The Church of the Transfiguration The Little Church Around the Corner One East 29th Street, New York, NY littlechurch.

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1 The Church of the Transfiguration The Little Church Around the Corner One East 29th Street, New York, NY littlechurch.org A Sermon for Palm Sunday: April 1, 2012 The Rev d Elaine Farmer IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD... SERMON for PALM SUNDAY, 1 April 2012 (Year B), Church of the Transfiguration, New York City TEXTS: Liturgy of the Palms Jesus said to [the disciples], You will all become deserters; for it is written, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered. 1 In the beginning was the Word, and this Holy Week we will once again explore our relationship with God, with the Christ. A relationship fraught with love and passion, doubt and ambivalence, chaos and tragedy. I want to begin with a question posed by Australian writer Morris West in his novel, The Tower of Babel. What are you looking for? one of his characters is asked. It s a simple question and the reply in the book is equally simple but singularly challenging. I want the lost thing... the thing you can believe in and die for singing... 2 It s a Lenten question which becomes an intense Holy Week challenge. What are we looking for? And of what shall we sing this week? We shall sing laments. My God... why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? 3 We shall sing of forgiveness. Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven 4. We shall sing of thanksgiving. O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures 1 Mark 14:27. Note Zechariah 13:7 and John 16:32. 2 Morris West, The Tower of Babel. Ref. Maryanne Confoy, Morris West. A Writer and a Spirituality, 3 Psalm 22:1b-2. 4 Psalm 32:1a.

2 forever! 5 We shall sing praises. Praise the Lord, all you nations!... all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. 6 And we shall sing of grace. Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful. 7 [We] trust in you, O Lord, we shall sing. You are our God but, despite our words, at all times we shall still be hunting down, trying to understand, that thing to die for... truth. Wanting to pin it down, make it clear, define it. Singing of it, and always hoping for glimpses of it. 2 We re all so familiar with the story and events of Holy Week and Easter. Too familiar perhaps. We must ask ourselves whether we allow the extraordinary story of this week to shock us as it ought, or whether we avert our eyes and think of other things. For I know we will--again--find Holy Week truth more multi-layered and complex than we would wish and more surprising than will be comfortable. We will have cause to remember what your own American poet Emily Dickinson said, Tell all the Truth but tell it slant... The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind... The first truth then, one from which it would be easy to shy, emerges in the Palm Sunday liturgy. Death and duplicity. With palm branches waved high in salutation; with exuberance and expectation; with shouting and singing: Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven! 8 Thus this day begins. But it shifts to contradiction and confusion and ends with unease and a foretaste of death to come. Death and duplicity strike through the heart of Palm Sunday even as we honour Jesus as Messiah. The lurking truth that we don t get to our longed-for goal, the sign of 5 Psalm 118:1. 6 PSALM 117. Note comment in NRSV NT p.86 on Mk 14: 26--The Passover ended with the singing of Ps Psalm 116:5. 8 Mark 11:9-11.

3 3 God s kingdom, the grace and glory of Easter, without the killing. The lurking truth that we cannot escape involvement in the Good Friday death. It s uncomfortable truth, Good Friday s sordid and inescapable reminder of human sin and complicity. Human hands did the killing. Not Jewish or Roman ones in particular, just human hands. Ours may not be the real ones that did the real deed but our real lives are the ones that keep the body of Jesus hanging on the cross. An unpleasant little truth--complicity--and it will dog us this week but we begin the Holy Week pilgrimage today with another truth: human contradictoriness. What my late mother called contrariness. It s liberally scattered through Mark s account of The Passion. First, in the story of the woman who anointed Jesus with expensive scented ointment, with self-righteous piety onlookers ridicule and condemn her gift and generosity. 9 Next, there s Judas--Jesus s friend. Judas loved Jesus, yet betrayed him. 10 Undermined. By what? Political ambition? Money? Then we have Peter who swore undying loyalty to Jesus then... just forgot... and betrayed Jesus s trust in him. 11 Undermined. By what? Thoughtlessness? Fear? And what of those who came to arrest Jesus in the garden called Gethsemane, agents of the chief priests, the scribes and the elders? Jesus challenged them: Why now? Day by day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. 12 What s different about now? Their only answer was to arrest him. Any other answer would have exposed their real and murky reason--preservation of their status and power. And the disciples? For all their devotion, their loyalty, they d never really understood this unusual man, and they fled, just as Jesus said they would. You will all become deserters; for it is written, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered. Contrary, duplicitous. Finally there s Pilate, ever the political animal, ever the pragmatist. He kept his eye on the main game, which was to keep the people quiet, to suppress any incipient rebellion. He would be brutal in achieving that but--he would be fair. Pilate could see 9 Mark 14: Mark 14: Mark 14:29 & Mark 15: Mark 14:49

4 the troublesome reality before him. Jesus, a man exuding quiet authority and dignity who, despite his apparent worthiness, seemed to have antagonised his religious leaders and crowds of his fellow Jews. And did nothing to protect himself from their wrath. To Pilate odd and contrary behaviour. What evil has he done? 13 was Pilate s quite reasonable question but he did not get a reasoned response. Only cries of hate and baying for blood. Crucify him! 14 was the roar from the crowd and Pilate, seeing a fickle mob whose bile could so easily be switched from Jesus to him and Rome s soldiers, shrugged his shoulders dismissively. What was it to him after all? Better a dead man than a riot. I am innocent of this man s blood, Pilate said, according to Matthew. See to it yourselves and he washed his hands of the whole affair. 15 Have it your own way, he might have said. And they did. 4 A crowd of people complicit in a killing. Ignorant, yes. Manipulated, yes. Complicit all the same. Fickle. His blood be on us and on our children! they cried--again according to Matthew--innocent, poor souls, of the hatred and killing their words would unleash upon their descendants for thousands of years even unto our own day. Generosity, loyalty, trust, fair-mindedness, religious open-heartedness--the truth of the good of which human beings are capable. The list of virtues we would like to claim for ourselves goes on. So does the list of the less than noble characteristics by which we undermine our better selves: ignorance, weakness, fickleness, ambition, fear, thoughtlessness, greed, desire for power and control, and self-righteous religious piety. We are flawed creatures and the Bible tells story after story of the bloody consequences, the conflict and chaos human sinfulness has caused. The particular story we live this week is, of course, the crucifixion of Jesus and there are two things I want to highlight today. First, not the laughter, ridicule and cries of derision, but the utter loneliness of the cross. The silences of those nine long hours 13 Mark 15:14 14 Mark 15:13. See also Matthew 27:22 Luke 23:21 & John 19:6 15 Matthew 27: See also Luke 23:1, and John 18:28-40 & 19: Pilate s hand washing appears only in Matthew s account.

5 5 when he hung there, and Jesus own cry: Eloi,Eloi,lema sabachtani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 16 The Cry of Dereliction it s called. God help me! we might say. A cry flung at the silence of heaven and there was no reply. The second is the utter isolation of the cross. Jesus was hung here by the mighty and powerful. Abandoned, it seems, his prayers for deliverance met by silence, Jesus experiences powerlessness in extremis. Abandoned, alone and isolated, his was the utter powerlessness of all the little people through the ages who have been pawns, despised, tormented, crushed and rejected, in the games of the mighty. In the late 90s my husband and I went to Rwanda and visited several genocide memorials there. Terrible places. Gruesome reminders of the massacres of My mind is a jumble of memories of horror and speechlessness before things too dreadful to have imagined. In particular I remember one figure. At first I thought it was a carved statue... until I caught a whiff, the faintest smell. Even after some years, a smell. It was a woman burned to death. Her head stretched back, her arms flung out as if in appeal. Maybe to fend off machetes. Or rapists. Or both. I was struck by her mouth. The wide gaping O of it. Like Edvard Munch s painting The Scream. A silent scream of terror, of powerless objection to what was about to be done to her. The loneliness and isolation of certain death. Perhaps in her terror she cried--like Jesus-- God help me! Certainly, she knew--like Jesus--there was to be neither answer nor rescue. All the world would understand that woman s terror. Most of the world would not understand or accept the Christian response. That Jesus s Cry of Dereliction My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 17 gathers up her lonely cry and those of all the tortured, murdered and abandoned of all the ages and takes them to himself. It is an extraordinary idea, one that says that, despite all the horror and death that sinful human beings have wreaked upon the world and upon each other, ultimately the 16 Mark 15: Mark 15:34.

6 worst will not prevail. Jesus s act of dying on the cross, alone and abandoned like all the world s lost, says that simply will not be so. All the duplicity, complicity with evil, contradictoriness and indifference to injustice of which we are capable will not write all the stories in the history books. 6 Believing this is not about unquestioning blind faith. The Christian response is not about believing in a magician-god with a wand or a parent-god issuing pats on the head and assurances that all will be well. It is about believing in the significance of a man who took a lonely path into Jerusalem, knowing it would end in his death. A man who said to his friends You will all become deserters but who sat down to eat with them anyway, knowing one would betray him and the rest would scatter, abandoning him. A man who saw the evil and injustice directed at him and held his peace. A man who cried, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 18 but accepted a lonely death, abandoned and naked, knowing that, through the promise of a gracious god, there would be a new dawn. A man whose death has inspired so many since that ancient day to act in love and to pursue justice for the powerless. In the beginning was the Word. We are called now to follow Christ through the last days of his life trusting that a new dawn is coming. It will not be an easy journey for this week we are to ponder how we would answer if Jesus were to say to us why have you forsaken me? Will we follow him to cross and tomb? Or will we be among the scattered? NO CONCLUDING PRAYER C Elaine Farmer In the Beginning was the Word... and the Darkness Comprehendeth it Not, Holy Week/Easter Series Mark 15:34.