I am reading Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” this week. I’m not sure how I missed reading the book earlier. I read a lot of books, but somehow this particular book remained on my “to read” list for years before I got around to it. It is a powerful story that is somehow familiar because I have read so much of the material that surrounded the movie based on the novel. I’m sure that I was reading a bit less in the time that the book came out. Our children were young, we weren’t getting as much sleep as we wanted and our lives seemed busy. Then, year after year, I had no trouble finding other books to read. It is about time. The story is compelling and I’m sure that I’ll finish it before long.

In a way it is an appropriate story for Holy Week. For me this week cuts through all of our pretenses. We might imagine some kind of a perfect world in which people aren’t abused and there is no pain, but we live in a real world where suffering and sadness, sorrow and pain greet us at every corner.

Holy Week invites us to look seriously at the simple fact that God does not somehow sweep us out of this world, but rather comes to us in the midst of the realities of this world and shares our common lot. When we sing the song of Jesus in the garden, we imagine an idyllic setting, but the truth is that Christ walks with us through the hardest and most painful times of our lives.

And life isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always pleasant. The going isn’t always smooth.

We had a wonderful Palm Sunday celebration in our church yesterday. I don’t know exactly how it looked to the members of the congregation, but from my perspective, it was dramatic. The palms waving, the children parading, the bright brass instruments and organ pipes in the choir loft – it was a pageant worth watching. The music was wonderful and stirring. We heard organ, piano, choir, brass all proclaiming loud hosannas. It was just right to begin this week.

But there was a moment later, after the pageantry, when I began to experience the journey that we will take.

After all of the people left, I spent some time preparing for the services that are yet to come. We set up the fireside room for the blues concert. I put in place some of the elements for the liturgy of the passion and checked my notes for the wake service. It is a busy week and there is a lot going on. After checking on several things, I walked into the sanctuary. The room was empty. The center aisle was littered with palm branches and streamers and the bright capes that the children left as they paraded. It is a powerful room at any time, but there was a stark beauty and presence as I paused a few minutes before picking up.

There will be a few, not many, really, who left the church yesterday and who will not return until Easter, when the room will be decked out with lilies, bright banners and filled with the music of celebration. They won’t witness the process of picking up the palm branches, stripping the altar, raising the crown of thorns, draping the cross, washing feet, sharing the stories, eating the bread and drinking the cup. They won’t hear the stories of suffering and pain and sorrow and grief.

My heart aches for those people because they don’t experience the depth of faith that goes far beyond the good times and happy faces and bright decorations. It seems sad that some only know faith for fair weather. As much as I don’t enjoy grief, as much as I wish pain didn’t have to come, I find that my faith is based not in the moments of victory and triumph as much as it is in the everyday walk with people in the midst of the realities of life. The people I know don’t have clean or perfect lives. They have mess lives with sometimes broken relationships. They make mistakes and they live with regrets. They carry pain and loss with them as daily companions. And it is in the midst of these real lives that I find the resurrected Christ sharing the journey of real humanity.

I think that the divinity of Christ is the easy part to understand. We get the “otherness” of God, we understand God’s greatness. We fathom the distance between God’s realm and our lives. We want to make everything that has to do with religion sweet and clean and without tension. But Christ is not just fully divine. Christ is also fully human. It is the humanity of Christ that causes us to struggle. We long for a God that is removed and distant from the everyday so much that we fail to see God in the midst of the commonness of our lives. We get the sacrament of Christ’s presence in the fancy chalice and plates of Holy Communion. We fail to recognize the sacrament in the everyday meals shared around our family table.

We anticipate the glory of heaven. We fail to recognize that God is no less present in the struggles of this life.

I walked down the aisle of the church yesterday, shuffling my feet, listening to the crunch of the palm branches as they slid across the floor. I though of all of the brokenness that we have witnessed in this church. Over the years, we have wheeled too many caskets down that aisle. We have said good-bye to too many good people. We have shed too many tears. I looked around the room and thought of the names of so many people who were part of our life together who now have gone before to a place where, for a little while, we cannot follow. The room was quiet. No hosannas - not even an echo.

It is a time of waiting.

But sitting with grief is not an unfamiliar feeling. The room that holds our greatest celebrations is at home with quiet.

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