Holy Week

Though I Walk Through the Valley | an online sermon for a socially distanced people

We enter Holy Week through the gate of Palm Sunday. In this message, I explore the power of these biblical stories, not as artifacts of history, but as agents of our spiritual transformation. I map Holy Week as a form of the perennial vision of the soul’s journey. To heal and transform what’s outside us we seek to heal and transform what’s inside us. On this journey the 23rd Psalm is an apt companion.

Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. If we were together in the sanctuary, we’d re-enact Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. We’d wave our palm branches and shout our Hosannas; the children would laugh and dance, and we grownups would try to be a little more playful.

It’s different this year, we’re separated from one another, but we’ll still tell the Holy Week stories of what Jesus did and taught, and what happened to him.

What’s the purpose of these stories? Why do we keep remembering the Bible’s stories of Holy Week every year? Do we tell these stories in order to pass on interesting historical facts as if they’re part of a modern documentary film? Or is there another reason, deeper, bigger?

How Holy Week maps the transformative journey

Religion, and the spirituality that keeps it fresh, holds the power to transform our lives.  Take Holy Week, for example.  Holy week is an ancient practice of soul-care.  It is, at its core, a mapping of the human journey—from our grand entrance, through ups and downs of our lives, into suffering, death, and final transformation.  Holy Week aims to teach us to walk our journey with courage and hope, no matter what may come our way.  Holy Week is a crash course in being human, and being human well. 

I don’t know where else we can go to school ourselves in what it means to live well.  There are, of course, classes and books and teachers—many of them quite good and helpful.  But over the course of my life and ministry, I’ve come to more fully appreciate this ancient practice as some of the best soul-care available, some of the best teaching on living and dying well that we can find anywhere.  What’s more, it’s an annual ritual that we do together.  Over and over, in the course of a life, we come to this annual renewal of our understanding and practice of what it takes to live well.

So I write to invite you into Holy Week.  I invite you into all of it, all eight days.  Here’s a little map for your journey:

Holy Week: The Way of Success

Success.  What is it?  How do you achieve it?

Arrianna Huffington, the baroness of a global media empire, used to think the path was up, up, up.  Until she crashed.  

"I was successful by all standards, but I was clearly not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood in the floor of my office," Huffington told HuffPost Live's Caroline Modarressy Tehrani, recalling the tumble that left her with a broken cheekbone.

Huffington went through rounds of doctor's appointments in an effort to identify what prompted the fall.

"I thought I might have a brain tumor," she remembered. But then she discovered that "what was wrong with me was the way I was leading my life. And what was wrong with me is what's wrong with a lot of people."

She had to redefine her life by redefining what she considered success and the path to achieve it.  She thought the path was up, up, up.  But she found that often in life you have to go down to go up.  You have to enter deeply into your real humanity.  You have to taste suffering and savor it.  You have to lose things in order to find what’s most important.

It’s Holy Week, and one of the gifts it gives us is a realistic map for the journey of our lives. 

The week begins on a high—the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem amid the acclamations of the crowds chanting from Psalm 118.  That psalm includes the prayer, “Save is, Lord.  We beseech you, give us success!” (118.25).

From that high, the week quickly descends into danger, suffering, and trauma.  Huffington found herself on the floor of her office in a pool of blood.  Jesus too sheds blood . . . and dies . . . and rises from it new.  For Jesus, the way up is down (Philippians 2.5-11).  And what’s true for Jesus, is true for the rest of us.  

My point is, Holy Week is a map for the living of our lives.  And walking the way of Holy Week trains us in that way of life.

“Lord, we beseech you, give us success!”  The way isn’t up, up, up.  It will include your failures and struggles with addictions.  That way will require honesty about what fears enslave you, the courageous confrontation with your compromises, your dangerous drives, the pain that binds you.

And the truth is that you can and will rise from it all.  New.  Beautiful.  Powerful.  Free.  Joyous.

This is why I’m crazy enough to call Holy Week the Divine [and human] Comedy.  A comedy isn’t silly, thigh slapping slapstick.  Comedy as history’s best artists have understood it, is a work that has a happy ending.  And Holy Week is such a work . . . a real work of art.

Walk its way.  Embrace your humanity.  Enter deeply into the clay of your life—even the most wounded places within.  There is a happy ending.  It will end well.  And that’s not slapstick.  It’s the way of creation.

“Look at a grain of wheat and you’ll know what I mean,” Jesus says.  “Unless it falls to the earth and dies, it cannot break open and ripen into its glorious fruitfulness.  So with you.  And to show you what I mean, watch me.  I’ll show you the way” (John 12.24).

That’s the best of comedy.  And in the midst of the struggle of life we all need a little of its hope to hold onto.  

Peace to you all.  And a blessed, transforming Holy Week to you.