All Saints, Dorval
April 5, 2020
I think we all have a visceral understanding of Palm Sunday this year.
Life is chugging along, with the usual pleasant daily activities and maybe even some celebrations. Spring is on its way, and there’s a lot to look forward to. You’ve heard rumours of upheavals in distant places, the people in power seem to be nervous, but it hasn’t really registered in your daily life yet.
And then, literally overnight, everything shifts. And suddenly nothing is the same as it was before, and you’re stuck indoors, and you’re afraid for yourself and your friends, and pain and death seem very close, and you wonder whether anything will ever be the same again.
No wonder the disciples were freaked out and panicked. No wonder they made grandiose promises that they couldn’t follow through on. No wonder their brains weren’t working as well as they normally did. We all understand those responses at a gut level now.
The people cheered Jesus as he entered Jerusalem – they cried, “Hosanna,” which means “Save us!” – because they thought he would make everything better. And he did – but it took days and weeks and years for that to be fully revealed. As the first Holy Week unfolded in Jerusalem, those who were hoping that the palms and the parade would lead directly to a joyful celebration of the overthrow of the Roman occupiers, were disappointed. And then worse than disappointed, as the cheers of “Hosanna!” became the shouts of “Crucify him!”, and the cock crowed to reveal Peter’s cowardice, and Judas threw down his blood money and went and hanged himself, and the Saviour of the world died of slow suffocation on the shameful cross.
Every year, we observe Holy Week. But this year is unlike any other. This year, I strongly suspect, we are going to feel like we are in the Upper Room, in the garden, on the Cross, and in the tomb, well beyond next Sunday morning. We are not going to be able to parcel out the suffering and anxiety, and keep it neatly confined within the familiar liturgies. We are going to have to learn how to keep living in what feels like an extended Holy Week, until what comes next is revealed – and we have no way of knowing, now, when that will be.
Because the Christian faith is fundamentally a faith of joy and resurrection, we are sometimes not very good at letting ourselves feel what we feel, when those feelings are not happy ones. We think that we should be cheerful all the time, or we are somehow betraying our faith.
But nothing could be further from the truth. And in fact, our tradition contains a deep and vital well of lament. Lament is essential in times like these, and God can handle our laments.
Lament does not mean moaning and groaning and feeling sorry for ourselves for the sake of feeling sorry for ourselves. But it does mean looking at the world with clear eyes and recognizing where things as they are do not reflect the world as God intends it to be. It means lifting up to God the places where the innocent are being harmed, where suffering and death appear to have the upper hand, and where leaders and those in power are using that power for ill rather than for good.
The Psalms are a rich, deep well of lament, and we have been delving into them in our daily Evening Prayer services, working through the Psalms in sequence, rather than in the very selective snippets that we get on Sunday morning. But today’s Psalm, for the Liturgy of the Passion, is also a psalm of lament:
Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble;
my eye is consumed with sorrow, and also my throat and my belly.
For my life is wasted with grief, and my years with sighing;
my strength fails me because of affliction, and my bones are consumed.
This is no cheery hymn of praise to God; this is the raw howl of a soul in deep pain, who has no interest in sugarcoating the situation or pretending to feel better than she does. This psalm is included in today’s readings because it is being put in the mouth of Jesus; but it also belongs to all of us. This is the language that this pandemic Holy Week is asking us, imploring us, to reclaim.
Dominique Gilliard writes:
Lamentation is uncensored communion with God — visceral worship where we learn to be honest, intimate and humble before God. Lamentation is both an acknowledgment that things are not as they should be and an anguished wail, beckoning the Lord to intervene with righteousness and justice.
When we lament, we confess our humanity and concede that we are too weak to combat the world’s powers, principalities and spiritual wickedness on our own. When we lament, we declare that only God has the power to truly mend the world’s pain and brokenness.
There are many voices in this moment encouraging us to keep our chins up, stay positive, learn to crochet or speak Japanese or bake bread while we’re stuck in the house. Ca va bien aller!
And it is a deeply understandable instinct. Yet we are also being asking to process levels of disruption, fear, and grief that for many of us were literally unthinkable a month ago. There are those who are working around the clock at great personal risk, and those who are out of a job and worrying about how to pay the rent. There are women giving birth alone, because hospitals have forbidden even the father to be present for fear of infection, and there are people mourning the deaths of elders taken before their time by the virus. None of these situations can be simply fixed by positivity. They require lament.
The other day, I read an article about why working at home is so exhausting, and after each point, the author offered tips for how to address the issues. And to be honest, the tips basically seemed to boil down to “work even harder to address the causes of your exhaustion!” and “don’t feel what you do, in fact, feel!”
We don’t need to work harder. And we don’t need to try to change our feelings. We need to stop, and take time to name those feelings, and feel them, and offer them up to God.
Our temptation is always to rush through lament to the joy and hope that we trust will be waiting on the other side.
And we can trust that that joy and hope are there. We can call on God to deliver us. As our Psalm continues:
My times are in your hand;
rescue me from the hand of my enemies, and from those who persecute me.
Make your face to shine upon your servant,
and in your loving-kindness save me.
But to get there in the long run, we need to acknowledge that we are not there now. That where we are now is in a place of brokenness, and pain, and fear. And that that’s OK, and that God is here, with us, walking the way of the Cross.
Let this Holy Week – this strange, isolated, hyperextended Holy Week – teach you how to lament. And then, wait on God, and see what comes next.
Amen.
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