March 20, 2016 – Palm Sunday: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.

Oh the insanity of it all.

No, I don’t mean snow on the first day of Spring…thankfully we were spared from that this morning.

I mean Palm Sunday.

Now, as I say every Palm Sunday, we shouldn’t be reading the passion gospel at all today, and we used to not do that. It doesn’t really fit. But we do read it, and the result is a wild rollercoaster ride of emotions – from the near carnival atmosphere of the procession of the palms, to the shouts to “Crucify him!” heard later. It hasn’t made sense for decades, but maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. After all, it marks the beginning of a week in which we move from the absurdly dark and hopeless to something beyond our wildest imaginations of what love can be. So, why not start this week of contrasting emotions with a service filled with them.

Now, if you look back at the Liturgy of the Palms, to the reading from the gospel of Luke, you might notice something is missing. We call it Palm Sunday, but guess what? No palms mentioned at all! Not in this gospel (you are now equipped to win that annual family game of Holy Week trivia).

Which reminds me about a little boy who was sick on Palm Sunday and stayed home from church with his mother. His father returned from church holding a palm branch. The little boy was curious and asked, “Why do you have that palm branch, dad?” “You see, when Jesus came into town, everyone waved palm branches to honor him, so we got palm branches today.” The little boy replied, “Aw shucks. The one Sunday I miss is the Sunday that Jesus shows up!”

Thankfully we know that Jesus shows up every Sunday…well, every day and everywhere for that matter.

And you may have also noticed that I did not read the full gospel text. There is no need – it is read by all of us at the end of this service. As I said before, it shouldn’t be read at all today. It is too soon. But I did read a part of it, and it is that part that offers a glimpse of something important for us to carry with us this week. It was Luke 22:40-53, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, and the arrest of him afterward.

In this moment, a time when many would choose to flee, Jesus chooses to pray and tells his disciples to pray too. He was praying so hard for something to change – for something to somehow be different. And yet, he knew it would not be. So, this is where we are too on Palm Sunday – between great joy at the beginning and great pain at the end. Jesus prays for another way. Don’t we all?

How many of us, in the inevitable valleys of our lives pray for another way? Jesus did, and so do we, knowing that in the invariable ups and downs of our human existence, the one constant is that God is with us. In our moments of deepest darkness, God is most present, even if we struggle to feel that light surrounding us.

Jesus knew that too.

And strengthened by that moment of prayer, he willingly moves toward what he knows is a choice only he can make – he heads out of the garden toward what awaits him. One of his disciples makes a choice too. He chooses to fight and with his sword hurts one of the high priests who came to arrest Jesus. Jesus chooses the way of peace not violence, and counters the pain of the sword with an act of healing grace.   And in that moment, Jesus, the living light of God, acknowledges the irony of what surrounds him, saying “this is your hour, and the power of darkness!”

Jesus leaving the garden walks from the light of prayer – of conversation with God – out into the darkness of human anger, hate, and violence. Jesus counters all of that with love, with healing, with peace. Wherever he goes, he changes everything – flips it around from the expected, forces us to consider the possibilities of another way. He makes sense of the absurd world – a world we experience jam packed into this off the wall worship service we call Palm Sunday. And as the body of Christ in the world today, he calls us to make similar choices too, in the craziness of the world in which we live today.

In a world filled with acts of violence,

Jesus calls us to choose peace.

In a world filled with words of hate,

Jesus calls us to choose love.

In a world filled with the darkness of despair,

Jesus call us to be the light of hope.

And in a world that can leave us unsure how to do any of that,

Jesus calls us to pray, as he did.

And so today we are left with a question that Palm Sunday lays out for us that asks – what journey are you willing to make this week to enter into this story? Because if there is one thing that we should not leave here feeling is any sense that we are ready for Easter. Instead, we should leave Palm Sunday with a load of questions, because the whole service, the whole experience of this moment in time, is filled with them – and there are not answers.

Not yet, anyway.

Just a choice to be made.

That is what Palm Sunday is all about – jarring us loose from our comfort zone, and shaking us up, because if we are to really understand this story – our Christian story – we have more to do. And we will – on Wednesday, Maundy Thursday & Good Friday.

Holy Week is a journey we make every year by choice – not because it is the same – but precisely because it is not. How we enter into it, what we hear in it, what we feel going through it, will change from year to year because we are never the same from one year to the next. But one thing is for sure, moving through it makes Easter the transformative experience it is meant to be.

Holy Week will challenge you.

Holy Week will engage you.

Holy Week will change you.

I invite you all to the journey of a lifetime.

The rest is up to you.

Amen.

For the audio from the 10:30am service, click here:

The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
March 20, 2016
Palm Sunday – Year C
The Liturgy of the Palms
Luke 19:28-40
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
The Liturgy of the Word
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 23:1-49
Psalm 31:9-16