Sermons
'The Storm Before the Calm, The Story of the Palm:'
March 24, 2002
"The Storm Before the Calm, The Story of the Palm"
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman
March 24, 2002
At the Unitarian Church of Montclair
67 Church Street, Montclair, New Jersey 07042
973-744-6276 WWW.UUMontclair.org
There’s an old story about a couple of long time Unitarian Universalists chatting with each other at Coffee Hour. One confides to the other, “I’d really like to invite a new friend of mine to attend one of our Sunday services, but our minister uses that “J” work so much I’m afraid it’ll make my friend uncomfortable.”
“What do you mean?” asks the other. “Our minister doesn’t mention Jesus, that often.”
“I’m not talking about Jesus,” says the first. “I’m talking about justice.”
It’s interesting that Unitarian Universalists often try to describe ourselves by what we are not instead of by what we are. I think we serve others and ourselves better by saying who we are. We are a community willing to learn truth from whatever sources hold truth. We are a community committed to acting on those truths we have found.
Jesus was one of the great religious teachers of all time. And so, I want you to know, we will be talking about Jesus this morning in our search for truth. And one of the subjects Jesus taught us most about was justice. And so we will be talking about justice, too, and how justice is at the center of religious pursuit. Imagine that, a double “J” theme at the same sitting.
As we join the story back in the ancient days of Jerusalem, it’s Palm Sunday. Jesus prepares for his triumphant ride through the city. He mounts his steed…well his donkey, and pandemonium breaks loose. People are jumping up and down; the kids are climbing into the trees to get a better view. People are throwing their cloaks down in the roadway before him. Everybody’s pulling branches off the palm trees and waving them at Jesus and yelling, “Hosanna! Hooray! It’s Jesus, our own true savior from the House of David! Yippee!” You can imagine the scene.
Over the years, we’ve all witnessed similar events, if not in person then on TV. They happen everywhere, but the ones in New York City come foremost in my mind. Astronauts, World Series champions, even occasional Presidents draw the people to line the streets and fill the windows, jumping up and down, throwing confetti and hollering, “Hooray! Here’s our hero! This is one of our own! Yippee! Hooray!”
With all that confetti coming down it really does look a lot like a storm. I have to imagine that’s how it was back in Jerusalem, too… a lot like a storm. Can you imagine being Jesus or one of the latter day heroes? The object of all that adulation? Add a large amount of ecstatic energy and you could easily be caught up in a typhoon of well supported self-acclaim.
But fame is so fleeting. Fifteen minutes and it’s all over. Nut much of a calm follows a short storm like that.
Before a real storm, the air is charged with an increasing intensity of negative ions. The barometer goes crazy. You can feel a storm coming, sometimes for days, as the negative ions build up more and more.
Then the storm finally comes through. It crashes and bangs and blows, and finally, it blows itself out. And then the air left behind is charged with positive ions. And there’s a calmness in the air, one that’s poignant with clarity. You know you’ve been through something; maybe you’ve even suffered losses. But there is a pay off at the end – a surviving calmness that hugs the world and you in it. And somehow everything is made okay. We sometimes have personal storms that follow these same patterns.
But in a Palm Sunday, hero-worshipping flurry, there’s not much of a chance for the negative ions to build up. What’s more likely to get swollen, I’d suppose – never really having had a parade on my behalf – would be the ego of the honoree. I’m not supposing that would be the case with Jesus, back in Jerusalem. But before we turn back to him, I don’t really want to let us all off the hook so easily.
None of us here may have ever had a parade in our honor, though I suspect there are even exceptions to that. Still, we live in this celebrity-crazed culture where we literally, “…throw our heroes up the pop chart.” (Paul Simon) Fame and adulation are a much sought after commodity. And even if we’re not looking for fame, part of that culture works its way into all of our lives. Our culture is over stocked with icons, and graven images. It’s in short supply though, of principled integrity. The comfort of the good life often precludes acting on our religious impulses to do what’s right by all our brothers and sisters and by our planet.
The ancient Chinese sage, Lao Tzu wrote, “Those who would take over the earth, and shape it to their [own] will never, I notice, succeed.” That’s why the calm that follows a storm of insignificance doesn’t have much healing to it. Nothing has come into balance. Instead, the storm is still brewing.
That, I think, is what was going on with Jesus on Palm Sunday. The waving palms were just a stirring of the air on the way to the big storm to come later in the week.
Jesus, our brother and teacher, knew, as Frederick Douglass did, that to profess freedom was to agitate; that rain comes with thunder and lightning; that struggle was likely to be both moral and physical. Jesus knew that true religious work, true spiritual work, is the work of justice.
We live in incredibly frightening times. Acts of terror around the world have become a part of our daily diet of news information. The aftermath of acts of terror from across the river are a part of our up-close daily reality. Stability in the Middle East seems to look more like something that has already relatively occurred, rather than looking like something that’s about to happen.
It feels as though the ions in the air are charging toward a colossal storm. The barometers we have can’t even measure the intensity. But I wonder if we are even aware of the direction from which the storm is blowing. There are so many little flurries to distract us.
I was at a dinner party last weekend and met a woman, Greta, with a strong German accent, who is Unitarian Universalist from a nearby congregation in New Jersey. As we passed the stuffed cabbage around the table, the conversation turned to the policies and directions that our country is taking these days. We were talking about how unsafe it feels, in this time of patriotic fervor, to disagree, socially or publicly, with these national policies. Greta added a perspective to the conversation, one which I hadn’t considered, that brought a frightening clarity to the table.
“I was a young girl, growing up in Dresden, before the war,” she said. “But I was old enough to notice what was going on around me in my country. It was very much like what I see in this country today. From that time to this, I have never been so frightened to speak the truth about what I see.
“We don’t have storm troopers here, but public places are filled with armed men in uniform. In Germany, back then, we were crippled by a failed war and a failed economy. Here, and now, we are deeply wounded by the first major attack on American soil in over a century and we also have a crippled economy.
“Back then, it was patriotic to hate non-Germans and to ostracize anyone who said different. People’s lives were ruined by it. Businesses were ruined by it. And so people were quiet when it should have been time to speak out.
“It’s not so different here, now. They say the economy is turning around, but we all know we still haven’t felt all the effects of its crash. And we are supposed to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of innocent people that’s already happened in Afghanistan and that is likely to happen soon in Iraq. And what does Congress do when the President asks for more support to continue this madness? They wave flags and pat him on the back.
“That’s the part that scares me the most. There were so many Nazi flags that waved in Dresden before that storm. Now, I see American flags waving while the military becomes bigger than ever. Flags wave while the country reneges on promises to support world and national population control; while the country reneges on promises to protect a woman’s right to choose her own destiny, let alone what we have done to the poor children. Flags are waving while the country reneges on promises to rebuild and revitalize racially defined, poverty stricken inner cities.
“We are asked to turn a blind eye and to wave our flags while this country dictates a new world order to the rest of the world and guts its own economy to make the rich even richer. And so many people are doing it, turning a blind eye, and waving their flags, and keeping their mouths shut about things that are wrong, and that they know are wrong. I have not seen anything like this since Dresden,” she concluded.
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground,” said Frederick Douglas. However inaccurate Greta’s analogy may be, we have to recognize that it does bear a great deal of truth.
There is a storm brewing and it’s going to take more than a palm-waving ride of pompous, quick fix patronizing platitudes to stem that storm. A worldview limited by an Andy Warhol fifteen-minute perspective is not going to produce the balm needed to deliver calm in this overly strained world. The question is—will the storm require some sort of a global level crucifixion?
Jesus rode through town in the midst of waving palms, supposedly at least, knowing the upcoming choices and the fate that awaited him at the other end of the ride. We don’t know our fate. That story is yet to be written. And so, I think, there is a time when our good thoughts need to take the shape of strong words. And then our words need to shape courageous actions. What might our actions be? If we pay attention to the story, we can learn and come to know that the quick fix ride to glory, and the seduction of our greatness are not the answers to the questions – the larger questions that we face today.
WWJD? What would Jesus do? I sure don’t know. But at least we know what he did, as it’s related in the story. He turned, for a moment, deeply inside himself to prepare for what must be done. Then he denied all the adulation that had been heaped up on him. And then he sacrificed all that he had so that the world might learn that it is through the storm of sacrifice that the world might be calmed, that the world might be saved.
It wasn’t about what he could take. It was about what he could give.
What is asked of us in these difficult times? We are not mythical beings. We are not messiahs. Still, I have to imagine the answer is not about what we can take. Even now, the answer is about what we can give. And the answer is justice. We can give justice to a world in need of it. What is asked of us in these difficult times? The answer is responsible participation in a world being rapidly consumed by greed and fundamentalist self-righteousness.
We have all been wronged in our lives and in our world. Until we religiously learn to be forgiving, until we learn how to courageously and respectfully give up our need for revenge and retribution, the negative atmosphere will continue to swell. And the storm that will follow, this storm we are in, will grow in direct proportion to that negative energy.
When Jesus died, he said, “Father forgive their foolish ways.” We need not only be forgiving, but we need to be forgiven, as well. And if we truly want to be forgiven for our foolishness, we’ll need to own up to it. We don’t deserve to be forgiven for what we insist on perpetuating.
What we need to perpetuate is justice, for therein lies the possibility of our salvation. Jesus did not become one of the greatest spiritual leaders of all time because he was consumed by some kind of regimen of private piety. It was through his religious actions based in his great compassion that he was made whole. Our road to fulfillment is on that same path.
A quick flash of glory won’t do it. We need to be in this for the long haul. It’s about the roots and the branches that connect us with each other and with all that is.
If we fail this opportunity, who knows what might be lost in the storm that will precede the inevitable calm. Once again we need to learn the lessons from the story of the palm.
Let us not conclude, but continue on with this “Prayer” by Robert Lewis Stevenson:
Give us courage and gaiety and a quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends,
Soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.
If it may not, give us the strength
To encounter that which is to come,
That we may be brave in peril,
Constant in tribulation
Temperate in wrath,
And in all changes of fortune, down to the gates of death,
Loyal and loving to one another.