Palm Leaves and the God Who Understands

In her sermon, the Rev. Talitha Arnold, recounted a phrase from a Palm Sunday service at Yale she attended years ago. "I cannot believe in a God who does not understand me," said the Lutheran minister in that chapel service.
Maybe Holy Week is a reminder that indeed God does understand. God understands the human condition, your life, mine. God understands.

Kathleen Norris confesses in Amazing Grace, "When I first began to attend church services as an adult I found it ironic that it was the language about Jesus Christ, meant to be most inviting, that made me feel most left out."

Norris goes on to say, "I began to realize that one of the most difficult things about believing in Christ is to resist the temptation to disincarnate him, to not accept him as both fully human and fully divine. The normal human tendency is to succumb to the errors that Gregory Wolfe delineates: "When emphasis is placed on the divine at the expense of the human (the conservative error), Jesus becomes an ethereal authority figure who is remote from earthly live and experience. When he is thought of as merely human (the liberal error), he becomes nothing more than a superior social worker or a popular guru."

Norris offers, "The orthodox Christian seeks another way, that of living with paradox, of accepting the ways that seeming dualities work together in Jesus Christ, in our own lives. For me, this has meant trying to hear the gospels in a way that allows me to reject a simplistic dualism in the interest of a creative tension between flesh and spirit, faith and reason, even God and Caesar."

Our own Church seems to resist relaxing into and embracing this creative tension between flesh and spirit, sexuality and spirituality, being human and divine. It seems that we have forgotten that all of us, not just some of us, are created good in the image of God. Moreover, we have forgotten that our human differences including who we are, who we fall in love with, and how we make love are part of this glorious creation, resurrection and liberation.

The poet Rilke said, "Who is this Christ, who interferes in everything?" Interference. Not a word that contemporary Christianity wants to associate with Christ. Where does "interference" and the table-turning, status-quo challenging radical Jesus fit into the present day formula we have created of "peace, unity and purity?" Maybe we need a little interference.

This morning at the United Church, I understood for the first time why as a young boy I thought those palmetto leaves seemed so out of place in church, but at home in the woods. They did not fit, they were out of place. They were to live in the woods, they belonged there. Norris speaks to the experience of "out of place-ness" when we do not embrace the creative tension of being both human and divine, of flesh and spirit.

As I travel our church working for LGBT equality and justice, people often tell me how out of place they feel at church. Just like those palmetto leaves. The problem is not with the people, it is with the church. And, of course, they are prudent to ask if they will be welcome, or safe, at church. The "all are welcome" sign at the front of the church could just be another Palm Sunday, a set-up. Or, it could be the truth.

Are we willing to remove all of the barriers that prevent people from feeling at home in our church? Are we willing to accept the example and call of Jesus to interference, or will we play it safe? Resurrection, liberation is possible.

Holy Week is a reminder that indeed God does understand. God understands the human condition, your life, mine, all lives. God understands.

with hope and grace,
Michael