Sermon for the 13th of April - Palm Sunday Choral Evensong
About forty days ago, Neil and I set out after the early morning Ash Wednesday Eucharist to stand outside Notting Hill Gate tube station. There we were, in the midst of commuters, children heading off to school, and others going about their day—offering Ashes to Go, a visible sign of God’s healing love in our broken world.
"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
One of the most thought-provoking encounters that morning was with a man who asked me what I thought about Spinoza. I suspect he was testing me. But beneath his philosophical curiosity lay something deeper: decades-old wounds inflicted by the church. He spoke of the pain he still carried, scars from early years that had never quite healed.
To the man abused by the church, I offered an apology. What this for me to do? I don’t know, but I felt compelled to. And I said sorry that the church had acted in such an un-Christlike way.
Many others came forward asking for ash.
"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
These are sobering words—especially when spoken over a child. I placed ashes on the forehead of a young boy heading off to nursery school around the corner. It takes a deep breath to tell someone so young that he, too, will die. And yet, like so many others, his mother simply said, "Thank you." Amen. Thank you.
Why would you say thank you when a stranger tells you that you are going to die? In a world full of illusions, ashes on skin strip away the falsehoods and avoidance of our certain fate, as we face the truth of where we have come from and where we are going.
This morning, forty days later, St George’s and St John’s Notting Hill joined together, again outside Notting Hill Gate tube. But this time we were processing with palms, to see whether we can again face the truth.
And this time Jesus raises the stakes. Because it’s not just facing our own mortality — Palm Sunday means acknowledging how we try to kill our God. And not only that, the truth that we also try to kill God’s image in others, and sometimes in ourselves.
Palm Sunday follows on from Passion Sunday. Passion, from the Latin passio, means to suffer. God’s passion is the suffering Jesus willingly takes on when he rides into Jerusalem. He is hailed as a king, yet within days, he is betrayed, tortured, and executed. The theologian Sara Miles puts it this way:
"The compassion—suffering with—that Jesus models through it all is about the willingness to face and absorb the hard truths of human violence and pride and weakness, and to love and forgive and stay with us anyway, so that sin and death will have no more power. His passion is not sentimental but fierce. It goes all the way."
Following Jesus on this path to new life means looking honestly at ourselves, our broken church, and our suffering world. We have to stop pretending.
The truth is that all babies grow and eventually die. We cannot always protect our loved ones from pain. Cancer strikes at random and takes people too soon. We will fail and be failed. We will hurt and be hurt. That is the passion of humanity.
But today, may we see it all through the eyes of Jesus’ compassion—loving and forgiving as he does. As we step into this most sacred Holy Week, may we see how much we have in common with all of Jesus’ beloved people: the shoppers in the supermarket, the commuters waiting for a bus, the strangers running errands—each carrying their own cross.
And as we enter this Holy Week, may we see how much we are like the crowd who hails Jesus with palm branches, then screams for his death. May we face the beauty and sadness of humanity — and not turn away.
And so, we walk out of the ashes, out of Lent, and out of the church doors into the suffering world. Walk in the light, run toward the crazy blazing light of Easter. Every terrible thing we've done, every mistake, every hurt is redeemed: and life, eternal, is all around us. Thank you.
Reference: Sara Miles (http://www.saramiles.net/