April 13, Palm Sunday C (Luke 19:28-40)

When the pharisees demand Jesus silence his disciples during the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his response carries an elementally deep truth: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” The very earth would take up the song of praise. It’s a statement that collapses the artificial distance we’ve created between ourselves and the rest of creation.

Jesus understood something that some of us are beginning to collectively remember: that creation itself participates in divine praise. The rocks aren’t a mere backdrop to the human story of salvation. They’re part of the whole chorus. When we forgot this wisdom, we lost something essential about our true place in creation’s call. It’s a wisdom that transcends species and categories, that breaks down the barriers we’ve built between sacred and secular, between human and nature, between worship and daily life.

When I can, I walk beside the river that snakes through the town where I live. It carved its path through ancient stone long before human feet walked its banks. I “go down to the river to pray” without words and to listen differently to this place I call home. The Blue Ridge Mountains are some of the oldest mountains in the world, and it seems clear that they are members of an ancient congregation. They remind me that praise isn’t confined to human vocabulary or even to human consciousness. When I experience the effects of climate change and feel the groaning of creation under the weight of human exploitation, I hear creation crying out in a different way. The land bears witness to our failures of stewardship, our forgotten kinship. The melting glaciers, the eroding coastlines, the raging wildfires—these are all stones crying out, if we have ears to hear.