Previous Sermons
10/22/06
10/15/06
Divorce
10/08/06
09/17/06
09/10/06
09/03/06
08/27/06
08/20/06
08/06/06
07/16/06
07/09/06
07/02/06
05/28/06
05/21/06
05/14/06
05/07/06
04/30/06
04/16/06
04/14/06
04/09/06
04/02/06
03/19/06
03/05/06
03/01/06
02/26/06
01/15/06
1/1/06
12/25/05
12/24/05
pageant
12/18/05
12/11/05
12/04/05
11/27/05
|
Palm Sunday
April 9, 2006
Delivered by Dora Odarenko, Seminarian
Liturgy of the Palms: Ps 118.19-29
Mark 11.1-11a
Liturgy of the Word: Ps 22.1-21
Isa 45.21-25
Phil 2.5-11
Mark 14.32-72, 15.1-47
Please pray with me: Gracious and merciful God, may we remember that you help us, guard us, accept us, support us, draw us, and that you have brought us safely to this very hour through your immense love and that of your son, our Lord Jesus Christ. AMEN
From the Gospel: "Peter had followed Jesus at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest; and he was sitting with the guards, warming himself at the fire." (Mark 14.54)
With the liturgy of the palms, we begin an amazing week, one that is so momentous that we observe it year after year. As we process around the church with our palm fronds, we are reenacting the heroic moment when Jesus enters Jerusalem, surrounded by expectant crowds. It is heroic because the people hail him as their long-expected deliverer: "Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David" (Mark 11.10). It is heroic because Jesus knows that he is entering the city where he will shortly be executed.
This is the beginning movement in a week in which what is holy will be "redefined and recreated."1 And not only for Jesus' disciples. The holy and our relationship to it is redefined and recreated for us as we live this week not only as Jesus' history but as our own, and as we understand that God is acting in this week "both in our history and his."2
Unlike the people who lined the streets, as Jesus rode through on his donkey, we may well carry our palms with mixed feelings. We know that there will be Easter rejoicing for a victory far greater than anything King David could have achieved, and an Easter rejoicing for us. But the dramatic reading of the Gospel that we have just heard reminds us that betrayal and humiliation and suffering come first. And so my emotions are highly mixed this morning. It is right that this is so, for the Eucharist that gives us joy and freedom--the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation--and that urges us to keep the feast, also breaks the bread and follows that breaking with the words, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us."
This day, Palm Sunday, and the week that we are entering invite us into a deeper faithfulness and closeness to a God who became one of us, defended each person he met, and was willing to die when his acts of "unexhausted compassion"3 were seen as too threatening. In a sermon on Palm Sunday, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that Holy Week "is a week for learning...[for] naked trust in that naked gift"4 of the cross.
Such learning is not always easy. Sometimes it is frightening. Sometimes it strikes too close to home, reminding us of our own pain and betrayals. It is much more comfortable to avoid the darkness of Maundy Thursday and of Good Friday, closing our eyes the way we do during the bad parts of a movie. But this journey that leads through darkness and pain into triumph and fullness of life is a challenge that I believe we must accept if we are to experience the fullness of Easter in our own lives and in the lives of the world.
Participation through pity and a willingness to share the suffering of Jesus' week will work upon our hearts. In fully undertaking the journey to Easter, we can receive the enormous and holy gift of Easter itself as something real, something tangible, palpable. There will be a context for its joy. We can also recognize that our enormous hunger for all that Easter is can only be satisfied by God's love for us. We must then pray for the grace to live with the naked trust in that naked gift of the cross.
It is my deepest hope that for each of us the journey towards Easter this year will be an intentional one. I haven't woven little stories into this sermon because we are already in the midst of an incredible story and our services enact it from beginning to end: I am not only thinking of the Great Easter Vigil next Saturday evening, with its new fire or the women coming to the tomb on Easter morning. This coming Thursday, Maundy Thursday, allows us to eat together and serve one another in the washing of feet as Jesus did. At the end of the service, we will strip our beautiful altars, a stark reminder of the harshness of that night for our Lord. Those of us who wish, will watch and pray in the church throughout the night. On Good Friday, there will be a story at each of the stations of the cross. In these stories, many, recognizing themselves and their own lives, are drawn closer to Jesus and to the life of the world.
It is important that each of you come to these services. Not out of obligation, of duty, of "should," but in response to Jesus' love for us and as one longs to be with one's dearest friend. It is right for us to be together at this time because together we are the body of Christ-- one body we--broken in our lives but united through our faith and our sacraments.
The children in Sunday School have already begun their Holy Week journey. During four of the Sundays in Lent, they gathered in workshops to experience in different ways Jesus' time in the Garden of Olives/the Garden of Gethsemane. In so doing, they began to enter the garden with him. The bread that we will consume at the Eucharist this morning was made by all the classes as they took their turn in the Kitchen Workshop, tasting olives and using olive oil to produce unleavened bread. This work of their hands is an act of worship, drawing us together with them as the body of Christ.
Last Saturday, I attended a performance in New Haven of Bach's St John's Passion. In the course of the work, the basic Gospel story is sung in speech-like recitatives. These are enriched by the chorus and by solo arias that reflect upon what the narrative might mean for the believer, for me and for you. One aria that I cannot forget comes right after a short passage in which the Evangelist tells us that, despite the soldiers, Peter follows Jesus into the house of the High Priest. In Mark's version, that we heard this morning, Peter not only goes right into the courtyard, but sits down by the fire with the guards to warm himself. In the aria, as the soprano and two flutes imitate and follow each other,5 we hear Bach's hope that we too might follow Jesus. We also hear the effort that Jesus expends for us to do so, for his history to become ours. May the words of the aria be our prayer:
I will follow you likewise with joyful steps
And will not let you [go],
My Life, my light.
Pave the way,
And do not stop
Drawing, shoving, imploring me yourself.
AMEN
1 Rowman Williams, A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1995), 45.
2 Williams, 46.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 48.
5 Program Notes by Professor Markus Rathey, Institute of Sacred Music.
|
