A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on April 1, 2007, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

            One Sunday morning about a month after I was ordained to the priesthood, I broke the bread at the Eucharist and instead of announcing, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” I loudly proclaimed: “Christ our sackover is past for us.” This mistake so unnerved me that I had to read the line from the prayer book with great care whenever I said it for years afterward.  This kind of verbal error is called a “Spoonerism,” named after a professor Spooner who by all reports was absolutely brilliant, but whose tongue slipped in some very funny ways.  He is said to have been ushering in church one morning when he spied a woman sitting in the wrong place.  Spooner’s classic response to her was “Madam, you are occupewing the wrong pie. May I sew you to another sheet?”  Spoonerisms are a great source of mirth and delight—except for those of us who commit them loudly and publicly.  Then they just make you feel like a fool.

            And here on April Fools Day when it is also Palm Sunday, it seems to be appropriate to talk a little about feeling like a fool.  Sometimes there are worse things than being a fool.  And sometimes being a fool is a holy thing.

            Take the Gospel and the liturgy for this day, for instance.  It doesn’t quite add up.  We start the day with taking fronds of palm in our hands—floppy, ridiculous things themselves.  And then we march around in some public space to a hymn nobody can quite keep up with.  We are taking ourselves back to ancient Jerusalem to the day Jesus rode into town as a conquering hero.  And that, too, is somewhat foolish thing. Everyone knows that kings ride into town on white horses or driving chariots, wearing rich clothes or suits of armor.  But here comes Jesus, riding on a donkey. As if that were not foolish enough, the mood soon turns ugly.  Now we make fools of ourselves again, and we--the same people who were shouting “hosanna” a moment ago--take part in an impromptu play and shout “crucify him!”  Whose side are we on anyway?  Finally the king we all proclaimed at the start of the service is strung up on a cross to die like a criminal.  What kind of King is this?  What kind of celebration is this?  Doesn’t it make fools of us all?

            The answer, of course, is that the Christian life bears out the truth of St. Paul ’s saying that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” In the way of the world, much of what we do is foolish.  We claim that the most powerful One laid down his life for us—not because we are so good, but because he loved us in our foolishness.  We claim that the greatest power in the world is sacrificial love.  We claim that love is stronger even than death.  And acting on those claims we do a lot of foolish things.  We tolerate leaky roofs and water stains on our walls even while we give our time and money to house the homeless.  We spend our precious time in the holiest week of the year not out buying fancy clothes but putting on a party for kids with AIDS.  We give our space away to addicts and alcoholics in 12-step programs. We recommend that people work on their personal growth in psychotherapy instead of pretending that there’s nothing out of whack in their lives. We encourage people to build houses for the poor instead of building mansions for themselves.  We ask people to spend time with the sick and lonely—people who can do nothing to further their careers.  When the rest of the world seems enthralled with military might, we ask people to pray for peace.  In the world of wealth and power, this Christian enterprise just seems weak…and, well…foolish. And sometimes we feel foolish while we do these things. And yet the Gospel of Palm Sunday proclaims that sometimes you just need to go ahead and feel foolish—when what you are doing is the right thing.

            The joke, I believe, is on the world that finds us odd. In Russia , the Orthodox Church celebrates the equivalent of April Fool’s Day on the Monday after Easter.  People tell jokes, recall colossal slips of the tongue and play tricks on each other as a way of reminding themselves that the Resurrection is a phenomenal joke played on the Devil.  Just when the forces of darkness and death think that they’ve won, God turns the tables and it turns out that love—even and especially sacrificial love—IS stronger than death.  It turns out that the “king” who rides into town on a donkey and gets nailed to a cross…really IS the King. It turns out that “faith, hope and charity” DO abide…and that the greatest of these IS charity. It is not a bad thing to feel like a fool when you are doing something good.  Being God’s fool is a holy thing.

                                                                     AMEN