Who We Are

Propers: Palm Sunday of the Passion, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

So it’s Palm Sunday, and we’re not here—not in the sanctuary, not in the church building, not out in the streets waving palm fronds and shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Hosanna in the highest!”

Instead we’re at home; watching, presumably, on a screen; entering into a Holy Week shorn of all its usual trappings: the music, the flowers, the fire, the candles, the sound of the Cross dragged ominously down the center aisle. Holy Week is our Sunday for the year. And here we are still stuck at home, having given up so much that we enjoy, all for Lent and love of neighbor.

We are suffering from anxiety, yes, as must all societies which experience pestilence and plague. But more than this, as a colleague of mine recently pointed out, we are experiencing a crisis of identity. We don’t quite know who we are right now. The stores are all closed—so we cannot define ourselves by what we buy. Our jobs are all upended—so we cannot define ourselves by what we do.

And we begin to realize, in the quiet, the uncertainty, here in the quarantine together alone, that all we did was buy stuff. All we did was do stuff—when what we should have been doing was building meaningful relationships. Who are we, if we’re not what we do, not what we own? We don’t know. Cripes, if it weren’t for Netflix, we might have a full-blown spiritual awakening on our hands.

And this affects the Church as well. So many clergy are scrambling to stay relevant, scrambling to stay visible, because we’re afraid that if we don’t livestream everything, if we don’t set up fellowship via Zoom and Communion via Facebook then we’ll all forget what it is that we’re supposed to be doing here. If the churches are closed for a month and a half, or more—will anyone come back?

I could hardly imagine a better reminder, than Covid-19, that the Church is not in the entertainment business. Whenever we sacrifice faithful discipleship for gimmicks or gewgaws, for lasers, screens, and fog machines, we’ve already lost. Because the Church will never out-entertain the world. That’s why so much contemporary Christian music is so pathetic, playing catch-up to a culture that’s already shifted before we could even get there.

Rather, the Church is a family of discipleship. It’s not someplace we go or something we do for an hour or two one morning a week. The Church is who we are. You, at home, right now, alone or with your family, you are the Church. Not a church, not a little gathering of individuals thrown together by circumstance, but the Church, the Body of Christ, His hands and feet and voice and heart still at work in this world. You are Christians. You are Christs for one another.

The Kingdom of God is within you. It is the lodestone of your life. A mother and father, as Luther liked to say, are the bishop and bishoppess of the home. And yes, our doors are closed. And yes, our lives feel as though they are on hold. But Christ is with you. Christ is in you. He has called you in your Baptism. He has fortified you with Word and with Sacrament. And He has sent you forth as a New Creation, to love and to feed, to forgive and to heal, this whole wide wild broken world. Now is the time when your faith shines most fiercely.

Be Jesus for the world. Be a faithful calm within the storm. Shine forth your hope like a lamp on a stand. In everything you do, in everyone you meet, ask yourself: have I done for this person what Christ would have done? Have I, in fact, done even one thing this day because He said, “Do it,” and have I refrained from one thing this day because He said, “Do not”?

You don’t have to save the world. You don’t have to cure Corona. You just have to love the person next to you, the neighbor in his or her need. Comfort the fearful. Give hope to the despairing. Share with the needy. Serve the undeserving. Spread joy in a world besieged by scarcity and by blame. Practice prayer and practice silence. Remember that love is not an emotion, not the same thing as feeling in love. Love is the willful choice to give of yourself for the good of another, which we are freed to do because Christ has first loved and given Himself for us.

This isn’t a to-do list. It’s not a recipe for works-righteousness, or bourgeois morality. This is simply what a life looks like when the sinner is set free: free from selfishness, free from greed, free from hatred and uncertainty and fear. Christ did not create this crisis, but He is in the very midst of it, indiscriminately serving, healing, forgiving, feeding, joining us in our suffering, dying with us on the Cross, and then pulling us up and out of the grave to life everlasting in Him.

You are loved; you are forgiven; you are freed. And now you are Jesus for this world. Show them a faith that brings humility, generosity, wisdom, compassion, hope, joy, and love, and they will beat down the doors of this sanctuary. They will clamor for Christ, for a Word that sets men free. They will lift up their palm branches and cry, “Hosanna in the highest! Hosanna to the King of Kings!

“For we were fearful and you comforted us! We were needy and you served us! We were broken and you refused to judge us! Show us the source of this faith and this life. Show us the living Christ who has defeated all death and the grave. Show us the Easter of Jesus, for truly this Man was the Son of God.”

And we shall all together be the Church, for the first time again.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Credit where credit is due: the above was inspired in no small measure by a lovely whiskey-and-Bailey’s rant by the Rev’d Tom Drobena.