April 13, 2025
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect of the Day
Almighty and ever living God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
IN the Name of the God of Creation, who loves us all…Amen. Grace to you and peace, and greetings on this Palm Sunday. If you are visiting us on this lovely Palm Sunday morning, I bid you welcome. We are glad you are here. As my time among you comes to a close, I am so very grateful for this season among you all. It has been a rich and lovely year, and I will miss you all when I take my leave. As I ran on the trails yesterday, I recalled so many moments for which I am grateful, from a wedding in Espanol, to so many wonderful healing services, and all the richness of our liturgical year, now come full circle. There are many reasons for us to celebrate and give thanks for the past year. And as the poet Szymborska has said of what it means to have a soul, what it means, that is, to be human: Joy and sorrow aren’t two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined. And this is the essence of Palm Sunday too isn’t it…the journey from a parade to sorrow. There have also been several funerals this past year, including the service for Palmer Temple, my dear friend, mentor, and colleague. And in our tradition, these services are outward and visible signs of Resurrection. We are, after all, Easter people. There is rejoicing, and yet it is so very hard when we lose someone dear to us. And, as I told my students for many years, much pastoral care takes place in Holy Saturday time and space, where we hold in tension the losses and transitions of the infinite Good Friday experiences of our lives and the hope and promise of Easter. And Palm Sunday and the journey to Jerusalem prepare us for the narrative of the Triduum. We must be prepared to sit in the uncertainty and ambiguity of Holy Saturday, to be there, to be present to all that is calls forth in us. And we cannot do this by skipping from Palm Sunday to Easter. The journey to Easter begins here, and now. What we need is here. And we have Mary Magdalene as one among our guides. All four gospels bear witness to Mary Magdalene as the premier witness to the resurrection – alone or in a group, but in all cases named by name. . . All four gospels insist that when the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene stands firm. As Cynthia Bourgeault as said, “she does not run, she does not betray or lie about her commitment, she witnesses.” But why, one wonders, do the Holy Week liturgies tell and re-tell Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, while the steady, unwavering witness of Magdalene is not even noticed? How would our understanding of the Paschal Mystery change if the role of Magdalene was acknowledged? What if, instead of emphasizing that Jesus died alone and rejected, we reinforced that one stood by him and did not leave? For surely, this other story is as deeply and truly there in the scripture as is the first. How would this change the emotional timbre of the day? How would it affect our feelings about ourselves? About the place of women in the church? About the nature of redemptive love?”
Some have used the term “glittering sadness” to describe Palm Sunday. There is such unbearable beauty, and such pain, today. Jesus is hailed as king, and winds up as a slave; he will empty himself, accepting torture and execution at the hands of humans with total forgiveness. He will love us to the end. As the hymn says: See, from his head, his hands, his feet; sorrow and love flow mingled down…Sitting with my student and his family at Columbia Presbyterian last week, I understood in a new way how sorrow and love flow mingled down. Palm Sunday reveals the passion, the sorrow and the love intermingled at the heart of all our lives. It forces us to choose how we will arrive at the cross: bearing that pain together, or using it to separate ourselves from others. Richard Rohr has suggested that the road to Jerusalem leads to a “bright sadness.”There is darkness, he says, but as we go through Holy Week there is now a changed capacity to hold it with less anxiety. It is what John of the Cross called “luminous darkness,” and it explains the simultaneous coexistence of deep suffering and intense joy that we see in the saints, which is hard for most of us to imagine. Palm Sunday helps us learn that after we take this journey, now we are just here, and here is enough. Such “hereness,” however, has its own heft, authority, and influence. As a result of this journey, one’s growing sense of infinity and spaciousness is no longer found just “out there” but most especially “in here,” in our heart, because Christ has become a part of who we are, too. The inner and the outer become one. As St. Augustine put it in his Confessions: You were within, but I was without. You were with me, but I was not with you. So you called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, and banished my blindness, you lavished your fragrance, and I gasped.
The great poet W.H. Auden was asked once why he was a Christian, since all religions share similar ethical values. And Auden said, “Because nothing in the figure of Buddha or Confucius fills me with the overwhelming desire to scream, “’crucify him’.” The desire to crucify is the way of the crowd. A crowd has the power to make people feel less alone in the face of death. This is why crowds are always at the heart of the violence done by religions and rulers. It is the shadow side of each of us.
Sigmund Freud knew how very seductive the mentality of the group, or the crowd can be: it makes and shapes our worldly identities, often through violence, casting-out and separation—relegating people to the status of the “other.” It lets us say, as Jesus’ own disciples will soon say: “That man? I don’t know him; he’s not one of us.” The crowd helps frightened, isolated individuals identify with the power of Caesar, the power of the temple, the nation, the tribe….the power, as my colleague Walter Brueggemann has said, of empire. The crowd allows prideful humans even to attempt to take the place of God: deciding who to judge, who to punish, who to scapegoat, who to cast out, who to punish out of a need for retribution. And so often we go to the cross, isolated in our pain. But we do not have to walk to the cross alone, we do not have to suffer alone, and this is what Palm Sunday is about. Look, Jesus says: this is how you do it. And so, in this glittering, bright sadness, we take up our cross, and follow him. I invite us all into a journey rich in story, ours, and His. Holy Week is a week of stories. It is a week during which we walk – liturgically, spiritually, communally, personally – on the road to Jerusalem, and on through the last days of Jesus. From the triumphal palm-laid path into Jerusalem we observe today, to the moon-lit agony of Gethsemane, to the sharp betrayal of friends, to the poignant washing of feet, to the arrest and execution of a beloved teacher and leader, this story needs no embellishment. It is an invitation to us. And so I invite you to do as Mary Oliver suggests, to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. And as Wendell Berry says, “We pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.” Amen.
April 6, 2025
Fifth Sunday in Lent – Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect of the Day – Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
The Gospel: John 12:1-8 Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.
March 30, 2025
Fourth Sunday in Lent – Bill Harkins
The Gospel: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 …..
The holy Gospel…according to Luke… Glory to you, Lord Christ.] All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So Jesus told them this parable: “There was a man who had two sons…
In the Name of the God of Creation, who loves us all, Amen. Grace and peace to you all and welcome to Holy Family on this Fourth Sunday of Lent. The story of the prodigal son is one we know well. It may be one of the best-known stories in the world. But ask “On what occasion did Jesus tell that story?” and it is unlikely many will know. While context isn’t always everything here, it is important. This is especially true of the context of Jesus’ parables. For as John Dominic Crossan has said, parables show the “fault lines” beneath the comfortable surfaces of the worlds we make for ourselves. Parables can be unsettling experiences challenging the reconciliations with which we have become comfortable—the ones, typically, we have created—and replaces them with a deeper level of reconciliation, a reconciliation which is contextually situated at the level of the Incarnation. Among my beloved professors at Vanderbilt Divinity School was Sallie McFague, who lovingly steered me away from law school and toward doctoral work in psychology and religion.
March 23, 2025
Third Sunday in Lent – Bill Harkins
The Collect
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: Luke 13:1-9
At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them–do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree,