March 20, 2005
Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday
Isaiah 50:4-9a
The Gospel according to Matthew 21:1-11

Last summer we moved out of our sanctuary for three months so that it could be painted and the organ removed in preparation for a new one. The beautiful colors that you see this morning, the rich cremes and taupes, the sky blue ceiling and red doors have not always been here, even though these colors feel like home now. In the midst of our summer move, the cross was removed from our back wall and stored under the church for the summer.

When we moved back into the sanctuary last September, we rented an organ, put in risers for the choir, put all the chancel furniture back in place, but we had trouble finding the cross. It wasn't in the basement where we remembered putting it. It wasn't in any of our offices or in any of our meeting rooms. We couldn't imagine that a heavy wooden cross would be a hot item on the black market or Ebay, so we decided to wait, hoping it would turn up sooner or later. For two Sundays we worshipped without it. The newly painted rear chancel wall was bare, absent of the universal symbol of our faith.

I have to admit that for those two Sundays, I didn't miss it much. There are days when the blue rose window is all I need to remind me of my faith. And I look back every Sunday, while you look toward the front. And there is a subtle cross in the rear window, way up in the balcony, so if I needed to be reminded of the cross, I could easily locate one. So I told myself that I didn't miss it.

Then some comments began coming my way. Another minister in the neighborhood asked if we were becoming a concert hall instead of a place of worship. Someone else called in to ask if we were still a Christian Church or were considering going Unitarian. A beloved long-time pillar said she didn't want to be impolite, but wasn't something missing in the front of the chancel beside for the organ pipes?

So Betsy York, our business administrator, put out an all-points-bulletin on our missing cross and (miraculously) found it the next day. A builder had taken it temporarily to reassess its condition and it was sitting in the back of his shop. We quickly dusted it off and rehung it up where it has been for many years, on the back wall of our chancel where it has been every Sunday morning for as long as we can remember

What does the cross mean to you? Is it an important symbol of your faith? Can you live without it for awhile? There are certainly other symbols of Christianity that have power and meaning, like bread and wine, water, the loaves and fishes, an empty tomb, but the symbol of the cross is has a staying power and continues to help Christians find each other all over the world.

If we were without this symbol, if we ignored it during Advent and Epiphany, it would probably be okay; we might even work at some other metaphors and symbols for our faith like salt and light, exile and return, departure and arrival. But if we ignored the cross this morning, or denied its importance in our life, we would be bereft of the most powerful part of the Christian story. This morning, we've had a glimpse of the resurrection in the joyful faces of our children as they waved palms and imagined the living Jesus. Now it is time to turn toward Holy Week and our turning moves us to face the reality of the cross in the life of the Christian.

The cross stands in the center of the sanctuary, just as suffering often stands in the center of many human lives. We cannot move to Easter without standing here for more than a moment. We need to linger. We cannot ignore the hopelessness in the world and forget about its problems, to rush toward premature joy and fullness. We need to stand here for awhile, to embrace the sorrow, and shame and suffering we know in the world today.

It would be difficult for any one of us to assist in an execution, especially one as awful as a crucifixion. It is a particularly brutal way to die, but as gruesome as it is, public deaths have always been fascinating to people. Aldous Huxley has written that for centuries, public executions, hangings and burnings, were considered a rare treat and people came from miles away as if it were a great theatrical event, not to be missed. It has only been as late as the nineteenth century that countries have abolished public executions. Lest we think too highly of ourselves, just this week, we watched as Scott Peterson was transported in chains to San Quentin's Death Row. Many of us feel that is exactly where he should be. Behind bars, in chains and sentenced to die. The death penalty may seem like a righteous way to deal with our criminals, but it is still a public death, witnessed by the world.

As we remember that today marks the two-year anniversary of the war in Iraq, we've got to recall the abuse or prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and at other detention centers around the world. Practices such as strangulation, beatings, no food or water, and lit cigarettes used as tools of torture, all our ways that torture has become an acceptable way of obtaining information in a post 911 world. Suffering and torture, whether prison guards or Pentagon officials order it, is a reality of life in the midst of war. It is ugly and it is awful and it is taking place all over the world.

We have to ask how in the world can human beings treat each other in such inhuman ways? The symbol of the cross becomes alive for us again today because it reminds us of the kind of possibilities for evil there are in human beings. It can help us to face the worst in ourselves and in others, that part of us that orders it, that part of us which can look the other way, or even sanction the suffering or hurting of another.

We cannot turn our backs on evil or suffering as say simply that it doesn't exist. Evil is not simply the absence of good in our lives; it is the reality of our war-torn, violence laden, power-hungry world.

I recall that in seventh grade, I tried to grapple with an understanding of evil. In our school library there were several textbooks about World War II. In the back of a second volume there were pictures of the liberation of the prisoners at Auschwitz. Time after time, I would go to the library, haunted by those pictures. Who would do that to another person? Who could line them up and send them, hundreds at a time into poisonous showers and hot ovens? More mysterious than these, how could they go home to their families, their own children at the end of the day?

I do not have an answer to evil -- to the awful things that people do to each other or to themselves. There is no rational, sensible or compact answer to evil. There is no easy way to understand why brutality, meanness, hatred and anxious compulsions are found in us, no easy way to understand why people should suffer so much pain, sorrow and tragedy. I don't even understand the need to gossip or to talk about someone in a nasty or crass way that is painful or hurtful. I don't understand it, but I do know that it is a part of all of us.

When we are faced with suffering more powerful than we can bear, our response is to want our old life back. We cry out to God that we cannot go through what ever is ahead, it is too awful and too painful. Many of you have faced this moment, this overwhelming darkness on the journey. The dark night comes when we suffer through a divorce or the loss of trust, when a parent dies or a child's life is threatened, it comes when we pick up the phone and learn in clinical terms of a cancer diagnosis, or when we hear that a beloved friend has suddenly died and we didn't even have time to say good-bye.

Is there a way of holding suffering and learning how to live in the midst of a suffering world? Could it be that God is present to us, most often in moments of suffering? Could it be that God is alive in the midst of evil? Could it be that exactly at the moment of the fear of abandonment, God is present and with us? The cross points to a God who suffers along with us, beside us, rather than a God who is above or beyond us, floating around in the airiness of the firmament.

God suffers when we suffer. The prophet Isaiah comprehended the nature of suffering: God is with us in the midst of our suffering, God helps us, we do not get to be confounded or put to shame, we get to stand with God in the midst of a suffering, sorrowing world.

Of all the days of the Christian year, it is this one that holds stark contrasts. The joy of the journey, and the sorrow before arrival, the happy waving of palms and the stunning silence of the cross, the innocence of our children and the realities of a world that made Jesus weep.

Our hope is in the cross. Suffering is not the whole of the story. The stage is now set for the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday. The cross will take on other meanings throughout the course of Holy Week. It will remind us that Jesus preached love, lived love, taught love and died it. Let the cross encourage us to move into the week and into our world with the same desire, to blind the awful wounds of the world with aching, caring love.

Jesus rode into Jerusalem in such a way that every one knew he had arrived, then he took everyone on—the entire establishment of power, authority and might, through the next days of Holy Week. He never lost his love for those close to him, and he never lost his love for the perpetrators who ordered his suffering and eventual death. When I think of the courage and the depth of compassionate tenderness in the face of Jesus on this day of blessing and suffering, and I know that this is how I want to live in the world, with courage, tenderness and passionate hope.

Let our eyes and our hearts move to the crosses in this room and in the world on this Holy Week as we journey home.

Amen.