Palm Sunday

Processions are a particularly interesting human phenomenon. Our parades tell us much about ourselves. A procession’s line up and the particular order of the participants reveals our values as a society. Any given parade has a line up. Where you ride in the parade is important. Be it an inaugural parade, a homecoming parade, a Martin Luther King day parade, a Mardi Gras parade, a graduation day celebration, a bride and her bridesmaids, a coronation or a funeral. We humans love to parade and preen.

We have a parade every Sunday in our church. Sometimes they are small and understated. Other times they are grand. It is something we do when we gather to worship. The processional piece of our worship tells us much about our theology as a church. The cross processes first, the clergy process last. The place of honor, the front of the line, is announced with a symbol of execution. The place of lowest esteem, the place of the servants, is carried by the clergy, in ranking order, with the celebrant of the Eucharistic feast as the last member of the parade. Who we are and what we proclaim about living our faith lives is found in our weekly parade. We follow a cross carried by a young person, flanked by two other young people carrying lights, followed by heralds singing music, followed by servitude ministers carrying our bible, and lastly the one we call the celebrant enters the space to lead and unite us in one voice in a ritualized celebration.If you stop to think about it, our weekly church procession is an odd thing. Look at the first thing in the parade, the cross. What an odd assignment we give to our youngest church members. On most Sundays we ask the youngest ones among us, the people at the beginning of their lives, to proudly carry a symbol of the end of their lives. What does that say about us? The cross is an odd symbol. We carry it like a victory flag. We hang it up and wear it around our necks, but it is not a beautiful thing. The cross is a deadly thing and not a symbol of immortality but of our common mortality. In our procession we show our whole lives in one act, namely, our youth, which is fleeting, carrying a certainty of our living and the reality of our dying. It serves as a reminder of our existence, and the sad and grieving nature of being human. We parade our youth along with our death. We make an initial proclamation in our worship together. The cross is real and the procession of living leads to a dying. That is a truth we cannot escape.

Yet, if you push on that a little further, the cross is a rich symbol of our faith and defining piece of what we proclaim. What if we looked at our church procession as the opposite of our living? What if the procession spoke of what happens after you die? What if the procession were the inverse of existence? What if this parade says to us, “What is on the other side of the cross”? We are people who proclaim the other side of the cross and what we celebrate is the after death. What we do each Sunday is proclaim a feast, a feast where all are welcome and all are worthy and all can participate. The parade signifies life and death and life again. We live and we die and live. This is something worth a celebration, something worthy enough for our singing of hymns, something profound that we need to proclaim as good news, something we ordain people to lead. Our parade, our procession, occurs in the midst of the realities we all face. It is an expression of our belief that our living and our dying are not to be feared. The procession of life winds its way through the years and we follow it along. It is what we do. At times we carry the cross, at times we sing the songs, at times we lead, and at times we follow. The whole time is spent in procession, in living, living past the cross as Jesus did. The procession of Palm Sunday leads us into a Holy Week. Over the six days we will walk through the best and worst that human beings have to offer. Each year we spend a week of our lives in holy contemplation about ourselves and see how ugly we can be, how unfortunately we can behave. In a week’s time we see how we can oppress and occupy and destroy. Each day in this holy week we process in front of the cross and each day we will see ourselves and our failures on display. By Thursday we will see how we are called into the service of each other and how the servant’s heart is the highest virtue. By Friday we will all be on the cross and our pain and suffering on display for all to see. By Saturday we will begin to emerge on the other side of the cross through the cross of our living into the cross of our dying and into the crossroads of a resurrection. This is our week to process as Jesus did, in a parade that proclaims who and what we are as followers of Jesus Christ.

The way is set. The path is clear. The days ahead will be holy because we will walk them together as a holy people of God. Afraid, yet faithful. Ashamed, yet redeemed. Anointed and called out. Amazed and filled with awe. The power of God revealed in seven days. Creation and revelation combined in a parade of living, dying and rising. Amen.