Palm Sunday – Marilyn R. Gardner

Lenten Journey: Palm Fronds and Hosannas

Published on April 9, 2017April 9, 2017 by Marilyn3 Comments

Palm fronds await us as we enter into our parish. It is Palm Sunday – that joyous day before Holy Week, where all of life makes sense as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, greeted by masses of people proclaiming him king. Unlike those crowds who gathered that day so long ago, we know what is coming. We know the grief and sadness, the immense pain and suffering that filled the following week.

I think of this as I stand listening to our choir chanting. Two things blot the joy of this day: a bomb has exploded at a church in Alexandria Egypt, killing people as they too worshiped on Palm Sunday. The second is that my mother-in-law is dying. She is surrounded by family and excellent hospice care, but that does not take away the fact that soon she will no longer be on this earth.

How did Jesus feel as he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, when he already knew the tension between joy and sorrow that would take place the week following? How did he feel knowing the very people who waved palm branches would shout “Crucify him!” This is when I am more interested in the humanity of Christ than the divinity.

How did he feel knowing the grief and suffering his mother would experience as a sword pierced her heart?

In the midst of joy, did he feel grief for what was ahead? And then the reverse – on the cross when he was in anguish, did he also experience the joy of knowing that finally, death would be conquered?

It will take a lifetime for me to understand the grief/ joy paradox and there is no week where it is more profound then Holy Week.

I’ve written before about my friend Kate, and her experience during a church bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan. But I share it again, because I can’t think of a more profound illustration of the grief/joy paradox. So on this Palm Sunday, as I prepare to go into Holy Week, I give you this story.

A couple of years after the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers, there was a terrorist attack on the International Church in Islamabad, Pakistan. The attack felt personal. It was a church we had attended for a year and a half while living in Islamabad; a church my oldest brother had pastored; and it was a church where many of our friends worshiped. There were several of our friends present in the church that day, one was Robynn’s father. Another was a friend who was there with her husband and small children. In the attack she shielded her small child from flying shrapnel and was severely injured in the process.

In a poignant letter describing the event, she and her husband speak of the indescribable joy she felt in saving her son.

I wanted to save my boy. I knew I was hurt badly, but when I looked down and saw that Iain was unhurt, in the midst of the pain and shock of the blast I felt an indescribable joy, knowing that I had taken the violence intended for him.

In the face of terrible violence and possible death, my friend felt indescribable joy at saving her boy.

This is the absurdity and irrationality of my Christian faith; an absurdity and irrationality that I will hold to for all my days. In the midst of suffering, in the midst of sorrow, there can exist indescribable joy.

A bomb in Egypt, a family member’s imminent death, palm fronds and hosannas, death and a resurrection – in the midst of grief and sorrow, indescribable joy.

This I cling to as I enter into Holy Week, covered with an umbrella of grace.

Photo credits: Cliff Gardner

The Victory That is Easter – A Guest Post

Published on March 31, 2013March 31, 2013 by Marilyn4 Comments

He is Risen Egg On this day Christians across the world are using a greeting that began over two thousand years ago – greeting each other with the words “He is Risen” and responding in turn: “He is Risen Indeed!” They are words that I have heard since I was a child, and in my faith tradition they are words of Hope.

My oldest brother, Edward Brown, wrote an Easter blog post earlier in the week and it resonated deeply with my soul. He has allowed me to re-post so I am sending you over to his blog today. Enjoy and make sure to take a look around his blog.

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It is the start of Holy Week. Christians of whatever label take time this week to remember and celebrate events that are at the heart of our faith: A coronation march into an ancient city. A sham trial. A barbaric execution. An unexpected finale with earthquakes, empty tombs, and wild rumors. And finally, a dead man come to life. Euphoria, despair, confusion, victory – all in one short week.

This up and down cycle of Holy Week is a pretty good metaphor for life. Whether it is our own small lives or the grand drama of human history through the ages, we experience the same wild swings from giddy joy to awful despair, with a lot of waiting time sprinkled throughout. This is a picture of how God works in our histories, small and large, to bring us to an end that he sees and has ordained from the beginning.

We know how it ends before we begin

That last phrase is where we have to begin: The end has been planned from the beginning. As Jesus went through the cycle from the exuberance of the Triumphal Entry (Palm Sunday) to the sorrow of the Last Supper to the humiliation of his trial and the agony of the cross, he knew that that he was participating in a drama whose end had already been written. There was pain. There was shame. But there was no uncertainty. He knew how it would end.

John makes this clear in his introduction to the events of the Last Supper:

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end… Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper… [John 13:1,3-4]

Jesus’ whole-hearted embrace of events that had been laid out for him from the beginning of time reminds me of Psalm 44:4 where we are told that God “decrees victories” for his people. What a great thought: We don’t have to earn our victories! God has decreed that we will win. If this was true of Jesus, and of the ancient people of Israel, it is also true of us in our day. Whatever today feels like, God has already decreed that there will be a victory. It almost feels like cheating – like starting your first game in the NCAA tournament knowing that strings have been pulled and you have been guaranteed the crown.

Not what we expect.

But the victory that God has decreed is not like winning a tournament. It may in fact be a ‘win’ that looks and feels like a defeat……Read more here!

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Ed Brown is the Executive Director of Care of Creation, an organization whose mission is “to pursue a God-centered response to the environmental challenges that brings glory to the Creator, advances the cause of Christ, and leads to the transformation of the people and the land that sustains them.” In this role he travels extensively both nationally and internationally, leading seminars and speaking on the topic of caring for God’s creation. He is the author of Our Father’s World, Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation and a second book that was just released, When Heaven & Nature Sing:Exploring God’s Goals for People and His World published by Doorlight Publications.

Muslims Ask What Does Holy Week Mean for Christians? (mark-cannon.com)

View From Above

Published on April 21, 2011April 5, 2012 by Marilyn3 Comments

In my faith tradition it is Holy Week. The week between Palm Sunday and Easter with Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in between. The week traditionally begins with Palm Sunday and includes palm fronds, small children singing (except this year it didn’t)and a lot of songs with the word Hosannah. It moves forward trying to pull me away from my distractions with a service commemorating the last supper on Maundy or Holy Thursday and is successful in attaining my complete attention on Good Friday, as I sit, without distractions, at a service in a church stripped of all the extras of a normal time of worship. An opportunity to remember incomparable love and sacrifice.

Holy Week is a chance to put on different glasses and look at the bigger picture, the view from above. The view that some day all of ‘this’ will make sense, wrong will be made right, tears will turn to laughter, and sorrow to joy. Holy Week is a time where I am invited to focus, not on my narrative and story, but on God’s story. A story of mercy and grace, where good triumphs over evil. It is a reminder that in the palm of God’s hand I am fully alive and completely safe despite what the picture below, the here and now, looks like.

Even signs around me point to a view from above. Blossoming trees, first flowers, plants with beginning buds all shout out that there is a bigger picture taking place, a picture that moves nature and humanity from death to life. Into this Holy Week came an NPR segment called “Beyond Bunnies: The Real Meaning of Easter Season” a short interview by Michele Norris with Annie Lamott. Asked what this season meant to her she replied:

“Well, it’s the most profound holiday in the Christian tradition,” Lamott says. “And I think two things really come to mind. One is something that the great writer Barbara Johnson said, which is that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. And I think that every year the world seems more of a Good Friday world. And it’s excruciating, whether it’s Japan, or Libya, or whether its your own best friends and their children who are sick, which is something that makes no sense when you think about a loving God. But it’s a time when we get to remember that all the stuff that we think makes us of such value, all the time we spend burnishing our surfaces, is really not what God sees…” Annie Lamott, NPR – April 18, All Things Considered

And that’s it – All this stuff “is really not what God sees”. I’m not great at living this out on a daily basis, but during Holy Week I am fully reminded that now I may see a blurry image without focus and clarity, but some day, I’ll see “face to face. ”