Sermon

March 20, 2005

A Sermon Preached on Palm Sunday, March 20, 2005, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

The Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton may be more remembered for an incident in his life rather than the poetry he wrote. It seems that as he was trying to read the inscription on a headstone in a cemetery, he absentmindedly stepped back and fell into a newly dug grave. The friend who was with him that day watched him struggle out of the hole and quipped that he had witnessed the resurrection of a genius. Chatterton himself put a darker spin on the event, saying, “I have been at war with the grave for some time, and I find it not so easy to vanquish as I imagined. We can find asylum to hide from every creditor but that.”

And that, for one thing, is what the progression of Palm Sunday is all about. One moment we are standing at the side of the road in Jerusalem , full of hope, shouting with the crowds, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” The next moment we are standing on a hillside watching the one we proclaimed as our hero, dying a slow and embarrassing death. Why this progression?

Perhaps this progression from waving palms to standing on a darkened hillside is a way of taking us beyond an easy hope to a deeper one. Perhaps something profound happens to us when our easy hopes are dashed and we come face to face with our most relentless creditor, death. A colleague in New York who serves a congregation that was ravaged in the eighties by the AIDS epidemic tells about her encounter with the father of one of her parishioners who died in that epidemic. The man had not known that his son was gay or that he was sick until he got word that the boy was in the hospital, dying. He flew out to New York and stayed with him in his hospital room, bathing him, comforting him as best he could and finally holding him in his arms while he died. Then he flew home to Minnesota . About a year later he sent back to his son’s congregation a box full of wooden crucifixes. The note in the box said that he had carved the crucifixes in the days after his son died, alone in his garage, sometimes in the middle of the night. He said that in those days, it was the cross alone that had been the only thing that he could cling to in faith. It was the only thing that had given him hope. So he carved them, one by one, in the hope that the members of the church all would wear them as a sign of hope.

Why this progression? Because Jesus was human. Death is an inevitable part of the Incarnation. This is what we all face in the end, and Jesus, being human, goes where we all will go. Facing this truth takes away the facile optimism that we will somehow avoid death and leads us to a deeper truth: that through it all God has something richer in store for us than we can imagine. The cross forces us to let go of unimportant hopes and lets us focus on something real.

In his poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry’s mad farmer warns against the love of the “quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay,” a life which makes one “afraid to know your neighbors and to die.” Instead the mad farmer challenges us with the words, “Every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world.” And then finally: “Practice resurrection.” Perhaps that’s why we must encounter the grave today. Perhaps that’s why we must go from waving palms to witnessing the cross. Only then can we see how important it is to love the Lord, to love the world and to practice resurrection. AMEN