Staying Awake

The Liturgy of the Palms

Matthew 21:1-11
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

The Liturgy of the Word

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14- 27:66 or
Matthew 27-11-54
Psalm 31:9-16 

I was laying in bed this morning, wondering how I was going to get this written, what with a plane to catch, and a bit of an insight hangover from three days of listening to brilliance. I had tried to write something very different last night, the thing I'd been planning on all week, when brain fog took over and I gave up. So I was not in an opitmistic state of mind as I woke up in my hotel room bed, thinking about how weak they make coffee in Michigan--even at Starbucks--when I had a revelation.

If you read the Gospels as a writer, you notice a change in that happens on Palm Sunday. Suddenly everything appears under a microscope. Up to this point, we've been hearing the words of Jesus--his parable, the sermon on the mount--and isolated incidents: the woman at the well, the conversation with Nicodemus, the raising of Lazarus. Everything has been very distilled and told at a bit of a remove.

Take "Jesus wept." As I said last week, we have no idea what amount of time is encompassed by that verse. Could have been five minutes. Could have been five hours. We don't know. In writing, they call that compression. Yet suddenly, today, we hear every detail. Where the donkey came from. What everyone had for dinner, and why. Washing the feet. Sweating blood. The soldier's ear. The zeal. The terror. The despair. Why? Why are John (and Matthew) suddenly so obsessed with all of the little details?

Well, a writer might say, this is the most important part of the story. The details make it feel real and fresh, as though we're there. And that's true, but an editor would say that the gospel writers really ought to have been going for that all along. The saying "Show, Don't Tell" is to writers what "One Day at a Time" is to AA.

But I think there's more going on. I think what we have in today's readings are the conglomorated stories of people so crushed and broken that they need to get it all out. Every last bit. They need to say everything that struck them about that night in the days and weeks and months and years that followed. Because when we experience something so shattering that if feels as though the very sky has torn apart, we need people to hear us.

Jim has family in Joplin, Missouri, and we had the great pleasure of visiting them two summers ago, a little more than a year after a catastrophic tornado ravaged their community. As we were getting ready to visit, I said to Jim, "I want to hear about the tornado, but I'm not going to ask about it. I don't want to make them relive the trauma, and they're probably tired of talking to people who can't really know what it's like."

Boy, was I wrong.

We weren't there a half an hour before someone mentioned the tornado. The tornado's damage was still everywhere, of course. There were entire neighborhoods where all the trees were gone. Whole streets were stripped of livable buildings. But if you didn't know where to look, it seemed like things were back to normal. People laughed, danced, had babies, gave hugs, and went about their days. The people of Joplin are very proud--and rightly--of the way they came together and started putting things back together on their own, without waiting for FEMA or other government assistance.

But in fact, nothing was back to normal, because the people of Joplin knew that they could never get back to what used to be normal. They were too changed. The tornado is everywhere in Joplin, including the conversation. Life is divided into before and after, the way life in New York and Washington, DC pivots on September 11. People were constantly telling us about how things had been before the tornado, and what had happened during the tornado. They needed to show and tell us what had been lost.

I think this is true of all of us. I think it's what's going on with the gospel writers. When the world is torn in half, when we're so broken and damaged that restoration and repair are inconceivable, we need to be heard.

Jesus was in the garden at Gethsemane, and he did something he rarely did. He asked the disciples for help: "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me." We know that he walked off, but we know he was still within earshot, because the disciples tell us what he said. And we know that the disciples missed out on a lot of what he said, because he kept coming back to them and finding them asleep. Is it possible that even Jesus, in his full humanity, needed a witness to his devastation and grief?

When my father was in the last weeks of his life, I went to the hospital. When I arrived, we started talking about how to split up our schedules so that his wife could go home and get some sleep, and patch together the responsibilities she had that wouldn't wait for her world to stop turning upside down. They had known Dad didn't have a very long time, but a nurse had used the word "terminal" for the first time that week, and it had shaken us all. In the midst of this conversation of calendars and errands, my father, who was not a man for admitting any sort of weakness if he could avoid it, said, "Well, I would really appreciate it if someone would stay the night. I don't like waking up here alone." I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.

It can be so hard to stay awake for people--even when we are up and walking around. We are innundated with a cornucopia of distractions. People talk proudly of multitasking, and I know mothers who spend their days driving their children from one activity to another, patching together a life of activity in which nobody ever has a chance just to sit and be. It is quite possible to get through a day of errands without looking anyone in the eye. I know this must be true, because when I remember to look at the cashier in the McDonald's or Starbuck's drive through, they always seem so surprised. And when we do begin to pay attention, it is easy to get overwhelmed by how much pain and horror the world contains.
 
But most of the time, we don't have the excuse of the flesh that the disciples had. The disciples were pretty grieved themselves, after all. Their slumber in the garden reminds me of the knack babies have for putting themselves to sleep. It's as if they have a light switch on their consciousness. When things get to be too much, something inside them just flips it to off. It seems like something similar is going on with the disciples--they're just so overwhelmed, they are incapable of processing even one more  of Jesus' anguished pleas to God. Maybe what Jesus should have said was, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is frustratingly protective of itself."

But mostly, what we're lacking is the willing spirit. It is hard to stay awake. It is scary, and sad, and inconvenient and uncomfortable. But it is so necessary.

A person can say a thousand times, "Our town was devastated by a tornado," or, "My father died two years ago," or, "Jesus was crucified," but telling does not rebuild her soul. Showing does. Showing is the way we get a witness to our grief. We need the world to know every last detail. We need to show our pain and our loss, and we need to tell, no, show, our stories. And we need to show them, maybe  more than once, maybe a lot more than once, to people who are really listening.

Because it is not the showing that begins to heal us. It's the being heard by those who are fully awake. When enough people witness, really witness, our pain and our loss, that is when we, like the disciples, can begin to build a new and powerful and miraculous way to be alive again.

And so, my dear friends, let us make this week, and every week that follows, a truly holy week. Let us, like the disciples, help each other clear away the rubble of our sorrows and losses and disappointments. Let us, like the disciples, build new and powerful and miraculous lives on the foundations of our grief.

Let us remain awake for one another.