Stay Awake

Palm Sunday 2023

“The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”

In a simpler age, before COVID-19 and the invasion of Ukraine and atmospheric rivers and devastating floods and yet another mass shooting in a school, I might have read the scary parts of this morning’s Gospel as a one-time event, specific to the death of Jesus. With some metaphorical lessons that we might apply to our own situation. But we Californians already know a thing or two about shaking earth and falling rocks. And I’ve lived in southern lowlands where bodies might actually float up in a flood, hence the heavy stone slabs that cover graves. There’s truth in this story that goes beyond history and metaphor. The crucifixion of our Lord is also a story about the vulnerability of all creation. Which is wounded very day. This week, I invite you to take note.

It’s oddly fitting, then, that the events of Holy Week begin with green leaves. In my family my husband is the gardener: he built a greenhouse out of recycled materials during COVID, and takes responsibility for planting our back yard. Which delights our one-year-old granddaughter Ella, who happens to be fascinated by leaves. She’s taking note of them. And she’s not wrong: leaves are fascinating! Chances are we all learned something about the magic of photosynthesis—the process by which leaves turn sunlight into energy—in school. But did you know that leaves are also phototropic? That is, they can physically turn toward sunlight because of a hormone that causes their cells to elongate on the darker side. So in some way, those who waved palm branches in the direction of the coming king were emulating the life sustaining natural processes of the plant world. Turning their leaves towards the light of Christ. That is, until the branches ceased to wave and the powers of death took over the story. If you are unsure of what happened next in Jesus’ final week, you need look no further than the beautiful Stations of the Cross in our sanctuary. I hope you’ll take note of them and spend some time praying with them this week.

This week. Holy Week. The week when we live between grief and the grave. “I am deeply grieved, even to death,” Jesus said in Gethsemane. And his instructions to his disciples? “Remain here, and stay awake with me.” Which, you may recall, they were not able to do. Three times Jesus had to wake them up. For a long time, that part didn’t make sense to me at first. Given all the drama in the air during Jesus’ last week of life, I found it difficult to imagine that adrenaline alone didn’t keep them awake. But then I remember how skilled we humans can be about denying or repressing sorrow, in ways that can come back to haunt us later.  So let me invite you, in this holiest of weeks, to actually pay attention—that is, to really notice—that uneasy time between grief and grave, both in Jesus’ journey and in your own.

Along the way from Gethsemane and Golgotha, we’ll meet wavering disciples—which might be ourselves—mourning women, plotting power brokers and bickering bandits. These are characters that live inside of all of us some of the time, if we are honest with ourselves. It is for these sorts and conditions of humanity that Jesus gave himself fully, as both king and crucified. And our faith assures us that he gives himself for us still. Amidst all the crisis’, fear and grief that are inherent in the human condition. In the wake of more than 100 mass shootings this year. This is our reality, friends. And God is in it with us. Let’s have the courage not to deny it, repress it, or sleep through it.

Before we followers of Jesus came to understand death on the cross as salvation, before it meant forgiveness of sins, before it became a sign of God’s sacrificial love and a symbol of church, the cross was simply a crisis. Matthew took his metaphors for crisis from the natural world: the death of Jesus was like an earthquake, as he described it. When the earth shook and the rocks split, all that we humans assumed—all that we thought we knew, all in which we had become complacent—was shaken to its core. Upended, like the many trees that fell during our recent storms.

At Golgotha, the ground literally and figuratively shifted under our feet. Theological constructions collapsed. The idea of God incarnate stretched credulity to its limits, the idea of the messiah arriving in Jerusalem without army was foolishness, the idea of God being executed as a common criminal broke the known theological frameworks altogether. From the moment when the long-awaited sovereign rode into town on a donkey and a colt, the very meaning of kingdom—as an expression of authoritarian power sustained by coercive violence—was shaken to its roots.

As we enter into the holiest week of our Christian year in this year 2023 of our Lord, much of what we had taken for granted in our day is also shaken. But know this: the crisis of our current situation is not given to us as a punishment for anyone. Nor is it given that we might grow spiritually. If it were, I’m sure I’d be failing miserably. What God always does give us—in good times as much as in the `grievous ones—is a chance to grow closer to God’s very self.

A crisis can be an opportunity, and grief can be can be transformed. In fact, it is made to be transformed through human resiliency and resurrection. Which God promises to us through the witness of Jesus’ own human life, death and rising again. And, also through the witness of our own ever-greening earth, emerging from a season of drought like recovery from a long season of mourning. Look around you, friends. Notice both lavishness and loss. We can weep with the women of Jerusalem, and we can live through loss and change without getting stuck in anger or despair. But we have to actually face our grief, not sleep through it.

Stay awake, people of God. Pay attention to your fear of what might come, notice your confusion when things doesn’t shape up as you wish, and stay awake to your grief. Because behind every sorrow is the longing for recovery and resurrection that God himself has planted in our hearts. Stay awake, then, until hope overcomes despair. Because it will. What Holy Week teaches us, year after year, is that crisis’ are exactly are the situations crisis where God shows up. And stays with us, no matter how bad things get. Allow yourself to notice God with us and all around us. Awaken to the one thing that is certain to get us through: the promise of the cross, yesterday, today and forever.