A Different Palm Sunday Shout
It’s time for the Palm Sunday shout! Palm branches in the air, familiar hymns to sing, bible readings we’ve heard before. The congregation cries out “Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest!” We shout out “Lord save us!” Save is what hosanna means. Come save us! It is a Palm Sunday shout that affirms our craving for God’s way in our lives. The shout announces our yearning for God’s way in the world. Save us Lord. Hosanna!
If it were only that easy; God’s way not our way. In his recent book, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America, historian E. Brooks Holifield traces a few themes present in the life of the clergy in every generation in America. One of those ever-present realities for clergy is what the author describes as “a paradox at the heart of Christianity.” The paradox is a Gospel that is at the same time world-denying and world-affirming. God is above or beyond culture, institutions, our way. God is revealed in and through culture, institutions, our way. God’s transcendence and God’s immanence are the fancy terms. So clergy embody what Holifield labels as the Gospel’s “irreducibly paradoxical relation to American culture … Priests and ministers called to serve within the culture and yet offend it repeatedly.”
