I am like a desert owl,
like an owl among the ruins.
I lie awake; I have become
like a bird alone on a roof.
...
For I eat ashes as my food
and mingle my drink with tears.
Psalm 102:6-7, 9 (NIV)
Today Christian churches around the world celebrated Palm Sunday, the day when we remember—and stand up cheering!—as Jesus enters Jerusalem. Today is the day we hear the story of the donkey the disciples went to fetch for Jesus, how they laid their cloaks on the donkey’s back, and how Jesus rode the animal through the streets.
Today those streets, the ones of our remembrance, are alive with cheers! With shouted hope! With overjoyed longing to see the Messiah come, especially when there is so much trouble, especially when so many are hurting.
When I preach this story, I like to add a little levity. Donkeys are entertaining creatures, and Jesus sitting on one would look a little silly. Especially when compared to the glory and crown of the Roman Emperor on a warhorse just a few streets over. How that Emperor turns our heads.
The levity helps us remember the everyday joy of celebrating together when times are hard. It is reassuring to laugh together, and be friends together in discipleship. Waving our fronds on Palm Sunday can have a little bit of that same silly feel to it. For a few minutes we get to be playful together, to bump and jostle each other as the crowd had done so many years ago, to dodge small children wielding fronds, and forget we ought to be serious in church.
The silliness is all too soon stolen away. The palms of Sunday morning replaced far too quickly with the passion readings, when we hear again the story of Jesus sharing a final supper, when we feel the darkness of his arrest, and worse.
As a pastor the palms we scatter have yet another meaning for me. In them I see the ashes of repentance. For, after the service, the palms are collected up again, even the ones the children split into tiny fibers, even the discarded ones half folded into crosses. Some will be given out to those who could not make the service, those in hospital and hospice, those we love.
But the bulk comes back to me. I take the strewn and folded ones and carefully bundle them together. I know what happens next. I know they will be set into a corner to slowly dry up and dry out. And then, when another February comes, I will light a fire and they will be burned to ash.
These happy, waving palms become the ashes of next year’s Lent.
I remember the first time I burned my bundle of dried palms in preparation for the Ash Wednesday imposition. Nobody warned me how quickly they would flare, nor how bright they would burn! And the smoke that billowed from my innocent, liturgical adventure was enough to bring the neighbor over—a police officer and family man, ready for an emergency—to make sure that everything was okay.
The next year when I burned the palms, I had learned my lesson. I burned just a few, a little then a little more. Repentance takes time.
So this year as we celebrate Palm Sunday, I am thinking of fires.
There is a photograph that became very famous in climate change circles, the photograph is of a few people on a golf course playing golf. They look happy. I can’t show the photo because of copyright, but if you click this link you will see and remember it: The golfers who finished their round while a forest burned.
It’s okay to play golf. I know a lot of folks who love the game! This photo, though, made international news because of the stark contrast of those with the leisure and money to play that game, and those who, unnamed behind them, were jumping into the fire to put it out.
Trees are like people, they are vulnerable when they get stressed, vulnerable to pests, vulnerable to heat, and vulnerable to fire. Pine needles go up as fast as palms do, with just as much smoke.
While the parties played golf and the Eagle Creek Fire raged, I swept those ashes from my deck. The Eagle Creek fire was too close to my home. And then, just a few years later, another fire would come closer still, only a half mile and blowing north. I stood in the evacuation zone and watched the flames.
Humans have extraordinary gifts. One of these gifts is our social bonds. We bond over good fun, challenges, and life in general. This same gift can be a curse. When we forget to see what is outside our own social circles, our churches, and our home towns. When we look away from the fires of climate change; when we fiddle while Rome burns.
Our gifts, though, are so evident on Palm Sunday. When we are one people in one shared hope, jostling side by side with fronds in the air and strewn with joy. This is a gift too. The gift we share of faith and resurrection.
In the event of fire, not only flames, but the whole community breaks out. There is neighbor next to neighbor with water, with warning, with determination to get everybody out, to find everybody shelter, and get the animals safely gathered up.
The whole point of the walk into Jerusalem, of the waving palms is that we do that together, side by side, one people one faith. And we are strong enough together not just to urge on hope, but to heed the call of Jesus to repent, and turn together, and when the passion comes, to follow God to resurrection.
So on this Palm Sunday, like many before, I think of fires. I think of the fronds that we use to welcome Jesus to Jerusalem, and how they become ash as a sign of repentance.
And I wonder, what will it take to turn us from our present course? When all our forests become ash, will we repent?
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Cover photo Owl by Jeremy Hynes. Owl pair by Zdeněk Macháček.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is an elder in the Greater Northwest Area, living in Southern Oregon. She volunteers with the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement and a number of other organizations at the intersection of faith and climate change. Find her at JustCreation.org
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