Palm Sunday 2025

Psalm 118:19-29

Luke 19:28-40

SERMON “The Lonely Mountain”

My family joined the white flight to the suburbs when I finished 6th grade, before I would have started junior high in an urban school system. I can look back on that now through the lens of an adult anti-racist, which does absolutely nothing to change the past. 

Because I had been considered gifted in my previous school, I was placed in the class with the highest achievers in my new school, an obvious mistake. 

My homeroom teacher was Mr. Taylor. He was that teacher. 

You know that teacher. There is one in every school. His classroom, the furthest from the office and cafeteria, was cool, had walls painted like a map instead of the pale industrial colors of the rest of the building. 

In addition to the core learning expected of all seventh graders, he offered a menu of independent learning activities for credit. One of the items on that list was reading “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

I was already an avid reader, and I was probably going to be a nerd anyways, but that sealed the deal. I spent my early teenage years with my nose buried in the Lord of the Rings and various prequels and supplements.

So it was that I sat in a bedroom that was still relatively new to me, decorated for our nation’s bicentennial, and wept. 

I had powered past Gollum and the forest, the initial events at the Lonely Mountain, and had just read of the death of a central character. I can still see the paperback, the quality of light in my bedroom, the quiet of the house, hear my own sobs, still more little boy than adolescent.

It was certainly not the first time I had cried, not the first time I had cried from deep sorrow, not even the first time a book had brought me to tears. But this was on a whole new level.

I’ve read plenty of books in the nearly half century since that day, wept more than a few times while reading, watching a film, attending an opera. 

Great writing can transcend genre and make you care about a character, whether it is Bilbo Baggins, John Grady Cole, or Katniss Everdeen. And if you are wondering, that is a range from the fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and the gritty realism of Cormac McCarthy, to the brutality of Suzanne Collins, this last without a doubt the best author of the eerily prophetic genre of dystopian teen angst. The Hunger Games series, in which the powerless are sacrificed to entertain the powerful and maintain tyranny, is looking more and more like reality every day.

Story is how homo sapiens makes meaning of the complex and the mysterious. You can get as hardcore empiricist as you want, leaning into the long de-bunked outlook called positivism, which has nothing to do with positivity, but in the end, we tell the story of those scientific discoveries, the story of how those discoveries changed lives, changed the world. 

No one does dramatic readings of the Pythagorean Equation or Fermat’s Last Theorem, except maybe at MIT, where I once worked as a Chaplain Intern.

I wept that afternoon a half century ago because I was learning through literature, learning that people, in this case hobbits and dwarves, are complicated and imperfect, that reconciliation does not always mean restoration, that good and evil lie on a continuum rather than a binary, that sometimes awful stuff happens.

The story worked as a story, moved me, because I started with the “Unexpected Party,” dealt with the trolls and the goblins, visited Rivendell and encountered the tricksy Gollum long before I got to the Lonely Mountain. 

If I has skipped from Gandalf scratching a sign on the door to the climactic events at the Lonely Mountain, there would have been no tears, no trips to the bookstore for volume after volume of Tolkien’s writing, no Tolkien calendar among the Christmas gifts year after year.

Just like The Hobbit, Holy Week is a complete story. 

It is so easy, all too common, to jump from waving palms to bonnets and alleluias, giving Good Friday at most a nod in passing. This is true for churches that don’t observe the liturgical seasons, that don’t do Advent and Lent. 

It is also true for folks who find the dominant interpretation of Holy Week embarrassing, not because we find the resurrection itself problematic, but because we find the God in the dominant interpretation problematic. But blood atonement, the violent and retributive God that requires the death of Jesus to protect God’s own fragility, that has never been the only understanding, nor would that God be worthy of our worship.

The story is the story of an un-credentialed rabbi announcing the goodness of God, a goodness that was bigger than our badness, that could call us to a new way of being in a realm of love where justice was the norm and everyone was both your neighbor and a bit of holiness, a bit of the divine. 

The story is the story of a belief, a love so powerful that people who were seen as sinful and broken and diseased and possessed felt whole again, a love so powerful that it disrupted the retributive violence of the misogynist mob that was ready to murder a woman in the streets.

It is the story of that teacher and healer, of that prophet’s entry into Jerusalem as palms waved and people cried out in celebration at the exact same time that the corrupt and violent puppet kings and colonial administrators were entering the city to control the people who might be tempted to take the Passover story of liberation too literally.

It is the story of that rabbi’s disruption of religious commerce and religious privilege and religious self-righteousness and the willingness of religion to partner with empire to snuff out the wild beauty of the spirit at work in the streets.

It is the story of how, as tensions mounted, he made sacred the common meal, anchored his practice of love lived out into the world at the table where bread is blessed and broken, where wine is shared.

It is the story of his fear and his courage in the garden, of the way he was framed by the Sanhedrin, accused of thought crimes, condemned by the Roman prefect, tortured and humiliated like a captive in a Salvadoran death camp, executed between two other troublemakers.

It is the story of the way the combined forces of evil sought to strip him of his dignity, to shame him and make him an unclean thing, to erase him completely.

The story of Holy Week is the story of empire and religion’s utter failure to achieve that goal because, no matter what you believe happened on Easter morning, no one can deny that there have always been those who have lived his message, radically and as an every day revolution, for we are called to every day revolution, rebelling against fear and loneliness and hate, sometimes even rebelling against those who sought to co-opt and misuse the power of his message for their own ends. 

The knife’s edge of Holy Saturday is meaningless, just another day to clean house and do prep for Easter dinner, without the flow of the whole week. We need to be in that space of sacred annihilation for a time because we sometimes live in that space of uncertainty, in that moment of crushing defeat, the sobs welling up as third-graders are handcuffed, as we bury damaged veterans who took their own lives.

All of the story matters, people made whole, people fed, the idea of the holy stretched and made more, made better. But this week, this is the week when we see what it means to live all of that in a time of chaos and cruelty. And this year, of all of the years in our lives, we need that example, for we live in a time of chaos and cruelty.

This is our story. For when people say God is a petty tyrant, dividing and punishing, we, like Jesus, can proclaim that the Holy Mystery we name as God is good, creative, and powerful. And when we experience shock and despair, as we certainly do at times, we can be mindful that defeat is not always defeat, and that our story is not over yet.

Amen.

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray.