Sermon preached on Palm Sunday, April 4, 2004 by Benjamin Wooten Van Dyne
Easter provides a lasting victory, because the sorrow of death has carved in us a greater space for joy. But Palm Sunday is shallower. It is the same exultation without so deep a spring. It is a wry and superficial victory—witness the King who rides in on an ass.
The Passion is the vehicle through which the giddiness of Palm Sunday is transformed into the authentic victory of Easter. So it is with each of us: our joy must be tempered in sadness. We each go through this cycle of Palms, Passion, and Resurrection—of premature gratification, despondency, and redemption.
If I were to reduce my whole sermon to one sentence, it would be this: Don’t neglect the suffering, the Passion of your salvation drama. When darkness comes we must be careful to confront its whole depth, or the redemptive delight that follows will be equally shallow.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We avoid acknowledging the reality of death. When my mother died in October of metastatic lung cancer, I think I startled some people when I informed them that she had died. Her death was not unexpected, though the diagnosis was. No—what seemed to surprise people is that I came at it directly. She hadn’t “passed away,” or “passed on,” or “gone to meet her maker.” She hadn’t “bitten the dust,” or “bought the farm,” or even “shuffled off this mortal coil.” I didn’t like those phrases because they danced about the reality of it, which is that she was dead, wholly dead, and was not returning.
There is a certain peace that comes with this admission. “It may suck,” I was thinking, “but at least it’s true.”
To say that life and death or joy and sorrow, are two sides of the same coin has become a staple of the fortune-cookie-writing industry. I’m not sure that’s the best metaphor. Death is not merely the opposite side of life; it is the instrument of claiming an authentic and grateful life. The darkness within us is a necessary gauntlet.
To say that life is the cause of death isn’t just the cynic’s metaphysic, it’s a gentle reminder that we are, or should be, confronting every day the reality of our own finitude. In some Buddhist monasteries, when one of their own dies, the monks meditate over the dead body, contemplating its return to dust, and from this their own transience.
In his book Cultivating the Mind of Love, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who was exiled from Vietnam for his work toward peace, wrote: “The Buddha implored us not just to talk about impermanence, but to use it as an instrument to help us penetrate deeply into reality and obtain liberating insight. We may be tempted to say that because things are impermanent, there is suffering. But the Buddha encouraged us to look again. Without impermanence, life is not possible.”
Of course, we don’t always perceive that deeply. We see a dark heart—in ourselves, perhaps, or even in the universe itself—and we ignore it, or run from it. Or we try to perceive deeply, but see nothing new, and lose patience.
More than anything, we drown our sorrow. It’s a common expression—to drown one’s sorrow—but an insightful one, for sorrow is alive and can be suffocated.
When it comes to avoiding what we ought to be doing, human creativity is unbounded. The most common ways to flee, are alcohol, sex, drugs, and probably work—but just about anything can become an idol if it permits us to avoid delving into our vital selves at defining times.
There’s the story of the old man who made cleaning his method of avoiding dark realities. After having had some tests, he got a call from the doctor, who said, “You have terminal brain cancer. You’re dying.” To which the man responded: “I’m not dying; I’m mopping the floor.”
Some people, like that man, try to ignore death and suffering, but ultimately this is impossible. A dog cannot run from its own tail forever. Eventually, darkness will bubble up to be dealt with or further pushed aside—to be used, or not.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
When finally we do confront darkness, we want to be out on the other side as quickly as possible. We don’t always have the patience to allow its revelations to make themselves known. Because it’s faster and it seems to work, we want to stop dwelling on death and dwell on life instead. We want to be done with crucifixion and move on to Easter as quickly as possible. We want to stop thinking about our impermanence and start asking: If we’re not permanent, what is? What are we called to do and to be, that will transcend our disappearance into dust?
These are important questions, and we owe them answers. But how we respond to these questions will be greatly affected by how we responded to death. Did you avoid it? Or did you get within it, and make it your own?
We are impatient. We spend our moments looking forward to the future, rather than looking deeply into the present and trusting that the future will come. This is especially true when the present is painful and the future bears the promise of reprieve. But hope becomes an idol if it is a replacement for feeling anguish, rather than a result of it. Hope cannot exist without despair.
Our patience with the painful present, then, is the midwife of our hope. We must wait three days for the Resurrection. But patience is a demanding virtue, especially in a culture like ours where gratification must be quick and constant. It’s tempting to react to a feeling of spiritual lethargy by regressing to avoidance through drugs, alcohol, sex, cleaning, or any number of other things, or by claiming a quick but illusory redemption.
The church can be an unwitting coconspirator in this last idolatry. It’s easy to drown one’s true and vulnerable self in the hope of salvation. A church should comfort the afflicted, but it can’t do that unless it affirms the reality of the affliction. If it refuses to focus its attention on that which matters most, even church becomes an idol—a blinding distraction from what we really need to see.
In the fourth grade, I went to a summer camp where we were never allowed to use flashlights. After dark, we waited for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. In a few minutes, we’d get our “night-vision,” which let us see more clearly with what moon- and starlight there was—in fact, we saw more clearly with this night-vision than we ever could have if we’d had flashlights. But if anyone ever turned on a light, or lit a match, our night-vision would be ruined and we wouldn’t be able to see anything once the light was gone.
So it is with the night of our lives. If we are impatient, and turn on a light, we lose our night-vision, and while we can see, what we see is false. It is night made into something it is not. Given time, and patience, our eyes will adjust and we will use what little light there is to see the world in a fresh way.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Rev. Forrest Church writes that “[r]eligion is our response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” I agree that religion grows out of this juxtaposition, but I would make one amendment: Being alive and having to die are not a “dual reality.” They are part and parcel of a single reality, and to treat with one is to treat with the other. To fully live is to know death well, and to emphasize life and avoid death is cheap deliverance.
In our zeal for proclaiming the all-conquering love of God, we liberal Christians can be tempted to separate Jesus’ death from his life, exalting his ministry and diminishing the importance of his suffering and death. I think it would be a mistake to separate his death from his ministry—because his reply to death and suffering is a part of what he has left us.
As the French mystic Simone Weil said, “It is in affliction itself that the splendor of … mercy shines. … If we reach the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry, ‘My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’—if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction…, something not of the senses, something common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.”
Whether from Jesus himself, or from the prophets of his line who followed him, how we are to respond to suffering is one of Christianity’s core themes. This does not explain it away; it does give us models of how to respond to it.
My mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in June. In the months before I had started discerning how to answer the call to ministry that I had felt emergent within me for years. Now, as I was prepared to devote my life to ministry, I was challenged to still feel called even though my days were becoming filled with sad trivialities. It can be hard to hear a call when you’re spending all day just making sure everyone gets bathed, watered and fed, and the only hiatus is aching.
As more of the burden of my mother’s care fell to me, I began to feel that I was being tested. But this metaphor—for it was metaphor, not fact—didn’t deal with explaining suffering away. That I was being tested couldn’t explain why terminal cancer would end the life of someone so filled to the brim with life and love. I’m not sure anything can. Lo these months later, the best I can do is to sigh and say, “Because it was the way of things.”
Instead, the idea that I was being tested had to do with how I might respond to its seeming meaninglessness. I had felt the call to ministry through joy. Now I was feeling it in anger and sadness. I knew that I was being called to use this experience to deepen and prepare myself, like Jacob, like Job, like Jesus. I was being challenged to remain at the point of despair “without ceasing to love.” Something in desolation was speaking to my very soul. My bones were vexed but my heart was weeping from joy.
We have a spiritual need to confront death and violence—but to confront it as a martyr does, with acceptance and with love—to inhabit it. That’s why, despite believing deeply in peace, I can’t bring myself to an indiscriminate condemnation of violent movies, songs, and art: because at their best they are aids in spiritual work.
Death and suffering are inevitable. Images of death and violence in themselves are not the problem, it’s that we don’t have the energy or inclination to follow through to the “liberating insights” of which Thich Nhat Hanh writes. Instead, we become captive to the events themselves, like a record stuck in the first half of a redemption play. I think both extremes—insensitivity to death and oversensitivity—are dangerous. Instead, we should seek be sensitive to death as we are to all things, but in a way that is not afraid of it.
For me, this is Universalism: the calling to be receptive to the meaning in every experience, pleasant or not, to draw out its significance and make that one’s own. Even if we could always tell the difference, which experiences are “good” and which are “bad” is not really relevant: As Universalists, we are called from every direction, not by booming voices from the sky, but by innumerable parts of a single reality, and by the knowledge that we are here now but soon to be gone. We must listen to the call that comes through the pain of limitations because it helps lend significance to our lives. If we weren’t going to die, the power and poignancy of our lives would be lost.
So in some sense, as I exhort you to confront your own impermanence, what I am really asking you to do is to live a religious life—a meaningful life. If there were time enough for everything, it wouldn’t matter what we did right now. But there isn’t, and it does.
I can’t tell you how to be called through dark times. I can only tell you that it can be done, even that it should be done. I can only suggest that you remain in relationship with death and all its lifelong shadows—that you be patient with it, and let its lessons emerge.
And so, on this dark and passing-triumphant Sunday, dwell on this: All will suffer, and all will die. The crucial question is how we will do it—how we will respond to mortality. Will we run from it, or lose patience with it, or ignore it? Or will we seek to understand our infinity by knowing our finitude—by finding our own death and letting it wash over us like rain?
The real victory of Palm Sunday is that it inevitably leads to Good Friday, the remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion, and the deepening that suffering can bring, if only we are open to its revelation. Jane Kenyon writes of this revelation in her poem “Twilight: After Haying.”
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?…
The moon comes
to count the bales
and the dispossessed—
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
—sings from the dusty stubble.
These things happen…the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses…
the last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.
May it ever be so.
Amen.
Read the accompanying pastoral prayer.
Posted by Sue Mosher at April 4, 2004 09:40 PM