Palm Sunday begins with a parade: palms and a procession, and it ends with the dark shadow of the pending execution.

If it feels like an emotional roller coaster . . . that’s because it is.  While a king was desired, prayed for, longed for, needed . . .

Jesus rode in on a donkey, looking like a fool instead.

God’s sense of humor was evident in the turning of the tables. The upside down nature of God’s reign.

This God of ours does not work in the same way as the world. This God’s power is found not in military might, but in humility, in relationship, in radical love, radical inclusion, and radical faithfulness.

The price to be paid is dear, indeed.

Nothing new comes easily or cheaply.

But the pain of Jesus’ journey is not limited to a singular event in time.

This is the recurring metaphor for anyone who tries to forge love and justice in an unjust world.

This is the story of faith in action. A faith that cannot survive huddled in quiet places or kept to oneself, but must go out into the world with compassion and commitment and be engaged in work that liberates others.

It was Jesus who invited us to see his struggle as the cries of all who struggle and to witness Jesus’ passion as theirs. It was Jesus who invited us to share in the struggle for the kin-dom of God. ‘Take up your cross’ he said to those who sought to follow. Meaning, of course, that it is impossible to follow without one.

This is what it means to stand with the poor, the oppressed, the least of these: it means to humble oneself, to give oneself in love, to align oneself with those who work for justice and work for peace even though you will be considered foolish, as was Jesus. Even though you may spend your life feeling you are wasting it, fighting a losing battle, overwhelmed by the complexity the enormity of the problems of injustice in the world as we have created it.

Those who follow in Christ’s footsteps will not be given kudos and ticker tape parades.

They will seem fools and be criticized and yet, and yet, they will keep on keeping on, even when success seems only a dream and victory looks impossible.

In the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Dr. Paul Farmer calls it the ‘long defeat.’ “I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. .”

This joke of a parade is the kind of thing we, too, are called to undertake, and it is hard for us, as Farmer says. We like winning, succeeding. (We are not even aware how it has become an idol for us.)  “ . . . we’re used to being on the victory team . . .” There is a televangelist whose theme is ‘let [our church] bring out the champion in you!’

But to follow Jesus is to stand not with those who win, not with ‘the champions’ but to ‘make common cause with the losers.’ To be a champion on this team looks as different as Jesus on that donkey did compared to one who would be king standing on an aircraft carrier declaring victory.

Yet the invitation offered is to look foolish. To stand not with champions but with those committed to the long defeat. Do we dare? Truth is: if we are Christians, we can’t do anything other.

We are called to servant leadership and this is what it means.

There is, of course, a high price to pay for such witness and solidarity. Isaiah proclaims: “I gave my back to those who beat me . ..  my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.” And the psalmist knows well that such faithfulness will be costly. “I am  . . . a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.”

But rejection and pain do not sway the psalmist, or diminish his faith, for “my trust is in you, O Holy One; I say, ‘You are my God.”

Paul talks about Jesus humbling himself, ‘emptying himself and taking the form of a slave.’

Unlike any king we’re used to; this is the master turned servant. The love he has proclaimed he incarnates. Radical love fleshed out, lived out. And it is a love so powerful that his teaching, his healing, his challenge to the status quo lead now to his death.

A caution:

The fact that Jesus suffers has been misused and it is important to note that fact. Phene Perkins writes: “The exhortation to suffer like Christ in expectation of future salvation was frequently used to admonish Christian women and slaves to submit to abusive husbands or masters. Christians who believe that the present world will soon end often find the idea of a reward for suffering like Christ to be an excuse for failing to struggle against the injustice in this world. They forget that [the Philippians] hymn starts not with the suffering Christ but with the Christ who is equal to God. The poor in Latin America who are told to suffer like Christ rather than struggle for freedom, or abused women whose ministers tell them to submit to husbands, are not in the position to copy the Christ of this hymn.”

Jesus’ became one with the losers, that the losers might see themselves as of value and worth. So that the losers could be exalted . . . could see themselves as God sees them: as they really are: children of God.

Jesus was seeking to close the gap by helping some see their value as human beings; and at the same time, challenge those with status and power to willingly humble themselves.

The idea then-- is as it is now – a leveling, an understanding, of seeing each and every person of equal worth. Eye to eye rather than a looking down or up.

And into the mix of this full day, with the palms and parade, and pending death, Rebecca and James bring little Ella Mae to be baptized. They bring her to be engrafted into this expression of the church, this group of those who seek to follow the Jesus who leads us to stand with the losers, and proclaim God’s love to all God’s children. Into this mix we are called to receive Ella and make promises to her. Promises that we will teach her the ways of this strange and radical man who loved even those who sought to do him harm, and valued all people, and taught us to fight the ‘long defeat’ – that is, to struggle not because we can win, but because it is the right thing to do to work for justice and peace.

Rebecca and James bring Ella to this font because they want her to know God’s love in her life, they want her to know she is God’s child, and they want her to know that her life has meaning and a purpose. They want her to know that true freedom is found only in giving one’s life away in service to others. They want her to spend her precious life on something just as precious.

And so they bring her to this font, because they know that the church is the only place she will learn her true value, the only place she will be encouraged to search for God’s call on her life, the only place she will learn the irony that richness and joy are not found in the purchase of things, but in willingness to stand with losers.

We promise today to teach her that. Not just by teaching her in Sunday School, though that is part of it. We promise to teach her by our actions; our willingness to humble ourselves. Our willingness to do the hard work of being church. Our willingness to prioritize our own lives in such a way that we are willing to give our time, talents, treasure, imagination, and energy to teach a Sunday School class, or prepare a meal, or paint a classroom, or sing in the choir, or attend meetings, or bake cookies or visit the prisons, or march for justice, or write letters to our congresspersons, or work for health care for all, or make our voices heard, or allow God to lead us in fighting the long defeat and any of a number of things that make it possible for Ella Mae to be nurtured in this faith. We promise God, for Ella’s sake and the sake of all children that we are willing to be the church.

These are not easy or empty or cheap promises. Just as it cost Jesus his life, it costs us ours. And much has been said about the costliness of this journey.

But what must also be said, and considered is what it costs us to NOT be faithful. We must consider the high cost of non-discipleship, as well. Much needs to be factored: what it costs us in terms of not being fully who we were created to be, what it costs to know only emptiness instead of knowing our lives have purpose and meaning, to know only despair instead of hope.

There are many even in the church that would choose to ignore that Jesus’ was committed to justice and love. One month before his assassination in El Salvador in 1977, Father Rutilio Grande said “there are those . . . who would prefer a buried Christ, a dummy to carry through the streets in processions . . . not Jesus of Nazareth who asks for lives lived in service to establishing a just order, the uplifting of the wretched, the values of the gospel.”

There is a high price to be paid when the life, the passion, the Spirit of Jesus is lacking.

Rebecca and James bring little Ella Mae to this font because they want to give her the best of everything there is in life.

And they want her to want that for all the babies ever born.

Just as the parade today reminds us of the metaphor for what it means to be a person of deep faith; the baptism of this dear little one is a metaphor for all children, everywhere.

For in this water is new life. A birth once more – not into this world with only problems and injustice. But being born into living life seeing beyond this world. Seeing hope, seeing God’s dream, believing that the world can be more.

As we bathe and ready ourselves for any new venture, here is metaphor once again – for the life Ella enters with us: lives poured out in joyous service. Lives of servant leadership in the long defeat, being fools for Christ, and not caring if we win, simply knowing it is the right thing to do. The only way to really live.

On this Passion Sunday, we can choose which Jesus we will follow. The living one who holds up a dream of more just and loving world and leads us into fighting the long defeat or the dummy who seeks nothing from us or for the world. We pray for the courage to follow Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus who loved and laughed and ate and drank and suffered, knowing that the joke was on death, after all. The one who saw us all as we see little Ella Mae and saw promise in both us and in the world.