Sermon for Palm Sunday 2010

Scriptures for this day are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/HolyDays/CPalmSun_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR PALM SUNDAY 2010

I have never been fond of roller coaster rides. The slow chug up to the top, looking out at the crowds and the amusement park below, the hesitation as the car reaches the top, the fear that wells up as you realize what is about to happen, the sudden swoosh as the car leaps over the peak and hurls you straight down at the ground, the dizzying whirls and loops as your stomach leaps up into your chest. All these are things I can live without.

Well, if you don’t like roller coaster rides, then Palm Sunday may not be your favorite day at church – because this liturgy is like nothing so much as a huge, dizzying roller coaster ride, hurling us from jubilant high to stomach-churning low with barely a pause for breath.

It is a day of polar extremes – from the beginning of joy and jubilation, as we hail Jesus as our king and shout Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! – to the dizzying drop into darkness and sorrow as we watch Jesus die, slowly and painfully, on the cross. This is a day so bipolar that we have to give it two names: the official name of this day is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday.

And if you want to ask, why is the Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday liturgy so strange, why couldn’t they adopt one theme – either Palm or Passion – and stick with it in an intelligent and rational manner – there are several excellent practical answers -- the foremost being the fact that you truly cannot experience Easter as a day of resurrection, unless you have also experienced the death that preceded resurrection. You can’t have Easter without Good Friday. If you try, you will end up with a lovely spring celebration that involves pastel colors and eggs and bunnies and visits from grandma, but you will not have Easter. And since many people will not or cannot worship on Good Friday, our calendar is set up so that we all experience some of Good Friday today.

Fair enough–but I think there is more to this roller-coaster day than that.

I think that this crazy swirl of emotions we experience today is very close to what the disciples experienced that last week in Jerusalem. One day they were parading in triumph through the streets, watching their leader hailed as King of the Jews. The next they were watching that same leader provoke the authorities with acts of defiance like driving money-changers out of the temple that were sure to get anyone killed who tried it. And a few days later they were hiding in terror as that leader died on the cross. A roller-coaster week indeed.

And when I read the gospels, I think Jesus intentionally set it up this way – he meant for this to be a week of extremes, veering from high to low in seconds flat. I think Jesus set this whole thing up knowing that it would come out exactly as it did.

To give you some context, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, in their book “The Last Week,” describe two processions arriving in Jerusalem that day. From the west arrives a column of Roman soldiers, Pontius Pilate at their head; though they live and prefer to stay in Caesarea Maritima, the new Roman capital of Judea on the coast 60 miles to the west, once a year at Passover, they make the journey to Jerusalem. They make this trip not out of any reverence for the Jewish festival, but in order to keep an eye on the population and the 200,000 pilgrims who swell a town of 40,000 to celebrate the Jews’ deliverance from an earlier empire that held them as slaves – and to squelch any trouble that might arise.

So imagine the Roman procession, say Borg & Crossan: “a visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.” The Roman procession demonstrates not only Rome’s power, but also Rome’s theology: Caesar was called Son of God, Lord, Savior – he was considered divine.

On the other end of town, from the east, an entirely different kind of procession is occurring, almost a parody of the first, certainly as a challenge. A ragged prophet from a no-account town in the northern countryside, a man with no profession and no home, has found a donkey – a donkey! – to ride into Jerusalem. His ragged crowd of followers follow him, shouting and proclaiming him king, and curious onlookers who are avoiding the Roman procession on the other end of town flood into the streets to join in the mayhem – not necessarily understanding what the fuss was about or even knowing about Jesus and his mission, but enjoying the insult to Rome.

If you ask why a donkey, which contrasts so pitifully with the grand horses of the Roman army, the answer goes back to the prophet Zechariah, who had said that one day Jerusalem’s king of peace would come, riding a donkey. Jesus has chosen this mode of entry to not only proclaim himself king, a king of peace, but also deliberately to set up a contrast and a challenge to Rome – another bipolar extreme on this day of extremes. He does this knowing that Rome’s answer will be swift, unhesitating & brutal; knowing that the fate of anyone who challenged Rome was slow death on a cross.

Jesus knows that the week that begins with joy and jubilation, as people elevate him with the lofty title of “king of the Jews”, will end in crashing despair, as he is crucified for that same offense – claiming to be king of the Jews, challenging the power of Rome.

Luke, our gospel writer, of all the four gospel writers the one who writes most from the heart, catalogs the emotions of the week with precision: the shouting; the exultation so fierce that the very stones might cry out; the betrayal; the arrest in the garden; the armed defense that Jesus stops by healing the ear of the servant; the denial and then the bitter weeping of Peter; the release of an insurgent terrorist while the king of peace is put to death; the weeping of the daughters of Jerusalem; the crucifixion; the prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”; the soldiers mocking him from the foot of the cross while the women who love him watch from afar. The darkness. The death.

It is a roller coaster ride from jubilation to agony, this Palm/Passion Sunday. And why would Jesus set us up for this? Why take us on this ride, why go to Jerusalem at all, why not hide out till all the fuss blows over and live to minister another day? Why come riding into Jerusalem in a way guaranteed to get him killed? Why do we celebrate this colossal disaster in this liturgy of Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday?

I think the answer, for us, lies in the fact that we call this worship a “liturgy.” Liturgy is not just a word that means “ritual” or “ceremony.” It is a word that means “the work of the people” – literally, a liturgy is something that we create together as community, with song, prayer, and communion. And when we understand what we are doing as not just a ritual but a liturgy, the work of all of us, we can begin to understand that, like the crowds in Jerusalem who one day shouted Hosanna and acclaimed Jesus their king, and days later shouted out for him to be crucified, we are not innocent bystanders. We are the same people shouting Hosanna and Crucify him. As Fleming Rutledge says, “the liturgy of Palm Sunday is set up to show you how you can say one thing one minute and its opposite the next. This is the nature of the sinful human being.” It’s the nature of each one of us. The extremes are in us. We are the disciples who sit at his feet and listen to his teaching and try our best to go out into the world and live as he has taught us. And we are also the disciples who sometimes betray him, sometimes deny him, sometimes cry out for his crucifixion - and then go out and weep bitterly when we realize what we have done.

On the cross we see Jesus identifying with the innocent victims of the world, those put to death, those mired in poverty, those stuck in hopelessness, homelessness, or despair, those who are stressed beyond the breaking point, those who are grieved even unto death, those who know that they are called to do something almost too painful to bear, those who watch as their loved ones suffer, those who have lost their way and those who have nothing left. On the cross Jesus takes on their burden.

And yet on the cross Jesus takes on another burden too. It is not only the suffering victims Jesus identifies with on the cross, it is other extreme too: the torturers and the perpetrators, the arrogant and the guilty. When Jesus says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” he is identifying not only with those who suffer but with those who cause their suffering. And as we shout the words Hosanna and Crucify him, we recognize that we are both of these things – the victims who need to be rescued, and the sinners who are causing their suffering – as Rutledge says: “he makes himself one, not only with my pain but with my sin–because I myself, and you yourselves, and all of us ourselves, are sometimes victims of others and sometimes torturers of others and sometimes both, and when we recognize this we are, as Jesus says to the scribe, ‘not far from the kingdom.’”

Here we are, on this dizzying roller coaster of a day, hovering on the brink of disaster, careening madly downhill towards Good Friday. In this whirling, spinning, stomach-churning world, there is one point of stillness: the Son of God is motionless, suspended on the cross. To all our words of “Hosanna” and “Crucify him,” he responds with only one word: love.

Sermon for 3.21.10

This week's Scriptures are here:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent5_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.21.10

Let me draw a picture for you. This is a picture of Harry and Sally. They live in our area, they have a reasonably stable marriage, they have a couple of children, they own their own home. Their income is roughly 5 times Arizona’s state average, so they are rich, but they don’t feel rich, because a lot of their money has gone to buy a nice house, two cars, nice furniture, electronics, travel etc. So they are sometimes anxious about money, but they are in no danger of starving. They’ve never been in trouble with the law other than a speeding ticket, their work and family life is proceeding more or less according to the expectations their parents had for them, they are doing what they are supposed to do. There’s not a lot of spare time in their schedule– they are very busy with work and family commitments. But when they can find the time, they do spend time thinking about God. They wonder how God looks at the world, they wonder whether there is some deeper meaning and purpose to their lives, they hope that the fact that they are doing the best they can with their lives counts with God & is appreciated.

If this picture of Harry and Sally sounds like you or someone you know, there’s a good reason for that – according to demographic data, this is a picture of the average family in our surrounding area. And for people who fit this profile, our scriptures today have a lot to say.

Let’s begin with Paul, who writes our letter to the Christians in Philippi today. I always get a kick out of Paul, because he says stuff like, “If anyone has reason to boast, I have more!” Paul says that even before he knew anything about Christ – his life was proceeding very well. he was a law-abiding citizen, very well-educated, respected by everyone, a good church-goer who had everything he needed or expected to have. And yet – he met Christ and decided that the one thing worth more in his life than anything else was the power of Christ’s resurrection. For the hope of Christ’s kingdom and Christ’s resurrection, Paul counted everything else in his life, everything he had to be proud of, as rubbish. He devoted his life to making Christ his own, because Christ made Paul his own. It’s an impressive commitment by a man who already had everything.

Isaiah gives us a more interesting view of what God might say to Harry and Sally. And to understand what Isaiah is saying, you need a little background. Two experiences of exile and homecoming formed the foundations of Israel. The first was their experience as slaves in Egypt – starving, beaten, oppressed, humiliated, murdered – God heard their cry and sent Moses to deliver them. Moses led them through wilderness for 40 years, they came to Promised Land. This Exodus experience took a ragtag bunch of slaves and made them a people.

Less well-known is the second experience, much later after Israel was established as a kingdom – Babylon invaded and carted off much of the leadership of Israel to Babylon. Now this Exile experience was much different than the slavery in Egypt. The people taken to Babylon were the educated leaders – they were not slaves – they had opportunities to do well in Babylon, to get education, to work – some of them rose to high and powerful positions in the new land. For them, the most powerful temptation of Exile was not despair, starvation, torture as it was for the suffering slaves in Egypt. For them, the risk was assimilation – that the comforts and opportunities of Babylon might make them forget who they were as the people of God; that they might adopt Babylon ways, Babylon values, Babylon gods – and give up their heritage as the children of God’s covenant.

Babylon understood something important: the way to kill a people is not to enslave them and make them suffer, but to take away their identity, to rob them of their dream, to replace God’s vision for them with another vision that is comfortable but small, dark and confining.

And if this seems long ago and far away, think of Harry and Sally – busy and comfortable and respected – yet tempted by busy schedules and comfortable homes and by a society that has very little interest in following God – to forget their own heritage as children of God and assimilate to the ways of the kingdom around us, the kingdom that tempts us to think that a comfortable lifestyle and a rewarding career are all we need to aspire to, and that God can be a convenient add-on when we have the time.

To a people in tempting, comfortable Exile, a people whose best opportunities for the future seem to lie in forgetting their own identity as God’s children, the prophet Isaiah says this: remember how those slaves were brought out of Egypt, across the Red Sea where Pharaoh’s horses and chariots drowned? Remember how God gave them hope and formed them as a people? Remember the miracles God can do? Remember those things! – and now forget them! Because that’s not all God can do! God has more to say that God hasn’t yet said, and God’s rescue of suffering slaves is not the only thing God is about! God is about to do a new thing! And forget the old thing, the slavery thing, because God can do something that is so transformative, so life-changing, that even a people in Exile among the comforts of Babylon can understand that it is worth giving up everything to be a part of this transformation.

What God has done in the past is only a small measure of what God can do in the future, because our God is the God of surprises, our God can lead us through the wilderness, bring water out of the desert, fulfillment out of emptiness, resurrection out of death itself. And nothing in our lives is worth as much as that prize, the prize of being part of the covenant people of God.

Which brings us to Mary and her crazy, extravagant gesture in our gospel today. Just a few days earlier, Mary had buried her brother Lazarus, and after Lazarus was buried for four days in the tomb, Jesus finally came, and called Lazarus forth from the darkness of death into the sunshine of life. All of Jesus’ miracles in John’s gospel are extravagant gestures, but calling Lazarus from death into life is the most extravagant miracle of all, the one that demonstrates Jesus’ power over death itself, the one that convinces Mary that Jesus is not just a miracle worker but someone who carries the power of God, the creative power of calling forth life.

Hearing about this impossible miracle, the rulers in Jerusalem decide that such power cannot be tolerated – God is the ultimate threat to their own power. So they begin to plot to kill Jesus – meaning Jesus will trade his own life for Lazarus’ – an extravagant outpouring of blood, flesh and spirit that is the new and stunning thing that God is doing through him.

Our gospel writer, John, tells us that this dinner party happens 6 days before the Passover, and John also tells us that Jesus died on Passover. So make note – this is the Saturday before Good Friday. The very next day will be Palm Sunday, and Jesus plans an extravagant gesture, entering into Jerusalem. He’s not planning to slip into Jerusalem through back alleys – he’s going to ride a donkey down the main street with people cheering and acclaiming him king. It’s a calculated gesture, planned to get the attention of the authorities, and Jesus knows exactly how it will turn out, with the even more extravagant gesture of pouring out his blood and his life on the cross.

Everyone else there also knows what is going to happen. They are all scared. Mary knows what is coming, and responds with an extravagant gesture of her own – anointing Jesus with oil worth whole year’s wages. If you think of that tax return you just filed, or are about to file, and you think of that income number at the bottom of page one, and you imagine breaking something worth that much money in honor of a guest, you will understand how extravagant this gesture is.

Judas, the thief, responds with more sensible ideas for how it could be used, but Jesus is adamant that the Son of Man has come, not just to give a small amount of money to the poor, but to bring the extravagant outpouring of the kingdom of God to life in this world, light into darkness, life into death – and therefore everything we have is not too much to pour into dream of God. It is the dream that makes us who we are, the dream that forms our identity as children of God, the dream that surprises us constantly with newness of life.

Don’t remember the things of old, says God! I am about to do a new thing!

If we think that God has already done everything that God ever intends to do; if we think that God has stopped speaking to us, that the scriptures are long ago, far away descriptions of the lives of a few strange old-fashioned people; if we think that God might have had much to say to people mired in slavery 3,000 years ago but not much to say to our comfortable world now - our scriptures tell us differently. Our scriptures tell us that God is constantly calling us forth into the extravagant kingdom of an extravagant God who poured out everything he had for us. Our scriptures tell us that the comfortable lives we create for ourselves are nothing compared to the immeasurable value of the prize God has waiting for us. Our scriptures tell us that God’s dream for ourselves and our community is new and fresh and surprising in every era.

And if Harry and Sally can begin to understand the dream God has for them, they can begin to know the hope that resurrection brings to their own lives, and their lives will be transformed. This is our mission at Church of the Nativity – not a mission to create a loving community or to build a beautiful building or to provide lovely worship, though all of these things are important and all of them will happen. Our mission is to reach into our community and find Harry and Sally, to help them dream God’s dream for their lives, to let them know how deeply they are loved. To transform their lives with the knowledge of the extravagant dream of the extravagant God who gave his own life for each of us.

Sermon for 3.7.10

Scriptures for this Week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent3_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 3.7.10

What is God’s relationship to us, and how is God involved in our lives? These may be some of the most important questions we will ever ask. There are Christians who will answer this question in a spectrum, ranging from God as a distant being who watches with amusement what we do; to, on the other end of the spectrum, some who say that God controls, plans and engineers every event that occurs, from the butterfly’s wing in Ecuador that causes the hurricane in China, to the next breath you or I will take.

And you have heard this last kind of belief expressed in many ways. How about this? A teenage girl is killed in an auto accident, and it turns out she was text messaging while she was driving. A momentary lapse in judgment that cost her her life. At her funeral, someone makes sense of it all by saying, “God needed another angel in heaven, and so he took her.” To which I always want to say – “God, we need her more than you do! Send her back!” Or, an elderly woman develops Alzheimer’s and becomes very difficult for her family to deal with, but they try the best they know how. Her daughter says, “I know God is doing this to teach me a lesson.” Or, a man loses his job and goes for months looking for a way to support his family. Burdened by worry and guilt, he says, “I am being punished for the bad things I did when I was young.” Pat Robertson believed that the Haitian earthquake was divine punishment for a pact with the devil; Jerry Falwell declared that God allowed 9/11 to happen because America was so full of sin.

These are all statements that try to bring order into a chaotic world. When we are in grief, when we are suffering, when we are full of worries and anxieties, when we can’t see our way ahead because the cloud of confusion that surrounds us is too thick, we comfort ourselves by imposing order on our chaos and attributing these events to God.

But are these statements true? Is this what our Bible tells us? These are the questions asked by our scriptures today. These scriptures are asking us: how is God involved in the ordinary events of human life? And like most scriptures, they don’t give us a straightforward answer – they come at the answer sideways, and we have to work at it to get it out.

In Jesus’ time, people were convinced God was intimately involved in their lives. Because they knew that God was a God of justice, they believed that God would ensure that justice happened to all people – and therefore, people who were blessed in their lives must deserve it, and people suffering from a calamity were sure to have deserved it. Which, if you are a person who is reasonably prosperous, in power or on good terms with people in power, with a rewarding family life, is a comfortable thing to believe – it allows you to be complacent about way things are, because those other suffering people must have deserved it. The unfortunate thing is that the people who are suffering are the ones motivated to change the world – but they have no power to change things. So a world where people believe that everything happens according to God’s carefully engineered plan, is a world where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the sick get sicker, the oppressed get more oppressed.

Jesus has a different way of looking at things. A famous 20^th century preacher said that you should preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. That’s what Jesus is doing here. Jesus is the preacher who preaches with the Bible in one hand, and the Jerusalem Times in the other.

In the Jerusalem Times today are a couple of stories everyone is talking about – we don’t know these stories from any other source, but we can guess what happened. Apparently a tower called the Tower of Siloam was under construction when it fell, killing 18 construction workers. And in another story, apparently a group of Galileans had come to the temple to perform ritual sacrifices, Pilate grew agitated with them for some reason and sent soldiers to massacre them in the temple. Everyone in Jerusalem is talking about it and speculating why God would not protect people who were right in the middle of praying, for God’s sake. The only way to push back the fear that arises – the fear that nothing can protect you – is to say ah, but those people are different from me – they’re sinners. Blaming the victims for their downfall is the only way of pushing back the darkness of reality – that we live in an unstable and dangerous world. If God is doing this to those other people because they deserved it, then maybe we are safe.

But Jesus says no – that is not the God we worship, and that is not how God is involved in our lives. God is not the punishing judge who makes sure everyone gets what they deserve, and who might visit vengeance on us at any moment – if he were, then we might protect ourselves forever by rigidly adhering to a godly code of conduct and obeying all its rules. Yet Jesus knows that we all break the rules. And Jesus is here to tell us that we are all sinners, just the same as those poor massacred people in the temple, and just the same as the construction workers – we can’t protect ourselves from their fate by pretending we are better. And we can’t excuse ourselves from reaching out to help those in need, either – by pretending that those who are suffering deserve what they are getting. We have an obligation to help.

Because the truth is, we all in some way deserve the same fate – we all have sinned and fallen short of God’s hope for us. We’re no different from those Galileans, or those construction workers at the tower, or the teenage girl killed on the freeway, or earthquake victims in Haiti. But there is good news, and the good news is, God’s mercy is as strong as God’s judgment – and so God was not the one who willed death upon them. Visiting vengeance on sinners is NOT how God is involved in our lives, any more than God is involved by rewarding those who obey the rules.

Remember our opening question: how is God involved in our lives – is God a judge who makes sure everyone gets what they deserve? Jesus says no – that’s not it. Then he tells this story of a fig tree – unproductive – gardener begs for one more year to give it nourishment and help it bear fruit. So God is the gardener who nourishes us and protects us and keeps on giving us second chances.

But if you really want an example of how God is involved in our lives, look at our Old Testament lesson today: the call of Moses. Moses had grown up in Pharaoh’s palace in Egypt, but he had seen an overseer mistreating a Hebrew slave. In a fit of anger, Moses’ passion for justice rises up and he murders the overseer. He becomes a fugitive from justice and has to flee for his life.

So today, here is Moses in the wilderness – a fugitive from justice, a man busy with ordinary work of raising a family, tending his business. A man whose once-consuming passion for justice and freedom has been tamped down to no more than a glowing spark in his heart – something perhaps he remembers with anguish in the dark of the night, something he tries to forget as he has tried to forget his whole past in Egypt. And yet that little spark has not died. And in the middle of his everyday world, something happens. We don’t know what it is that he saw as a burning bush. But in Moses’ heart – the wind stirred, the voice of God spoke as that great and mysterious I AM stirred the embers of his heart to life. And once again his passion for justice woke up and he was called to action.

And when he began to question himself and to question God, to ask how in the world could he do this thing God was inspiring him to do and who in the world would ever believe that he had the right to do it – God said only one thing: you can do it, because I will be with you. And that promise of God’s – I will be with you – was enough to free a nation.

If you want to ask the question – how is God involved in our lives – I think this is how. I don’t think God is a punishing parent, ready to visit revenge on sinners. I think God is the one who created us and knows what is in our hearts. I think God is one who never forgets us, no matter how we try to forget him. I think God is the one who calls to us in the middle of our ordinary, busy days, reawakening the hopes we thought we had forgotten; stirring to life embers of passions we had buried in the busyness of our lives; calling us to new ministries and new ways to make a difference in our world.

And if we start to ask the question of God: how in the world can I do these things you are calling me to do? God has one simple answer for us: you can do it, because I will be with you. I will be with you as you do the things you didn’t think you could do alone. I will be with you as you awaken a passion for justice and mercy in our world. I will be with you, nurturing and encouraging you, as you grow into the image and likeness of God you were created to be; bearing the fruit that I know is in you; living the reality of the kingdom of God on earth.

We want to impose order on this chaotic world, we want to think that life always makes sense and that people always get what they deserve. Yet God is not so easy to categorize – God is something far more mysterious, the great I AM whose name we can never truly understand. We cannot know God’s thoughts or plans – but we can know something better. As Frederick Buechner said: “God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals himself. He doesn’t show us why things are as they are. He shows his face.”

How is God involved in our lives? God is involved as the one who loves us, who calls us, who stirs us to action in his name.