a sermon for palm/passion sunday
There’s sort of an unwritten rule that good preachers take care to not share too much in the way of personal stories when it comes to sermons. I think this is generally a wise rule to keep in mind. But it seems like we’re in the midst of a time when most of the rules about life and ministry just don’t apply, so I decided I would go ahead and break any that might be remaining and just tell you the God-honest, vulnerable truth about where I’m at right now.
The truth is that I think I’ve cried more this week than I’ve cried in years. I mean, the tears have just been coming out all over the place. I have my family’s permission to tell you that my uncle Paul has been in very critical condition in a North Dakota hospital. He was intubated just over a week ago with what was the second confirmed case of COVID-19 in that state. He hadn’t been around anyone at all who had been sick, but the illness brought him within inches of death, and my aunt wasn’t able to be with him in the hospital. So many tears. And then, after a number of days when it wasn’t at all clear whether he was going to survive this illness, he miraculously turned a corner. And I do mean miraculously. He’s not yet out of the woods, but his medical team was able to lift him out of his coma, and he was able to say hello to my aunt on the phone just a couple of days ago. Again, so many tears.
On Tuesday, my first official day as your new pastor at Grace, I had a Zoom meeting with a small handful of the staff. As the faces of those four other colleagues showed up on the screen, I started to cry. Like, I cried an embarrassingly unprofessional amount of tears, right there in front of God and everybody as that meeting got started. I’ve grown accustomed to the overwhelming sense of joy I’ve felt in stepping into this call as your pastor, but I was wholly unprepared for the grief that hit me like a sucker punch when I saw the faces of these people I already love but with whom I cannot gather. I feel exactly the same way about each of you. I already love you, and I’ve never even seen you. So when these flowers arrived at my door on Saturday morning, together with a beautiful note from the congregation, welcoming me as your pastor, guess what happened? Yep. So. Many. Tears.
On Wednesday, a calendar reminder popped up on my phone. It said, simply, “Kate Rehearsal.” Our 7-year-old has discovered a passion and a gift for musical theater, and we’d signed her up for her first-ever musical with a really amazing community children’s theater group. Her first rehearsal was to have been this week. Somehow that calendar reminder also triggered So. Many. Tears. Tears for Kate’s loss, and tears for the many, many little losses that your families are also experiencing, which don’t actually feel so little at all.
I’ve cried more this week than I’ve cried in years. And I think, at the root of it, is the sense of powerlessness I feel in the hands of this global pandemic. I wonder if you might feel the same way. There is illness, and there is more to come. There is grief, and there is more to come. There is overwhelming loneliness and isolation. There is also, for some of us, unrelenting togetherness – houses filled with the people we love most in the world who we can also just BARELY stand to be around sometimes right now. It’s just all so much, and we’re powerless before it. Here we are, God’s people literally the whole world over, standing empty-handed and defenseless before a virus that has upended every one of our lives in the blink of an eye.
It strikes me that we’re not so unlike the crowds of people who had gathered to greet Jesus riding into Jerusalem all those years ago. They are similarly empty-handed; similarly defenseless before the forces arrayed against them. But rather than staring down a virus that’s upended their lives, they’re looking square into the temple priests’ exclusionary religious rules…the Roman officials’ oppressive laws and armies…the centurion soldiers’ threatening spears and armor. Their branches and their garments are simply no match for the powers that have upended their lives, and so the lay them on the ground and cry out to the man riding into the edge of town, whose reputation precedes him. “Hosanna! Hosanna!” they shout as a dusty, smelly donkey carries Jesus through the crowds.
Hosanna. We’re used to hearing it as a joyful shout of praise, but the Hebrew root of the word actually means “save us.” “Save us!” the crowds cry out. And on their cries is the God-honest, vulnerable truth of where the people were at on the day Jesus rides into town. Hosanna! Save us! Save us from the religious rule-makers who say we’re not worthy to enter the holy places. Save us from the crushing weight of poverty. Save us from the abuses of the empire that rules over us. Save us from our apathy. Save us from our hopelessness.
The crowd shouted “Hosanna! Save us!” and I imagine that the people in that crowd had expectations for what that salvation would look like. It would look like all the other things that seem to win in the world, except it’d be bigger, and stronger, and more effective, and more complete, because God had sent this one named Jesus. And maybe this man named Jesus would finally be enough to conquer the powerful ones who had kept the people crushed under their thumbs.
And here we are today, standing with siblings across the entire world, shouting the same cries of “Hosanna! Save us!” as our own need for salvation becomes increasingly clear to us. Save us from rising rates of infection and death. Save us from economic devastation. Save us from the loneliness and isolation, and also from the too-much-togetherness. Save us from our overwhelming anxiety. Save us from the feeling that the pressures and pains that were present in our lives before the coronavirus somehow no longer matter to anyone. Save us, Lord.
Church, here is what I know. Jesus hears the cries of “Hosanna!”. He heard the cries of the people in the crowd on that first Palm Sunday, and he hears them from us today, too. And as we enter into this Holy Week, we will witness, again and again, the salvation that Jesus brings. Except that as much as human hearts throughout history have yearned for the salvation of Jesus to come in the form of conquering might or permanent deliverance from human suffering, that’s not what we’re going to get. We rightly heap glory, laud, & honor on Jesus as he comes riding into town, but he’s not going to pick up that mantle. He’s not going to defeat the powers that be. He’s going to surrender to them. He’s not going to wipe away suffering from our human experience. He’s going to go to the heart of it. And in so doing, he will carry with him the promise that, from now on, God will be intimately, profoundly present with us whenever we face our own seasons of suffering and death.
Jesus will journey to the cross and join himself to our suffering because, as upside-down and backwards as it seems, this is what the salvation of our God looks like. It looks like a love so deep that it willingly takes on the most painful, wrecked pieces of our human story…holding onto us along with our pain until it is all transformed…until it is returned to us as new life.
So stay close to one another, beloved of God, as we walk alongside Jesus through this holiest of weeks in the most difficult of times. Watch what happens to our cries of Hosanna! in the hands of a God who is quick to save. Amen.
Heidi Torgerson 