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.
[1] “What is collective
effervescence,” wiseGeek, http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-collective-effervescence.htm#didyouknowout..
[2] Ched Meyers, “PALM
SUNDAY AS SUBVERSIVE STREET THEATRE: SIXTH SUNDAY IN LENT (MK 11:1-11),” RadicalDiscipleship,
March 26, 2016, https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2015/03/26/palm-sunday-as-subversive-street-theatre-sixth-sunday-in-lent-mk-111-11/.
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