16 March 2008

Palm/Passion Sunday

Matthew 21.1-11, 26.14-27.54

Reverend Jennifer K. Morrow

---

Were you there? Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  Sometimes it causes me to tremble.  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

 

 Were you there?  That’s the question of the day.  It’s the one Peter was asked in the courtyard following Jesus’ arrest.  A slave girl approaches him, studies his profile in the pre-dawn firelight and with a hint of accusation in her voice asks, “I think I recognize you.  You know Jesus, don’t you.  You were with him weren’t you.  When they arrested him up in the garden, Were you there?”  Of course, Peter would answer her—forcefully and three times—“No!”

 

Much is made this Holy Week of the answer to that question.  For thousands of years the church has reenacted the events of those days in efforts to help we Christians muster an answer to the question: Were you there?  Of course, none of us was there.  But we believe that having been there would change a person…so we search for ways in story and song, in worship and fellowship to “be there” now.  We shout “Hosanna,” even if a bit timidly and wave palm branches in a way that always feels a little uncomfortable to our social graces.  “Were you there?”  We sing songs urging us to “go to dark Gethsemane” and stay with Jesus with his words to his long ago disciples echoing in our ears: “Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray.” “Were you there?”  We share communion—every time using the words Jesus used that fateful night in that upper room—working, perhaps unconsciously, to muster up a sense of what it felt like to be there. On Friday we strip our altar bare and put out all the lights.  A symbolic act meant to take us to that harrowing place of the soul’s dark night and the pain of grief and loss.  “Were you there?”  Every year we undertake this effort to pry ourselves out of the grip of daily life long enough to experience a whisper of what it must have been like to have “been there,” ever hopeful that we will emerge from the experience changed.

 

But this year, as I think on this process we begin again here today, I’m aware that I’m looking for something.  And what I’m looking for is more than a taste of what it must have been like to be there; more than the ability to answer Stephanie when she sings, “Were you there?”  “Yes, yes I was.”  I’m looking for more than an experience this year.  I’m looking for an answer.  I’m looking for an answer to that familiar question, “Were you there?”  And I’m looking for that answer from God.

 

Frederick Buechner has said that most people who come to church on any given Sunday are not there because they have experienced God’s presence, but rather because they have felt God’s absence.  In other words, on any given Sunday there are people in the pews…and the pulpit who need to ask, “Were you there, God?” 

 

Often when we pray we ask God to “be with” someone.  And what we mean is not that we think God has somehow removed God’s presence from that person and they need it reinstated.  What we are saying is that we need God to do for that person what they cannot do for themselves.  We need God to be there to act…and love or heal or protect or bring hope or just hold.  When we talk about God’s “being somewhere” we’re talking about God’s being there to act.

 

“Were you there, God?”  Maybe you haven’t used exactly those words, but have you ever felt it?  Not wondered about the existence of God mostly, but wondered how something could hurt so badly or be so fearful if God were really with you, present and active. It happens for me in those moments of grief that can’t be shared, or when I fear I may lose something I can’t get back.

 

Life is such that grief, and fear, and loss are inevitable.  It is not a matter of whether they will happen, but when.  Poet Mary Oliver writes that “It’s not the weight you carry but how you carry it—books, bricks, grief—it’s all in the way that you embrace it, balance it, carry it when you cannot, and would not, put it down.”[1]

 

In the story of Jesus’ passion we have two moments in which we find him in the place the poet describes: completely vulnerable in his grief, fear, and loss.  And in these moments we get an unsettlingly personal look into how he would embrace, balance, carry a grief that he could not and would not put down.  And in both instances, he turns the question of the day on God, shifting the verb from past to present: God are you there?

 

In the garden as he prayed—perhaps praying not out of a perfect trust in God but out of a deep need to know God’s presence in that harrowing moment.  Are you there?  God are you here?  In this night and the way it is unfolding?  Is this what you want?  It’s not what I want—is it what you want?  If I ask my friends, ‘Are you there?’ they’ll answer only in sleep.  So what about you God?  Are you there?

 

Somehow, Jesus pushes onward.  Somehow he continues the journey from the garden down the mountain, now prisoner to an angry mob.  From there to trials, and from the trials to a cross.  And there, on that cross Jesus utters the question again, “Are you there God?” with the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  You see in this question that what is at stake for Jesus is not God’s existence, but rather God’s presence.  He wonders not does God exist.  But since God exists, he needs to know more than ever before: God are you here?  As I die?

 

What will the answer be?  Can you feel how much hangs in the balance?  Do you see how Jesus asked this question not only on his own behalf, but for us all?  If God’s answer is “yes, I was there” then there is nowhere we can go where God will not also be.  Do you see?  If God was there then there is no loss, no diagnosis, no death, no grief, no sorrow, no betrayal where God will not also and always be.  Dare we ask?  Are we prepared for the answer?  Breath held, hearts pounding, now or never, just say it…God, were you there?

 

If Easter comes, we will have our answer.  Until then, we wait…