A Prelude to Palm Sunday
"The way the Gospel writers tell it Jesus came back from death not in a blaze of glory, but more like a candle flame in the dark, flickering first in this place, then in that place, then in no place at all. If they had been making the whole thing up for the purpose of converting the world, presumably they would have described it more the way the book of Revelation describes how he will come back again at the end of time...
But that is not the way the Gospels tell it.
They are not trying to describe it as convincingly as they can. They are trying to describe it as truthfully as they can. It was the most extraordinary thing they believed had ever happened, and yet they tell it so quietly that you have to lean close to be sure what they are telling. They tell it as softly as a secret, as something so precious, and holy, and fragile, and unbelievable, and true, that to tell it any other way would be somehow to dishonor it. To proclaim the resurrection the way they do, you would have to say it in whispers: "Christ has risen." Like that." from Frederic Buechner's "Secrets in the Dark."
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The image of the Gospel as a candle flame or a whisper being passed from one person to another resonates with me. In a time of pandemic sure, rumors of cures and conspiracy travel nearly as quickly as an invisible disease.
Manhattan is closing.
We are at war with a biological weapon.
Malaria medicine can cure it…
The image of whispers and candle flames as an expression of faith was birthed for me, not in a classroom of learned professors pouring over Biblical texts, maps and ancient writings ; nor was it formed a miracle experienced and shared on a Damascus road or at a Good Samaritan Hospital .
No, the whisper of grace for me came from my father, a Lutheran minister who was nearing the end of his life. I didn’t know that then. I thought that perhaps he was being melodramatic. After all, the image he gave for Christian faith was from an apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy book he was reading, The Road.
The Road imagines a father and son who survived an unspecified cataclysm that destroyed most of civilization. They have no names. They are father and son. They journey together on the road seeking safety. Together they are the good guys. They must carry the fire.
My dad was moved by the image. He wanted to share it with the congregation he Pastored as a theme for Lent.
His idea was to introduce it on Ash Wednesday; a fire creating ashes for the faithful… He intended to keep speaking of faith as a fire carried within through the Easter Vigil—which he envisioned beginning with a massive flame. He intended to skip the theme of firekeepers for Easter Sunday—flowers and brass, not to mention butterflies had their parts here.
Instead, he would pick up the story of being on the road, as one of the good guys, carrying the fire; after Easter when the Gospel tells the story of the disciples, on the road saying to one another after encountering the Risen Christ, “did our hearts not burn within us?”
As one who led a community of Christians dad made plans in his head that he was going to tell the people of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, in Muncie Indiana, on Pentecost Sunday that they were the keepers of the fire; just as those who had flames above their heads had been told.
This is the kind of Pastor dad was.
He read widely.
He prayed deeply.
He tried to integrate scripture, culture, tradition, and passion into a seamless expression.
That’s a tough calling. It’s bound to have disappointment. Not many people have the mental or spiritual bandwidth to keep up with the events of their own lives; let alone to keep front of mind a theme from a book; the lectionary readings of the church, and a minister’s musings.
I know this and I still do it.
Dad, I think, knew this this; and pressed on because he was a dogged optimist. He believed that most people enjoy being intellectually stimulated. And he even more fervently believed all benefit from spirituality that is deep and broad rather than shallow and small.
So, when I told him the Pulitzer prize winning book he was so moved by was being made into a movie he was excited. To him that meant that the story would be accessible to more people—even those who didn’t like reading.
I told him I got tickets to a talk back and preview of the film The Road in Manhattan. He asked if I would please keep watch for the theme that the father and son carrying the fire.
Dad died before he implemented the theme.
To be clear. Dad went on medical leave before Lent began. He fell deeper and deeper into depression. And as my therapist said, there was nothing on earth that could have held him. He took his own life the day before Pentecost.
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This is not a meditation on death; or my father. It is however a story of the ways in which faith is shared; and born. It is a real-life reflection on the ways in which faith ignores the linear limits of time and space. Which means that this is a message for all of us now who need spirituality which is deep and broad…which is real. Because, danger; it too is real.
Sickness and death spread quickly.
So too do hope and life friends.
God is alive and at work in the world.
Listen.
****
Just before we all entered collective quarantine I drove to Connecticut to see my friend Fred. I hadn’t seen him in 15 years. He was a Pastor and colleague at a Lutheran church not far from where I began my ministry in Naugatuck, Connecticut.
When I arrived at Fred’s house he introduced me to his girlfriend. He likes to say that at 81 she’s the older woman in his life. It’s funny because Fred is 79.
Before we sat down for coffee Fred took me across the street to a Revolutionary War cemetery. They hadn’t held a burial there in 100 years; except for his wife Ulla. The visit wasn’t morbid. I was a friend of Ulla’s she had been kind to me. When the dementia she had been suffering in 2004 grew worse she would come to me and move her hand down my cheek as though she knew me; or I knew her, in a way that felt familiar to both of us, but neither could express.
And so I visited her grave.
On her headstone were the lyrics to the hymn,
“My life flows on in endless song; Above earth's lamentation, I hear the sweet, tho' far-off hymn That hails a new creation; Thro' all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing; It finds an echo in my soul— How can I keep from singing?”
Fred began to share the story of Ulla’s last days. He recalled that I had left Naugatuck to move to California to Pastor another church. Although he had recently retired to care for his sick wife, he reminded me that he had agreed to assist the congregation on Sunday mornings.
For Palm Sunday two of the high school students of the congregation had helped Rootbeer to come back
The previous Palm Sunday, I rented Rootbeer the pony to offer rides before Church and then lead a palm procession. Brett, then a high school senior, now a pastor in Rhode Island and Sarah, also a senior, also now a Lutheran pastor had been moved to make the one-time occurrence a tradition.
Fred told me, to this day he still felt awful that he wasn’t emotionally available for their enthusiasm. Ulla had died the day before. I told Fred, that’s not that far off from what I experienced when the Palm Sunday tradition of a pony began.
When I was making plans for the pony to come I also made a call to the Waterbury Republican newspaper. I told the reporter something clever like, “the pony will lead us down the street. It will not come inside; because one accident on the rug and the tradition is ruined forever.”
The day was perfect! There were no accidents. A little girl with down syndrome was Jesus. She sat high on the saddle. The choir waved palm branches. The pony stopped just short of the entrance steps. 100 people participated. The local paper covered it.
Not bad for a little church on the verge of closing.
After everyone left. I was feeling great. I wanted to share good news of hosanna in small town Connecticut. I logged on to the dial up internet to send some messages about the day.
Before I could type anything I read a message from my friend Andrea. It was three lines long:
“Dear friends,
Mom was killed in a car accident this morning.
Please pray for us.”
From the high of hosanna to the low howls of sadness in the same moment.
That’s Palm Sunday.
I told Fred we are Pastors and life-long Christians. We know the story of Jesus coming to Jerusalem. We know the story of a palm parade.
We also know people.
We know that some people are literalists.
Some people are barely paying attention.
There’s the story of the crowd that cheers for Jesus and then chants for Barabbas.
And there’s the story of our congregations.
Sometimes we do a good job leading them and there’s silence and other times we do a lousy job and they cheer.
“I’m sure they understood that you were grieving your wife; before caring for their spirits.”
Silence.
We looked at the headstone a moment longer. Then, we got coffee. Fred’s girlfriend, which is an incredibly silly thing to call an octogenarian woman of sophistication and grace, began telling me about my father. Jan said she had known him when he was 27 years old. He was her Pastor in St. Peter, Minnesota. I had just been born. He was just beginning his first pastorate.
Time suddenly got a lot smaller. I leaned in to hear the whispers of who my father was.
There wasn’t a lot of detail.
“He was thin.
He looked so young.
When he spoke it was profound;
I hung on every word.”
I did too. I wanted to know more.
That’s what the disciples did. Or at least it’s one interpretation, “The way the Gospel writers tell it Jesus came back from death not in a blaze of glory, but more like a candle flame in the dark, flickering first in this place, then in that place, then in no place at all…They tell it as softly as a secret, as something so precious, and holy, and fragile, and unbelievable, and true, that to tell it any other way would be somehow to dishonor it…”
This sounds to me like the theme my dad wanted to explore during Lent. We carry the fire.
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It’s been 10 years since dad died. Life has changed a lot. I had forgotten all dad’s excitement and the book about a boy and his father until I had coffee with someone who knew him 45 years ago.
What a blessing!
Friends, there are not many places where this blessing can come true. Church is one of them.
These days many of us talk about our buildings in need of repair and the collapsing social institution which used to hold communities together…and Lord knows that this may be true on steroids with the doors of financially vulnerable places closed during this health crisis…
But the stuff we say when we are at our best, that Church is not about a building but people…and faith is not just a set of beliefs, but a way of life…
…that’s the Easter story.
It’s the Palm Sunday story too.
Every time I introduce the Passion reading for the day. I tell people in the pews, “we’ve all got a line today.” By which I mean that our line, our part, is not just spoken in the words of an ancient story. Our lines are whispers of hope, our lines are experiences of the resurrection of Jesus from the parts of our lives which have experienced Christ.
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If time were linear none of these stories—the big one of resurrection, and small ones of a father and son, would make much sense. God moves through time and space collapsing decades; geographic distance; even life and death.
How else to explain a woman with dementia looking deep into my eyes until we are both on the verge of tears stroking my cheek a seeing faint recognition of something neither one of us could speak outloud…
How else to talk about what it is like to sit across the table from a woman I never met before, to hear stories about my 27 year old father; to hear about my birth; and then to share pictures of my new born son. So few of us have people in our lives outside of our immediate family who remember not only our births but the births of our children. The Church is one of those places.
The Church—by which I mean the people of God—is a place—by which I mean relationship—in which people of goodwill carry values of faith and integrity and honesty and grace and mercy, like fire; passing it from one person and one generation to the next.
We are in a time of fear, yes.
We are in the time of whispers.
Let us use our voices to whisper of things faith;
we carry the fire.
We carry God within us.