Passion/Palm Sunday

Everyone here over the age of 3 has at some time felt betrayed by someone close to them.

It’s the human condition. People are people and they will fail us, either by their own weakness or their ill intent. We’ll fail, too. Like Peter—who loved Jesus, yet denied Jesus three times while he was on trial--each one of us will fall short and fail some people that we love.

Everyone school age up has felt misunderstood, done wrong, by an institution—a teacher or principal, our workplace, alas, even the church. At some time every one of us will feel we’ve suffered injustice. We won’t make the team we’ve worked so hard to qualify for. We won’t make the grade we think we deserve. We’ll be passed over for a promotion. We’ll lose a job we’ve been doing very well—laid off, perhaps, or undermined by someone who wants to take our place. Human institutions, like human beings, fall short. Life is not fair.

But—let’s always remember friends: life also isn’t fair in our favor—big time. It should be embarrassing in the extreme to complain about lost promotions when good folks around the earth are struggling for their subsistence—and working far harder than we. Mildred’s presence reminds us that countless millions around the world suffer the injustices of disease and oppression.

We live in a land of infinite opportunity. That privilege has enabled many of us to gain worldly success and worldly rewards. Some of them are the very things—the promotions, the perks, the positions—that we may feel we lose unfairly.

The world giveth and the world taketh away. Jesus knew all about that. And my own experience is: when the world takes away we can begin to identify with the Passion. That’s when we become teachable.

Jesus knew better than to put his faith in the world, to place his identity there. He knew better than the disciples who cheered Jesus as he came toward Jerusalem, who hailed him as the Messiah who would lead the people, a kingly, military hero who would liberate them from Roman oppression.

The world might have given him the glory they envisioned. But his message of self-giving love was a threat to the establishment. So, instead, they took away his life with unspeakable violence and injustice: they crucified Jesus of Nazareth.

    How many of you have ever been in the eye of a hurricane? As a Houstonian, I’ve been in two: Carla and Alicia. I remember Alicia well. Winds tore at the trees bending them and whipping them around as though they were blades of grass. Then, the eye of the storm passed over Houston. Everything was calm. People came out and walked about for a while, then retreated when the storm winds returned.

Jesus was like that eye of the hurricane. Throughout the persecution of his arrest, his trial, his Passion, Jesus remained the still center in the hurricane that swirled around him. He was in it, but he was not of it.

He was of God, and he stayed centered in God’s will for him.

In that terrible situation, where the priests and Pilate and Herod seemed to hold all the power Jesus exercised the only power he had: the power to control his own response. Jesus used that power to stand apart from what was happening. The power to refuse to be defined by his crucifixion any more than he had been defined by the praise on his entry into Jerusalem.

Seven days from now we will celebrate the Resurrection—God’s ultimate gift in Jesus’ life and death. That gift is ours to claim when this earthly journey is over.

But in his Passion, Jesus gave a precious gift for the duration. Jesus lived in the world, and so do we. In his Passion, Jesus showed us how to face the conflicts and setbacks that come to us in this journey.

Jesus was a contemplative: he lived a life based in prayer. His identity—his reality--lay in God, not in the world. His teaching, his healings, his other miracles all were grounded in that reality, in that identity--in his relationship with God. When he came to the ultimate trial, that relationship enabled Jesus to trust in God, to stay centered in God—beyond the reach of the powers and principalities.

Jesus gave to all his followers that example. And Christians for 2000 have claimed and manifested that same power. We have allowed Jesus’ passion and death to give meaning to our own sufferings and to help transcend them. Just twenty years after Jesus died, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed….For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake".

Nineteen hundred years later and worlds away, in Honduras, shortly after Hurricane Mitch had ravaged their land, a priest of the Episcopal church there used Paul’s words to express the faith that got them through. "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed…" They—who had so little--had lost family, friends, property, livelihoods: a horrible injustice. "Our God is bigger than a hurricane," one woman said to me. She and her fellow Christians in Puerto Cortes drew strength from Jesus’ Passion to rebuild, to go on.

Jesus’ God was bigger than the Crucifixion; so he could face suffering and death unafraid. His example showed us that death is the path to spiritual transformation and resurrection.

As you and I follow Jesus on the spiritual path, as we grow deeper and more committed in our life of prayer, in our contemplative journey, we will die many times. We will die as we surrender our identity with the power, pleasures, and privileges of this world. Through each of these little metaphorical deaths, though, we will rise, ever stronger, ever closer to the love for which God created us and for which Jesus gave his life.

Richard Rohr says that Christians make the mistake of just worshipping Jesus’ journey when we are supposed to follow him in it. In this Holy Week, I invite you to journey together with Merrill and me. We will be here at 7 every morning for Eucharist, for Maundy Thursday at 7 p.m. and Good Friday at noon. Each service is a chance to grow in faith as individuals and in faith together as a covenant community.

Please join us.