Weekly Sermons

Palm Sunday is fun, isn’t it?  The parades, the palms that you can make into palm crosses if you are crafty, the familiar boisterous songs.  Jesus has arrived in the Holy City of Jerusalem and it can feel like we’ve arrived, too.  Especially if we only tune in for the palms and then take a break until Easter Sunday.  But if we are paying attention to the whole sweep of Holy Week, Palm Sunday is actually a false summit.  Do you know what I mean by false summit?  

When the kids were little we lived in Colorado Springs, which sits just at the base of Pikes Peak.  The city is planted at 7000 feet above sea level, but Pikes Peak is 14,000 feet above sea level, and there is a cog railway that will take tourists up to the top.  At some point they upgraded the railway and laid down a different railroad bed.  But the locals began to use the old rail bed as a hiking trail.  It climbed 2,000 feet in the span of less than a mile.  Portions of it have a 68% grade.  It was simply called “The Incline.”  Gretchen and I decided that before we left Colorado, we needed to try to hike The Incline, so one day when Edith got on the bus to go to 1st grade, we strapped little Alice into a baby backpack and started trudging up the mountain.  No big deal, we thought.  We’ve been hiking a lot since we moved to Colorado.  How hard could this be?  In fact, it looked like you could see the top from the bottom and it wasn’t that far.  Up and up we went, making sure to drink water and take breaks as we went.  We were almost there… until we weren’t.  We got to what looked like it was the top, but it wasn’t the top.  It turned out we were only halfway there.  False summit.

Palm Sunday is the false summit of Lent.  We have gotten almost all the way through.  You can almost taste that chocolate that you gave up.  Only one more week to go!  And it feels like time to celebrate.  But in reality, we’re only halfway there.  In fact there is a dark valley that we have to traverse before we arrive at the peak. Today Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey to the adulation of the crowds, with rejoicing, shouting and singing.  Everyone is in high spirits as people flooded into Jerusalem from all over for the Passover celebration.  And by the end of the week, of course, we find that the authorities have indeed contrived to arrest him and silence him once and for all.  Those who cheered and sang and thumbed their noses at the powers that be in one moment betrayed Jesus, informed on him, denied knowing him, actively called for his death, or quietly faded into the background in the next moment.  It’s a position we find ourselves in all too frequently.  We are happy, even ecstatic, to praise God and give the glory to Jesus Christ in the safe confines of this sanctuary where we are surrounded by others who believe as we do.  We can challenge the empires of our day, the social and moral decay that we see around us from the comfort of a pew.  But when we are scattered and confronted with the injustices and inhumanities of daily life, too often we betray, deny, collaborate, fail to pay attention, and fall silent.

These are the realities with which we must contend during Holy Week.  The jubilant highs and the somber lows.  This week, we are also drawing this sermon series on the Spiritual Disciplines of the Christian faith to a close, I want to focus on two disciplines that seem to mirror these Holy Week peaks and valleys – song and silence.

At the beginning of Lent, when we gathered for Ash Wednesday, I used Barbara Brown Taylor’s description of the spiritual disciplines as ways of embodying our faith.  Or to use her phrase exactly, “to know more God in our bodies.  Not more ABOUT God.  More God.”  Spiritual disciplines can be understood as pathways by which we commune with the divine.  

I think we can all understand how that works with song.  Each of us has certain music that transports us to a different space emotionally and spiritually.  Music helps us tap into our feelings in a different way.  It activates a different part of our brain and our spirit.  It has a different power.  And when we use music in our conversation with God, whether through the hymns, through choral singing, by singing along with Christian radio in the car, or soloing in the shower, it helps us express ourselves more fully to God.  And it helps open our spirits to receive the Holy Spirit.  

I’ve had a fraught relationship with singing myself.  I grew up singing the hymns in church with a free spirit.  But somewhere along the way, someone made me feel self-conscious about my voice and I stopped singing out, at least in public.  I closed off my voice, and in so doing, I closed off a part of my spirit.  It took me many years to get over that.  I took singing lessons when I first started in ministry so that I would not feel so self-conscious about it standing in front of a congregation.  And I’ve been taking singing lessons for the last 6 months or so, too.  As I’ve improved, I notice that I focus less on the quality of my offering to God and more on the God to whom I’m offering it.

I’m really excited that we are now able to consider re-starting a choir here at the church.  Aaron Wade, who filled in a few weeks ago on the piano, is willing to lead the choir to sing in worship once a month to start.  We’re going to gather anyone who’s interested after worship one Sunday in April.  Let me know after the service if that’s a way you want to contribute to our worship.  Plus today we’re going to try out adding music to our Communion liturgy.  All of the parts where you would normally respond in unison, we’re going to SING in unison.  There’s a beautiful musical setting by Mark Miller that we’re going to use.  Elaine and Gretchen are going to lead us through it.  I think this will enhance our worship markedly.

On the other end of the spectrum is the spiritual discipline of silence or contemplation.  I love the Scripture from 1st Kings that we heard this morning, where the prophet Elijah is standing on the mountain waiting for the Lord to pass by and it says there was a strong wind, but the Lord was not in the wind.  Then there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  Then there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And finally the sound of sheer silence.  That’s where Elijah was able to encounter the Lord.

We all have a relationship with silence, whether we’ve thought about it or not.  Some of us crave it, especially if our days are usually filled with noise and commotion.  (I’m looking at you, mothers of young children!)  We just want a moment of peace.  Others of us are VERY uncomfortable with silence.  Whenever there is a gap in the conversation, we want to fill it.  We have to keep a busy schedule, because if we didn’t we might have to deal with unwelcome thoughts or memories or feelings.  Or maybe it’s just how we’re wired.  

Silence, though, when we practice it as a form of prayer and connection with God, can help us tune in to God’s will for our lives.  

It certainly played a key role for Jesus in the week leading up to his crucifixion, death, and resurrection.  Time and time again, we see Jesus in the gospels taking time away from the crowds and the disciples to go into solitude and pray.  In his final week, as they are in the midst of Passover preparations and heated debates among the disciples, he again goes into prayer mode in the Garden of Gethsemane.  In this quiet time, Jesus asks God that, if possible, could he be spared the suffering that is to come but then turns it back over to God, “yet not what I want, but what you want” he says. It is in creating the space and silence to listen for God’s will that Jesus hears and finds it.  When he goes before the chief priests and Pilate, he is able to maintain his silence and equanimity in the face of their condemnations.  He is able to stay silent so that the will of God might be made manifest.  In order to truly listen, we must practice being quiet.  And so we I invite you this week to follow Jesus and enter into silence periodically as we journey with him to the cross, the tomb, and into new life.

Today, friends, let us sing our hearts out.  And this week, let us find time for silence to truly listen for God’s voice.  Both are part of a balanced spiritual diet.  They can help us grow closer to Jesus and grow in our discipleship.  And let us praise the God who meets us in the highs AND the lows, the song AND the silence, the palms AND the passion.  AMEN.