The View from Above
Sermon preached by Rev. Patricia Farris
April 9, 2006

Oh, we get to wave our palms again! Wow! What a day!

You know, I’ll share with you that we had a big discussion in staff again this year about when in the service to distribute the palms. There’s the “late in the service” camp and the “right-up-front” group. The later-is-better folks argue that it’s just too unseemly and uncontrollable to give children and crazy adults something to wave around and poke with all through the worship service. The right-up-front folks, who won out again, as you can see, say: Great! We only get to do this once a year. Let’s go wild!

There you have it. It’s a debate surely as deeply felt as that of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., but such is the life of the people of God. So I invite you to join in the fun today, but if you’re not so comfortable with all this frivolity in church, just put your palm down in the pew or hand it to someone else and console yourself with knowing that it won’t come ‘round again for another whole year! And if you’re a closet waver at heart, do it with gusto today, but please try and not poke your neighbor in the eye and we should all be fine!

Palm Sunday launches into Holy Week each year. This is it. It hasn’t felt a whole lot like Spring yet this year and some folks are saying that it seems like Christmas was just yesterday, but here we are, ready or not! The most special week of the year. A week with its own name: Holy Week. The week we walk with Jesus through all the events which lead up to his eventual betrayal and arrest and crucifixion and on to that astonishing, earth-shattering, life-changing, tomb-opening Easter morn. Holy Week begins today.

Many of you know already that it’s about Jesus’ triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem, hailed as a King by crowds thronging the roads and waving branches to greet him as they would any royalty, though I assure you, these folks hadn’t seen any real royalty go by for a very long time. But they knew what to do when the moment came. Thousands of them, we imagine, whooping and hollering, throwing their caps into the air and their cloaks along the ground, madly waving those branches to salute their King. Hosanna! Hosanna! Which means: “Save, we pray!” People bursting with joy and relief, with a sense of tremendous expectation and fulfillment. What day! What a parade! It just doesn’t get much better than this. (continued...)

"The View from Above" by Rev. Patricia Farris, April 9, 2006

If you’ve been to church before or if you know the whole story, you know that if this were a movie, right about now you’d start to hear some pretty spooky music in the background. Creepy music. The kind that puts a knot in your stomach and causes you to hold your breath even before you know for sure what’s going to happen. You know it’s bad and you know it’s coming. In the movies, it could be a shark no one has spotted yet or a giant meteor about to hit the earth or an axe murderer in the closet. You don’t know what it is yet, but you’re starting to get scared.

Because for Jesus, as we know, long before he gets to the other side of the grave on Easter morning, a whole lifetime is going to happen in these seven days. Oh sure, he’s gonna know joy with the crowds, intimate fellowship with his closest friends and profound prayer with God during this Holy Week. But he’s also going to experience betrayal by one who knows him well, confrontation with the authorities, arrest, and the unspeakable agony of death on the cross, all part of this Holy Week.

It’s very hard to go through all that with him, though that is exactly what this week is designed to cause us to do. Quite frankly, most of us much prefer to fast-forward from the Palm Sunday parade to the Easter parade, leaping from one mountaintop experience to another, as if, by somehow short-circuiting the process, we can extract the essence of our faith and still avoid the pain and the sorrow of it all.

I suppose it’s because it’s how we’d like our life to be, or how we think it ought to be, one happy moment after another. I always try to get at this in premarital counseling, though I never feel that I accomplish it very well. Couples planning their weddings are usually aglow with happy thoughts and expectations. About the best I can do is to try and encourage them to build a strong relationship so that they will be able to withstand and work through whatever comes their way between the moment of their “I do’s” and their final resting place. Because none of us knows in advance what that may be, thank God, but we know that it will come.

At some point in every life, in every marriage, in every family, in every relationship, that ominous, scary music will start to play. Most all of us, at some point or other, will experience some form of pure hell — death, illness, betrayal, hardship, failure. In some form, in some way, it will come to us all and we will need a strong foundation of love and trust and prayer and a good circle of friends and loving family and a supportive congregation and caring neighbors and patience and courage, beyond what we could ever have thought ourselves capable of.

We don’t live on the mountaintop all the time. One avid mountain climber put it this way: “I grew up climbing mountains. Mountains are beautiful and (continued...)

"The View from Above" by Rev. Patricia Farris, April 9, 2006

challenging, majestic and all powerful. They also have lessons to teach us: lessons about life and how to live it. Every mountain has a surprise around the corner, an obstacle in the path, or a storm brewing minutes away. During every climb, you’ll find yourself teetering on a ledge, knowing you could fall, and then rounding the bend and seeing a pristine light blue mountain lake nestled in the cradling arms of a snow-capped peak. You may struggle to take one step at a time, and then be inspired by a mountain goat teetering on the ledge above you. Mountain climbing taught me how to deal with the unexpected.”

“But, LIFE taught me this: the hardest mountains we climb are the ones we can’t see. Just when we think we have life figured out and we know where we are going, and how to get there…something changes: we lose a job, a loved one, our health, a dream, a goal. There is a mountain in the way.”

This Holy Week starts and ends with a mountaintop experience, each an incredible high. Not because we live up there, but because we don’t. Everything that happens between the two mountains is what gives us life and hope. God incarnate in Christ Jesus experiences the complexity of human relationships, the cost of challenging the powers that be, the terror of arrest and of suffering, the total transformation in the experience of dying. God in Christ Jesus experiences it all — for our sake and for our salvation.

As the writer Kathleen Norris has written: the incarnation “is the place where hope contends with fear.”

With Jesus, hope goes down into the city, down into the valley, through the valley of the shadow of death. Hope goes down all the way to hell itself. The oldest version of the Apostles’ Creed reads: “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord: who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.”

Between the mountaintops of his birth and his ascension, we Christians through the ages have testified to everything that happens in between, where hope contends with fear. God in Christ suffered and was crucified, dead and buried and descended into hell. To transform it all. To redeem it all. To sanctify it all.

A French climber/poet who died just before the end of WWII wrote: “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” (continued...)

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