The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Matthew 21:1-11
When they had come near
The disciples went and did as
Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their
cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on
the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.
The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, ‘Hosanna to
the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna
in the highest heaven!’
When he entered
Sermon:
About nine years ago, at exactly this time of year, a few days before Palm Sunday, I was doing what ministers do. I was preparing for my big week, and to be honest, for my favorite Sunday.
I have always looked forward to Palm Sunday, from my childhood memories of waving the palms in processions at any number of churches, the adults who could miraculously transform those long palms, with just a few folds, into a small cross that I kept all year long, the pageantry and the choruses of “All Glory Laud and Honor,” as well as the giggles that erupted among the children whenever the minister said the word “ass.” I still think that’s funny.
But now as a minister, Palm Sunday had become the gateway to the busiest week of my year. There would be an attendance surge at church, multiple worship bulletins to put together, so many services to plan with Easter, the biggest of all, around the corner.
I still loved Palm Sunday, but I came to love it the way an accountant loves April 15th. It signaled the most intense week in my working life, the week I was made for, the week I saved up for, the week that reminds me why it is that I do what I do, even as I see a certain exhaustion, around the corner.
Our eight year old son was under the weather, so, given the time of year, it was my husband Lou who volunteered to cover the doctor’s appointment and the inevitable trip to the drug store for whatever prescription would clear up this little infection. “You go to the gym,” he said. “You need to relieve some stress.” And I took my hall pass freely.
I was drinking a cup of coffee in the gym’s café, with the post work out glow of relaxed self righteousness, and picked up a call from Lou reporting on Calvin’s appointment. “We’re being admitted to the hospital,” he told me. “They say that Calvin has diabetes.”
My first reaction, I must confess, was one of judgment. “I
should never have let Lou take
I was calm because I knew that there was absolutely no possibility that this could be true. Eight-year-old Calvin was healthy in every way. Juvenile diabetes was something that ran in families, and we didn’t have any in ours. I drove calmly to the hospital, ready to clear this up for everyone. And instead, they were waiting to clear things up for me.
A chronic condition is impossible to understand to those of us who don’t have one, but as a parent, I needed to understand as much as I possibly could. At the hospital, we were bombarded with information about this strange disease. Unlike the more common type-two diabetes, which is growing to epic proportions in this country, the much rarer juvenile diabetes, or type-one, can not be reversed by diet or lifestyle. With type-one diabetes, the body’s immune system attacks its own pancreas, for no apparent reason. The pancreas then shuts down slowly over the next few months, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, our son was dependent upon insulin for the rest of his life.
All this happened just days before Holy Week; ironic, because Holy Week begins with the cheerful procession of people waving their palms before Jesus, shouting Hosanna. His followers are ecstatic. They are having a party in the street – but in a matter of days, the disciples will be eating their last meal with Jesus. He’ll be betrayed. They’ll be afraid. The cheering and partying will seem like a distant memory from a time when they thought life was easy.
Those days spent in the hospital, I later realized, were more about us, as parents, than our son. His health stabilized quickly once he received the insulin his body had stopped making. It’s a lot better to have something like this happen in 2001 than in 1901.
We, his parents, needed a lot more treatment. The doctors would not release Calvin from the hospital and into our care until they were convinced that we could manage his treatment – that we had adjusted to this change.
We learned about what he could eat and should eat to avoid high blood sugars. He would have to monitor his carbohydrates, and cover them with the right dosage of insulin. This would keep his blood sugar at the right level, and allow him to live a “perfectly normal life.”
Just when we got that straight, we learned that he should eat the very things he shouldn’t when his blood sugar was too low. This disease was frustratingly counter intuitive. “I thought diabetics couldn’t eat sweets,” I said. “Not really,” the doctor said, “and in a case of low blood sugar, when he’s had too much insulin, he has to have sweets, in order to avoid a diabetic coma.” This was not sounding to me like a “perfectly normal life.”
What is a “perfectly normal life?” Have you ever noticed that the only time that phrase gets invoked is at times when life is neither “perfect” nor “normal?’
But is life ever perfect or normal?
The Palm Sunday procession must have seemed perfect, like a
We had been at the hospital for days, tag-team parenting, taking turns there, and with our five-year-old daughter at home. We had friends, but no family nearby. My mother had died a year before, and I don’t think I ever grieved for her as much as I did in those days.
Calvin was a trooper – positive, interested in the treatments, but mostly interested in the hospital’s Nintendo, since video games were something he did not have at home. As flexible as the eight-year-old was being, my heart became consumed with one desire: Calvin must come home. I think I thought that if we left the hospital we could leave all this news there as well.
I have since come to wonder if there was a little of that going on during Palm Sunday. Did the crowd really think everything was fine, or were they celebrating in the face of fear, or were they just putting their heads in the sand? After all, they were people just like us, Jesus-followers with a somewhat spotty record when it comes to consistency. “I just want to get him home, and deal with all this there,” I said to the doctor. “Everything will be fine if we can just get out of here.”
“He can’t be released until you are able to manage this,” was the doctor’s response.
“Well, what else do we need to do?’ I asked.
“You and your husband need to learn how to give your son his shots,” he said. Calvin grimaced, brave but doubtful as to our abilities.
My husband gave his first shot with confidence. Calvin took it with similar confidence. Between the two of them I saw I strength that I knew I did not have.
I held the syringe in a hand that was not steady, but shaking. I winced away from myself, a person with a lifetime fear of needles, twitching uncomfortably in my own skin, sorrowfully squeamish, utterly convinced I could not do this one simple thing. But this was our only way to get home.
Finally, I jabbed the needle into him, the most counter intuitive action a needle phobic mother could perform on a child she loves. When it made contact, he screamed in pain, I had hit a muscle, and I did the worse thing you could do; I jerked the needle out again, causing more pain. “You have to put it in,” the doctor said, and so I jabbed again, this time worse. I watched my sweet boy lunge away from me, grabbing his arm protectively, glaring at his mother who had in one clumsy moment hurt him, failed him and frightened him. We were not going home from the hospital yet.
Meanwhile, by now, it was the Saturday before Holy Week. Our thoughts turned from getting Calvin home to the more reachable goal of getting him to church the next day, for Palm Sunday. Finally, the doctor agreed that Calvin could leave the hospital for a few hours to attend the service. Lou stayed at the hospital and I spent that Saturday night at home, sleepless and unprepared for the most important week in my year that suddenly seemed, I confess, a lot less important.
Because I love Palm Sunday, I had planned a lot for that
day. There was to be the usual grand procession with the palms, the special
music, the triumphant entry into
Now, early that Sunday morning, I sat at the desk in the front office, feeling nothing celebratory whatsoever.
I wondered if it would be easier to simply lead the congregation through the service and then tell them the news, or tell them first. It seemed like a different person had planned this festive Palm Sunday worship.
One of the new members who was to the join that day, a young man in the medical field, had arrived bright and early. “How are you this morning?” he asked innocuously, not realizing he would be the first person I had seen at church that morning, and that he was about to find out.
“You know what, I’m not doing too great. My son is in the hospital, diagnosed with diabetes, out of nowhere, and he may or may not get to come to church today. No, it doesn’t run in my family, unless you count my great uncle, who I am just now remembering, who lost his leg to it in his thirties and his life to it in his forties, leaving behind a widow and a little daughter, but then again they say he never took care of himself, but how do you make someone take care of himself? So how am I doing? To be honest, I’m a little shaky.”
I realized that after I said it, I had said more than I had wanted to say, and more than he, a new member, had asked. I think I remember that I said, “Sorry,” as we careful people do when we are accidentally honest with one another.
“Juvenile diabetes or type-two?” he asked, appearing to know a distinction that most people do not. “Type-one?” I nodded.
“Well, I have type-one diabetes,” he said. “In fact it’s what drove me to go into medicine. I’m passionate about helping people to live healthy lives with this condition.”
I looked at this young man who seemed to have it all together, the picture of health, a person who had talked about climbing mountains, kayaking, who traveled the world. Suddenly, my image of this disease had a new face, and I liked it a lot better than my late, great uncle’s.
“I think that’s why I am joining the church today,” he said, and we both stopped to take that in. “I’m going to be a friend to your son, and help you all to deal with this.”
That is exactly what happened. His friendship changed our lives in the years that followed, and none of that would have happened had we not been joined together in the body of Christ, not just in our good news but our bad.
On Palm Sunday, things change so quickly. The followers of Jesus move from triumph to tragedy in a matter of days. That’s how quickly life moves, too. As surely as the arc goes down into the solemn services of Holy Week, we know the arc will go up again on Easter Sunday.
Some resurrections are enormous and get recorded in scripture to be read year after year. Other resurrections are smaller. They happen in the midst of ordinary lives. We witness one another’s resurrections in church all the time. For me, that Palm Sunday morning, what was resurrected was hope. When my son ran into church that morning, finally out of the hospital, his energetic self, I knew that as quickly as things change, they can change in all directions, as much as they do in Holy Week.
It turns out my son was released later that Palm Sunday – but he was not released because we, his parents, had finally mastered it all. No, in fact, I never learned how to give that shot. I had failed and I would never succeed. In my failure, something remarkable happened. An eight-year-old boy, whose life must have seemed terribly out of control, decided to take control. After what I did to him, he said, “Nobody else is ever going to give me a shot. I’m doing it myself.” And he did it, and because of what he was able to do, he was released that day.
I thought back to my devastation at failing to give the shot. I remember thinking that I had hit an all time low, not just unable to help, but contributing to the hurt.
The lesson of Holy Week is that pain and sorrow do not have the last word. My failure had opened up the way for my son to succeed.
While I would have given anything to have gotten it right, in the midst of getting it wrong, God was working on the bigger picture, and my Holy Week story had yet another hero, an eight-year-old boy, now a fifteen-year-old young man, whose courage I admire every Palm Sunday, when I think about how quickly things can change.
I also think of that new member. He probably thought that he
was joining the church that day because he needed it; but sometimes the reason
you are joining the church is because somebody there needs you.