Hosanna! April 5, 2020; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson
This is not how I expected to be spending Holy Week. I thought Steve and I would be watching the crowds thronging to the beaches. Today, Palm Sunday, I expected the ladies in the Spanish Speaking Congregation of Iglesia Cristiana Congregacional de Mazatlan to have beautifully decorated the sanctuary with Palm Branches. Daniel, Steve and Rich would be playing the opening strains of All Glory Laud and Honor, the trumpet’s clear sound rising over the voices of the English Speaking congregation. I was looking forward to the first (hopefully annual) Palm Sunday brunch potluck at Linda Hannawalt’s lovely home on Libertad Street. As the season wound down, we would try to fit in as many farewell -for this- year dinners at our favorite restaurants with friends. The warmer weather would mean morning coffee on the patio watching the hummingbirds flit between my neighbor Sylvia’s azalea tree, the hibiscus plants and her feeders. We had plans. We thought we knew what to expect.
Jesus’ followers had expectations too. He was headed to Jerusalem, the seat of religious and political power, for Passover. Special meals and rituals would recall the ancient plagues and God’s liberating power to save the people. Their hopes were pinned on this unlikely man, Jesus. Centuries of longing were going to be fulfilled in this Messiah. They waved their cloaks and whatever they could find along the dusty roads, palm branches held high in acclamation with cheers of Hosanna!
Hoshiya-na, Hosanna in Hebrew, means Save, Please! Like a failing swimmer’s cry for help as they struggled to make it to shore, Ayudame!– the word changed over the years. It came to mean, Salvation! in the sense that even before a call for help was uttered, help arrived. No longer a victim’s plea, it became an exclamation of praise bubbling from the heart of the endangered as the lifeguard could be seen racing through the turbulent waves to save the drowning.
The story of the faithful follows a repeating pattern: threats come and then salvation, disaster and restoration, death and rebirth. We know this from studying the scriptures, from reading history. This too shall pass. God is good, all the time. We know this from our own lives too—when we have felt the strength of the community, the support of prayer, the presence of God carrying us through difficult times. But this global pandemic—this is not what any of us (except maybe the doomsday preppers) know or expected.
We are asked or commanded, as the case may be, to stay safe at home. Shopping and restaurant parking lots are empty. Even the beaches in Mazatlan during Semana Santa, normally the busiest time of the year, are vacant for the very first time. Social isolation means even the faithful are sleeping in on Sunday mornings, or watching hastily prepared video broadcasts of preachers proclaiming to empty sanctuaries. On this first Sunday in April pastors everywhere are consecrating the elements for the Eucharist via YouTube. Communicants are individually partaking of their own bread and cup, simultaneously in dispersion. Not in anyone’s wildest dreams would this be so!
It is a drab morning here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I write this from my desk in the loft of our home, looking out our floor to ceiling window. A dozen deer are silently making their way through the grey and dormant landscape, avoiding the icy patches in the shade they nibble on our brush pile and the tender shoots of my rhubarb plants. If I close my eyes I can seen the congregation now scattered: a few still in Mazatlan. Are Rich and Wendy, Keith and Sylvia sipping coffee or tea, watching the waves crash on the empty beaches on either side of the Casa del Marino? Are Chuck and Katy, Bob and Cheryl, Kirk and Carol hunkered down in the Pacific Northwest, one of the hotspots of this silent, invisible threat—the coronavirus? Are our friends from Alberta wearing wool socks and fuzzy robes warming their feet by a blazing woodstove? Surely in all these places and more, masks and gloves and sanitizer are ready by the doorways for any essential excursions.
Like Jesus’ first followers our expectations have not been met. We face mortality in a new way, the future uncertain. But unlike those palm waving crowds we know the ending of the story. We know that the betrayal, denial, suffering and injustice of Holy Week was followed by God’s ultimate salvation—resurrection. We know through the witness of Mary and Peter and others that God has more in store for the world than we can even imagine. The nationalistic dream of a restored Israel with Jesus on the throne of David was too small a hope. God’s holy plan is bigger and bolder. The prophets tried to tell them. “Behold I am doing a new thing!” (Isaiah 43.19)
Paul proclaimed it for the early church, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation h as come! The old is gone and the new is here!” (2Corinthians 5:17) Each year the cycle repeats, the message is proclaimed. Each year our hopes and dreams are too small. This year, 2020, the whole earth finds itself at a standstill during Holy Week. We wait for what we cannot know, crying Hosanna! Save us! Ayudame!
Surely our dreams and hopes are too small. We may long for a return to the old normal: palm branches waving, a potluck brunch complete with baked ham and green bean casserole in Grandma’s china dishes, friends and family around the laden table, every chair in the house crowded to fit, the freedom to shake hands, hug, and kiss cheeks. But this grand pause can direct our attention to the One who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine! (Ephesians 3: 20) And so, we are called to open our hearts to trust God’s repeating pattern of salvation.
Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us the faith to go out (or stay home!) with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Martin Luther’s evening prayer.)