Palm Sunday
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
At the end of my first parish ministry, I left Woodstock, Vermont and moved to Chicago. It was hard to leave the picturesque and quaint town that I had called home for three years, and harder still to leave the wonderful gardens that I had begun to plant. Around the manse (we called it the parsonage) there were three flower beds. Out in front -- to the south -- was a sunny bed that had daffodils and blue spike and salvia that I had bought from a woman who cultivated heirloom plants. Around the back on the west side, in a little courtyard between the house and the garage was a small very shady bed planted with perennials that I had bought from a quirky nursery.
In this one, you just walked around the gardens, and when you spotted plants that you liked, the owner would come zipping over on his golf cart, dig out a piece of it, plop it into a plastic pot, and then tell you how much it would be. The whole property was shaded, and it was fun to go and buy plants there.
I had pulmonaria -- with its lovely pink flower that turn blue, and its abundant early spring blossoms. And lamium in pale purple, lady's mantle with its florescent yellow flower and pretty leaf, and silver mound cascading over the rocky side of the bed. To the east of the house was a sunny bed with columbine and lilies and mock strawberry, coreopsis and evening primrose.
I loved my gardens and hated leaving the plants that I'd so lovingly accumulated. So my friend Peggy offered to have some dug up, and replant them for me in her garden until I could return to get them to put them in where I wanted to have roots. Kate, her gardener, came over to begin the transplanting process.
I took her around and showed her the ones I wanted to take, and after we were done with that last bed, she looked over to the side where the lilac tree shaded the end of the bed, and the hill sloped away toward the river. There on the other side of the ancient lilac was a stand of trillium. I had never seen trillium until my first spring in Vermont, and watched in amazement as the three leafed and petaled creamy white flowers emerged. I knew that they were rare in gardens, and that it was illegal to dig them from the wild -- they were endangered, in fact.
Kate said: "Would you like me to dig a piece of that trillium for you to take?"
Surprised, I said, "No, it's not mine -- it was here when I came."
"Right," she said, "but I could dig a piece of it without hurting the plant, and could get it untangled from the roots of the lilac. So would you like me to take a piece?"
"No," I repeated, puzzled. She must not have understood what I said, "It's not mine," I insisted.
"Right," Kate was undeterred. "Would you like me to dig some?"
And it hit me. I could take some of the trillium with me. It wasn't mine but there was plenty to go around and a little piece of Vermont would be wonderful to take. So, I said yes.
Well, it took some time for me to find a place to be, but finally, in the spring nearly two years later I called Peggy and asked her to send the plants to me. They arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and I was busy with something, so I couldn't get to them. For some odd reason, I had some time in the morning on Sunday, and -- being anxious to get some things planted in my garden -- I went out with my trowel in hand to plant. The pulmonaria went in fine, the columbine took right away, the salvia had grown so that I had to separate it into two bundles, and the blue spike was just healthy and happy. But then there was the trillium. The roots were still moist, but the stem looked a little dead, and there were no leaves or anything. Still I planted it and hoped.
The stem disappeared pretty quickly. I looked at the spot, hoping that something might poke out during the summer to give me a bit of hope that it had survived. But no luck. Nothing poked out. Just dirt.
Until the next spring. I'd been watching with glee as the perennials came back to life. The pulmonaria, bright with flowers and the foliage just simply lush. The blue spike and salvia putting up their blossoms. A few of the plants didn't make it, though each time I declared something dead, it came up. I watched the square foot around where I planted the trillium diligently. And finally, I was rewarded by a small sprig that came up. As it grew it was clear that it was the trillium and not some errant weed that happened upon that place.. It had survived the transplant, and suddenly, I felt that I, too, had arrived in some way. My little piece of Vermont, a little piece of my life there had indeed come with me and though it seemed dead and without hope, still it came up, and got ready to bloom, in the week just before Easter
I told a friend about it this week, and shared with him my amazement that it had come up, that this dead thing had lived and was getting ready to bloom.
What I didn't know -- though he filled me in -- was that trillium is a very fragile plant, and it didn't take kindly to transplanting. It doesn't like to be moved at all. He and another friend told me lore about that little plant -- it take seven years to rebloom if you pick one, he said. "And I tried to move them from my grandmother's place, but they never took," the friend said. "It's really quite the miracle that it did make it, that it did survive, and that it will bloom, even if it is small."
"It sounds like you don't think that you deserve it," he said to me. "You tried to not take it from Vermont, and then you didn't expect them to come up. And you know what?" I was ready to hear the good news: "You don't deserve it. It's a pure gift. You should celebrate."
Now, you may be wondering about the ways in which I choose my friends. We expect to hear from our friends that commonplace affirmation that we're all worthy and good, that we all deserve good things to come to us. But this friend was making a somewhat different statement, one that resonates with what I wanted to talk about this morning.
What he was saying to me -- he elaborated as our conversation continued -- was that we come to expect that we somehow deserve things in our lives. Because we've been good. Because we're smart. Because we've done nice things for the people we know. Because it's the way it's supposed to be. Because we tried our hardest. Because we did everything right and followed the rules. Because we've had to overcome so much, we deserve to get what we want.
A woman I know and her husband had been trying to have children. The final word was that there was no way that their body chemistry would work to produce a baby. They went through years -- nearly 8 -- of treatments and procedures and tests and poking and prodding. They would have been wonderful parents: they were married for six or seven years before they started to try for a family. They owned a home. He had a university job that paid exceptionally well. She could and wanted to stay home and be a full time mother. Still it didn't come. It didn't happen.
They had done it all right, damnit. They deserved to have a child. Last we spoke, they had begun the search for a white infant to adopt. Ten years into trying -- they still had no child. Though they never say it, there's an undertone. They deserved to have that child.
But the world doesn't and hasn't ever worked like that. We don't get what we deserve: we get the fragile beauty of a spring flower, we get terrifying loss and pain and grief. We get the warm smell of freshly baked bread, and we get bodies of our own which do what we don't want and wouldn't choose. We get the power of simple loving, plain and uncomplicated, and we get our hearts broken by those we love, by the agony that is the world sometimes, by random acts, by bad luck. We don't get what we deserve. We get what we get.
And sometimes it's good. And sometimes it all goes sour. And all of our accomplishments, and all of what we do, and all of our succeeding has little to do with what happens to us ultimately.
The story of Palm Sunday has always appealed to me for that reason. There's Jesus, triumphant and riding into Jerusalem, ready to take on the world, with the crowds cheering him on, with the crowds laying palms for him, with the whole world, seemingly, ready for his radical messages of love and peace. Yet just a few days later, his friends betray him, leave him, he is arrested, tortured and ends up executed. In the midst of what seems to be success, everything falls apart. And I wonder how many times in smaller and much more subtle ways we've all found the same thing.
Just when we think we've got it all together: the right salary, the great house, the perfect mate, the in style car, and still everything can dissolve into nothingness in an instant and in a flash.
Now, I know that it's likely that few of us hold to that standard of success. Few of us are so shaped by the culture to really believe that. So, perhaps we don't have the vision of success in the cross hairs. But still, I would guess that we get captured by those ideal visions. It's like the two leaves that are hanging next to one another. And one says to the other "what's this I hear about falling off the tree and turning brown and blowing away? Surely that can't be right." The other leaf describes the process of the autumn, and how when the air gets cold, the sap takes on an acidic character, and it changes the leaves to a brilliant color before they die. "Oh, that won't happen to me," says the first leaf back, "I jog."
Somewhere, I would suspect, in our your life, there's that place where you know you deserve that flower, that baby, that touch of a lover's hand. That sense of entitlement that blinds you to what is actually the case: there's nothing we deserve, not the beauty nor the tragedy. What we get is what we get and the question, as Reynolds Price suggests, isn't "why me?" but "what's next?"
It's far too easy to get swept away by standards and ideas and that certainty that we deserve it all, isn't it? Too easy to believe that we know the way that things should be. Too easy to believe in our own power to shape events by what it is that we've done. Too easy to believe that some small piece of success, somewhere, shields us against what else might be coming. As I pause in thankfulness when we hear the news of some other unlucky -- maybe undeserving? -- person, I wonder if those old signs against the evil eye actually worked and wonder if I could figure one out. Something to shield me and those I love against the harm, against what happens and what we get.
But we get what we get. Radiant days, and ice and wind. Destruction and wonder. The question isn't "why me?" but "what's next?"
And the question is: How do we keep in touch with what it means -- really means -- to succeed? Success isn't keeping harm at bay from those we love, success isn't getting it all, success isn't being able to take that triumphant ride into Jerusalem. Success is learning how to welcome what we get, no matter what it is. Success is learning to celebrate the fragile flower not because we deserve anything, but because we've all gotten more than any one of us deserves. Success is being the taxi driver who is at work and peace while everyone around him frets and fumes about getting somewhere on time. Success is remembering that we all need time to step outside the treadmill of getting and doing, to be like those more traditional societies where there's plenty of time for telling stories, for sitting at fireside, for making love and holding hands, for sitting quietly in the soft morning light, looking for the sun to rise and begin the day.
Half of the trick of having a life that is truly successful is paying attention to the moments and hours, and the other half is learning how to welcome the whole of it, knowing that we get not what we deserve, but what we get, and -- blessed be -- we are graced with precious people, touched by joy, overwhelmed sometimes, I hope, by love beyond our imagining.
My friend tells me that in his childhood they called the trillium the wild Easter lily because it blooms in early spring, in time for Easter. The trillium that grew in my garden did bloom that week of Easter, and the story of it is that reminder for me of that which comes to us unbidden. It will be a reminder -- even though it did not survive beyond that blooming -- of what comes to us in our lives, and of what is out of our hands. What is in my hands and where I may be able to succeed is in welcoming and cherishing both that flower and all the rest of what comes to me.
May it be so with us all.