on the Fifth Sunday in Lent as we consider our own sinfulness before God.

We always approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week with great trepidation.  I know that Easter is coming, but it is the second Easter that we celebrate, not the first one.  The first one was approached by the disciples and the women with terrible fear.  They had experienced the horror of the crucifixion and the loss of the body from the tomb.  They had no idea what had happened.  Neither would we.  Resurrection is not really in our vocabulary, except as a hoped for event that supposedly will follow our death.  We have never seen a resurrection and neither had the people surrounding Jesus in his last days, except for the few people whom Jesus restored to life.  There are those Christians who approach Easter as a given.  I always hated coming into the church on Holy Saturday and smelling the flowers that the altar guild was arranging for the next day.  Holy Saturday ought to be the day that God is dead, at least if we follow our own theology that Jesus came to us as the incarnate God. Yes, I know that the altar guild had to have time to get ready for Easter, but the theology is clear.

Easter ought to be a surprise.  We ought to be astonished at it.  It is impossible, yet it is right before us.  I have stood at many, many caskets in the church and profoundly wished that I could do a resurrection.  The family sits in tears and friends are around them in comfort, yet that person who means so much to them lies before us all in a casket.  Yes, there is resurrection, but it is not at that moment evident.  It has always been my job as a priest to help to produce the faithful evidence of the resurrection.  That is what the lessons at funerals try to do along with the remembrances of friends and the homily that I would always try to preach.

I want to come to the moment of Easter cleansed of my doubts, cleansed most of all of my sins.  Cleansed of those things that have kept me away from God for so much of my life.  That is the value for me of Psalm 51.  I can put myself in the shoes of King David and remember the things that I have done that have separated me from not only God, but from those around me.  This is when forgiveness becomes more than a word.  It is when I understand the mercy and grace of the God who loves me more than anything else.  That is when I become free to see the enormity of the resurrection not only of the Lord Jesus, but of me also.

The Guy in the Rainbow Wig

       How many times have I seen the guy in the rainbow wig sitting in back of the goal posts at an NFL game with the sign that says John 3:16.  He wants us all to get the saving message of that passage of scripture:  the words from John’s Gospel that says so clearly For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.  There isn’t a more beautiful statement of God’s purpose in sending Jesus to live among us than that, the clown wig notwithstanding.

Oh, I sometimes have a problem with the “believe in him” part of that passage, but I’m not going to let my quibble with a couple of words diminish the infinite power of God’s love.  I believe that God’s mercy surpasses ours in every way.  When we get to the Kingdom, we will discover a number of people whom we don’t believe ought to be there.  But that is our problem, not God’s.

For the past week and a half, Rosie and I have been sitting on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean trying to relax and restore ourselves.  Looking out over that vast ocean has reminded me over and over again about the unlimited mercy of God and the vastness of our ignorance of God’s Kingdom.  All that we have are the scriptures to tell us about God’s love and we have argued about them forever.

     I have, for example, a problem with the reading from Numbers where the people cry out for food and water and God sends poisonous serpents among them to bite them and to kill them.  (Numbers 21: 4-9)  That doesn’t sound much like God to me, but that is early in the Old Testament and God is still getting used to the crabbiness of the Hebrew slaves whom he rescued from their impossible lives in Egypt.  The people complained to Moses and Moses prayed about the problem of the serpents.  God told Moses to put a serpent on a pole  so that everyone who is bitten, when they look at it will live .  That is the source of Jesus’ comment in John’s Gospel to Nicodemus about himself being lifted up so that people could look at him and be saved: Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  There is that “believes in him” problem again, but I know that Jesus meant his crucifixion to be the salvation of humankind.

        I have seen some wonderful things happen with people at the moment of their death.  One woman said, “I never knew it could be so beautiful” almost with her last breath.  I know that Steve Jobs said “Oh, wow” when he died.  Who knows what we will find beyond this life.  I only know that God craves our presence even more than we crave his love and mercy.  That is the overwhelming evidence of Holy Scripture.

So is that good news for you?  I hope so.  We all know that we have fallen short of what God has intended for us to be, and that his forgiveness is overwhelming.  That isn’t a license to sin, but it is certainly comforting for those of us who have not lived up to what we know God has in mind for us.  Looking at the ocean has been a helpful reminder for me.  It has been a blessing for me.

Getting Away From It All

         Vacations are wonderful things.  They are an opportunity to get away, to reflect and to think about how life is going and how we want it to go.   Rosie and I are at Long Beach, North Carolina for the next two weeks, a beach where we had a beach house for a number of years, where the kids grew up and where we learned a lot about the ocean and how it affects the land.

There is no question that the ocean is in charge.  When we bought our beach house in 1979, we stood out on the deck and we gave it to the ocean.  That relieved us of a lot of worry over the years about what was going to happen to the place.  I remember every time that there was a storm on the east coast, my stomach would tighten up and I wouldn’t calm down until the storm was passed.  Ultimately, it was one of those storms that claimed the house.  It was a very large nor’easter that dumped three feet of snow all over the east coast and produced winds of hurricane strength at Long Beach and the house never really had a chance.  We had endured a number of hurricanes, one year two in one week, but this was a different sort of storm.  We thanked God that we had had the place for fifteen years, and we had so many wonderful memories of the place; but we gave it up and realized that the ocean had finally claimed its own.

So we don’t have a beach house any more, but we have a lot more than that.  We have the ability to rent a place down here and savor the memories and enjoy the beach without the worry.  That is a great deal in itself.

 Jesus never had a beach house.  I’m not even sure that he had any house at all.  The Gospels tell us about his ministry, but there is very little about his personal life.  We know his friends and those whom he met and helped, and those who conspired to bring him down, but where did he live?  All over the place is what I would suspect from the stories.  Foxes have holes, birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head, he said at one point.  That is certainly in keeping with how he directed himself and his disciples.  There was no place to accumulate things, no dining room table, no kitchen.  He lived off the kindness of strangers and got through his life as best he could.  What was important to him was doing the ministry that consumed his life.  Things meant nothing to him.  People and their needs were all that mattered to him.

Ultimately, his ministry devoured him.  He infuriated the powers that were important in his culture and they crucified him.  He knew that this would happen, but he lived his life and conducted his ministry anyway.  What was important to Jesus was showing all of us the compassion of God in the ultimate sense.  That God Almighty could come down to earth in flesh and live life with us, even through death and still remain God.  What is ultimately important is that the God whom we crucified rose from the dead and beckoned all of us to follow.  That is the relentless beauty of the power of Jesus message to all of us.  Do we think that we are unworthy?  Certainly we are.  We have broken every one of God’s commandments and we have treated our neighbors with scorn and judgment, but we are still welcome in our Lord’s presence and eligible for God’s forgiveness.

We are getting ready to celebrate the great feast of Easter when we remember the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection.  The certainty of our own resurrection is also a part of our celebration.  My hope for myself is that I can live my life in the light of that glorious miracle and show the love that God has given to me in the way that I treat all of those who surround me.  What else is important?  Certainly not a beach house.