Encountering the Thin Place of Palm Sunday Mark 11:1-11a, Psalm 118:19-29, Isaiah 45:21-25, Psalm 22:1-11, Mark 14:32-15:47 April 9, 2006, Year B, Palm Sunday The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Well, this is it! Today and this upcoming week reveal what is unique about the God we worship in our Christian faith. Yes, we celebrate Jesus’ birth at Christmas, however, other religions claim miraculous births and deities with divine and human parents. Yes, throughout the year we hear stories of miraculous healing, but other religions tell similar stories. Even in Jesus’ time, miracle workers healed the blind and lame. We marvel at accounts of Jesus walking on water and feeding mass crowds but that is not what grounds our faith. Today and this coming week, as Christians, we are invited to enter into what Celtic Christianity calls thin places: the most liminal places in which we are particularly aware of the permeability in the boundaries between our earthly world and God’s heavenly kingdom. It is a thin place in time. Today we condense a week’s worth of history into an hour. It is a thin place spatially. The triumphant entry, the trial, and Calvary all took place in less distance than most of us drove today. It is a thin place in reality. If we study them closely we have the chance to identify our world and ourselves in the characters of this sacred story. We begin this day known as Palm Sunday carrying crosses made from palm fronds. We, as did the crowds, greet Jesus as king. Imagine a ticker tape parade today in NYC. We shout approval. This man of God with his healing powers and his promise of equality and justice for all people was an answer to prayer. For those for whom life has been pretty miserable, here is someone to set things right. For those for whom things are going well, here’s the chance to ride the coattails of a rising superstar. We follow him to Gethsemane. Sure his secretness confuses us, but we’re drawn to the intrigue. His depression disturbs us, but Jesus has always leaned toward the extreme. We don’t mean to, our intentions are in the right place, but sleepiness overwhelms us. After all, we’ve been busy, we’ve worked hard and being distracted is easy. We arrive leading an angry crowd. We’re not really betraying him. Either he’s the Messiah dragging his feet and we’ll just help him speed up his rise to power or he’s a charlatan and we’ll expose him. Either way, our intentions are honorable. We greet him with a kiss, “Okay, Jesus, now’s your chance.” We interrogate him at the Temple, “Alright Jesus, you’re upsetting our world as we’ve got it organized. We’ve got our pious sayings and rituals that make us feel good and give us power; we don’t push too hard against the earthly kingdom; and everyone comes out okay. You’re upsetting things around here. What should we do about you?” We follow the scene from a distance, warming ourselves by the fire. We want to be faithful. Perhaps we can intervene in some way, but when it comes down to risking everything, “No, I’ve heard of him, but he’s too extreme for me.” He’s brought before us for us to determine his outcome. We encounter the poor, beaten, oppressed on a daily basis. Fortunately we seldom have to personally acknowledge them, and when we do we wonder why they don’t do more to help themselves, – you know, pull themselves up by their bootstraps the way we did. “Come on, Jesus, speak up for yourself, you can do it. I’ll check with the crowd to see what to do about you, otherwise, I guess there’s nothing I can do.” Pilate presents him to us. We’re the only one participant who has followed Jesus from the beginning – from the time we heeded the summons of angels to visit a stable in Bethlehem to see a new born babe, to witnessing miracles and being fed in the wilderness and finally through the triumphant entry, trial and crucifixion. This gathering of the poor, the rich, the ragtag, the sophisticated, the men and the women, old and young, has followed him at different times, for different reasons, but when Jesus’ plans are different than ours, our cheering stops. First comes disappointment, then intense anger. As smoothly as our celebratory Palm Sunday hymn of “Hosanna, Lord” segues into a different Palm Sunday hymn with the ominous words, “Ride on, ride on in majesty, in lowly pomp ride on to die,” that is how seamlessly the atmosphere changed. A palm-carpeted passageway leading to a royal throne, becomes instead a desolate path to a cross. We don’t just do it to Jesus, we so easily give up on people when they do not meet our expectations. Then we deprive him of what little dignity he has left: stripping him, beating him, spitting on him. We’re just following orders. No one should blame us – though an extra hard blow across his back does relieve some of our frustration. We’re just minding our own business, keeping a low profile, when suddenly we’re forced, through no choice of our own, to carry his cross. It’s heavy but since we don’t carry it too far, it’s not a big deal. If someone recognizes us and confronts us later with, “Weren’t you the one carrying that radical fool’s cross the other day?” we can respond, “Yea, but they made me do it.” Or, if they ask, “Weren’t you the one I saw helping carry the cross for that poor fellow they crucified the other day?” we can respond, “Yea, that was me. He just looked like he needed a little help.” Yes, and sometimes, we’re the women, the only ones brave enough to stay with him through the end, to agonize in his suffering, to risk even following his body to the tomb. Or, sometimes, we may not show up in person, but offer to buy his tomb so at least he’ll have a decent burial place. Finally, there is a thin place in the suffering itself. You see, it is the suffering that separates Christianity from all other religions. No other major world religion claims a god who suffers. But it is not just suffering, not even the suffering of Jesus, that makes this week holy or a thin place. Rather, it is holy because of the inexplicable and immeasurable love that prompted that suffering. It is a suffering that emanates from love – a love that cannot exist without suffering. The thin place this passion story invites us is the awareness that despite all the roles we have taken in the story, God loves us enough to suffer. We may want a God who promises us we will not suffer, but it is not the God we have. Instead, we have a God who loves us enough to suffer for and with us, to suffer for and with us despite our anger that God is not who we want God to be, to suffer for and with us when we turn and walk away, to suffer for and with us even when God’s suffering is at our own hands. If we will enter into this thin place, if we will open our eyes and hearts to the fact that we worship a God who does suffer, we encounter God in two profoundly liminal ways. First, in our own suffering, we find the profound awareness that in our deepest suffering – whether past or present suffering or suffering that is yet to come – that this God is capable of suffering with and for us and loves us enough to be present in our suffering. Second, this awareness will open our eyes to suffering around us and finding the face of God in the suffering of others. This thin place invites us to open ourselves to God’s genuine love to empower us, even to transform us. Today, Easter is only a myth. As we make our journey home, we will be left with a dead Jesus in a tomb. There's no Easter in the lessons today. Nor will there be all week. Unless we can walk these paths, leaving our comfort zone, our self-satisfaction, stepping into that thin place, daring to walk beyond safety into the darkness of evil and death, carrying Jesus to the tomb, we will not even begin to grasp the power of the Resurrection.