Palm Sunday-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
Palm Sunday 2022
April 10, 2022
Years ago, the church I served in
Gulfport, Mississippi, decided that we were going to have a float in the
Gulfport Mardi Gras Parade. Mardi Gras
is as big a part of that culture as St. Patrick’s Day is here; different groups
and organizations create these elaborate floats on flatbed trailers high off
the ground. They spend lots of money
buying stuff to throw, and people from all up and down the Mississippi Gulf
Coast come out for the parades—some in the daytime, some at night. We decided that we would do it as a church,
and we would use some of our throws to advertise the church and the service
times.
As a family, three of the Lemburgs were
planning to participate. (David wanted
no part of it.) And Mary Margaret, who
was in early elementary school, was especially excited about the prospect of
rolling in a parade. We weren’t sure
what to do about Jack, who was in pre-school at the time, but he wanted to do
it, and as he had already participated in his Episcopal pre-school’s “crew of
chaos” parade where they dressed up, rode their bikes and threw beads at their
parents from a platform, we felt like he’d be ok. I was in charge of purchasing all of our
family’s “throws” for the parade, and I spent weeks doing mathematical
calculations that involved how many beads a person could throw in a minute
multiplied by how many miles per hour the float would be moving, factoring in
the mileage of the parade route. (It
took me weeks because—English major—remember?)
I was determined that I was going to manage and mitigate the chaos ahead
of time because we certainly did not want our church’s float to get the
reputation of not buying enough throws and running out way before the end of
the parade. (In Mardi Gras culture, there’s
no greater shame than people riding by on a Mardi Gras float and only being
able to wave at you about half-way through the parade route because they have
run out of throws!)
The day finally came. David stayed home and avoided the chaos
all-together. The other three Lemburgs,
dressed in our animal costumes (the float theme was Noah’s ark), loaded up our
boxes and boxes of beads and plastic frisbees and moon pies with stickers on
them advertising the church into our spot on the float. And then we waited, and we waited, and we
waited. Finally, after hours of waiting,
the float began to roll. All of a
sudden, the sun had set, and it was dark and the lights from the streetlamps
and the other floats were dazzling. We
were filled with so much expectation, as the float rolled out of the staging
area onto the parade route, the kids and I scooped up our first handful of
beads from the boxes at our feet. I quickly
rehearsed with them the bead disbursal strategy of how many beads a minute they
were supposed to be trying to throw, and then, we hit the crowd. Out of the darkness, we are greeted by thousands
of people lined up along the street.
They’re waving their hands.
They’re screaming at us to throw them something. There’s loud music blaring from our float and
the floats ahead and behind us. And we
do the only thing we can do in the face of such chaos. We start throwing beads just as fast as we
can scoop them out. It was pure
chaos. A couple of minutes into the
chaos, I look down to check on Jack who’s standing beside me, and he has those
first two handfuls of beads we had scooped up for him before the parade
started, and he is just standing there frozen holding them with his eyes as big
as saucers. I pause from my frenzied
throwing to try to show him how to throw them, encouraging him to throw the
beads, and the kid doesn’t move. So
finally, I give up and go back to throwing beads at all the people yelling at
me to throw them something.
The observances of Palm Sunday, Holy
Week, and Easter are not unlike our experience riding on the Mardi Gras float
in Gulfport. Many of us enter these observances
with different strategies. Some of us
opt out all-together. Some of us make
meticulous plans to try to control the chaos.
Some of us freeze up in the face of such chaos.
The invitation to all of us, starting
this day and rolling through Holy Week up to the grand parade that is Easter
Sunday, is to let the chaos come. As we
walk in the last footsteps of Jesus, the invitation is to give ourselves over
to the riot of emotions, to the conflict and the hypocrisy of a crowd, a
hypocrisy we are not strangers to, a crowd who will shout both Hosanna to the
king and crucify him in the same breath.
To give ourselves over to the shame and vulnerability of having our own
feet washed and the quiet joy that is uncovered in and through acts of love and
service. To give ourselves over to the
discomfort of praying for all sorts and conditions of people—to pray for all
those who Jesus offered his life for under the shadow of an ugly wooden
cross. To give ourselves over to
participating once again in the deep stories our own salvation, as if they are
happening to us now, once again, rather than just happening to people who lived
long ago.
In order to do this, we have to show up,
hearts open to chaos and ready for whatever it may bring.
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