Not without Passion

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Palm Sunday
March 28, 2021
 
Follow your passion.   That bit of self-help advice is a consistent theme as we seek our way in this world.  Graduates in this spring season will hear variations on this theme in commencement addresses as someone of note attempts to help them launch to whatever is next for them.  Passion is what drives us.  Passion is what moves us.  But do we ever stop and think about what passion really means?
 
The word entered our language from the Latin word meaning to suffer.  As language tends to do, especially when the root is unpleasant, the word passion has been whitewashed to indicate a strong emotional feeling or commitment.  Given the original meaning, telling people to follow their passion is better advice than the cliché it has become.
 
There is a great line in the movie, The Princess Bride where Wesley, a main character, tells Princess Buttercup: “Life is suffering, highness, any who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.”  And yet, for the rest of the story, the two characters continue to suffer and struggle out of a deepening love for one another.  The story is a comedy, which Carol Burnette one quipped is tragedy plus time.
 
We do not need to be reminded about suffering.  Suffering has been front and center with a global pandemic, children separated from families at our borders, two mass shootings in the past week, and the now standard and predictable divide of partisans pointing fingers and gridlocking thoughtful and compassionate solutions.  There is that root word again.  Compassion means, literally, to suffer with.
 
In stark contrast were are bathed in beauty too.  Spring is happening in this particularly verdant part of creation.  Healing and help is happening as folks are being vaccinated through the collaborative efforts of science, industry, and health care providers.  Folks are cautious, but gathering again as they feel more safe in doing so. Houston, Texas is reports that traffic is really bad again, touting that as a blessing to go with a curse.
 
Today is Passion Sunday.  It all starts out wonderful.  Jesus comes to Jerusalem and is welcomed as a hero.  He has embodied compassion for them.  The crowds turn out because they want to believe Jesus will overturn an oppressive regime and set the world right.  But he shows up on a donkey, not in a horse drawn chariot like all the good conquerors do.  And very soon, all turns dark as the powers that be act out of fear, blaming Jesus for stirring up the people, and seeking to silence his threat to their tightly held control.  His own people deny Jesus, run off, or join the crowd in screaming “Crucify him,” all because things do not go as they expected, they  wanted and they needed.  We are not as removed from the story as we might like to think.
 
As we know, this is only part of the story.  It is more appealing to skip ahead to Easter, but all that goodness does not come without passion, without suffering.  We have to go there on the way to glory. 
 
Is there anything worth anything in life that is not experienced without some measure of suffering?  Loving another person enough to put their needs ahead of our own?  Birthing a child?  Raising a child?  Finding our own path through failure at following the wrong ones?  Passion is not a feel-good emotion.  It is a hard scrabble commitment to knowing what is worth suffering for.  In the end, love is not a feeling, it is an action and a decision.
 
Jesus suffers on the cross to show us that even in the face of the worst fate imaginable, even in the face of hate, shame, and blame, Love does not back down or leave us hanging.  God’s action, God’s decision is to love us, anyway.
 
The whole journey of this Holy Week walks us through the unvarnished Truth.  Life can be terrible and filled with pain, loss, and suffering.  Life can be amazing, glorious, and beautiful.  Both of these things are true.  To deny one negates the other.  The secret of life not to follow our passion, it is to live in the light of God’s Passion for us.  At the cross, Jesus shows is that nothing else in this world holds power over Passion, Compassion, and Love.  Amen.