Holy Days in the Apple Pi Inn: Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday is often Parade Sunday in small churches with a strong Sunday school tradition. This is one time that kids can be heard as well as seen, according to the scriptures. Real palm branches aren't required; green paper works just fine as long as it's being waved about by children who are actually encouraged to run up and down the aisles and make loud noises. Children in parades are the holy stuff of Palm Sunday, along with a lot of singing, sometimes dancing, and definitely the sound of clapping hands. Not even grumpy grownups can resist a great Palm Parade.

But why a parade, aside from the fact that there’s one in the scripture lesson for this Sunday? Someone special was coming. Someone who made a difference between down and up. Someone who changed a loss into a win. An ordinary somebody who’d become extraordinarily important to their friends, their neighbors, their hometown, and not to stretch the point, the entire nation.

That’s what made the first Palm Parade different from all the others. Somebody who was SOMEBODY was coming to town. Every corner, every window, every sidewalk would be decorated. There would be banners, and signs, and definitely ribbons. There would be clapping and waving and definitely dancing in the streets.

I saw that kind of parade once: the Wirt County homecoming parade for Jessica Lynch, July 22, 2003. She was an American soldier, POW/MIA, a national icon, but in her own words, “I’m just a country girl at heart.” A country girl who dreamed of being a kindergarten teacher and enlisted in the Army so she could afford go to school. In the years since her rescue, Jessica finished her first college degree, did her teacher training in the same elementary school she attended as a child in Wirt County, and is a teacher. That’s a West by God Virginia tradition: serve your country and get an education. In the years since that parade she has continued to educate her community about service, and struggle, truth and virtue. I pass the road sign with her name on it and remember her friend, Lori Ann Piestewa, a fallen hero, a Hopi warrior. I remember her because Jessica doesn’t let us forget Lori Ann or any of the others who continue to put themselves in harm’s way in a war that isn’t over.

I think about the yellow ribbon that I took down after the parade that day. I keep it with my Easter things. Wasn't he was just a country boy? He spoke a truth that the Powers That Be didn’t like. He loved the little children, all the children of the world. He offered his life, not for a nation, but for us, all of us, red and yellow, black, and white. He shows us the truth that lasts, the truth that takes a lifetime to learn: love is stronger than death. That’s the lesson. That’s why we call him, “Teacher”.