Seems like everybody loves a parade. In the passage that Wil read from the gospel of Luke, we see a jubilant, royal, triumphal entry, a spontaneous, street-fair sort of event, with people spilling from their houses, drawn by the fanfare, sharing food and laughter as they raced along to welcome Jesus. Some were sure he was the promised Messiah. Some thought he’d come to toss the Romans out. Others saw him as a celebrity from the north, but a special one, someone who raised the dead. Some were just curious. Some recognized that he was a prophet, someone God-sent, and something special was happening. Clearly Luke wants us to know that the arrival of the Anointed One was a big deal!

I confess that I was raised in what Harvard preacher Peter Gomes calls "that festival frenzy of the palms, that marvelous chaos which we organize each year… a festive dress rehearsal for an Easter triumph… Palm Sunday addicts like the procession, they like the anticipated glory of Jesus, and they love the sense that the Lenten gloom imposed these last six weeks has at least risen if not fully departed."

I’ve always loved a good parade, and in my mind "hosanna" was just a fancy Hebrew way of saying"hip-hip-hooray." All palms, no Passion. But it wasn’t all palms and no Passion for Jesus in Jerusalem. No one ever told me -- or at least it never sunk in -- that Jesus wept on his way into the city that day. No one ever explained to me until much later in life that "Hosanna" in Hebrew is a call for help. "Save us! Save us!" they cried that day, as Jesus came into town to die. Later that week, they’d shout derisively, "Save yourself!" No wonder he wept at the start of this procession.

Processions are kind of mini-journeys. Journeys can be nerve-wracking. There's all the packing to do. Maps have to be consulted, arrangements made to stay in motels, dogs to be kenneled, bank accounts to be raided. A journey’s a major event. And this procession was part of a journey. Near the end of a long journey.

We could actually call this Sunday, "Journey Sunday." The lessons we read and hear this week take us from a field near Bethany to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives, from there back to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Golgotha. Finally there's the journey from Calvary to the tomb. Each one of these journeys is a major event in itself. Each new path taken seems to draw us deeper into the shadows. Death and burial beckon us. Holy Week services seem to reinforce this reality. Perhaps that's why so many of us avoid Holy Week. We like happy endings. We know all we want to know of grief and pain. Let’s skip the pain and get on with the joy! ‘Cause there IS joy at the end of the journey.

Over the years, on a lot of Palm Sundays, I’ve been invited to put myself in the crowd that day. To feel what it might have been like to be waving palms as Jesus rode by. To identify with, say, a disciple, watching Jesus set his face, like flint, for Jerusalem. And I do think that it’s good to put ourselves there on the streets of Jerusalem that day. But I want us to identify with a different character.

One of the most neglected characters in the Palm Sunday story is the donkey. I often identify with the donkey, or with donkeys in general. There’s an old Middle Eastern story that says, if one person calls you an ass, you can ignore them. If two people call you one, you might want to look behind yourself and check for hoofprints. But if three people call you an ass, just go on out and buy yourself a saddle. I’m not at the saddle-buying stage yet, but I do identify with the donkey.

I had a wonderful adventure with a kindly donkey once, when I was in Jordan. I was in Petra, one of the most beautiful places on earth, on a trip that I’d anticipated and looked forward to for months, and I got suddenly and violently ill, and had to give up and leave. Only problem was, I had dysentery so bad that I couldn’t walk out of Petra under my own steam. One way or another, I had to be carried. And one of the ways you can get around in Petra is to rent a donkey. There are all these little bedouin boys hawking their donkeys, "Lady, see my beautiful donkey... Lady, air-conditioned donkey ride!"

So while I was sick and laying in the dust, one of my professors was negotiating with the boys, and all the other little boys were trying to decide WHICH donkey I should ride. And although I don’t speak any Arabic, it eventually came to me that what they were arguing about was, they were trying to guess my weight. The only thing I can say is that I felt so sick that I felt neither embarrassment, nor pity for the donkey. Not till later.

Now, donkeys are conservative folk. They prefer to do things the same old way. The words "adventure" and "donkey" just don’t really even belong in the same sentence. And yet, the Palm Sunday story, the Palm Sunday journey, begins with a donkey in a field.

It’s obviously a Baptist donkey because it loves tradition. Actually, Anne told me if it loved tradition, it was probably an Anglican donkey, but I think for sheer stubbornness, it had to be a Baptist. Donkeys won’t change for anything or anyone. It lives in the same field, treads the same path, eats the same hay at the same hour day after day, year after year. Then one day, some strangers come to the field, throw a halter on this donkey and haul it away. Now, your average donkey is going to resist this. Donkeys can be very stubborn. It’s what they’re known best for. It’s one thing to be called to do something in our own field, so to speak. It’s OK to be called to do something within the context of the life we know and enjoy. Journeys of faith are something else. Leave adventure to those strange folks who seem to have nothing better to do than get involved!

Then the donkey was taken to where Jesus was and clothes were put on its back. If this donkey had been given the gift of speech, like Balaam's ass in the Hebrew Scriptures, it might have had something to say about this. It might have objected – loudly – that it was good enough the way it was. "I don't need dressing up. I didn’t come to where Jesus is to be changed. I come for comfort. I come for recognition, for affirmation. To be told that I’m all right. I’m a good donkey, I am!"

Then Jesus sat on the donkey. You remember that part that Wil read that said the donkey had never been ridden before? "Leave that to the stupid horses," says the donkey. Anne tells me that when there was an MCC in Calgary, she preached a sermon there on breaking a colt, on "Christ the Cowboy." Jesus was good at teaching critters who didn’t want to do something how to grow in faith and skill and maturity, good at creating that relationship of trust, so that they could do what they needed to do.

The donkey might have done what donkeys do, reared, kicked, and thrown this strange person off. Carrying Jesus is for enthusiasts, for religious fanatics, but surely not for us. We don't come each Sunday to be where Jesus is in order to take him with us and carry him around with us through the streets of the city, do we? What would people think?

Then the journey into Jerusalem began and the crowds cheered and gave a ticker tape reception (using palms instead of ticker tape.) The donkey might have mistaken the cheers to be in honor and praise of donkeys! After all being a Jesus-carrying donkey was an extraordinary achievement. "A unique donkey am I," this animal might have thought. If it had attempted to acknowledge the crowds, Jesus might have been tossed aside. Instead the donkey just plodded on to the place where Jesus would do his great work of redemption.

All through Holy Week we find people drawn to Jesus, who then resist him, or try to change the story, avoid the consequences or denounce him. People who just don’t want to carry him along. The crowds that had cheered him, later cried "Crucify!" Religious folk plotted his death. Most of the disciples ran away rather than face facing suffering and death. They just didn't like the way the story was working out. They feared reality. In the end only Simon of Cyrene was prepared to be a faithful donkey and carry the cross, only the faithful and brave women and St. John, stood and watched the reality of a barbaric execution. Only Joseph of Arimathea was brave enough to offer a tomb. Only a faithful few, like the donkey, then carried his body from the cross to the grave.

And each of these journeys draws us farther and farther into a world of shadows, of betrayal, of naked power, of cowardice and of death. Those of us who love a brave new world, inevitable progress, a comfortable pew, joy, peace, and love; who find illness, separation, betrayal, the use of naked force, violence and death offensive, may well be discomforted by this day and the days that now are before us.

But our faith ISN’T an escape from reality. It draws us into the reality of this world as Jesus, who is one of us, and Jesus who is also the holy One, confronts and submits to the worst human beings do in order to give us the grace to be the best human beings can be. Jesus dies. Really dies an agonizing and dreadful death. And in that death, Jesus dies to all the acts of betrayal, false ambition, power, authority, evil and corruption that lie within the human race and within each of us.

For a few hours, when the last journey is over, we’ll be left with a dead body in a tomb. There’s no Easter in the lessons today. Nor will there be all week. Unless we can take these journeys, leaving our comfort zone, our self-satisfaction, daring to walk beyond safety into the darkness of evil and death, carrying Jesus to the tomb, we will never be able to grasp the power of Resurrection.

At Christmas, I’m fond of quoting Meister Eckhardt, a 13^th century German mystic. He meditates on Mary and says, "Of what use to me is it that Mary bore the son of God 1,400 years ago, if I do not bear Christ for my time as well?" It’s work meditating on in this season, too, because I think Meister Eckhardt has something to say to us on this Palm/Passion Sunday. Of what use to me are the life and death and resurrection of Christ, if I do not, like the donkey, bear the body of Christ -- BE the body of Christ -- to the world?

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