Here is the sermon text if you prefer that format:
I wonder if you’ve heard this Palm Sunday sermon before. You know the one. It’s the one where the preacher reminds the congregation that this coming week is Holy Week. And that we shouldn’t just ignore the story of Holy Week, especially the solemn remembrance of Maundy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper and the betrayals and denials of Jesus’s closest followers, and the pain and fear of Jesus’s crucifixion on Good Friday. We shouldn’t skip over Holy Week and go straight to Easter. Shouldn’t ignore the difficult parts, the suffering, the death, and go straight to the big celebration and the lilies and the brass band.
I wonder if you’ve ever heard a preacher say on this day:
“We can’t skip straight from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to the Hallelujahs of Easter!”
I know I’ve heard preachers say that.
I know I’ve preached that very message before, myself.
But as I sat down to write this sermon, I could not bring myself to preach that message. Not this time. Not this day. Not this year.
For one thing, with the order from the governor to shelter-in-place added on to our previous commitment to distancing measures in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, our church and thousands of churches like us our trying to figure out how we’re even going to “get together” for Easter, much less what to do about Holy Thursday or Good Friday. Footwashing ceremonies somehow just don’t work the same on Facebook. And for another thing, I don’t think any of us, right now, are blithely skipping over the tough parts of our sacred stories in order to rush ahead to the good stuff. No, the realities of sickness and suffering and death and isolation are really quite present for us this week, thank you very much. You need no high-minded reminder from me that these things are part of our story of faith. They’re pretty front and center for most of us right now.
Leigh has a cousin, Sarah, who serves as the principal of a school in St. Louis that’s run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. They serve a population of students who have had difficult and often traumatic circumstances impacting their access to education. She loves her work, but it’s hard work, and she is privy to a lot of really difficult and painful things in her students’ lives. Sarah gave me permission to share this story with you all: A few years back, Sarah was having a bit of a rough time. She was feeling discouraged in her ministry and in her personal life. She shared with us that she had gone to talk to a trusted spiritual advisor who said to her: “I don’t think you should do Lent this year. You have plenty of Lent in your life right now. Do Advent instead.”
I’ve been thinking about those words that Sarah’s spiritual advisor offered her as we move into Holy Week. Not that I think we shouldn’t “do” Holy Week this year. It’s just that right now, at least to me, every day feels like Holy Saturday. Like we are stuck in this scary, anxious limbo, scattered from our usual way of doing community, locked in rooms or at least houses haunted by the ghosts of isolation and fear. So I don’t want to tell you that you have to dwell in that kind of emotional space. Too many of us are there already. Instead, let’s really lean into those Hosannas and Hallelujahs this year instead, shall we?
Actually, the current public health crisis aside, there’s something else that bothers me about the admonition not to skip from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to the Hallelujahs of Palm Sunday. That directive seems to assume that ‘hosanna’ and ‘hallelujah’ are synonyms. But they really aren’t. Hallelujah, you probably know, means “Praise the Lord!” It’s a Hebrew word. It shows up in many of the Psalms, for example in Psalm 150, the culmination of that great prayer book of the Bible:
1 Praise the Lord! (Hallelujah!)
Praise God in the sanctuary;
praise God in the mighty firmament!
2 Praise God for God’s mighty deeds;
praise God according to God’s surpassing greatness!
3 Praise God with trumpet sound; praise God with lute and harp!
4 Praise God with tambourine and dance; praise God with strings and pipe!
5 Praise God with clanging cymbals; praise God with loud clashing cymbals!
6 Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! (Hallelujah!)
Praise the Lord! (Hallelujah)
Some Christian traditions have a practice of “burying the Hallelujahs” during Lent – they won’t sing or pray using the word Hallelujah in the 40 days leading up to Easter, so that on Easter Sunday the Hallelujahs of the Church ring out with an even greater intensity of joy and victory. I’ve been part of a community that has that practice, and it’s amazing to notice just how many of our hymns and our psalms that would mean we couldn’t sing during Lent – we love to sing that word Hallelujah!
Hosanna is a rarer word. We generally only mention it on Palm Sunday. It’s also a Hebrew word, and it also shows up in the Psalms…but it doesn’t mean “Praise the Lord!” It means “Lord, save us.” Rescue us.
For example, here’s a piece of Psalm 118 – tell me if this sounds familiar:
25 Hosanna! Save us, we beseech you, O Lord!
O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!
26 Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
The crowds in the Palm Sunday story are literally signing the words of Psalm 118 as Jesus enters Jerusalem. In fact, if you go back and read the whole Psalm, you’ll see that pieces of it get incorporated into the story throughout Holy Week – the happenings of Holy Week are drenched in the language of the Psalms.
"Hosanna" means "save us, Lord!” As Jesus rides into Jerusalem, the crowd is praising him, yes, but more than that, they are crying out for deliverance! Jesus, to them, represents the possibility of freedom – freedom from the oppression of the Roman occupiers, whose military police are watching over the procession with suspicious eyes and twitchy trigger fingers. Freedom from the political and religious leaders who have aligned themselves with their oppressors. Freedom from the crushing economic realities of debt and wealth hoarding and harmful labor practices. Freedom from the shackles of guilt and shame and that so often chain those who are forced to live on the margins. And so they are crying out for rescue.
“Save us, Lord.” This week, and this month, and this year, have given us plenty to shout “save us” about. Save us, O God. Save us from fear. Save us from sickness. Save us from isolation. Save us from the harmful behaviors that can be brought about by times of anxiety and crisis, whether its grocery hoarding or profiteering or xenophobia. Save us from those who put profit over people. Save us from callousness and evil at the highest levels and antipathy and nihilism at the lowest. Save us, save us, save us God, anybody, save us, for surely it seems we are in need of saving. .” And so it is not so much that the "hosannas" fade over this week, as that the tone of them changes, and that, by the end of this week, but before the beginning of the next, they have become quieter, more muttered, more like whispered prayer than shouted acclamation.
So yes, we can lean into the Hosannas this year, Church. We are allowed to sing them out loud and proud, for surely we are as much in need of them now as we ever have been.
Now I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about hallelujahs and hosannas, but if you were listening carefully to the story from Luke’s gospel today, you might have noticed something. You might have noticed that in Luke’s account of Jesus’s triumphal entry in to Jerusalem, there actually aren’t any “hosannas” at all. Mark’s gospel has ‘em. Matthew’s got ‘em. Even John, strange and ethereal John, has the crowd singing “Hosanna! Save us, Lord!” But not Luke.
Luke instead adds a little detail which none of the other gospels have, and which I just couldn’t pass up this particular Palm Sunday. In Luke’s gospel, there are some religious folks in the crowd who start getting more than a little nervous. And I don’t blame them. It’s one thing to get a few people together, maybe sing a few songs, get seen by the right people – but this sort of mass gathering? This was starting to feel like a riot. Those aforementioned Roman military police were not going to look very favorably on this kind of thing. And when a big group of people armed with nothing but palm branches goes up against the most powerful military force in the known world? Well, we all know how these kinds of things end. In blood.
Jesus, of course, knows this as well as anyone. He knows the sort of violence and oppression he’s up against. How will he respond to the request of his fellow countrymen and religious teachers?
“I tell you,” Jesus shouts to the nervous onlookers, “if they were to keep silent, the stones would shout out.”
If they were to keep silent, then even the very stones upon which they walked would shout out in praise and petition.
I don’t know if I can think of any better good news for Disciples of Christ right now then this: that even if we were to shut up right now, why then even the rocks would shout out for us.
I don’t know if I can think of better good news for the Christian Church than that even if we cannot be gathered together in person right now that even the rocks will shout out.
That even if we can’t get together in this building made of stone that the very stones of this building are crying out and letting God know that we sure do need God doing some saving and some rescuing and some victory-making right now. In fact, right now we the Christian Church are getting a good healthy reminder that our faith ain’t never been about this stone building anyway, our faith is about the God who sets us free, the God who gives us the victory over sin and death, that even if our church buildings were to crumble into rubble, even that rubble is capable of up and praising God. And so we, too, are given the gift of voice and of Spirit to be up and about praising God even in the midst of trials and tribulations, because if even these stones can cry out than certainly we can too. In fact there’s a song by the composer Lloyd Larson that goes like this, it goes:
Here comes the Lord ridin' on a donkey
With people waving branches and callin' Him King
Here comes the Lord ridin' through Jerusalem
If the people don't shout
The rocks will cry out
Rocks keep silent
Jesus comes to set me free
Rocks keep silent
I'm gonna' shout in victory
Rocks keep silent
Jesus reigns in majesty
Ain't no rock gonna' shout for me
Ain’t no rock gonna’ shout for me
No, I’m gonna shout out myself.
And there’s more. Because as the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we are saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it in patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words.” So it’s not just the rocks that are shouting out with us, Church. It’s all of creation groaning and crying out with the birth of something new. All of creation is crying out, and our own spirits our crying out within us, and the Spirit of God is crying out within us, and they are all crying out for the same thing, that same freedom and deliverance that the crowd around Jesus shouted out for as he rode into Jerusalem on that day long ago. Save us, O God, deliver us, free us, open our mouths that we might truly sing songs of praise and of new life.
Disciples of Christ we may be physically apart from each other right now, but that’s never stopped the Church from crying out before and it’s not gonna stop us. Nothing can stop this song we sing, nothing can stop our prayers of rescue, nothing can stop our praise of the God who gives New Life and New Birth, because even if we run out of breath for a second, even if for a few minutes our voices drop to a whisper out of discouragement or fear or pain, that’s ok, Church, because the stones are going to be crying out, the creation is going to be crying out, the Spirit of God is going to be crying out within us, singing, in the words of Psalm 118:
19 Open to me the gates of righteousness,
that I may enter through them
and give thanks to the Lord.
20 This is the gate of the Lord;
the righteous shall enter through it.
21 I thank you that you have answered me
and have become my salvation.
22 The stone that the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone.
23 This is the Lord’s doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes.
24 This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.
25 Save us, we beseech you, O Lord!
O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!
26 Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
We bless you from the house of the Lord.
27 The Lord is God,
and has given us light.
Bind the festal procession with branches,
up to the horns of the altar.
28 You are my God, and I will give thanks to you;
you are my God, I will extol you.
29 O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever.
So yeah, Church. We’re singing some hosannas today, and throughout this week. And we will be singing some hallelujahs with each other next week. And that is good, and right, for us to do. The rocks are singing and crying out – save us, Lord! Free us! Open our mouths to sing songs of life, of love, and of praise! Creation is singing and crying out – save us, Lord! Free us! Open our mouths to sign songs of life, of love, and of praise. God’s very Spirit is singing and crying out within us – save us, Lord! Free us! Open our mouths to sing songs of life, of love, and of praise! Rocks are singing, creation’s singing, the Spirit is singing….Take a deep breath. And let’s sing, too.
Amen.