All Day Ones are special. They mark the beginning of a new week, a new adventure, a new lifestyle. When you are on Day One of a trip, you know your destination. When you are on Day One of a new health habit, you know your goal. But on the church's calendar, Day One of Holy Week, we are given a choice. This can be Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday.

Usually for me, it is no choice. Palm Sunday it is! It's much easier dealing with the 11 verses of scripture assigned to the celebration of Palm Sunday than it is to choose the 119 verses that it takes to tell the story of Jesus' passion, the events that stretch from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion. It's easy to pick a parade with children of all ages waving palm branches and singing "Hosanna." It's not easy to choose the somber story of a good man betrayed and deserted, arrested and tried, stripped and whipped and crucified. It's the difference between a story that lasts the length of a church aisle and a story that must be sustained through the six long days of Holy Week. Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday, which would you choose?

Pretend you know nothing about the Christian tradition, that you want to choose according to what sounds best, that you don't want the overlay of religious language, the trappings of faith. My guess is that you would pick Passion Sunday.

For in our day, Palm Sunday is a non-event except in church. Palms have little relevance in your life unless you live in California or Florida. Their association with victory and triumph is gone. We may gather around celebrities. We may throng after them. We may organize parades for heroes and sports figures. We may stand straighter as the president reviews troops and leads a parade on Inauguration Day. But we no longer involve ourselves in enthronement celebrations, processions that proclaim a particular person king. That is what the people hoped they were doing on that first Palm Sunday.

We want our children and youth to find out what they are passionate about so that they can channel their energies to be the best. Passion flowers and passion fruit make us think of warm, sunny, idyllic places. There is a company known for its no-nonsense, electronic expertise, but it advertises its wares telling the consumer to "be passionate." If you didn't know anything about Holy Week, about the events that begin today, you would probably choose to pass on the palms.

Ahh, but before passion was the general category for all those amazing emotions like hate and grief, love and fear and joy, before passion was synonymous with steamy sex, before we were told to find our passion as in "follow our bliss," passion meant suffering. It meant agony, endurance through all the indignities of life. Passion was the state or power of receiving. It was to be acted upon by someone or something outside ourselves. Passion was the very opposite of action. It was being acted upon. That understanding, that earliest definition of passion, sends me right back to the parade.

For who among us wants to suffer? Who among us wants to agonize? None of us wants to be the subject of other people, acted upon by them or events outside our control. We don't want to be passive. We want to be active. We want to be actors, even if we're only stand-ins for the parade of someone else.

But the fact of the matter is that more often than we like, we are acted upon. For instance:

* We work really, really hard. We are devoted to the company. We keep up with skills and information pertinent to our jobs. We do what is asked for and more. We get good reviews. But there is a downturn in the economy. Layoffs are inevitable. We are unemployed.

* Or we take care of our bodies. We eat right, we get plenty of sleep, plenty of exercise. We stay involved and stimulated, keeping our minds and emotions as healthy as we can. But we are not immune to disease. The diagnosis is not good. We are terminal.

* Or we pour ourselves into a relationship. We are attentive to the needs of our partner; we truly believe we are made for one another, copacetic, simpatico. We can't imagine life without the other person. But one evening, that person says, "I'm leaving." And we're devastated.

As much as we like to be in control, we are not. As much as we long to be actors, we are subjects. We may see ourselves as passive or not, but as surely as we are human, we will be influenced or acted upon by something or someone outside our control. And often we suffer as a result of it.

But Passion Sunday is our opportunity, our opportunity to say that we will suffer with the one who knows that in the end, the forces for good will overcome the forces for evil. Today, we who follow the Christian tradition follow the one who began it, and we declare to the world that we will follow him all the way. We will follow him as he parades on a donkey, a beast of burden, with the riffraff and the children, the vulnerable ones of the village proclaiming him king. We will follow him through the events of the week, the betrayal and desertion, the arrest and trial, the stripping and whipping and nailing and burying. We will follow him in his suffering with the hope that we may learn from him how to suffer so that our suffering, like his, may move beyond itself, and in the end bring life and hope.

It was George MacDonald, the 19th-century preacher and novelist, who said, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that (we) might not suffer, but that (our) sufferings might be like his." A century later the artist and novelist Madeleine L'Engle said, "It's the ability to choose how we suffer that makes us human." And so those of us moving into the 21st- century must choose how we will suffer, how we will live out our passion, how we will endure that which happens to us, and more than endure suffering, we want to use it to strengthen us, to encourage us, to give us life. That way we will not only live life more fully, but we will be more life-giving to those around us.

Now that's not to make suffering a virtue. It is to say that the way we choose to deal with suffering, the way we discipline ourselves to act while being acted upon, the way we move through suffering can be very life-affirming. In his book "Strength to Love," Martin Luther King Jr. said to the powers and principalities that had caused so much suffering for him and for his people, "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering and be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory."

Back to some of those ways we experience suffering:

* Unemployment is not good. But it can enable us to focus on what matters. It can cause us to retool. It can provide opportunities for us to support one another. It can even cause those who have the ability to provide employment to rethink the nature of work, to provide new opportunities, to close the earning gap.

* In like manner, illness is not good. However, it can enable us to focus on what matters. It can cause us to take care of ourselves. It can be the impetus to be more empathetic to the abilities and needs of others. It can even cause breakthroughs in research that provide cures. It can provide the impetus for legislation that curbs the causes for disease.

* Broken relationships are not good. However, they can enable us to focus on what matters. They can cause us to be more caring and careful about others and ourselves. They can free us from unhealthy situations and enable us to live again. And, sometimes, they can be mended and grow stronger in the broken places.

God does not want us to suffer. But since suffering goes with being human, since it is often the context for our exercising our ability to choose, since it is often the prelude to new life, let our suffering be like Christ's this Holy Week--passionate and compassionate. And when it is all over, as surely it will be, for none of us suffers forever, let it be said of us that we followed Jesus the Christ, the one who did not shrink back from any part of life even when the going was difficult. In so doing, he became the one who leads us from death to life. He picked and still picks passion.

I invite you to pray with me.

Gracious God, you suffer with us for we are all your children. You ache when we ache. You hurt when we hurt. Suffering is inevitable, especially if we choose to work for good. So help us choose how we will suffer. Help us choose the ways we will respond to the forces that are beyond our control. Until that day when every force and every power, every system and every person knows your control, your will, which is the will for life and love, we pray these things through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.