Palm Sunday - Year C (RCL) 2010

This Palm Sunday sermon was written and delivered by The Rev. Ken Arnold, Deacon at St. Stephen's.

Sermon
Sunday of the Passion, March 28, 2010
St Stephen’s
Luke 23:1-49

Who is condemned in the Passion? Who dies on the cross? Jesus of Nazareth? Or Ken of Portland?

The answer in a few minutes.
Many of us have watched as someone we love has died, perhaps slowly and painfully, although it is not all that common in our culture, to be with someone as they are dying. We can watch movie and television violence, seemingly without pain, but we avoid the realities of suffering and death. Even in events like the earthquake in Haiti, where the agony is dressed up for us in newscasts meant to entertain even while they appall.

To be with the dying is to begin to understand suffering as a condition of life itself. And to be with the dying is to begin to be with ourselves, who we really are.

My father had Parkinson’s Disease, which as you know is a debilitating and cruel condition. He was a physically active man for whom this disease was especially galling. He said once, immobilized in his wheelchair, that “it wasn’t supposed to be like this.” He suffered the last few years of his life, as did my mother who cared for him. I was there on occasion to help, washing him, cleaning up after him in the bathroom, feeding him. When he died, I think he was grateful to be done with the suffering. I think I would have been. I know my mother was. Her back and knees hurt, she had half-slept with her mind attentive to what he might need in the other room. She was exhausted.

How is the death of my father different from the suffering and death of Jesus?
It isn’t. And, no, my father was not the Messiah--far from it. We had a difficult relationship. He once threatened to run me over if I blocked the entrance to the Pentagon, where he worked, during a protest against the Viet Nam War. He might have done it.

Were we reconciled in the end? Yes, to some extent. When I’m in Virginia, I visit his grave and play my flute for him. It’s the best I can do. It is good enough. I am a witness.

The question I want to raise for you today is: How does the Passion--this story of Jesus’s suffering and death--help us live our own lives? Probably not the question you were expecting. Never mind the thorny questions of how his death redeems humans or why or if God lets Jesus suffer and die. Never mind the theology of atonement or whatever explanations the church has devised to explain this event.

The purpose of the Gospel, in whatever version, is to show us how to live in harmony with the reality we call God. And that is what it means to be redeemed. It means to become our self and live in freedom. The life of Jesus is the story of the spirit’s arduous journey toward oneness with all that is. We suffer in this journey, as Jesus did; the work is hard, the obstacles many.

But this Gospel, Luke’s, demonstrates that God is faithful to humanity--to everyone, including those thought to be outcasts and sinners. God journeys with Jesus from the beginning of his life to the end. And beyond.

It is the same with us. That is the good news.
God-with-us, however, does not absolve us of responsibility for our own lives and the lives of others. We have work to do and not much time in which to do it.

The curious thing is that everyone suffers with Jesus: Pilate, Herod, Mary, Judas, Peter, Sam, Dennis, Joyce, Molly....Because, you see, we inhabit a single body in which the suffering of one affects all. The problem is that we often deny that connectedness. The church refers to this as the Body of Christ--and that’s certainly one way to say it. But it’s too limited. The body is actually all that is, everything. It is the cosmic body, which is also the body of God. Everything is one consciousness.

We cannot actually escape this fact, although we can and do deny it, by focusing obsessively on the pursuit of our individual happiness, and on the pursuit of a pain free life. The pursuit of happiness is the bondage Jesus died to free us from. His life was not about the pursuit of happiness; it was about the pursuit of his own truth in the Cosmic Body of God--and no one can find that without suffering and dying.

The crumbling society in which we live is being consumed by an obsession with happiness, with an idea of freedom that is based on what’s actually an alternate reality. This alternate reality insists that individuals can escape suffering if they make enough money or have enough toys. This alternate reality insists that those who are not wealthy cannot be happy and are condemned by their own inadequacies to suffer. This alternate reality is demonic. It is the reality of a society possessed.

What stands in the way of our living in freedom, either as individuals or as a society?
We do--the false self that protects us from the reality we call God. The false self is the ego, the crybaby who wonders why God allows suffering. Why me? is the cry that prevents our living our lives in freedom and grace. The more relevant question is, Why not me? What makes me think I am exempt from the suffering of my father? He thought it was not supposed to be that way--but it is. That is exactly how it is. In refusing to accept the reality of our certain death, we hide behind a mask that prevents our entering into the kingdom of freedom announced by Jesus. That’s the Kingdom of God--the Kingdom of Freedom. Jesus’s primary message is: Take off your mask. Stop hiding. Stop kidding yourself. You really are going to die and before you do you should figure out who you are. Because you don’t get another chance to do it.

Jesus dying is an emblem of our own life purpose, as he taught, which is to die to self. It is the same with this parish. We must die to self, to the illusions of who we are. It is the same with me, with each of you. The false self is what crucifies Jesus--revealed in its fear, self-importance, fantasy, secrecy, politics, lying, despair. Jesus was not killed by the Romans or the Jews but by the forces of denial. Around Jesus were many who kept looking for the solution to this man’s enigmatic life. As Jesus himself asked, Who do you say I am? Which is--who do you say you are? When you strip away your false assumptions, your protective coloring, who is left? Once you know that, you know Jesus.

Several times in this Gospel reading today the verb “to see” shows up. Seeing is an important concept here. What do we see when we look at Jesus in this story? Certainly we see his agony and death. We see the story in a vivid and disturbing way. We are meant to be disturbed. We are meant to be changed in seeing it. We cannot turn away from these events. They rivet us over and over, year after year. Why?

Because they are events in our own lives. If we turn away, we are denying our own reality. If we turn away as a society, as a parish, as individuals, we are denying the Cosmic Reality we know as God. God has not turned away. God is walking the same road Jesus is walking and you and I are walking.

At the end of the Gospel, we read that “his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.”
Another translation, The Message (which is somewhat more contemporary), says that these people “who knew Jesus well”--more than just acquaintances--”stood at a respectful distance and kept vigil.”

They knew him well. They were intimate with him. They knew the one who was dying to self. They too were being called to die to self. And in keeping vigil that is what they were doing. Letting go the fear and denial and keeping vigil, as we do when we wish to witness to what has happened.

Some years ago in New York, as many of you know, I was the on-call chaplain at St. Luke’s Hospital up next to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The hospital had a tradition of calling a chaplain after someone died. On occasion I was called to the hospital during the night. It seemed odd to be going up Broadway to visit a dead body.

I recall one visit in particular. It was about 3 AM when I was called. I dressed. Couldn’t find a taxi. Walked ten blocks. The nurse was glad to see me because there was no one else around. She was alone. She showed me to the room. The dead man was a transient, perhaps 70 when he died. Emaciated. He was not yet wrapped and so I was with the recognizable body of this unknown man. I would recognize him today if I saw him. I prayed for him, for the repose of his soul, as we do. On his forehead, I made the mark of the cross with holy oil. The nurse thanked me. I went home and back to sleep. The next day I went to work as usual.

What was I doing? I was keeping watch. Keeping vigil. I was honoring the dead man who was also me, who was also Jesus. The women who kept vigil at the cross and went to the tomb to keep vigil make the resurrection possible. If we are not present to suffering and death, if we do not watch, God remains silent. Jesus remains in the tomb.

In keeping watch, we die to our self, to ego. My ego self that night would have preferred to stay in bed. No one would know if I did not go--except the nurse, who probably would have understood. Certainly the dead man would not know. But I went, leaving my self--my ego, my self that hates suffering--behind.

We might ask if Jesus lacked the problem of ego what we experience as a barrier to our true selves. Well, look back at this morning’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It is a perfect example of what we all imagine for ourselves--the triumph of ego, adulation, praise, a perfect life. Jesus too has to shed the ego that wishes to be admired. He too leaves the ego self that does not want to suffer--remember his prayer that the cup be taken from him--he needs to leave it in order to grow into the self he is called to be.

Not one of the apostles, not seen to be important, Mary Magdalene keeps vigil. She is has no ego. She is present at the cross and at the resurrection; she has also anointed Jesus in Bethany. Hers is the real self, not the false; she stays with the journey, with Jesus. It is also our journey. She is the one we should emulate.

Suffering is part of the journey but our suffering is the result of not seeing the world for what it is and clinging to our illusions. It’s not suffering itself but our reaction to it that matters. What do we do with the inevitable suffering of our lives and the lives of others?

Keep vigil. Witness. Be present. The self that is not afraid of reality stands with reality, as God stands with us in our suffering, which God shares. That is what we learn in this Passion, that God shares our suffering and is with us. And God was with Jesus. And we, like Jesus, can awaken to our true self, the one without a mask, the self that can love as Mary Magdalene loves in keeping watch. The self that can love selflessly, as Jesus does.

Oh, the answer to the question, Who dies on the cross, is, of course, Ken of Portland. And Dennis of Portland. And Molly of Portland. And and and. And St. Stephen’s of Portland.

Thanks be to God.