March 16, 2008 Sixth Sunday in Lent, Palm/Passion Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Matthew 21, 26 & 27
As Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday some in the crowd asked,
“Who is this man?” No one corrected them and said, “This is no man, this is
God!” Instead they said, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” A
man from a small town in the north. Again and again in Matthew’s Passion story
Jesus is called, “this man” or “this fellow,” until the final comment of the
centurion at the foot of the cross says: “Truly, this man was the Son of God.”
It is natural to read the Passion story from the perspective of what we
already know. We know what is going to happen. We have heard the reasons
why. We know Jesus will be proclaimed the resurrected Son of God and we know
what the church says that means. But to read the story that way is to miss the way
it was written and the way it wants to be read. To read it and yawn because we
have heard it all before and know the ending is to miss the power that this story
has to move us and change us.
Listen to Matthew when he says, “This man…” Whatever else Jesus was,
he was a man, a man who had a face, who had a way of walking, a way of talking,
a certain endearing sparkle in his eye, a certain charismatic power that made your
heart beat faster in his presence and made you hang onto his every word. Above
all, he was a man you would regard as a tower of wisdom and strength, a leader
you could trust with your life, a person you would look to in any kind of trouble
with confidence. He gave hope. And yet, at the end he was a man sitting on a
donkey, a man bleeding and exhausted and heart-broken, a man whose face bore
the contorted, screaming anguish of someone being tortured to death.
If we are going to get the full benefit of this story, we need to be able to
identify with those who knew Jesus as a man. Maybe it would help us to think of
people in our lives who have been like Jesus to us, people we looked to for
wisdom and courage and strength who have died and left us feeling devastated and
lost. Many of us felt that way when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, but
it doesn’t have to be a national figure.
My mother was a wise woman I turned to with questions on everything
from wildflowers or birds at the birdfeeder to literature or Roman history, with
questions about my family history or spiritual or philosophical matters. I used to
find myself dialing her number after she had died and then remembering with a
jolt the new emptiness in my life that no one else could fill.
I remember when Donnella or Dana Meadows died. I was thinking of Dana
as I prepared for this service—and now I see that Scot and Christina have
dedicated the flowers to her today, so I know that I am not alone in what I am
about to say. I used to read the Donnella Meadows “Global Citizen” column in
the Valley News every Saturday, and I watched Dana as a person active in the
Upper Valley Land Trust and other organizations here, and she grew to be one of
my pillars of wisdom, courage and strength. In 2001 as the Bush Administration
began its assault on the environment and world, I was counting on Donnella
Meadows to speak the truth and lead us to hope. And then suddenly she was in a
coma, and then dead at the age of 60. When she died, and again when Bill Coffin
died, and again when Grace Paley died, I felt the whole earth drifting from those
firm moorings. How would we ever be able to save the world without them alive
to lead us?
So imagine what it felt like to the people around this man, Jesus, who had
more power and wisdom and courage than anyone who ever lived..
I think that is all we have to do in response to the Passion Story—not
analyze it, not think, but just feel ourselves in that grief. The best thing we could
do this Holy Week is to keep the grief of this story so real that we walk through
our days with some degree of heaviness of heart and confusion and fear. That is
why I encourage and even urge you to come to the Maundy Thursday and Good
Friday events here, which are designed to help us feel this story at our deepest
level. Because what we need now does not come through our intellect, it does not
come through knowing all the answers, it does not come through figuring things
out. The help we need comes through the process of our grief.
The kind of grief we feel when we lose someone huge in our lives lands on
us like three feet of snow capped with a solid crust of freezing rain. We think we
will suffocate. We think we will be crushed. We think it will never go away and
we will never break through it. But then as the light of even the weak winter sun
touches it, in places grief begins to melt away. Patches of ground show through.
The first patch of ground that shows through every winter on my land is
under a pine tree on the north edge of our field. When I walk by it on a sunny day,
if I have time, I take off my snowshoes and lie down. I soak up the good feeling.
It is funny, but I never lie there any other time of year—in fact I rarely lie down on
the ground. Something about that ground surrounded by deep snow moves me.
When the ground shows through our grief, it is like that. The deep grief
that weighs on us and suffocates us makes that patch of ground sacred. You may
take for granted whole acres of summer fields, but one tiny patch in winter gives
you hope and strength to get through the slow melting till spring.
The deep, heavy fields of snow and ice are grief, but what are those
patches? The ground that shows through grief is the ground of love. Love is what
underlies all grief. As time passes after a loss, love is the divine light of spirit that
shines through the human flesh of grief. It shines down from above and up from
within. There is no love as powerful as that which we find coming through grief.
Its power can save us and lift us and give us some of the qualities of those whose
passing we are grieving. That love can make us wiser, stronger and braver. It was
this power that came to the disciples at the end of this week and transformed them
from scared or listless drifting souls into the most powerful force for human and
world transformation that has ever existed. But they had to go through this week
of grief to get that power. They had to go deep into grief to find that saving,
transforming love.
So I invite you to enter into silence once more and allow yourself to feel all
the grief that your heart holds, picturing the face of Jesus or the face of any saint
you have known and needed and lost. Grieve, trusting in the love that underlies
and shines down into the grief, the steadfast light of God’s merciful love that holds
you all through this life and beyond into the realm past death.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 03/19/2008