Palm Sunday-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Sunday of the Passion:
Palm Sunday Year C
April 13,
2025
How does the wilderness become a
refuge? What does it look like for me to
face my own wilderness and to befriend it?
These are questions I was pondering for
myself at the beginning of this Lent—as I thought about how Jesus is driven
into the harsh, unforgiving wilderness to face temptations but then at some
point, he begins seeking out the wilderness and the lonely places as places of
refreshment in his ministry. How does
the wilderness become a refuge? What
does it look like for me to face my own wilderness and to befriend it?
I realized last week that I had pretty
much forgotten about this question, and so I picked it back up again and looked
at my Lenten journey through the lens of wilderness. And I realized, much to my chagrin, that I had
not befriended the wilderness, but instead, I had done the exact opposite. I had spiritually bushwacked my way through
the wilderness of Lent.
In this dance that is the spiritual
life, we fall away and then we return.
We fail and we begin again. So I’ll
ask myself again: How does the wilderness become a refuge? What does it look like for me to face my own
wilderness and to befriend it?
As today is Palm Sunday, we start with
Jesus riding at the head of a triumphant parade, and we end with Jesus alone in
a garden, facing his betrayal which then leads to his arrest and death on a
cross. Today we set the scene for our
movement through Holy Week and into Easter, and we are invited to both watch
and participate as Jesus embarks on this wilderness journey of loneliness,
sadness, betrayal and death, even when he is completely surrounded by
people. We can contemplate what it means
for us to befriend those places of sadness, grief, loneliness, betrayal, and
the shadow of death in our own souls, not rushing to try to triumph over them
or beat them into unruly submission, but making peace, making friends with
them.
In his book The Tears of Things,
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes about this phenomenon saying, “We all
need to feel and know, at this cellular level that we are not the first ones
who have suffered, nor will we be the last.
Instead, we are in one universal parade—God’s “triumphal
procession,” as Paul calls it (2 Corinthians 2:14…), using the metaphor of a
Roman triumph after a great victory. In
this parade, he says, we are all ‘partners’ with both the living and the dead,
walking alongside countless ancestors and descendants who were wounded and
longing for healing….[Rohr concludes] The body of Christ is one great and
shared sadness and one continuous joy, and we are saved just by remaining
connected to it.”[i]
Here at the beginning of Holy Week, you
are invited to remain connected to both the sadness and the joy that can be
found in Jesus’s final days. You are
invited to contemplate with me:
How does the wilderness become a
refuge? What does it look like for me to
face my own wilderness and to befriend it?
[i] Rohr, Richard. The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage.
Convergent: New York, 2025, p 101.
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