Sweet and Sharp

The liturgy of Palm Sunday is one of my absolute favorites-- sweet and sharp, all at once.

Sweet with the praises at the start of the service, with the raising of palms and voices on the march from the muddy park across the street into the (relative) warmth of the sanctuary. Especially sweet this year because I was a chalice bearer, which is an honor and a privilege every single time.

Sharp because the accolades change so swiftly and seamlessly into accusations. Sharp because the Passion Gospel is long and stark and difficult, though there's an edge of sweetness listening to my husband's deep, rich narration.

Sharpness at the long pause after "He breathed his last."

Sharpness thinking about the week ahead, especially the footwashing service we will have on Maundy Thursday. That's another Liturgy of Mixed Emotions, combining the bittersweet example of servant leadership with a discomfort as much about the awkwardness of cradling a stranger's feet in a giant salad bowl as it is the stripping of the altar at the end of the service.

Good Friday, with the usual daily routines impaled upon a spike at 12 noon and left to hang until it is finished.

And, of course, that ridiculous relief coming on Sunday morning, with the sweet, silly muddling of traditions both secular and so completely religious as to be the defining core of what we're about when we say we're about Christianity.

Hollow bunnies. Hollow tombs. Hollow despair, in that it can only be hollow and empty and formless next to the reality of a resurrected Savior.

The sweetness of all of this wrapped up with a knife-point sharp knowledge that it's still only going to carry me so far. Yes, Christ will be "the first fruits of them that slept" and the empty tomb will mean more to me now than ever, here in the shadow of my first Easter actually believing in a bodily resurrection.

Even so, all of that brilliance is not going to bleach away the difficult truths I'm still learning how to speak and live. They will be with me as I put out the children's Easter baskets, and they will be with me as I put on my pretty Easter dress, and they will be with me as I walk through that morning, and church, and all of the hundreds of more ordinary mornings and afternoons that will pass until Easter comes again. Sometimes they will be with me in so violent and visceral a way as to blot out almost everything else.

So what is the point of any of it? What is the point of believing if it doesn't change the plays in the playbook? What is the point of holding on to faith if it's not going to actually change anything bad that's gone before or will certainly happen in the future?

Part of it is this: "That I might fight befriended." That everything we reenact and remember throughout the entirety of Holy Week has already happened, with the ultimate and incredible result that He is with us. It might be hard, but it's never going to be lonely. None of us face any of it by ourselves.

More than that, though, is the fact that it's about way more than just me. It's about us, as in all of us, working together to try and bring about that most beautiful vision of the world prefigured all throughout the words of scripture, in the words of the law and the prophets and Christ himself and then developed through the labors of the apostles who started the church. It's a vision of healing and restoration and love that will, I absolutely believe, become a reality in God's own time. And in my own time, I can help it flourish.

So I guess the point is love, then. Love and community and the best work to which I could ever commit myself, which is to say God's work, which is to say my best efforts to uphold that love and community. I can confidently hold on to that. That's what makes it possible for me to continue to believe, this Holy Week and every week that follows.