Urbanity

Yesterday at church, we were celebrating together. The service started with palms, of course. The children gathered in the Session Room before the service, and I equipped them with the greenery. The palms had arrived at the church on Thursday, and they were still all sealed in plastic on Sunday morning, so they were a little damp at first. We had to do lots of practise waving to dry them off. And we had to practise our hosannas loudly to be ready for the acoustics of the sanctuary. I told children that we would march in together during the first hymn, waving our branches as we did, singing if we could. One visiting boy told me he probably wouldn’t know the words to the hymn. He only knew one song, he said, and that was Yellow Submarine. I told him just to sing hosanna as loudly as he could, and all would be well.

And it was.  It always is. Palm Sunday is about celebration, a little bit of chaos, a lot of smiles and the joy of doing something in church that is a little out of the ordinary. Waving the branches, we were the crowds in Jerusalem, praising and singing and expecting great things. We were the city.

Last week, I wrote that cities are wonders. And they are. But they are often seen as somehow less viable spiritual locations. They are noisy and dirty. They are artificial. They are alienating. They are dislocated from the process of the natural world. And the urban forest is sparse.

We talk about “nature” as the loud and beautiful witness to the Creator God. Nature is blessed. We can see God in the complexity and wonder of the natural world. We feel refreshed when we leave the city, step into the natural world, and experience “creation.”

But we are also created, and we are created as social beings. We like to gather together. We like to live together in cities and all sizes of collections of people. I think that this is because we are made in the image of God – and God is three-in-one. Father-Son-and-Holy Spirit, Creator-Redeemer-and-Comforter. We think about God as being both one and many. God is characterized by being relational. That is what our Orthodox friends who describe as a mystery  - a fact before which our rational minds should stop worrying and start enjoying. And, just as God is relational, so are we. We are made to be together. A mystery and a wonder.

We Presbyterians believe that God is at work when we are together. That belief is built into how we do government. It accounts for our considered, and sometimes slow, processes. At root, we have faith that when we gather to listen well to each other, we can hear the wisdom of God in the voices of the group.

This week, I spent some time listening to a podcast of Dr. Rodger Nishioka lecturing. He holds the Benton Family Chair in Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. (You can find his lecture here.) The lecture was part of the Princeton lectures on Youth, Church and Culture at the Fall 2009 Princeton Forum on Youth Ministry in Hendersonville, North Carolina. The theme of the Forum was hope, and Rodger’s message was that hope is shaped by the cross.

In the background of every Palm Sunday is the Friday ahead. We sing hosanna, and we prepare for Good Friday.  So, it was good, in thinking about Holy Week, to listen to Rodger’s words about hope and the cross as he worked through the theology of Jurgen Moltmann. He emphasised that the cross “concretely, centrally and vitally effects God;” that in the event of the cross, God is in suffering and suffering is in God. Again, not easy stuff for the rational mind. As Rodger said, these are things to spend a life thinking through.

The central proclamation of the cross-shaped hope is that there is no suffering which is not God suffering. Moltman’s proclamation is that in the cross, God is present in the very midst of godforsakeness. There is no city too artificial, no alienation too profound, never too much noise or dirt or too many crowds.

Because Jesus came into the city.

Hosanna in the city.