Engaging the Christian Perpetual Motion Machine…

We start the morning at the height of celebration, parades and cries of Hosanna In The Highest… About half way through we are in the midst of a stark play of dire monologues, death, despair, dispersion and cries of Crucify Him… and then we try to make sense of these opposing spaces in the midst of the Eucharist.  

To be honest I am not a huge fan of Palm/Passion Sunday liturgically. I honestly think that this is the one Sunday of the year that our liturgies are simply not ready to even try to maintain. I think that is why it so often is an over the top production in parishes, by making so much of it we can ride the wave of the day without ever plunging into the depths. We put on the biggest show on earth in order to avoid looking at what is going on behind the curtain.

There is a problem facing the church, the community as a whole faces it and the individuals in its must grapple with it personally. On one level there is the constant call for self-denial, purgation, and recognition of our sins. This is a historic reality, it is where many of our older liturgies call us, it has, for good reason, faced much criticism over the past half a century. On the other level is this constant call for rejoicing in the grace of God, being assured of our own blessedness, and recognition that we are children of God and God is well pleased. This is a historic reality, but one to which we have been perhaps overly fond of over the last half a century as we engaged in a necessary response but, in my mind, too often have overdone it.

The reality is that we are in this constant motion between these two callings as Christians. The call for deep, and even caustic, introspection to ask are we truly living out our lives in harmony with God and also the call to know that the Grace of God fills and fulfills us. The reality being that it is actually impossible to know one without the other. We, however, seem to fixate on one and reject the other which is inherently problematic regardless of where we fixate. Where there is supposed to be perpetual motion about these levels there is instead a tendency to stagnate at one end or the other.

My guess is that everyone is aware of the problem of overly fixating on self denial, purgation, and recognition of our sins. We have been deconstructing that one for half a century. The issue is that there is an equal problem with overly fixating the assurance of our own blessedness, of rejoicing in the grace of God, of knowing that we are beings in whom God is well pleased. The blunt reality is that we are not living in full harmony with the will of God and that we need to regularly stop and work out what is blocking us from being in such a state. If we don’t do that we are entering into a cheap ephemeral grace, a grace that only meets us at the points where we are willing to look, not the Grace of God which meets us in the midst of the points in our lives where we strive to never look.

Palm/Passion Sunday is the day that these two realities are presented to us at one time. It is the day that calls us to confront fully both at the same time, to be called from one to another and back again in the course of a single service. It is the day that is supposed to restart a perpetual motion in the church and in each worshipper to forever be moving from one place to another, to never be too caught up in our sinfulness as to not encounter grace, but also never so caught up in the idea of grace, that we do not allow us to encounter it meeting our sin.

So the question, in the end, is can we get the Christian Perpetual Motion machine going? We have gotten unstuck from quagmire of self-denial and focus on sin and deprivation that we were caught in so long... but have we in the midst of that become too ungrounded and refuse to recognize that our feet are quite dirty and in need of a wash. If we cannot constantly be looking for the movement of our selves and our communities in and about both realities, our sinfulness and our gracefulness, then we will never be able to fully engage the reality of either.