Its All About the Parade!

Folks – we were planning a first rate Palm Sunday worship service for you this year. 6 weeks ago I started talking to
Connie Cline and Karen Cunningham, our Worship and Music Committee Chairperson and Altar Guild leader, asking their opinions on this special service. I was imagining in my mind the way we would process into the sanctuary from outside the building at the start of the service, all of us singing at the top of our lungs “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” which Marianne our organist had already picked for our processional hymn.

I was excited about this for a special reason, which is hard to admit. You see – I had never gotten this parade right in all my years of ministry. I planned and led Palm Sunday processions in many churches, but I always had the choreography or the timing wrong. Connie and Karen assured me that Trinity does it right, and there was no way I could mess it up, so I was pumped!

I just love a good parade, and a procession is really a parade. That is exactly what all the pomp and circumstance on Palm Sunday are about. On that day the sanctuary becomes the  great city of Jerusalem and we who enter the sanctuary play the part of the disciples who accompanied their Lord into the holy city. We carry palm branches just as they did when Jesus entered Jerusalem that fateful time. As the service continues and we take our seats, the very long gospel reading is read dramatically by several people, and we worshippers even find ourselves becoming members of the crowd in the Passion of our Lord.

I think everybody loves a parade. I used to live in Pennsylvania. We had parades all the time. We had Christmas parades, we had Memorial Day parades. When the high school basketball team won the championship, we had a parade. At one of those parades, I watched one of my young parishioners play his saxophone in one early band coming down the street, only to leave that band, make a quick change of clothes, and run to another band near the end of the parade and play the drums with that band.

I even get excited at pictures of parades. I have seen pictures of the parade in Times Square at the conclusion of World War II. The war was over, the killing was ended, and a nation’s weariness and hurt could start to be healed. The nation reflected on its loss, acknowledged its debt to those who had made the supreme sacrifice, and marched into the future.

Of course, with the arrival of Coronavirus, we won’t have a Palm Sunday procession this year. The pandemic isn’t over, the killing has not ended, the weariness we already feel will no doubt be with us for a while yet, and chances are, by the time this disease is over, each of us might know this disease firsthand. We might even know someone who will succumb to the disease.

I don’t know about you – but I’m getting weary of not going to church. My longing for Holy Communion is turning into a hunger, I miss my friends, and I worry about my family. How strange, and how similar to what happened to our Lord between the big parade and his death. He told his friends, “I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom”. One of his friends betrayed him. All of his disciples abandoned him.

Maybe Jesus is closer to us that we think. We are not going to church for the big parade this year, but we discover that Jesus comes to us, into our very social distancing as we fight Coronavirus, into our very hunger and thirst for communion with him.

Someone else on Trinity’s Worship and Music Committee (Tammy Panther by name) wrote me this e-mail: “I think that when this Coronavirus passes and we are able to worship together and have fellowship, that we should just hold a BIG Trinity Reunion!! Worship, then be together outside like the picnic we had. It may be a while until that happens, but it will be all the sweeter! Stay well friends – Tammy”

A picnic may not be a parade,  but I will settle for it!

– Pastor Ron