Palm Sunday 2022: Silencing truth

Luke 19:28-40

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and people shout, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" But right away, some of those with religious power in Jesus’s day tried to silence the truth that Jesus lived and taught, the Living Truth that is the Christ. 

History shows us that those in power will go to great lengths to hide the truth if the truth might get in the way of what they want. Sometimes they silence the truth directly, by forbidding speech — “Teacher order your disciples to stop” — or censoring the written word. Often there will be active promotion of the opposite claim, the lie, in a way that makes people question the truth. Russia’s campaign at home to convince people that Russian soldiers are conducting a “military exercise”, not a war, combines the tactics of forbidding the truth to be published or spoken with an advertising campaign. 

In the United States, the truth can simply be buried when major media outlets ignore it. On Wednesday this week climate scientists around the world protested to being attention to the urgent message in the IPCC report that was released on Monday. You may not have heard about this, as it was covered by few major news outlets. I knew about it because I follow climate scientists on social media. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote a moving piece for The Guardian about the frustration — the desperation — of trying over and over again to get us to pay attention to the facts about climate change that should be spurring us to immediate large-scale action. How do we counter indifference and purposeful silence?

Jesus said that if his followers who were calling out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” were silenced, all of creation down to the stones, the earth itself, would cry out. Nature has been crying out close to home for Americans this week, with another round of violent storms in the southeastern United States and dangerously high winds and wildfires in the Plains. 

Many people affected by these storms won’t connect them to climate change, and it’s not possible to connect any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is that overall, warmer global temperatures result in the sort of instability that products violent storms and high winds. And what I’ve discovered in talking with people who aren’t particularly attuned to climate change is that they do know that something is different, something is “off”. Older people are eager to tell you what they have observed about changes in storm patterns and planting seasons and bird migrations in their own lifetimes. The people I talk with might not say the words “climate change”, but because they observe what happens outdoors, they are aware of climate change on some level. 

The hymn “My song is love unknown” (#458, The Hymnal 1982) breaks my heart open every year as I listen to music during Holy Week. The words, written by Puritan minister Samuel Crossman in the 1600’s, name the mix of grief and love in the Passion Gospel that is typically read after the Liturgy of the Palms in Episcopal Churches. The third verse of the hymn says:

Sometimes they strew His way,

  and His sweet praises sing;

resounding all the day

   hosannas to their King.

Then 'Crucify!'

    is all their breath,

 and for His death

    they thirst and cry.

We often act irrationally when we are grieving. We deny the grief, even the truth of the cause of the grief, at the same time that our knowledge of the grief and loss we are denying runs deep. 

As Holy Week progresses, we turn liturgically from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the demands for Jesus’s crucifixion, and to his trial, the mocking and torment, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ, the incarnation of truth and love. As the story continues, the truth is not completely lost. One of the men crucified beside Jesus, the centurion keeping guard, and the women who had followed him from Galilee and stayed where they could stand in witness all see and acknowledge the truth. The story we tell during Holy Week can help us see more clearly what is happening now in the world around us and discern how to serve in the name of Christ at this weighty moment in history.

Looking Toward Holy Week 2022

 Monday of this week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the conclusions of Working Group 3, the group of scientists looking at what humankind needs to do to reduce the effects of climate change. 

From one perspective, the report was hopeful, as the group did indeed list specific actions we can take and a timetable of when we need to have these actions in place in order to escape the worst consequences of climate change. From another perspective, the report was disheartening, emphasizing the urgency of making big policy changes and the nearly unthinkable consequences of failing to act quickly. 

The UN News published this article — UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees — summarizing some of the key points and the comments of UN leaders.

The next three years are critical, and we know the world is occupied with other matters — matters both significant and trivial — that make it hard to imagine that the world’s governments and corporations will make the large-scale changes that the challenge demands. And yet, we also know that even if it is unimaginable, it is still possible.

The timing of this report in relation to the church calendar called me to reflect on places where the elements of both our hope and our despair about climate change intersect with some of the themes of the texts and liturgy we will be meeting during Holy Week. Climate change is one of several big, serious issues that make this point in history more challenging than most, and all of these issues are intertwined with one another. We come into this Holy Week different people in a different church than we knew in years past, a church coming to grips with an ongoing pandemic, national and global political instability, a new awareness and admission of racism, and, underlying it all, a knowledge that seasonable weather as we knew it when the 1979 Book of Common Prayer first appeared is becoming rarer even as destructive storms, droughts, and fires increase. 

Even people who never read or hear the often buried news stories about the IPCC reports know on some level that something is different, something is off. There is unacknowledged, often unconscious grief; there is anxiety; there is a yearning for hope, for a feeling that we can do something meaningful to meet this crisis. 

I know that for me, any attempt to skate through Holy Week and Easter without engaging this crisis at least in my own reflections as I prepare, if not also in my preaching and conversations during the week, would result in a failure to share the Good News with a world more in need of good news than ever. In the days ahead, I hope to share some of those reflections as we prepare to tell each other again the story that has formed us into a people of hope in the face of despair, of love in the face of hate.