Rev. Scott Summerville

When we were boys my daddy taught me and my three brothers how to paddle a canoe. He showed us how to hold the paddle, how to keep your arms straight while you stroke the paddle through the water, how to hold the paddle flat to the wind as you bring it forward, how to turn the paddle 90° back just before you dip it in the water again, and how to put your back into it so your arms don’t get tired. He taught us how to steer the canoe.

He taught us that the canoe was like a sail, so you always have to be very careful about the wind. He taught us that when the wind is blowing hard and the waves start coming up higher on the lake, you need to keep the point of the boat going straight into the wind. If you don’t go straight into the wind, if you don’t let the canoe split through the wind like a knife, the wind may catch you on the side of the canoe, and you may lose control get swamped or even overturned, which leaves you in a bit of a pickle if you are in the middle of a lake in a storm.

I have a Jewish friend who said to me, “You have a busy week coming up.” I imagine from his perspective he pictures all those things that Christians do this week: having extra worship services, the palm branches and the lilies, children looking for Easter eggs and candy, and singing the Hallelujah Chorus. It certainly can be a busy week. But beneath all those busy things, there is this journey that Jesus takes to Jerusalem; in this week we remember how he went directly into the wind.

His disciples urged him not to go to Jerusalem. Others warned him, even some of the Pharisees who were sometimes at odds with him, warned him that he was in danger. If he had asked his mother whether he should go to Jerusalem for the Passover, she would have told him not to go. The gospel says he set his face to go to Jerusalem – I like that phrase, “he set his face.”

It is so easy to avoid things that are hard. It is natural to want to bend with the wind, instead of going straight into it. He set his face to go to Jerusalem, and on this day we call Palm Sunday he arrived there, and so began his Passion, the journey to the cross.

From a reasonable perspective he did not have to make this journey. He could have had a good career in Galilee. He was known as Rabbi or teacher, and greatly respected for his wisdom. He had a reputation as a healer. He possessed extraordinary powers of touch – touch that could comfort and heal. He was a storyteller par excellence; he was a master of words. He was a man of the poor; the Gospels say that the poor heard him gladly. At the same time he was someone who could mix with people of every sort, the high and the low, the holy and the unholy, the clean and the unclean. He had a special relationship with people who were scorned, those who were regarded as outside of the bounds of polite society. In his encounters with them he took his message to its deepest point: his message of radical forgiving love. He related tenderly to children, and he did not discriminate in his treatment of women.

He was so many things, did so many things, encountered people in so many different states of life. His life was full – he did not need to take the road south from Galilee to Judea to the city of Jerusalem. He could have stayed home. That would have been the sensible thing to do. That would have been the safe thing to do.

But he called himself a prophet and saw for himself a prophet’s death. The prophets of Israel never did bow to the powerful; they spoke the word of truth and took the consequences.

So in this Holy Week, this big week for Christians, there are palms and lilies, and the Hallelujah Chorus, and there is an opportunity given to us to stop and to meditate on the cross.

I have been doing that a bit myself. I will share with you what has come so far from my meditations of this week on the cross:

As I meditated on the cross there first came to me an awareness of Jesus and the way he embodied compassion and love and generosity of soul, as I pondered his suffering, it brought to my mind the suffering of many gentle souls that I have known and now know. As I remember those people and the suffering that they are going through, while the same time remembering the cross, I found it clarifying. When I meditate on the cross in connection to individuals who are hurting, it helps to take the focus off of me and what it is I am supposed to say and what I am supposed to do; instead it helps to keep the focus on the one who is hurting. It helps me to stay with their pain, not to run away from it or deny it, not to try to find just the right thing to say. The cross can guide us to true compassion, which means to suffer with, (from the greek: com-pasko: to suffer with another person. )

I was very touched by the request which came from the member of our church who was hospitalized and recovering from cancer surgery this week — her request for us to pray for her roommate in the hospital. She had her own discomforts and was facing her own challenges, but she so freely took in the hurts of another being, instead of doing the sensible thing, which is to block out the pain of others and say, “I’ve got my own troubles … got troubles enough of my own.”

As I meditated on the cross there came to me another awareness: the awareness that we are all avoiding something. The decision to take the journey to the cross for Jesus was the ultimate decision to face down fear – instead of avoiding the things we fear. What am I avoiding? What is it I am scared to look at in my life, in my relationships, and my habits? “Let it slide,” “Don’t rock the boat”, “Don’t bring it up now,” “Deal with it tomorrow.” As I meditate on the cross I find it harder to avoid things.

Also, as I meditated on the cross there came to me a fresh awareness of my own body. We tend to separate physical and spiritual things, but the cross does not let us do that. The cross keeps us forever connected to the body. We live so much in our heads, wrapped up in our fears and fantasies and plans for the future. Sometimes we have to find ourselves in a hospital bed or under the surgeon’s knife to realize this constant truth: we are bodies; even our brains – the part of us that has these mysterious capacities to think and imagine –are made of cells; the brain is living tissue just like our bones.

Our bodies are sacred. Mary Ellen and I led a discussion this past week entitled Sacred Sex: Divine Love in Human Intimacy. Only two people showed up! When I mentioned to my office manager that the attendance was meager, she said “Why do you think that is?” I said, “Oh, I guess people are very busy.” She said, “I don’t think people want to talk with the ministers about sex.” ! That is not true, is it?

In any case, to meditate upon one who suffers on the cross is to come inescapably face-to-face with the fact that we are flesh and blood, embodied beings, male and female, full of all the aches and pains, pleasures, longings, desires, and fears that come from this fact that we are flesh.

As I meditated on the cross there came to me a deeper sense of what it means to live in solidarity with other human beings. Jesus’ decision to accept the cross was a decision that makes no sense in purely personal terms. It only makes sense as an act of love and solidarity with other human beings. Contemplating the cross can bring to us an illumination, a sudden awareness: “Oh, I thought life was all about me; that everything was all about me; I see there is another way – it seems a bit strange, but maybe I could get used to this idea that living a life that is all about me doesn’t really go anywhere, but a life that is about my solidarity with others – this strange idea is something that offers all sorts of possibilities to grow, to love, to give. Maybe life is not all about me, and in that awareness lies my liberation.

Finally, as I meditated on the cross this week there came to me the awareness that I wish the world was different than it is. I wish that humanity was not so skillful in devising ways of inflicting cruelty and suffering. On the cross a gentle and loving soul suffers. I wish that gentle loving souls did not suffer. I know it is a virtue to accept certain things, to embrace all of life, happiness and pain both. But there are things that cannot be embraced and should not be accepted. There is something about the cross that is not acceptable. This is not a comfortable thought. If we meditate on the cross and this brings us face-to-face with what we don’t like about this world, then maybe our meditation on the cross will move us to do what we can to change the world.

So our meditation on the cross leads us to deeper self-awareness and challenges us to action to confront and seek to change the conditions of our world, the injustices of our world.

Next Sunday some of us will be up your singing the Hallelujah Chorus. I look forward to being with you and being part of that chorus.

Between now and then I invite you to meditate upon the cross of Christ.

Grace and peace to you.