A few years ago, I tried something I was pretty confident I could pull off. People I trust, people who are smarter than me about these things, told me not to do it. They said it would be too much. They said something would have to give. I smiled and nodded and privately thought: “You just don’t know me very well.”

I’ve always believed, somewhere underneath everything else, that there’s no amount of work I can’t handle if I really want to get it done. It had never not worked.

So, I ran for office. While serving this church. While teaching at the university. Because I was the kind of person who could do that. I figured I had a lifetime’s worth of evidence to back me up.

I was not, it turned out, the kind of person who could do all that with impunity.

What came afterward—the burnout, the isolation, the depression—well, I won’t try to dress it up. There was just a long grinding stretch where the best I could manage in my prayers was something that didn’t sound particularly faithful. It sounded more like: “God, please. Come save me.”

I didn’t have a better theology than that. Nor did I have the energy to frame it more carefully. That’s all I had, just had that. “Save me. Please.”

I was thinking about that time in my life in the context of Dennis Lehane’s novel Shutter Island. If you haven’t read it or seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, I won’t wreck the ending entirely.

The story follows a U.S. Marshal named Teddy Daniels who arrives at a psychiatric hospital to investigate the disappearance of a patient. You follow Teddy through the whole book, seeing everything through his eyes, completely trusting his read on what’s happening. I mean, he’s the investigator, after all. He’s the competent one.

But then you discover that Teddy’s been living inside a story he constructed about himself, a story that felt completely true to him, one that the people around him had been carefully trying to help him see past for a very long time.

So, even though it kind of feels like it, Lehane isn’t cheating. I mean, the text doesn’t lie to you. The problem is simply that you trusted the frame you were handed and never thought to question it.

That feeling came back to me as I thought about my own failure to ask all the right questions. I had a frame around my life I trusted, too. The frame that said: "You’re the kind of person who can do this.”

I kept reading my own story inside that frame until the evidence stopped holding up, until the most honest thing I had left was “God, save me, please.”

What I’ve come to understand is that the prayer, my needing help to move on with my life, wasn’t a failure. It took me a while to see that.

I want to suggest to you this morning that we’ve been doing something similar with Palm Sunday. We’ve been handed a frame for this story, and we’ve trusted it so completely that we've stopped noticing it’s a frame.

The frame goes something like this: Adoring crowds, children waving palms, rose petals strewn on the road, a triumphant entry, a king finally getting the reception he deserves. “All glory, laud, and honor.”

Happy **occasion, right? The sight of an oft-harassed prophet when everything snaps into place, and everybody sees him for the ruler he truly is.

We’ve read this text inside that frame year after year, and it’s so familiar that it feels like we know what’s happening without even getting to the final verse, because the frame tells us what we’re supposed to be looking at.

But what if we’ve been the unreliable narrator of Palm Sunday?

Stick with me for a second. Here’s something important to notice about the word the crowd’s shouting. “Hosanna!” We print it in the bulletin, and we sing it in the hymns. We used to hand it to the children to wave alongside their palms. “Hosanna!”

It’s actually kind of cheery-sounding when you say it, isn’t it? “Hosanna!”