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"Holy Hush" - Luke 19:28-40 A Sermon Preached By Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle
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Palm Sunday Meditation, April 4, 2004 |
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PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY 13214 Phone: 315-446-0960 |
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I remember I was 12 years old when I experienced the death of someone close for the first time. We were having a family gathering at home. It was late on a Friday evening. I remember, because Steve Allen was on the television, and I wouldn’t be able to stay up that late on a week night. We were all laughing and having a good time, when the phone rang. My dad answered. He looked over at us and said, "Mom died." What struck me was, just like that, everything turned and changed. I knew enough to turn off the TV. This was serious now. I knew that it was going to be a strange and hard time. This was new territory for me. We were all close to my grandma. She was a kind, funny and smart lady who used to take us "uptown" to go for ice cream when she visited. I felt the worst for my dad. His younger brother was sick with a brain tumor, the only sibling he had, 10 years younger. We thought the call might be about him. They grew up without a father, who had died when my dad was ten, and his brother just a baby. When my dad got sad, he’d play the piano, the same song, usually - "Star of the Sea." It kind of scared me when he’d go into himself - but he didn’t do it very often, and we respected the distance he needed. Most all of us have memories of the first time that death came knocking. Whatever the circumstance, it deepens you. It brings a kind of holy hush, as people cry and embrace. Whatever else there was, this is now what is. No respecter of persons, their age, their social standing. The ones left to deal with it come together to get through it - and, scarred, they find a way to move on. There are few here this morning who do not have a story about that first time. Those who don’t, will. We don’t talk about it very often, unless it has happened recently, perhaps. Why is that? Death is as much a part of life as anything we know. And yet, certainly in our society, the cults of youth and health push an honest consideration of death as a part of life to the fringes. It is treated as a defeat of some kind, just as aging is considered a disease - and yet death is that to which all life leads. Our worship today has a split personality. It is Palm Sunday, the day we commemorate what we generally call Jesus’ "triumphal" entry into Jerusalem - like a victorious king marching into the city liberated from the harsh oppression of occupying forces. And so it was, except that the occupying political and military force was still in control - and the hopes of the people, soon to be dashed, would be reflected on those 2 disciples who were on their way home to Emmaus after the crucifixion: "We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel." You may remember a time, as I do, when this was the only emphasis on this day. One pastor tells of a children’s music director with whom he worked. She was just the sort of lively, talented and relentlessly cheerful person you like to have in that position. Nothing seemed to bother her, except Palm and Passion Sunday. Every year she would say, "Why did they have to mess up my favorite holiday? What were they thinking?" She’d remind him that Palm Sunday used to be like a mini-Easter, with everyone marching around smiling and waving palms. Since there were neither Easter baskets or big family meals to worry about, there was no pressure - just a happy Sunday that helped build momentum toward Easter. Now it is the more common practice to commemorate both Palm and Passion Sunday, recognizing, I believe, that this isn’t the end of Lent, but the beginning of Holy Week. In a little while we’ll be singing, "Ride on, ride on in majesty. In lowly pomp ride on to die." We know it’s there, that last part, out there ahead of us, just as it’s out there for him. The turning, the changing that the death of someone close brings to us, when it takes over, when all that was is suddenly and abruptly absorbed by what is - this is the work that Jesus had been doing all along. It was not some kind of morbid fascination with his own death, but his decision to enter the holy hush of death’s closeness - to follow God’s will right to the deepest darkness in the awareness that his future was held by a wisdom and love greater than his own. Canadian theologian John Douglas Hall writes about how we North Americans are not particularly disposed toward tolerating darkness. Our remarkable optimism and all that goes with it might just be one of our best features, but it also has a downside. "We are," he says, "a people wondrously afraid of the dark." We have been assured that the darkness was gradually being banished, that it would always grow lighter - "and that we ourselves were the vanguard of the new age of light." But we don’t banish the darkness by simply ignoring it. Jesus entered it - not so we wouldn’t have to - but that we might in faith live in the presence of death, in full awareness of it, that for us there in the darkness an angel stands with us as well, to lift us up, to keep us in our ways, to bring us through the darkness to the other side of Good Friday. We imagine that time is on our side, and so it’s too early to make sacrifices, too early to take on the powers that threaten and destroy life. Having entered the darkness Jesus knew, and would have us know, that it is not too early to love the unlovable, to throw lavish banquets for the starving, to welcome in the lost and the hopeless. We don’t die in peace if we do not live in courage, or die into God if we do not live with him. Life isn’t for sissies, especially not the Christian life. Let us set our faces toward Jerusalem, and as we enter the holy hush of this week. As death comes closer for him, let us realize that it comes closer for us as well. But in that same movement let us turn to the God of whom the Psalmist writes: "Even darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for the darkness is as light to you."
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| Copyright, Rev. Dr.
Peter W. Shidemantle. All rights reserved. Permission granted for
non-commercial use.
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