Continuous Form within a Form

Palm Sunday: Isaiah 50: 4-9a; Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29;

Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 19:28-40

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

April 13, 2025

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s, and welcome to Palm, or Passion, Sunday. The current of Lent has been moving us over these five plus weeks through the desert toward the deepest mystery of our faith, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now this current increases. Just as at Ash Wednesday we passed through the gate into this holy season, now we cross the threshold to enter Holy Week. At the close of our service, we will hear and share the Passion narrative, the story of the intense days leading up to Jesus’ arrest and death. Sharing these stories in community, reliving and reflecting upon them, provided primal ways for this story – these stories within stories – to imprint themselves on the hearts of Jesus’ earliest followers. They remembered and acknowledged the trauma of these days and allowed the myserty and promise of resurrection life emerging on its other side to accompany them, to move them as a current through their own lives amid Roman imperial oppression. Today’s service invites our lives to be so accompanied. Beginning with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and concluding with Luke’s Passion narrative, we too are carried by this holy current into the depths of the Paschal Mystery, held amid the rapids of a churning world.

Already we have spoken that entry through our palm procession. Beginning outside our doors in the courtyard, we blessed palms and made our way into this space waving them, enacting in our own context with our own bodies the strange victory that Jesus’ followers together with crowds observed in Jesus’ procession on a colt. “Open for me the gates of righteousness,” we proclaimed together in the words of Psalm 118. “I will enter them; I will offer thanks to God” (Ps 118:19). A few lines later we continued the Psalm’s processional theme: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Holy One… God, our God, has shined upon us; form a procession with branches up to the horns of the altar” (Ps 118:26-27). Amid this procession we have reveled in how “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” a work of divine justice that “is marvelous in our eyes” (Ps 118:22-23). This day, this week, narrates that stone’s rejection and resurrection reversal, expanding the transformative bounds of our imagination. While services later this week will share this story in smaller chunks, with greater granularity, Passion Sunday tells this story up through Good Friday in a grand sweep. And so today, as we are carried by this narrative current, we are invited to take it into our own hearts, to be accompanied by it so that we in turn can accompany others.

Our reading from the Prophet Isaiah deepens this invitation. Outside we heard it as we began to step into this current. Isaiah calls upon God to waken his, our, ears, to “listen as those who are taught,” to be given “the tongue of a teacher, that [we] may know how to sustain the weary with a word,” even as we ourselves are sustained (Isaiah 50:4). As we take in the foundational Christian story of this day and this week, beginning with Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem on a borrowed (stolen?) colt, Isaiah invites us into a posture of anticipation, opening our hearts to deep learning from and of this story. Not book learning, but lived wisdom, the kind of wisdom that sees the landscape clearly, understands pain and oppression as it unfolds and meets it with depths of divine strength: “The Lord GOD helps me,” Isaiah proclaims, “therefore I have not been disgraced; Therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; the one who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. ... It is the Lord GOD who helps me” (Isaiah 50:7-8). There is a resolute spirit in this declaration, words that I imagine helped strengthen Jesus as he made his way into the terrifying turns of his ordeal. Isaiah’s call can sharpen our ears this morning to listen to our ancient forebears and to the pioneer of our faith, who passed through the worst evil that this world inflicts upon fellow human beings and were sustained by God in the midst of it. Who cried out in prophetic anger against injustice and oppression. Who learned to perceive and collaborate with the transformation of the rejected stone into the cornerstone of new life, green growth that cannot be quenched by calamity.

My family and I recently spent time at a new exhibition on the work of the artist Ruth Asawa at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is the first retrospective of her six-decade career since she died in 2013.[1] Asawa was born in Norwalk, California, outside Los Angeles, the fourth of seven children born to parents who had migrated to this country from Japan. In 1942, when she was sixteen, she and her family were sent to an internment camp in Arkansas as a result of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.[2] While there she met and began to study with artists who had also been interned. After the war she studied in Wisconsin to become an art teacher and then went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she studied with Buckminster Fuller, among other leading artists. There she began to create the hanging looped wire basket sculptures for which she became so well known. Moving back to California, Asawa and her husband settled here in San Francisco in the 1950s and for many years lived near here in Noe Valley, as I imagine many of you know. Deeply engaged in civic affairs, with a particular passion for children’s arts education, she created public art that we can still see around the city, and of course the Ruth Asawa School for the Arts is mere blocks from us.[3]

As we made our way through Asawa exhibit, I was especially moved by her hanging baskets. I had seen images of them before but had never seen any in person and had not appreciated how large they are. Made with a single wire, woven into fascinating bulbs, teardrops, spheres, and cone shapes, they express Asawa’s signature concept, “a continuous form within a form.” Their interiors become their exteriors, and vice versa. As she is quoted in one of the exhibit plaques, “I have tried to make use of the space inside and find that what is an outer surface can become an inner surface.”  Their shadows are also as crucial to their shape as their exterior physical forms. The passage of light through them is foundational to their expression, as well, as one of her adult children, Addie, remarks in an audio clip accompanying the exhibit: “Transparency is part of the magic of her work. They have this lightness to them, and it’s almost because of the shadows. I think it’s almost like they transform.”[4] And as Asawa herself remarked of transformation (again, in one of the exhibit plaques), “a sensation of watching metamorphosis can be achieved through the grouping of related forms at studied distances apart.”

As I read these quotes and reflected on the key phrase “continuous form within a form,” I could not help but think of this day, Palm or Passion Sunday, and how it presents us with a form that further unfolds within Holy Week’s subsequent days. Each day this week is a form within a form. I thought as well of the Eucharist we celebrate each Sunday, its sweeping, overarching prayer now becoming contained within smaller portions of its story. Here are forms within forms that in turn form us as disciples, as followers of Jesus. This is formation to sustain the weary with a word, with a form we iterate in our own lives day by day in this world. A form we share, encouraging one anther when we are overwhelmed, pressing back together against tyranny, creating something new even as the world around us convulses. We do this in so many ways. In our worship each week, our prayers, our music, our conversation in community. We do this in our formation series, our food ministries, our marching, our kitchen campaign. Friends, as we make our way into Holy Week, may our hearts be opened, our perception sharpened to learn, to perceive, to be sustained, to share. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. A metamorphosis is afoot, unfolding in shadow and in light. This mystery cannot be quenched by calamity. It is God’s doing, with us, sustaining us in community and in creativity. May we be taken into this mysterious current, marvelous in our eyes.

[1] https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/ruth-asawa-retrospective/?gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAACzvO2ZE2JUgnarpSj35xq1zcUdP9&gclid=CjwKCAjwwe2_BhBEEiwAM1I7seaA4qGDWPSKs7S5Iv66QZ9jIDuxMPeMiL0FbX-YQnCQRXeaYvSdWxoCy7cQAvD_BwE

[2] Reflections by Asawa on the internment can be found here: https://ruthasawa.com/life/incarceration/ The language of the executive order can be found here: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066

[3] For more on Asawa’s life and work in and with San Francisco: https://ruthasawa.com/life/ 

[4] https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2014.794/