“Be Alive”:
A Sermon for Palm Sunday 2009
Jan K. Nielsen
Spring has come to New England.
Though some of our days still carry a chill,
the sun sometimes shines brighter and longer now,
jonquils and crocuses push toward the sky,
and songbirds raise their voices in praise of the morning.
We are in the spring season of sacred days.
For Christians,
and others who try to follow the teachings of Jesus,
today is the beginning of Holy Week,
those seven days that stretch from Palm Sunday to Easter.
Thursday evening,
some of us will honor our Christian roots
and gather here to share communion,
as we remember both Jesus’ “Last Supper” with his disciples
and the teachings for which he died.
It is our custom here on Maundy Thursday
to speak the names of our loved ones
who have passed from this life,
in remembrance of the gift of each one of their lives.
This is also a sacred time in the Jewish tradition;
Passover week begins Wednesday at sundown.
It is our custom here to honor our Jewish roots
with a Seder hosted by our fourth graders
as a part of their study of the Hebrew Bible.
Friday evening, our children will once again tell the story
of the Exodus of the Jewish people
from slavery to freedom.
On Sunday, we’ll gather to sing the Easter hymns
and hear again the story of resurrection and new life.
This is a season of song and story.
Right now, song and story may be just what we need.
We come here on this April morning
after a winter of cold and months of hard news.
“Restore our minds to wisdom,” we sang earlier.
A little wisdom, wherever we can find it,
seems like a good thing.
Maybe today your heart is heavy.
You’re worried about someone who is sick and hurting.
Or maybe it’s your own body
that seems to be letting you down,
either from sickness or aging.
Or maybe today, though you wouldn’t want anyone to know,
you feel, quite honestly, a little “beaten down” by life,
by circumstances, by the way things are.
You’re awake in the night
wondering about a job, the bills,
and all the “unknowns” and “what ifs” of life these days.
Whatever the state of your soul on this day,
know this: you are not alone.
Someone sitting here this morning
knows a similar burden,
asks the same questions in the middle of the night,
carries the same longings of the heart.
All week long, I look toward the coming Sunday
and think of you and your lives
as I try to gather words for these Sunday mornings.
When I look to the week’s
scriptures and stories,
poetry and songs,
both ancient and new,
I ask, “What does this mean for our lives,
on this day, in this season, in this year 2009?”
Today, we hear the Palm Sunday story.
It’s all “high drama” –
a scene for the widescreen.
From the east, we see Jesus riding on a donkey
into the city of Jerusalem.
He’s come from the peasant village of Nazareth,
for the festival of Passover
and he’s not travelling alone.
He’s followed a ragtag bunch:
peasants, outcasts, the “down and out” –
people who don’t fit the profile of “success.”
It looks like a poor people’s march.
Jesus creates quite a stir;
people wave palm branches in the air
as they cheer and shout, “Hosanna!” and “Praises to God!”
There’s more to the picture;
Jesus’s parade is just one part of the scene.
From the west,
we see another parade,
but this is no poor people’s march.
It’s a royal procession,
led by Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruler.
He’s followed by the imperial army,
and they ride not donkeys, but only the finest horses.
Pilate’s parade is the picture of power:
cavalry and foot soldiers adorned in the finest armor,
carrying weapons and banners,
hoisting shiny poles of metal and gold.
Trouble is brewing.
Jesus is at the height of his “in your face” activism;
he’s living his Jewish faith and values,
he’s preaching about love and justice,
even when it’s hard and risky.
A “peasant with an attitude,” some have called Jesus.
He’s traveling an uncertain and dangerous road and, of course,
we all know how the story will unfold the coming Friday,
when the Roman government gets fed up
and tries to end Jesus’s rabble rousing and trouble making
by putting him to death.
How do we make sense of the Palm Sunday story?
Why the excitement?
Why the conflict?
It can help to know the context,
to get a feel for what times were like on that first Palm Sunday.
Times were tough,
a lot tougher than anytime most of us have ever known.
An elite few held most of the wealth;
the masses barely got by on way too little,
and the lowest of the low didn’t get by at all.
Slavery was the norm;
women were treated as property.
It was a time of government by brutality and violence.
Voices long before Jesus
had looked at the way things were
and tried to raise hell over it all.
Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah,
along with the other Hebrew prophets
railed against the corruption of the day,
and the takeover of the temples
by a government bent on domination of its people.
Jerusalem, a longtime sacred city for the Jewish people
had become the city of pain,
breaking the hearts and fueling the anger of the prophets.
Listen to the words of Jeremiah:
Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,
look around and take note!
Search its squares
and see if you can find
one person who acts justly and seeks truth . . . .
Has this house (the temple),
which is called by God’s name,
become a den of robbers? . . .
This is the city that must be punished;
there is nothing but oppression within her. (5:1;7:11;6:6)
These were the times,
and this was the Jerusalem,
into which Jesus rode his donkey on that first Palm Sunday.
For generations, the Palm Sunday story,
like nearly all of Jesus’ ministry,
has been misrepresented and misunderstood.
Jesus rode into Jerusalem not to challenge Judaism
but instead to live the teachings of his Jewish faith.
“ . . . (W)e must understand Jesus within Judaism,
not against Judaism,”
writes historian and Jesus scholar Marcus Borg.
“Jesus was a part of Judaism,
not apart from Judaism. . . .
It was not Jesus against Judaism,
or Judaism against Jesus.
Rather, his was a Jewish voice, (Borg concludes)
one of several first century Jewish voices,
about what loyalty to the God of Judaism meant.”
For Jesus, loyalty to his God meant
doing everything he could to fight the existing order,
the domination system of the day
enforced by a corrupt government
by means of persecution and oppression.
His message was not about himself, Borg tells us.
Jesus entered the city
not to proclaim himself the Savior of the world,
or the Messiah, or the Son of God,
(and not to start a new religion in his name)
but instead to proclaim the coming Kingdom of God,
his dream of a world where everyone might have enough,
and no one would live in fear,
a world of justice and peace for all humankind.
So that’s the Palm Sunday story,
and the story behind the story,
but what might all this mean, today, for your life and mine?
Maybe there are days
when you feel like you are travelling a rough road,
headed toward your own Jerusalem,
living your own Palm Sunday drama.
Or maybe you haven’t yet set foot on the road.
There’s something calling to you,
something you know in your soul you must do,
maybe some new direction, some new way of living,
but you’re holding back, playing it safe, laying low.
Whatever your situation,
whether you are on the road or holding back,
maybe your heart is like the poet’s:
“full of hesitations, questions, choices of directions.”
It is when life leaves our hearts
“full of hesitations, questions, choices of directions”
that we most need to find wisdom,
some way of making sense of all that life has put before us.
Our “hesitations, questions, choices of directions”
can be about big, once in a lifetime turning points.
Do I stay or do I go?
Do I do the work I’ve always done or is it time for a new path?
Do I open my heart to new life?
Do I open my heart to deeper, more faithful love?
Everyday life, too,
can bring our hearts to this place of hesitation and questioning
with all the smaller choices of direction we face.
Do I stop to help?
Should I speak up
when I see or hear something I know is not right?
Should I say something
to that person I know is hurting and lonely and afraid?
Should I ask for help when I’m scared?
Questions of the heart sometimes shout
and sometimes they whisper,
but one thing is clear: they do not go away.
When life seems uncertain,
when times are hard,
when the day to day seems like a struggle,
voices of wisdom, both ancient and new,
turn us toward
what the poet names “the earth world,.”
the “green pastures,” the “still waters” that await the soul.
For thousands of years,
the words of the 23rd Psalm
have helped people to find
within their souls
the strength, the courage and the peace
to live through the trials of life,
to walk their hard “Palm Sunday” roads.
Maybe Jesus knew the 23rd Psalm;
it was a part of his Jewish faith tradition.
His heart, like the poet’s, must have known
“hesitations, questions, choices of directions.”
I have recited the 23rd Psalm
with people in hospital rooms, at bedsides near life’s end,
in memorial services,
and also alone, by myself,
in the middle of a wakeful night.
It was the first scripture I ever learned.
When I was about nine and decided to read the Bible on my own,
my father came along.
He was distrustful of organized religion
and not much of a churchgoer,
but he wisely rescued me
from the more obscure and arcane passages.
(I tried to start at the beginning
and work my way through to the end,
a frustrating way to read the Bible for the first time.)
My father turned me toward the 23rd Psalm and said,
“Here. Learn this. Learn it by heart.”
I did, and those words have never left me.
“What, in the earth world,”
writes Mary Oliver,
“is there not to be amazed by
and to be steadied by
and to cherish?”
The “earth world,” the poet wants us to remember, offers us not only comfort and beauty.
The “earth world” has wisdom to share.
“The singular and cheerful life
of any flower . . . (she writes)
catches me
by the heart,
by its color,
by its obedience
to the holiest of laws:
be alive
until you are not.”
“Be alive
until you are not” -
those words could guide us
through a lifetime of questions.
It can be so easy sometimes to stop living,
to give up and sit back
and, through our actions,
and sometimes even through our words,
to say no –
to say no to life, to truth, to love,
and to also cease to be truly alive.
Life can bring times of blessing and deep joy
and also times of pain and hardship –
and, as I’ve seen again and again,
sometimes the blessings and the joy
come all mixed up with the pain and hardship.
If we tried to put it into a picture, or a snapshot,
we might see a vacant lot, gray and brown and barren,
littered with debris,
and in its midst,
a rare and beautiful wildflower
rising and ripening,
a “singular and cheerful life”
catching us . . .
by its obedience
to the holiest of laws:
be alive
until you are not.”
Let our lives,
whatever they may bring,
be like that wildflower.
Let us live –
with souls alive,
with hearts singing,
as long as we have breath
saying yes –
yes to life, yes to truth, yes to love.
Be alive.
The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
April 5, 2009