Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Palm Sunday, "Attention liberation-collective effervescence"

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Palm Sunday, "Attention liberation-collective effervescence"

B Palm Sunday BFC 2018

Mark 11:1-11, 16-17

March 25, 2018

Throughout the United States, on this Palm Sunday, pastors and priests are standing to preach what has become a regular seminary topic. Thirty years ago it was taught to me, seems to be blogged about every spring, shared all over social media the week before, and comes as a wag of the finger to all of you who will only attend Palm Sunday and Easter Day services. You should know that the liturgical calendar is set up in such a way that you are not to go from celebration to celebration. In between Palm Sunday and Easter Day are betrayal, desertion, crucifixion, and death. I am supposed to tell you that to only attend those two services, Palm Sunday and Easter Day, is to forego not only the difficult story and raw emotion of Holy Week but also the hard road of Lent. I hope you feel sufficiently chastised.

I have admitted to many of you that I miss the intensity and devotion of the Lenten season—the extra Wednesday services or study, the sobriety of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the heightened devotion of the Easter Vigil, which all drew me through to Easter Day in a way that felt more whole and real and right. My first communion was on Maundy Thursday so it always had powerful meaning for me. My pastor typecast me as Judas on Good Friday so I enjoyed staring at congregation members before my part to unsettle everyone. And I remember always signing up for the Easter Vigil for times at dusk so I would go into the church building with the light of day fading and come out into the black of night. All of that seemed to help me live the story of Lent. My hometown pastor made each one of those studies and services special and original.

As a result, I took great pride in making mid-week Lenten services special and original. I have oodles of material and preparation I have put into Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. But, as with my colleagues, the number of people attending what people used to tell me were the most meaningful services of the year, that number has dwindled to next to nothing. What is going on with that? I believe we are all profoundly spiritual beings looking for profoundly spiritual experiences. What is going on?

I think we are all gassed. I think we are all too pooped to pop. We are exhausted with all of the distractions placed before us . . . to the point where we give up trying to participate and collaborate. We end up believing the only thing available to us is to be entertained. As a result, we give our opinion and lose our voice. We share how many stars without being subjects of our own story line. We complain about the bleak outlook for the future without asking what movement or struggle would call our hearts to quicken. Climate change leaves us feeling helpless. The present political climate makes us feel useless. And colds, flus, and winters that never let go push us right up to the edge of feeling hopeless.

Into this morass of helpless, useless, and hopeless, many of you have asked me what to do. And I’m sure I’ve told many of you to check your Sabbath rhythms and practices. How do we get intentional solitude that then balances you to re-enter back into community? How do we get moments of rest where we can turn our brains off and soak in the goodness God intends for us? How do we key into moments of communal celebration and play that energize us?

French sociologist Émile Durkheim, referenced these times as “collective effervescence.” They are times when we come together in joy or in pain to participate and collaborate. When we do so, we are excited and energized for the work that needs to be done and develop a broad sense of how deeply we belong to each other.[1] Durkheim saw this happening in religious faith. But I think it is something that has become evermore rare in our communities of faith.

How do we make part of our regular week moments of solitude so that we can plug back into community life? How do we program into our day times of rest so that we can bask in love intended and therefore see both work and rest as gifts? How do we make part of our consistent rhythms communal celebration and play so that there are times of collective effervescence that electrify us, animate us, and send us back into the world with renewed hope and transcendent courage?

Jesus is coming to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. As Ed shared in the introduction to the story of Palm Sunday for today, the Passover was a meal to remember God delivering the Children of Israel from slavery and oppression. It was a time when the community came together in participatory celebration of who they were as a people. That identity is also tied up in a familial event where children are encouraged or prompted to ask questions and play choreographed games. Non-Jewish guests are often welcomed.

Passover lends itself to the idea that the Jewish people collaborate with God in their deliverance. They are active participants. Some tellings of the Passover encourage participants to lounge as they share in the meal to convey a posture of rest and ease. In other words, not the posture of a slave like they were in Egypt, but of free people who have the opportunity to rest and celebrate. Passover is a celebratory rhythm for the Jewish people, a spiritual practice which reminds them that God intends liberation, good questions, rest, play, and celebratory participation.

Contrary to what all that seminary scolding taught me, I want us to take a collective breath around Palm Sunday and just hold it right there. Let’s not move on to everything else that is going on in Holy Week. I see Christ intentionally basking in a moment of collective effervescence. He planned for it. Biblical scholar Ched Myers calls what Jesus did political street theater.[2] He sends his disciples ahead to talk with people Jesus knows have that colt or donkey for him to ride into town on. There is a sense of humor or sarcasm to what he does. He knows he is flipping the script on Pilate’s entrance into Jerusalem on the other side of town. The people collaborate in the celebration with him by putting palms down, an ode to when Simon Maccabeus rode into a free and liberated Jerusalem.

It was Jesus’s way, right? Jesus did not point to himself. Jesus was always pointing to the people around him and lampooning Rome by referencing the consistent communal celebrations with his followers, as God’s empire. After all, he was called a glutton and a drunkard—a sense that the authorities thought his social play and celebration went too far or crossed too many boundaries. Jesus regularly sought participation and collaboration that led to a collective effervescence long after he was crucified and dead.

It is God’s way. God calls for our collaboration so that we might do on earth what is regularly done in the heavenly empire.

If this church is to make the turn and follow God’s leading, we are going to have to intentionally build in rhythmic moments that lay the groundwork for collective effervescence.

I am sure I have repeated this story but I want to share it with you again so that you might see and know what is possible. I am the facilitator for Sanctuary Rising. But it was this summer, with me on vacation (Hmmm, maybe that had something to do with it), when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement changed the check-in time for Audemio Orozco-Ramirez and Billings Sanctuary Rising responded. I believe Dan Cohn and Emma Kerr-Carpenter were pivotal in calling people in such that when Audemio arrived for his check-in, 35 people were there to accompany him. The picture of all those people, as I look at that, it is just darn glorious. I believe Immigration and Customs Enforcement was ready to deport Audemio on that day but blinked because of the engagement, the participation, the collaboration of people on that day. Even better, that group of people decided to throw a party knowing that they were not helpless, useless, or hopeless. More people showed up for the party . . . which included the celebrated Sister Helen Prejean. It was one of those moments of collective effervescence.

Now, we know that the Domination System sometimes hits back even harder after we have shown ourselves to be collectively faithful. That was true for Audemio. But how can we not look out on the incredible pilgrims who turned out yesterday all over the world to say that it was time the violence of the Domination System come to an end? It was those Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who took their trauma and said they were no longer going to be an audience but participants and collaborators in creating a brave space for transformative justice. In so doing, they also called others in, they stepped aside and gave their platform, as good allies, to people of color so they could also be collaborators and participants. Yesterday was a day of collective effervescence that called on all of us to stop waiting for the world to end, stop relying on the people in high offices to save us, and stop opting out of those moments that could very well lead to our own collective effervescence.

Yes, Christ ends up crucified at the end of this week. As Art Dewey shared with us during the Jesus Seminar, crucifixion was used by the Romans to not only to liquidate Jesus but, by creating so much trauma and so much a sense of hopelessness, that the crucifixion would liquidate his memory too. That did not stop his disciples. For Jesus had told them that it was not about him. He was not God’s Empire. They were. In their moments of collective effervescence the celebration of Palm Sunday translated into an Easter Day which confounded the Domination System and kept the memory of Jesus and his ministry alive. Pay attention to our sabbath rhythms, but on this Palm Sunday, I call us to especially pay attention to our rest, play, and celebrations. For our rest, play, and celebrations give us the energy and electricity to walk the hard road of our lives so that we will never, ever be stopped. Praise God. Amen.