Sermon 4/5/20: The Earth Moved Under Our Feet (Pr. Craig Mueller)
Pr. Craig Mueller
Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
April 5, 2020
The Earth Moved Under Our Feet
It feels like the earth has moved under our feet. Everything has changed. We have lost our footing. Unlike other tragedies, this one is long and drawn out, with more bad news ahead, we are told. I, like you, feel off. My emotions erratic. Tears sometimes catch me off guard.
I thought of the Carole King song: “I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down.” It sounds like an earthquake, the apocalypse, the end of the world. But no surprise, it’s about love.
Like so many songs, like so much of life, the words can mean two things at once. Like this Sunday, with its twin themes of palms and passion. It’s an emotional roller coaster: the highs of “hosanna” and then howling cries from Jesus, abandoned on the cross. Tragedy and triumph. Terror and beauty. What it means to be human.
We are living through a seismic shift. Like an earthquake. In Matthew’s account of the passion, an earthquake follows Jesus’ death. For the early followers of Jesus, his death and resurrection were the end of the world as they knew it—and the beginning of a new age. For us, the narratives of this holy week are seismic. They reveal God’s deep love for the world and the pattern of our own baptismal dying and rising.
Grief expert David Kessler said in a recent Brene Brown podcast: “We are dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew. It is now gone forever. . . Now we’re going to talk about the world before the pandemic. We’re going to find meaning and come out the other side of this.” Kessler described grief as the death of something: a loved one, a marriage, a relationship, a job .. . . this is a collective loss of the world we lived in before the pandemic. And we, like every other loss, didn’t know what we had until it was gone.”
As Kessler went on to say, in these times the worst loss is the one happening to you—whether a high school senior who can’t go to prom, or a spouse unable to visit their dying beloved in a hospital.
As the earth moves under humanity’s feet, we proclaim divine self-emptying, divine vulnerability. As Paul puts it, though Christ Jesus was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. This divine humbling—revealed most fully on the cross—is also victory and resurrection. Something we celebrate even this Lord’s Day. For every Sunday we hold in tension death and resurrection, loss and transformation.
As you listen to the passion this morning, listen for some earth-shattering elements:
Imagine how the earth moved under the feet of the early followers of Jesus as they heard the story of their leader naked, vulnerable, rejected by his very own. Listen as Jesus throws himself on the ground in Gethsemane, prays and pleads for his life, struggling to accept what is happening to him. Note how the Lord of life is denied and betrayed by two closest to him. Sense the darkness that covers the earth as Jesus cries words of abandonment. And finally, pay attention as the earth quakes, leading to the climactic words of faith by the centurion: Truly, this was God’s son.
Let us listen to the passion and I will share a few more thoughts afterwards.
As we enter this Holy Week and reflect on all the losses in the story of Jesus’ suffering and death, we also proclaim that God now enters our story and shares all the godforsaken losses that people are experiencing today all over our globe.
In the words of a eucharistic prayer for times of lament:
You entered our sorrows in Jesus our brother.
He was born among the poor,
he lived under oppression,
he wept over the city.
With infinite love, he granted the people your life.
Jesus enters our sorrows and fears this day. As one writer puts it, “He declares solidarity for all time with those who are abandoned, colonized, oppressed, accused, imprisoned, beaten, mocked, and murdered. He bursts open like a seed so that new life can grow and replenish the earth. He takes an instrument of torture and turns it into a bizarre vehicle of hospitality and communion for all people, everywhere.” (Debie Thomas)
When the earth moves under our feet and we are disoriented, we pray in the words of today’s psalm: “My life is wasted with grief and my years with sighing.” What a relief that such words of lament are part of our biblical tradition and we are free to express such feelings. We can imagine Jesus praying these words during his passion.
And don’t forget that though hosanna seems like such a happy word, especially as we wave branches, it means “Lord, save us.” And in this time of great equalizing, these words take on new urgency: Lord, save us!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet? Somehow, this day of palm and passion holds the paradox of tragedy and triumph.
Some of us are fans of the NBC show, This Is Us. On the season finale, Rebecca is celebrating the first anniversary of her triplets, though one is adopted because one of the triplets, Kyle, died at birth. Rebecca and her husband, Jack, acknowledge their sadness to each other. Then they pack up the triplets and the entire family goes to visit their OB, Dr. K, who was with them through their earlier loss and had provided some helpful wisdom.
This time Dr. K. tells them of his own deep loss when he and his wife lost their first child. The song “Blue Skies” became associated with the sad memories of singing the Ella Fitzgerald song to his wife’s pregnant belly. Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see. Blue skies all of them gone, nothing but blue skies from now on. And then they lost that child. They would listen to the song over and over and it made them so sad, Dr. K said. And then to their great surprise, his wife got pregnant again and he sang it once more to that same belly. Eventually he wound up dancing to the tune at his daughter’s wedding. “That song made us happy, made us sad, made us happy again,” he muses. “The whole human experience, wrapped up in that song. I think the trick is,” he went on slowly, “not trying to keep the joys and tragedies apart. You have to let them cozy up to one another. Let them coexist.”
Around the table of the Lord—the table for which we long—we sing “hosanna in the highest,” in times of deep joy and times of deep sorrow. All these times coexist for us, as individuals and the people of God. God’s passionate mercy and love embrace us and all our suffering world this day. Holding us close, even as we are physically distant from one another. For as we walk the way of the cross, we trust the promise of spring, the hope of resurrection and new life.
