The Palm Sunday Passion readings are stark in the silence of Jesus throughout them. Jesus does not have much to say, because he knows who he is and what must happen next. The question and the invitation that the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel shares with us is this: What is our role in the silence?
Sermon from Palm Sunday by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel.
Today's readings are:
Philippians 2:5-11
Psalm 31:9-16
Mark 1:1-11
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Palm Sunday, Year B.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466.
https://www.stmartinec.org
Transcript:
Please join me in a spirit of prayer.
Lord God, grant us grace to open our hearts so that we may enter deeply into the holy mysteries of your passion and death. Grant us grace to bring our heartbreak our grief and our pain to your cross so we may know that you share our pain. Grant us grace to hear in your silence to hear in your silence the deadly wheels of sin, violence, and domination grinding to a halt. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Please be seated.
Silence is what I will talk about today.
Our Quaker neighbors have a lovely saying when they ask, "Are your words an improvement on the silence?" In my case, most certainly not. Especially since the silence I'll be talking about is the silence of Jesus. His silence is a sign of something much deeper that is in play.
When the clergy were practicing the passion gospel that we read together at the 8 a.m. service today, Barb took the part of Jesus and then she immediately noted how little Jesus had to say.
He is operating at a level deeper than words. Jesus is throwing his whole self, holding nothing back, giving his whole body into the deep programming of human sin. Jesus is throwing his body into the gears, the gears of violence domination, and corruption that have been building momentum for millennia. Jesus, who is so strangely silent through the trial and crucifixion, is operating as the Word of God challenging the corrupt God-rejecting programming of sin with the deeper world-creating program of love.
Authorities: religious, political, military, and the mob itself, which we will play later, play an unwitting game of mistaken identity throughout the passion. They mock and torture Jesus hailing him as the "King of the Jews" and "the Messiah", tempting him to save himself. Repeating the pattern from the wilderness temptation of the adversary, where the adversary tempted Jesus to serve himself and not the world. As if Jesus's life is for himself. As if Jesus's life is for his own pleasure, his own self-aggrandizement, and not for the world, for the healing of the world. This cruel, stinging, hateful, taunting which we can feel in our bodies is ironic on a deeper level than the mockers know. They are calling him a fake king when in actuality Jesus is the sovereign authority sent by God. Jesus is the sovereign authority sent by God, a king in other words. Jesus is the Messiah, the one anointed by God, a king in other words. He is simply displaying his authority in his silence. Because he knows that only the sacrifice of the cross will fundamentally and permanently override the deep programming, the systemic infection of sin and domination, playing out around him and upon him. And if you minimize the role of sin in the world, this is not the sermon for you. We live in different worlds. I'll have to say the work at hand does not call for a lot of words. It's a preacher's nightmare. This is the work of the embodied Word of God who is written into the very molecules of creation itself. The word that was spoken at the beginning of time itself, and abides at the deepest level of God's beloved creation, is at work. This is the logos of God confronting the corrupt logic of sin and domination, to replace it with the foundational programming that runs through the heart of creation. God's program of love.
What is our role in the silence?
Our role is to bring our sorrows.
We, too, have been caught up in the crushing wheels and cogs of human viciousness. We, too, have contributed to the crushing force of sin through action or inaction; through good intention or malicious intent; through indifference, ignorance, or silent consent.
We bring the heartbreak and sorrow of all that infects our common life: patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, racism, rampant, unchecked greed normalized as a law of nature, corruption, nationalism. In the silence, you may add yours.
Even the Philadelphia Inquirer front page this morning is a testament to this deeply entwined world of greed and cruelty. From the story of hundreds of horses dying for the sake of greed on the race tracks across our state, subsidized by our tax money, to the story of Kensington and the unchecked opioid epidemic that we have not rallied as a people to address with anything close to compassion or effectiveness.
Read the paper in sorrow. Read the paper and grieve. Read the paper and follow Jesus into the silence.
We bring the pain inflicted on us. We bring the pain of our own moral failures. We bring the pain we have inflicted on others, the pain we have ignored or trivialized or silenced in neighbors near and far. We bring all of our sorrows, our grief, our loss, our hurts to the cross of Jesus and Jesus reveals to us the cost of rejecting God. Yet even more and most miraculously that our sorrow is shared by God. The grief that is in us is the grief that is in God. The heartbreak that is in us is God's heartbreak. The moral pain that is in us is the sorrow worn by the Man of Sorrows. This is our loss, this is the pain, the pain in our loving, and the cost of our unloving, embodied, embraced, and surrounded by the love of God in Jesus on the cross. The beginning of the unraveling of all that rebels against God.
My invitation to you, to the whole parish here and online for this Holy Week is this: bring your broken hearts to Holy Week.
I'm not going to say why or spell it out anymore. I'm not going to explain. I'm going to invite. I'm going to invite you to enter the experience of our Lord, the experience invited by his silence.
Simply trusting that the deepest grace is at work in this sacrifice, beyond our feeble naming. Follow your grief, abandon yourself to the mysteries of the passion and cross, and let Jesus, the Word of God, dismantle and transform the deep programming of sin we carry in us and between us. For this is what saves us. This is what sets us free. This is what relieves us from our burdens and grants us everything we need to be Christ's body, mourning, grieving, and celebrating in this world.
Amen.
