In many churches, this is not just Palm Sunday but Palm/Passion Sunday. Over the course of this service, we go from Jesus and the disciple’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem straight through the Last Supper and Gethsemane and into the arrest, the trial, and the Crucifixion. There is a lot packed into this service.
As the Liturgical year developed and still in some churches today, Palm Sunday is technically just the beginning of Holy Week. On Sunday, you celebrate only the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Then other parts of Jesus’ final days in Jerusalem take place the rest of the week. Tuesday is for the Cleansing of the Temple, Wednesday is for Jesus washing the disciples feet, Thursday is for the Last Supper, and Friday is for the long Passion narrative (from Gethsemane to the Cross). Then on Easter Sunday we celebrate the Risen Christ.
But what if people only come on Sundays? What if they can't or won't come to worship during the week? Then you go from Jesus being celebrated and praised as he enters Jerusalem one Sunday to Jesus rising from the dead the next. It had to leave people wondering how that happened. Just last week he was riding into town while people cheered. When did he die?
It would be a little like watching the original Star Wars trilogy and skipping The Empire Strikes Back. We just hung medals on these guys, why is that one a statue on a wall now?
And so, we celebrate it all on this final Sunday of Lent - both the Palms and the Passion.
When we started this season of Lent, I invited you to journey with me through various streams of spirituality, the ways in which we live out and live into our relationship with God and each other. Each of these streams is present in the life of Christ and in the history of the Christian tradition. Each of them connects to the others in some ways even as each offers us a distinct way of understanding and communicating with God.
We started the season off with the Holiness Stream, the virtuous life, and looked at the ways in which we focus on living righteously and resisting the temptations that arise in life as a part of our devotion to God. We moved then to the Charismatic Stream, the Spirit-empowered life, and talked about the gifts of the Spirit and how the reason for those gifts, whatever they may be, is for building up the body of Christ in love. Next we looked to the Contemplative Stream, the prayer-filled life, and we explored the deep longing for and intimacy with God that is a hallmark of this stream.
Two weeks ago, I talked about the Social Justice Stream, the compassionate life, that extends our ideas of personal love and holiness out to include our interactions with others, completing the Great Commandment to love both God and neighbor. Last week’s topic was the Evangelical Stream, the Word-centered life, which focuses on proclaiming the Good News and sharing how God’s love is available to all people.
As Lent draws to a close, as we travel today from triumph to the cross, from the Palms to the Passion, we turn to the Incarnational Stream, the sacramental life. For those that like to study words and etymology (not entomology - we won’t be discussing bugs today), Incarnation shares a common root with the word Carnivore - the Latin root carnis means flesh. So incarnation is about flesh, about bodies, about physical reality.
When we think about this in terms of the spiritual stream for today, “the Incarnational Stream ...focuses on making present and visible the realm of the invisible” (Foster, Streams of Living Water, 237). It is about finding God in the details of everyday life. It is about God being made known to us through material means.
Most often in the life of the church, we talk about Incarnation with a capital-I as we think about God become flesh in the person of Jesus. This is a major theme around Christmas as we focus on God being born into this world of flesh and blood. We don’t often talk about the Incarnation this time of year as we approach the cross and the tomb. And yet, without a body of flesh, the cross and the tomb have no meaning. After all, what is a means of physical death to God, who is beyond physical existence?
Through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of God in Jesus, God blesses the physical as surely as the spiritual. And so, through our own birth, life, and death, we see that this fleshly existence has meaning. The physical world, created by God, has meaning. The spiritual and the physical are not at odds with each other. Rather God created our flesh to hold our spirits, just as the flesh of Jesus also held within it the fullness of God.
As a whole, humanity has the ability to see, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, each of us in our own way, just as God created us to do. And so God is made known to us through our senses. Sometimes (perhaps most often) this takes place in religious settings. Our central text today falls more or less right in the middle of the lengthy scriptures assigned for this day in the church year. We find Jesus sharing a meal with his disciples, a usual enough practice and one we will see again in a few weeks. But in this particular meal the meaning and purpose begins to shift. We hear today words that should be familiar to us from our own religious celebrations at the Table.
“This is my body…”
“This cup is the new covenant by my blood…”
Jesus takes the everyday elements of bread and cup, common items that would be present at any meal, and gives them new significance. In the worship life of the church, this takes on new meaning as sacrament. The bread and the cup shared at the table in the midst of the worshiping community makes the reality of Christ again present in our midst.
Those things that we call sacraments are one way in which we make visible the invisible reality of God. Through these practices of the church, we make holy the everyday things of life. The bread becomes no longer just bread. The cup no longer contains only the fruit of the vine. Water becomes more than just an agent of physical cleansing. And this is powerful stuff. But the power of the incarnation, the joy of the sacramental life, is that it is not confined only to our worship spaces.
As we extend outward from our formal worship experiences, we find other less formal practices that we can use to intentionally make the invisible visible, to see the spiritual manifest in the physical world. Devotional practices involving icons and other religious art or prayer beads are other ways that our physical senses can be used to bring to mind God’s presence in the world. Or maybe our experiences of Holy Communion begin to change our experiences of all of the other meals that we partake in throughout our week.
This is what lies at the heart of the Incarnation and at the heart of incarnational spirituality. The point of the sacramental life is not to pull ourselves aside, to temporarily step out of the “dog eat dog” world so many of us find ourselves in in day-to-day life. Instead, the incarnational focus is precisely to find the place of God in the midst of the “dog eat dog” world. No matter what everyday life is for us, the challenge of the incarnation is to find God in the midst of life.
Over the last few months, I have been leading an online Field Education group for my seminary in Chicago. I have been working with students preparing for full-time ministry in four different states scattered from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. And every week as we reflect on the joys and challenges of life in ministry, my constant question for them has been “Where is God in the midst of this?”
No matter our life situation, even for those of us called to a full-time ministry of leadership in the church, we need those reminders in the midst of everyday life to sit back and ask, “Where is God in the midst of this?” Because the reality of the Incarnation is that God is in the midst of this. The truth of this physical world with its everyday struggles is that God is with us.
Yes, God may often feel more present in our religious settings. I for one have a deep love of the sacraments in the life of the church. The model of equality and inclusion that we have at Christ’s table is particularly meaningful to me. But - even though I don’t have a specific reference this week - the reason I constantly use examples from movies and other elements of popular culture week after week is because I want you to see that God isn’t only available to us when we come together to worship. Jesus isn’t only present to us in the bread and the cup. God isn’t only present to us in the times explicitly set aside for prayer, as important as those times are.
Rather God is here with us everyday. Everyday we encounter things that can point us to a deeper reality, from the beauty of creation that proclaims God’s love for the world to perhaps hearing Queen's “We Are the Champions” and being reminded of the triumphant entry of Jesus and the disciples into Jerusalem while people wave their palms and their cloaks as they arrive.
While we may most often focus on the Incarnation around Christmas time, I am particularly struck by the enfleshment of Christ as we enter Holy Week this year. This is a week full of reminders that God came down and took part in the same physical existence that we have, thereby blessing the physical world all over again.
We see reminders of God around us, of God present in what we see and smell and touch and taste and hear, as we approach Jesus’ final days before the tomb. The feel of the water and the touch of hands as he washes the feet of the disciples. The smell and the taste of the bread and the cup that they share.
And then they leave the table and head to the garden so that Jesus can pray. As he prays, he knows that time is short. He knows what is coming. He knows where his teaching, his healing, his fame, his constant reframing of the religious rules, and his actions in the temple overturning the tables are leading. We hear his anguish as he prays in the garden, an anguish that makes his physical life very real.
[See Luke 22:39-46]
Most of us know where the story goes next. As Jesus was praying in the garden, a crowd showed up to arrest him. The crowd is led by Judas, one of the twelve. He betrays Jesus with a kiss, a sign of relationship and peace, a physical expression of family. Then the crowd leads Jesus away.
Peter follows for a time, but, when he is confronted, he denies knowing Jesus. Three times he denies Jesus. And then realizing what he has done, he leaves to cry alone. His fear of enduring the same physical pain that Jesus will soon experience overwhelms him.
Jesus is mocked, taunted, beaten, and put on trial. Hated by the religious leaders because he challenged their assumptions and taught a different way of loving God, Jesus was executed by the state for disrupting the status quo and leading the city to potential violence, even though it was the potential of violence among those that opposed Jesus that was the problem. It was an execution of expedience.
And while Pilate may have washed his hands, it was still his soldiers that beat Jesus, that lead him away, that put him on the cross while many of the same people that had praised Jesus upon entering Jerusalem now cried out for his death. They hung him there with two criminals who were to be executed as well. And then the crowds and the soldiers continued to mock Jesus on the cross.
And yet, there were believers present.
[See Luke 23:39-49]
We may know that Easter is on the other end of death. But the disciples didn't know that as they walked into town. They didn't know that as they shared a meal. They didn't know that as armed men took Jesus away. They didn't know that as Jesus was questioned by the authorities. They didn't know that as their Messiah/teacher/friend suffered on the cross. They didn't know. Yet.
So I invite you to try to imagine what that was like for them. If the cross was the end of the story, how is God’s love proved? If Jesus simply dies on the cross and lies in the tomb, where is the promised joy?
We may know how the story ends, but they did not have that knowledge. The cross for them is death and pain and the end of everything that they had hoped for. The joy for them was not in the cross. Their joy is yet to come. The cross may have its place in the story, but the story of salvation is not complete today.
Like the Centurion, we recognize the righteousness of Jesus.
Like the crowds, we recognize the role we play in condemning the innocent.
Like the women, the only members of Jesus’ inner circle to remain that day, we watch and wait for God to do a new thing.
With the knowledge they didn’t have, we wait with hope in the midst of sorrow for the promise of God’s love that is, was, and shall be fulfilled on Easter morning.