Easter Sabbath Devotional :: All Glory, Laud, and Honor Anyway

Easter - Mormon Women for Ethical Government — .

During my time in college, I spent a semester on a study abroad in Jerusalem and the surrounding Holy Land. In Jerusalem, one of the most popular sayings on tourist tchotchkes is a verse of scripture: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. It’s written on wall hangings, keychains, and T-shirts in almost every shop in the Old City.

The words come from Psalm 137, traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, who relates in narrative verse the lament of the Israelites taken captive into Babylon. The psalm begins, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion” (v. 1–3).

The exiled people’s response haunts me: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (v. 4). Their world had been turned upside down. They had been taken from the temple, the center of their worship and the symbol of God’s indwelling and protection. The old order, and their confidence in a victorious Jehovah, was no more. How could they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? What did it even mean to praise God, or to have faith, in the face of destruction, when none of the landmarks were familiar? How can you sing, “The Lord is my light, the Lord is my strength,” when the light has gone out, and the promised strength has failed to materialize?

Last Sunday was Palm Sunday, a day that commemorates Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem two millennia ago. It is a day for processionals, for communal rejoicing, for hymn singing and holy togetherness. The traditional hymn for Palm Sunday is “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” which speaks of “The people of the Hebrews” who “With palms before thee went,” and “the lips of children” from which “sweet hosannas” rang, and concludes “To thee, before thy passion, They sang their hymns of praise; To thee, now high exalted, Our melody we raise. Thou didst accept their praises; accept the love we bring, Who in all good delightest, thou good and gracious King.”

They are words I sang many years ago, as I joined a Palm Sunday processional down the Mount of Olives. They are words I have loved to sing in many services, in many Christian denominations, throughout the years. They signal the beginning of Holy Week, the most sacred week in the Christian calendar.

But last Sunday, instead of joining our co-religionists at church, my family was stuck at home, complying with a statewide — and almost nationwide and worldwide — stay-at-home order, in order to slow the spread of a deadly disease.

We are doing well, all things considered, and for that, we are grateful. We have somewhat stable jobs, and we are both healthy and low risk. We have food, and we have each other. But we are tired, and stressed, and feeling the effects of the change to our routines and our futures. We are worried for our families and friends. And, like the ancient Israelites, we’re feeling the ground shift under us, as many of the religious observances that had grounded us, and routines that had governed our lives, are no longer possible. Our temples are closed, our meetinghouses empty, our missionaries quarantined, and our choirs only pre-recorded. Many of our members cannot take the sacrament (communion), and, harder still, we are missing out on the communion with the saints that we have long enjoyed.

Technology is helping us make do, it’s true, and we’re grateful for it. But video people are no substitute for real-life people, and when you need a hug, a Zoom meeting hardly fits the bill. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? When the laying on of hands is what we need, or what we have to offer, how can we minister to each other from at least six feet away?

The answer isn’t obvious. So much of Christian theology, and especially Mormon theology, involves the body, our physical presence, and touch.

From our ordinances to our blessings to our services to our ever-ubiquitous handshakes, everything about our religious life involves proximity, gathering, and physicality in ways that don’t translate easily to the virtual world. When we cannot sit with a friend by their spouse’s deathbed, or take the kids of an overwhelmed mom out for a playdate, or even get together to help a family move, how do we bear one another’s burdens? What does our Christian discipleship look like when none of the landmarks are the same?

Noting the strangeness of commencing Holy Week with churches closed and group gatherings banned, my friend Trudy said something that has resonated in my mind:

“All Glory, Laud, and Honor anyway.”

Her tone of defiant worshipfulness struck me as exactly right for this moment. It was the same spirit that led Paul to declare that nothing, not “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword,” not “death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Whatever we face, he was persuaded, “we are more than conquerors through him that loved us” (Romans 8:35-39). All Glory, Laud, and Honor anyway.

It feels strange to sing the alleluias of Easter while so many people around the world are sick and suffering and dying. You wonder if it’s really the right time for celebration, if maybe you should switch out your Easter dress for sackcloth. In your darker moments you wonder whether the core promise of Easter, that the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ, that the grave has no victory, is true at all. The grave seems to be having a lot of victories right now.

But there’s something about Christianity that makes it perfect for moments like these, that makes praising God in the midst of tragedy more than just a depressing farce. That something is the Incarnation, the belief that our God doesn’t just sit in his Heaven and demand our praise — he emptied himself of glory (Philippians 2:7) and came down to walk among us, to be our Emmanuel, our “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). To experience the highs and lows, the loveliness and the loneliness, the beauty and the brutality of this fallen world, to know “according to the flesh” how to succor each of us (Alma 7:12).

We miss out on some of the beauty of Easter if we forget that the man that Mary mourned — and then embraced — outside the garden tomb that Easter morning had himself, barely a week earlier, mourned outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus. We worship a God who weeps, a God who IS “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15), a God who loves us right to the end (John 13:1) and commands us to love each other the same way (John 13:34).

Jesus is the King of Glory, it’s true, but he’s also the son of an unwed teenager, a refugee child fleeing from a murderous gang, and a prisoner sentenced to death. He knows what it is to suffer, and what it is to love when the world is upside down. We only know that it’s possible to praise God in the midst of calamity because we know that God himself lived through that calamity, and he did it as one of us, subject to the same “pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind,” including, as we all must be, to death (Alma 7:11). The Resurrection is meaningful only because of the Incarnation, the emptying, the “God-with-us”-ness of it all.

The words of Christ from the cross include both his cry of abandonment, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and, at the end, his declaration, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Jesus committed his spirit to God, even when he felt abandoned by God, when he felt most alone.

As disciples, so must we. Though we may feel abandoned, alone, and afraid, we can commit our hearts to God in a new way, and sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, because we have learned a few more of its verses.

Friends, today is Easter. The traditional Easter greeting the world over is, “Christ is risen! Hosanna, he is risen indeed! Alleluia!” And though the world is in commotion, though we don’t know what our lives will look like on the other side of this, or even next week, because of Jesus our song can be: Alleluia anyway. We are tired, uncertain, or scared. Jesus knows what it’s like to be all these things, and He can show us how to minister in new ways and with renewed strength. As we try, however haltingly, to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, let us retain within us a spirit of worship and discipleship that is steadfast and defiant:

Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace, anyway. I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go, anyway. All Glory, Laud, and Honor, anyway.