I preached this sermon at St. Lyda's on Palm Sunday, 2011. The text is Mark 14:12-25; read it here.
Tonight is a night to live in the tension between
all that is breaking apart,
and all that is holding together.
The disciples have gathered to celebrate the passover.
To tell the story once more of how God liberated them from captivity,
so many years ago.
Of how God brought them out of slavery.
They’ve gathered to tell this story that binds them together --
and then Jesus breaks them apart.
He says,
“One of you is going to betray me.”
And the text tells us, “They began to be distressed.”
“Surely, not I, Lord,” they say.
And then having broken them apart,
Jesus puts them back together again.
He does it, not in the way we might think to put something back together,
fitting shards of a broken piece of china together with glue.
Instead, Jesus does something curious,
and backwards.
He puts them back together again
by doing even more breaking.
He takes a loaf of bread.
A loaf that is,
as our Eucharistic prayer puts it,
“grain scattered across the hills,
made one in this bread,”
and he breaks it.
He breaks it so that we might be whole.
Not like a shattered piece of china, painstakingly repaired,
but like grain from all the hills,
baked together in one loaf.
The bread is broken, and in some backwards way,
we are made whole.
Later, Jesus knows,
his very body will be broken.
Broken just as the bread is,
so that we might be whole.
The kids I teach music to
sang the same “Hosanna” in worship this morning
that we sang earlier tonight.
A few weeks ago, I asked them,
“Do you think this song is happy or sad?”
Some of them said happy, and some said sad.
Then one child said, “both.”
And I said, “why?”
And she said, because the people are happy that Jesus is coming,
but they’re sad because he’s going to die.”
Tonight is a night to live in the tension
between all that is breaking apart
and all that is holding together.
It’s hard to tell if we’re walking in a parade or a funeral procession.
Turns out it’s both.
It’s hard to tell if the meal is one of friends, or of betrayers.
Turns out it’s both.
So often, the tension of Holy Week is resolved into something much less complicated.
So often, our worship seems to say,
“Look, isn’t it sad that we killed Jesus? We must be terrible people.”
When it might say something much more:
“Look. Look how God is breaking us apart and holding us together at the same time.”
“Look how we can come to this table again and again,
seated next to friends and betrayers,
And still be made one in the breaking of the bread.”
So I want you to close your eyes for a moment,
and sit in the middle.
Sit in the tension and ambiguity of this night.
Remember the ways in which you have been broken.
And even in your brokenness, remember how you have been held together.
And know that both of these,
the breaking and the wholeness,
the grain gathered from the hillside
and the loaf broken and shared,
are holy places.
Places where God lives and breathes.
Some of you may have a story to share
of being broken and made whole.
And I invite you to share it briefly now.
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