If I Had Only One Week to Live
Rev. Holly Baylies
UU Church of Wakefield
Palm Sunday
March 20, 2005

As a child, when my classmates and I handed out palms in Sunday School on Palm Sunday, it was an honor to be asked. When we learned about the entry into Jerusalem and made little parade routes and clay donkeys on a pathway of brown construction paper, I made two, just incase the first one collapsed! I loved the music the most and sang loudly. One Palm Sunday as I sat fidgeting in the pew with my family and listened to the same story again, I heard the teacher say something that I never realized before. She said that on Palm Sunday Jesus knew he was going to die.

 From that moment on all the ushering and palm giving, clay donkeys and paper roads and singing would not make up for the troubling fact that Jesus actually knew of his impending demise. For the first time I understood the correlation between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, but no one seemed to be able to explain to me how Jesus managed to cope with the realization that his life was about to come to an end.

 My fairly traditional Sunday School teacher taught straight from the good book and no one ever offered any practical here and now real life insight as to how we are supposed to think about this, and how we are supposed to prepare for the end of our lives. That has always bothered me and even my work at the Funeral Home in the past six years has not answered that question.

 There are libraries filled with books on how others think we should live our lives but I have yet to find one that would help us prepare for the true life down to earth fact that we are all going to leave here someday. Sadly as I speak, the government has stepped in to interfere in the fate of one tragic life. I could not imagine what it would be like to know the exact date and time in advance.
 
I have heard many folks, faced with the actual impending death of a friend or loved one say, “From now on I am going to live my life everyday as if it were my last.” I often wondered exactly how they planned to do that.

 Imagine for a moment if we all knew when our time was up. What if every one of us were born with a manual of operations, a neatly packaged set of instructions for the care, feeding and dissolution of our time here on this earth? What would we do if we only had a weeks warning? I know that by the time I got through the fear, the disbelief and the bargaining…that would take at least 3 or 4 days, then making the long list of all the things left unsaid or undone, time would be up…

 Not to mention the stress of worrying about what to say to those who would be most affected or left to decide what to do with the ton of stuff I’ve collected and held onto over the years such as that ponderous brown and black ceramic nut dish with the impish smirking squirrel molded on top that my nephew gave me for Christmas many years ago, or the odd  assortment of collectable Happy meal Burger King toys meant to be my nephew’s inheritance 30 years from now when they might actually be worth something! How could I possibly see everyone I wanted to, get all the debits paid, update my own selections for my memorial service and clean the house?

 The mere idea left me feeling so exasperated that I decide that I was certainly NOT going to live my life as if each day was my last, as it wouldn’t be long before no one could stand to be around me and everyone would end up wishing it were true!
 Mentally playacting this hypothetical melodrama came to an abrupt and peaceful conclusion when I really thought about how I would react to such improbable knowledge…that I changed my scenario from, “I’m going to live each day as if it were my last”, to “I’m going to live each day as if it is my first.”

 My thoughts drifted back to that Sunday School Class, to that day when one teacher’s simple comment penetrated my inattention and stirred up in me a need to know more about how this doomed and amazing man dealt with his impending fate. How did he manage? I began to finally pay attention, looking for anything that might make it easier, not to learn how to die, but to improve upon the ways in which we learn how to live.
 Traditionally we skip over the events from Palm Sunday right to Maundy Thursday, to the Last Supper, the Passover Seder, then on to the tragedy of Good Friday and then ironically the celebrations of Easter. 

 Between Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and interesting event took place when Jesus entered the temple and found the moneychangers. No where else in the Biblical accounts of Jesus life is there any other mention of his uncontrollable anger, like the rage he expressed at what he found in the temple. There was no miracle or kind word which was so characteristic of his ministry, just a fury so intense at what he was seeing and hearing that he overturned their tables.  Possibly it was emanating from the awful knowledge that he is alleged to have carried, that this was to be his last public act of his ministry on this earth that was within his control. It was a raw emotional response, so very human and justified.

 The very idea that we are aware of the fact that our days are numbered makes us all furious. There never seems to be enough time to finish what we started, to experience all we want to do, to learn all of those things we yearn to know. Underneath all of these not- so- hypothetical worries of managing our day to day agendas; when life constantly nags at us, or pats us on the back, then takes from us or even cruelly betrays us; the act of picking ourselves up and beginning again has one common denominator in our spiritual legacy, from the stories of Adam and Eve, to Job to Jesus… anger. Jesus did what we all do when faced with bad news…he got good and mad!

There was something in that discovery that calmed me, that told me it was alright, once in a while to shake my fist at life and all the injustices around me and say, “It’s not fair.” To realize that it was not fair, then to step out of the cycle that kept me down and back into the mainstream of actually living well.

 We are blessed with the gift of this life. All our lives we search for ways to find meaning and purpose in our existence. In re-thinking how I would address my life as if this were my first day, an occasional re-assessment is not a bad idea…as it is in our response to life’s awful tricks on us that make up the legacy we can create for ourselves while we are here and for those around us to benefit from after we are gone. That whole process begins when we are old enough to realize that we are indeed alive.
 There were some thoughts about this that came to me…

* If our jobs, our families and our lives bring us continual worries and problems, then it is problems we expect, problems we prepare for and problems we will die with and leave behind for others to sort out.

* On the other hand if each day is welcomed as much more than simply an extension of the one before it, with possibilities and joys and challenges that are just waiting to find us, then it is in turn, these joys we will leave for others to remember us by.

For me Palm Sunday is a special time, a day which once jogged my childhood discomforts and challenged me to think about what I would do, how I would react and behave. More importantly I realized that we struggle with the fact of our mortality every day, we see it on the news, and all around us, we do everything we can to stay young, exercise, eat right and even alter our bodies surgically to remove any evidence that we might really be a bit longer in the tooth that we would like to admit.

But the inevitable remains as something that of course worries and angers us. 

It also makes what we do here so important for those who will be completing the tasks that have remained unfinished or leaving them behind for someone’s to deal with. How important it is that we share our wishes with the ones who will decide how things should be done while we have the chance.  If today is our first day on a new adventure, we can indeed begin again at any point in our lives, to live as if we were seeing things in their proper perspective for the first time.

 It is no co-incidence that Palm Sunday and Easter fall in the springtime of the year. The time when all which was cold and dormant, stagnant and bare, very soon becomes so beautiful and for a while, never stops blooming.

 On our first day, when we have howled at the universe in mourning for our limitations, then made our peace with what we cannot change, as so many of our heroes and role models have done, then do something beautiful, something we love to do and that is what gives us power over everything that threatens to leave us in sadness, in anger and despair.
The idea of beginning anew changes everything, inviting us to leave behind all the troubles that we cannot control, to think up new ways to jump back into the pool of our becoming and more importantly we have the option of making peace with ourselves, not just once but over and over again as each new obstacle arises. We have so many opportunities to reach out and take a firm hold on this life. Joining this church is one of them; opportunities to make changes where they are needed and to step back and put into perspective what we may have missed. The enemy that all mortals face is the anger and the injustice that hangs on too long…

 Today is a new day, all awaits our coming, all around me us in harmony, all is before us to find, all is beckoning us to enjoy, to love and to share…so welcome this church, this life…and a new day that has just begun.

So be it….Amen