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Homepage >> Ministry >> Worship And Music >> Sermons >> Between the Cross and the Palms Between the Cross and the Palms
For those of you who
have been in my office, you may have noticed the beautiful wooden crucifix that
hangs on the wall over my desk. It’s about twenty to twenty-four inches high
and proportionally wide. A friend bought it for me in Rome several years ago –
it’s a cherished possession. On the cross, is an exquisitely carved figure of
the crucified Christ – hanging there, with the bloody nails in the hands and
feet prominently highlighted. The loincloth around the body is carved so as to
suggest it blowing out to the side of the body – recalling the windy desolation
of that hill over two thousand years ago. Carefully tucked behind
the crucifix, however, is a dried and brittle bunch of palm fronds. I brought
them here from the parish in Brooklyn, New York where I served as a seminarian
– carefully wrapped in tissue paper so as to preserve them as best I could. For
me, far from being a reminder of the more grim parts of our Christian heritage,
together they are a sign of the life I live within – the breadth and depth of
God’s mercy and love. You might be thinking –
wow, she spent three years in seminary and she still doesn’t have her
liturgical seasons right! In our celebrations, I know that Palm Sunday
certainly precedes the abject desolation of the crucifixion remembered on Good
Friday which, in itself, precedes the joyous outpouring of Easter. Yet it is
our custom of burning those palms from the previous year’s celebration to
create ashes – ashes which mark us in yet another way as one of God’s own –
that remind me of our journey through God’s time. Lent is marked on our
secular calendars as forty days. Yet with our daily prayers and meditations we
are ushered into a deeper, richer and much longer time during which we are
invited to reflect on God’s unbounded love for us and on those things – done
and undone – which separate us from that love. I am one of those who believe
that God knows each of us from before all time and through all time. But our
Lenten ashes remind us of our own mortality – our own finite time here on
earth. It has been especially
hard this year to impose ashes on those in our community who are among our
oldest and our youngest. Ray and I made what you might call an “executive
liturgical decision” when we decided to celebrate the Ash Wednesday liturgy
with the residents of our nursing homes and assisted living facilities on Monday
and Tuesday of this week. My husband David laughed a little when he said that
we were certainly stretching out Ash Wednesday this year! Today at noon, we
experienced some overlap between our Day School Chapel service and the
regularly scheduled noontime Ash Wednesday service. To make the ashy sign of
the cross on the forehead of those who are in the advanced years of their lives
and say “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” was hard. To
make that same sign on the little forehead of a two year old and to say those
same words was even more so. Yet the older ones were
profoundly moved and grateful to be included – in an extended way – in our
observance today. They know where they are in life and to whom they ultimately
belong. And the youngest ones! Perhaps it was out of curiosity or maybe – just
maybe – it was from an innate sense of who God is to them – well, they came up
bravely to receive their ashes. They wanted to be a part of this community as
well – perhaps on a level that we can only begin to understand. And so it is with us. We
exist in this expanse of God’s time, marked less by days and liturgical seasons
than by our own experience of God. Our formal entry into this time is marked by
a splash of holy water and our sealing with a glistening, oily cross on our
forehead. We are marked as one of Christ’s own forever. This dark smudge of a
cross we receive this evening is a temporary reminder of where we are on our
journey. It fails to cover up that original cross. It fails to dim the
reflected light of that oily cross underneath. So the ashes from those
glorious palms – faded and brittle though they might have been – remind us of
where we are and whose we are. They remind us that we live in the shadow of the
cross because of the things we have done or left undone. But, paradoxically, we
are reminded that we live in the radiant splendor of the cross that has
redeemed every facet of our being. We are reminded that we
are caught up in the arms of an amazing grace that has existed since before all
time – that will extend until all eternity. (This
sermon was preached by the Rev. Terri Stanford, Associate Rector, in St.
Chrysostom's Church, Chicago, Illinois, on Wednesday, February 21, 2007, Ash
Wednesday.)
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