Palm Sunday 2003 Mark 14 and 15

Let us pray: Lord, send the gift of your Spirit to fill this sanctuary and each of us. Touch us with your truth that burns like fire. Set us free Lord, free to try new ways of living; free to forgive ourselves and others; free to love; free to join in works of justice and peace; free to see and listen and wonder again at the gracious mystery of your love for each of us. Amen.

This Sunday in the church year has two designations, Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday. Today we also deal with two moods. We began our service by reading about a parade, that marvelous chaos of people waving palms which we Lutherans don't do so well, if you noticed, most of us got them up about to half mast. Many of us grew up with this being the primary mood of the day. Let's parade the Sunday School children through the church, let's have a dress rehearsal for Easter.

But in the last fifteen years or so, a second mood has predominated-the reading of the Passion narrative with its account of the betrayal and death of Jesus. This is the solemn side of the day, and it is almost unbearable in its anguish and pathos. Here we confront the dark side of the human experience, and when we are forced to cry "Crucify, crucify" along with the biblical mob, it is painfully close. In carrying our palms we also meet two worlds in conflict. The palm was the symbol of Roman victory, and to bear your palm was to have achieved and triumphed over your foes.

But to bear these palms, is to bear the symbol not of victory but of the vanity of human foolishness, the illusion of what passes for victory in this world. For us, the palms are a sign of suffering, the suffering of our Savior, the suffering of his people, the suffering of all creation and of us with it.

The church's call this day is to wholeness, it is a call to holiness, to an ability to take the ambiguity, even the confusion and conflict of emotion that comes from starting with a parade and ending with a crucifixion in both of which we are participants, and seeing in the whole that the only reconciliation possible between them is the reconciling love of God in Jesus Christ. That is the only thing that stands between chaos, insanity, and an attempt to stand whole and complete in the middle of ambiguity and beyond tragedy. God's love is the only thing that makes sense out of suffering, conflict, tragedy. God's love does not do away with conflict, it does not eliminate suffering, it does not gloss over tragedy; the cross teaches us that. God's love is what makes it possible to bear it, to see it, to share in it, to begin to try to understand it, and to go through it. That is the truth of the gospel.

We are a people who live with conflicts of mood and vacillation of the will. One moment we celebrate with life giving "Hosannas" and the next we deal death with "Crucify". The same Jesus says "Let this cup pass from me," and also, "Not my will but thine be done." The same disciples who followed Jesus for three years, become deserters, deniers and betrayers.

The Passion is, not simply to see suffering as in a play, but to share in suffering, to weep as Jesus wept at the brokenness of what is meant to be whole. To suffer with indignity and inhumanity, to weep at injustice and crime, and violence and deprivation and depravity, to enter into the sorrows of another as if they were our own, because they are our own. Suffering with others leads us to work for justice and understanding. For what can dawn mean, if you haven't experienced darkness? What can restoration mean if you haven't experienced separation? What can resurrection mean to you if you haven't in some sense tasted death?

Jesus died that we might live, and live fully and hopefully. Victory comes to Christians not by our doing, but by God's love for us in Christ's death on the cross and his rising from the tomb. So we live not in some fantasy never-never-land of our imagining, but in ambiguous reality here and now. Look at the cross and our suffering bleeding Savior. Beyond tragedy lies truth redeemed. So look, and in looking and believing - you live. Amen.