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Palm Sunday

April 8, 2001

Palm Sunday, with its shouts of ‘Hosanna’ and of ‘crucify him’, its stories of exuberant welcome and grim executions, all in such a brief space, Palm Sunday is about paradox. It’s about paradox in the usual sense, of conflicting ideas or images that somehow manage both to be true. But it’s also about paradox in a deeper, and older, sense too. The word “paradox” includes two Greek words. One is doxa–which means glory, and is where we get our word“doxology”; the other is para, which can mean other, or beside. A paradox reveals another glory, a different glory than the one expected, and sets that up beside the usual, or the expected glory.

That’s what we get today, two notions of glory, two ideas of what is wonderful, what is splendid, and what is important, set side by side. And we get to choose which one is ours, which one we embrace.

And it is an amazingly modern situation. As we learned during our Lenten program, today’s service with, Palms and the Passion Gospel, has been around since about the year 380. I suspect that for centuries the paradox, the fickle behaviour of the crowd, the contrasting cries of “Hosanna” and “Crucify him” were stunning, almost incomprehensible to the generations who have shared this service with us. To people enmeshed in stability, or longing for stability; to people who knew they needed salvation and who were willing to go places and do things for the sake of their salvation, this erratic crowd in Jerusalem must have seemed alien, perverse, and villainous.

But not to us. If not as individuals, then as a culture, there is no doubt that we understand this. Our culture would be right at home here—both on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, and we just might wonder why it took everybody so long to come around. Someone with great insight said recently that, at some point in the modern world, people stopped trying to be saved, and began wanting only to feel a little bit better.

The glory of the modern world, one side of today’s paradox, lies in efficiently meeting our needs—with quick fixes, rapid turn-around, overnight shipping and guaranteed, fast, fast, fast results. The goal of it all is that we feel better, at least a little bit better. And we decide what our needs are; and we decide what it looks like to meet them; and we decide when we feel better. It’s easier and clearer this way, and it puts the focus right where we like it to be; which is on us. That’s one of the versions of glory we see today.

Part of all this is the notion that if we don’t get what we decide is satisfaction quickly; then it’s time for a change. And we make lots of changes, and we make them often. We change fashions, leaders, churches, spouses, values, curricula, preferences, passions, favorites, goals, and hopes at a clip that is truly astounding. Right?

So that crowd’s behavior in Jerusalem probably makes more sense to us than it did to previous generations. We know all about this sort of thing.

The problem was, Jesus just didn’t meet the people’s Messiah-needs. It’s as simple as that. You know, today there is a lot of talk about people’s needs, especially people’s spiritual needs, and what it is like for the church to meet or not to meet these needs. Well, in Jesus’ day people had their messiah-needs. They wanted a messiah, and they had certain things they expected, and were sure they needed, a messiah to do for them. (Things like run off the Romans, support the temple, make everybody happy, lower taxes, smash the gentiles, stuff like that.)

Those were their messiah needs. In light of those, Jesus blew it. The glory he offered was very different from what they wanted—it was different from what everyone but Jesus wanted. During Holy Week, during that time from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, Jesus made this very clear. He wept over Jerusalem, he didn’t liberate it. He attacked the Temple precincts and the Temple functionaries. He disputed with the religious leaders and made them look bad. He didn’t show good sense about money; and he was downright rude to the wrong people. Nothing that anyone wanted to happen, happened. People’s messiah-needs were not being met. So, “Crucify him” was simply a theatrical way of expressing their disappointment.

Now, none of what Jesus did was capricious or frivolous. Jesus didn’t go out looking for trouble just because he could. Instead, Jesus was offering the glory, the presence and the power, of the kingdom of God. He was presenting to the world, in his own person, words, and deeds, the reality and the meaning of the kingdom. He was offering another glory, a glory that stood beside the world’s glory, so the world could choose.

In presenting the kingdom Jesus reveals, among other things, that every human society, structure institution, government, church, and organization—and, just as powerfully, every human heart—was both under judgment and in desperate need of transformation, grace, and forgiveness. Presenting the kingdom reveals the emptiness, the superficiality, the unabridged sin and selfishness that lies just below the surface in so many of our institutions, pursuits, habits and appetites. Presenting the kingdom shows very clearly that we—and what we want and what we think we need, and the way we define and understand ourselves, our problems, and our hopes—presenting the kingdom shows that we are not the final word, or the best word, on any of this, and that God is. And we can neither grasp this nor do anything about it without a heart transformed by God.

Presenting the kingdom reveals that God, our creator, our Father, the great lover of our souls, God desires for us what is best for us, and most of the time we don’t want that right now thank you. Most of the time we will be glad to settle for feeling a little better, or for getting what we have already decided we want. So presenting the Kingdom reveals that we are lost, and wrong, and desperately in need of what we are so passionately resisting from the hand and mercy of God.

Jesus comes to save us. He presents the Kingdom, he offers us the truth. That is the glory he brings. Next to that, set in contrast and in opposition to that, is the glory of the world—of our desires and wants, including our religious desires and wants—as well as our insistence that we get fast relief. Two glories offered. The paradox of Palm Sunday.

It wasn’t even close. The cross is what we, as a society, as a civilization, as a culture, and as individual souls, had to say to the glory of the Kingdom.

Today, and every day, (but especially today) we are faced with the same paradox, the same choice. We are asked to choose which glory we will love, which we will serve, which we will run after for ourselves and for our family. It is always the same paradox, always the same choice. Palm Sunday does a pretty good job of showing us how we usually choose, what we usually do. It takes the rest of this week, and Easter morning, to find out how the story really ends.

The Lessons are: Isaiah 45.21-25; Psalm 22.1-11; Philippians 2.5-11; Luke 22.39--23.56

Lessons for Lent

Maundy Thursday
April 12, 2001

When you think of Maundy Thursday, of the last supper, what do you see, what image do you have? For most of us, what we see is that blasted painting of Leonardo da Vinci—where there are these thirteen guys, all by themselves, sitting around a nice table in what appears to be the special dining room of a nice restaurant somewhere in the late 15th century. And most other pictures, like the one on our bulletin today, are variations in one way or another on that same theme.

What I want to do tonight is expand your vision a little, and give you some more images of that meal we remember tonight, images that talk about both the history of the meal, and the meaning of the meal.

First of all, and easiest, is the historical picture—what did the Last Supper look like? Well, for one thing, in those days even more than now, you just couldn’t expect a dozen guys to put together a fancy meal. It wasn’t a guy thing. Women were not only present in the background doing the hard work, they were also at the meal itself. The liturgy of such a meal had specific roles for the women of the household or the community, and there were, by all accounts, a large number of women among those who were with Jesus in Jerusalem. Also, there were kids—there had to be at least one child to begin the meal, and doubtless there were more, given all those women and men.

A different picture begins to emerge. The Last Supper probably looked a lot more like St. Mary’s than da Vinci. It was a community meal, probably spread over a large room, with folks moving around and a lot of noise. To be sure, there were special moments, quiet moments, when the liturgy of the Passover was said, and when Jesus’ special, puzzling, words and actions were heard, and absorbed, and remembered. But most of the time it wasn’t like we imagine. Most of the time it wasn’t all that different from what we are used to over in the Parish Hall. That’s one of the different images I want to offer—the last supper looked very different from the way we usually picture it. All sorts of other folks were there—that’s the key.

And there is another, different, sense in which there were lots of other people at the last supper—people not there in person perhaps, but there all the same—people who are part of the meaning of that event.

You see, it was at table, at all sorts of meals and feasts and banquets, that Jesus was at his clearest, his most transparent, and his most challenging. His parables might have been difficult, and some of his teachings were puzzling and demanding. But you could probably hear just about everything Jesus had to say by watching what he did when he ate with people.

That should come as no surprise. Jewish communities—families, religious groups, indeed the people of Israel itself, had always been constituted by meals, and by what happens at meals. In all the sacred writing of Israel, meals, especially great banquets, are the most persistent and abiding image of what the Kingdom of God is like. Jesus continues in this tradition with a sort of vengeance, and summarized and epitomized much of his teaching by the example of his behavior at table.

Now, all of the meals of Jesus’ ministry, and all that he tried to say and do at them, all of them build up to the meal we remember tonight. all of them find their clearest meaning and significance when seen in the light of what he did when the hour came on the night he was betrayed. So they were all there—everyone who had been a part of what led up to this final gift on the very edge of darkness was also a part of this meal.

Levi the tax collector, and his rich, crooked friends—outcasts one and all—were there. Jesus got into trouble for eating with them. The woman whose tears of repentance and grace washed Jesus’ feet was there (more trouble for Jesus) as was that other woman who poured a king’s ransom worth of perfume on those same feet—and taught everyone something of the real value of money. She was there, part of the background of the meal.

The prodigal son and his older brother were there—or at least they were both invited. That was the secret point of the parable, a point that could not be known until now. Mary and Martha were both there—and I like to think that at this meal both of them took the better part, and sat at Jesus’ feet and listened, and that they let Lazarus, who had shared so many other meals with Jesus, take care of the serving this time.

All sort of people like that were there, in spirit and in the elaborate tapestry that made up the background of this extraordinary night. And just to make that very clear, just to show how wide the door is open, remember that Judas really was there. Jesus made sure that Judas stayed for the meal, that he was invited to share the bread and the cup. Jesus sent Judas away to do what he was going to do; but not until Jesus had made clear that this meal, and all it could mean, was for Judas, too. The door is open wide.

But outnumbering all of these other special guests at the last supper were the crowds: The nameless, countless multitudes who had, on hillsides and sheep pastures and by the side of lakes, eaten their fill of the bread that Jesus had taken, blessed, broken and given to them. These were the ones present at the only miracle we have reason to believe that Jesus ever repeated—the feeding of the multitudes, where meager offerings of ordinary folks were transformed by Jesus into something that was truly, and deeply and fully enough for everyone. (By the way, I think Jesus repeated this miracle as a hint to us that the Eucharist—which is the hidden form of all these feedings and the heart of Last Supper—is something we should do often, also.)

All of these folks were there, in one way or another, at this last Passover of the Old Covenant. All of them went into making that meal all that it was.

That meal, and the Eucharist it began, are the center of our remembrance this evening, and the first thing we always have to say about these is that our Lord Jesus is as present, as really present, in his self, in his grace and in his person, in the Sacrament that he instituted as he was during the meal on the first Maundy Thursday. That is always first. But don’t forget, Jesus is also present in this sacrament in his teaching as well. So here we meet again all those fascinating people who were at the earlier meals.

So, when you think about the last supper, think about it bigger. Remember that it didn’t look very much like those famous paintings we usually picture. And remember also all the meals that led up to this meal; and all the people who were there. Imagine them watching, and remembering, and understanding, at long last, what was really going on. ||That can help us to watch, and to remember, and to begin to understand, at long last, what is really going on.

The Lessons are: Exodus 12.1-14a; Psalm 78.14-20, 23-25; I Corinthians 11.23-26; Luke 22.14-30

Good Friday
April 13, 2001

It’s been an unusual Holy Week. I’ve been going around town, to preaching services at both the Methodist and Presbyterian Church, carrying this crucifix, waving it at people, and insisting that we cannot understand our faith, and we cannot understand our Lord, and we cannot see what love really looks like, until we gaze long and hard at this image—until we begin to see, and to notice, and to feel, the reality of this cross. Then we have only just begun, but then we have the direction set, and we can begin to touch it, and we can begin to enter the great power of sacrifice, and we can begin to understand what this day, and our faith, and the horrible power of sin, and the great cost of our redemption, are really all about. To understand Christianity, and God, and love, we have to look here—we have to gaze long and hard. We have to do what Pilate told us to, we have to behold the man.

That’s what I’ve been talking about. Today I want to add something to that; something a little different from what I usually do from this pulpit. I want to suggest that there is something else we need the cross to understand; something more. We need the cross, we need to look hard at the cross, if we are ever going to understand our own lives, if we are ever going to enter fully into our own lives.

There is no getting around Jesus’ saying, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Most of us, if we are honest, wish we could get out from under the cross, skip that part of it. Christianity would seem so much neater if we could take just the second half of Jesus’ invitation. If we could say, “Okay, Jesus, I’m willing to follow you, but you can’ keep the cross part to yourself.”; if we could have some other symbol we put on our wall and wore around our necks. But it doesn’t work that way. Jesus says that if we want to be his follower, we must take up our cross-not his cross but our cross-and follow him. He says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.” This is about us.

What is it for us to take up our cross? I don’t think we have to go out and look for it. It is probably already right there in our life. The cross, for each of us, is not some exalted thing; it is probably some lowly, humbling thing. It is almost certainly something which we would never have chosen to be there, but it is also something from which we cannot escape. Where is the cross for you? What is the cross for you?

In more down-to-earth terms: What is killing you right now? What is consuming the life right out of you? Because that may well be the invitation of the cross for you.

It may have something to do with your family: with your spouse or your parents or a sibling. Maybe you are afraid because someone is leaving, or because someone is coming; maybe someone has changed—or someone hasn’t changed— and that is the problem.

The cross that has been handed to you might have something to do with your children or grandchildren–with the choices they are making or have made, or the choices that you are making or have made for them. It might be the children who are still home, or the children who used to be home; or the children you always wanted and never had.
The cross might have to do with yourself, with something of which maybe few people are aware, perhaps which no one else is aware. Though there’s every outward sign and every seeming reason that you would be thriving, you actually feel like you’re dying . . .

What is killing you? It may have to do with your work which you can’t get out of. It may have to do with the work you once had, and can’t get back into. Maybe the cross has to do with a diagnosis or an addiction you’re living with.

What is the cross for you? It is most likely already there, in all of our lives, and we either stumble over it, or we break ourselves upon it, or we pick it up and bear it and offer it. I suspect that most of us know about this, and know it pretty well.

The cross is not some thing we can escape. Jesus never promised bliss in this world, but he did promise us a cross. Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we think that if we are carrying a cross, then we have failed, or there is something wrong with us, or with our faith, or with God. But carrying a cross means that we are living the lives Jesus promised we would live. It means that we are sharing his life, and that we have at that moment, the possibility of new growth and of new life.

The cross is Jesus’ way of truth and life which he shares with us. The cross is not the end, but it is the way to the end. And that is where the bad news of the Gospel becomes good news. We are not left hanging on the cross simply to die.
The cross is not the end. It is a doorway, a portal, through which we pass, and often more than once in this life. What could seem like a sentence of death is actually a breath of real life, and there is no other way to get to that authentic life. I read recently, “There are places in the heart that do not yet exist, and then suffering enters so that they might exist.”

Remember, we do not go looking for our the cross; the cross has a way of finding us. If you understand just now what it is to have been handed a cross, to be carrying a heavy cross, to be nailed to a cross, and it is undeniable and unavoidable and inescapable, then you may well be in a place of transformation. You might be ready to offer some kind of prayer of acceptance, perhaps as simple as, “Okay, God: here is this cross in my life. Okay.”

Maybe you will feel led to say a prayer like Jesus’ own prayer to God the Father: “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” It is to say, “Okay, God: if this is your way for me and your truth . . . which feels like it’s just killing me, then I will wait for the life. I will wait, (maybe desperately) for the life that you promise will come out of this.” It is an honest prayer, and I believe it is a prayer that will be answered, in God’s way and in God’s time, with hope and with blessing.

Jesus’ cross is the way of new life and of new hope for all creation. We cannot know Jesus without knowing his cross. At the same time, our version of this cross is part of what he calls us to and to be. It is part of the key to our own lives. The good news is that the cross—his or ours—is not the end. But carrying it, and offering it, are the way to find our end with God; and that is forever, and that begins even now.

The Lessons are: Isaiah 53.13--53.12; Psalm 22.1-21; Hebrews 10.1-25; John 18.1--19.

Click here for the Easter Season Readings

Easter Day
April 15, 2001

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!

This year, I moved into Easter through those three lessons we just heard. It’s a good way to get there. Those readings talk about the three things Easter is about, and we need to hear them all, all three, if we are going to grasp even the beginnings of a complete vision of this great festival. Let’s look at the lessons, starting with the Gospel, and with Mary.

All four Gospels say it was Mary Magdalene who saw it all, who was at the cross and saw Jesus die, who watched his body carried to the tomb and who came back to that same tomb and saw it empty. Mary saw it all, and what Mary saw makes very clear the first thing Easter is about. Easter is about Jesus. It is about a particular man who really lived and who really died, and who lived and died in a very particular way. Easter isn’t about Spring (by the way, do you realize that for just about a majority of the world’s Christians, Easter comes in the Fall—they are south of the Equator), it isn’t about seeds coming to life or bunnies or eggs or the immortality of the soul or any such. It’s about Jesus of Nazareth who Mary saw die and whose dead body she watched and touched (and, believe me, folks back there knew dead, they knew it real well; it is kinda hard to miss), and that same person who was alive again—not by nature, but by the supreme action of God the Father.

That’s what Easter is about first and foremost—and we have to begin where Mary began, with the acute and overwhelming particular-ness of the resurrection. God didn’t raise just anybody; God hasn’t raised anybody since. In raising Jesus, the Father is vindicating just exactly that specific way of living, and of dying, that was Jesus. There is nothing general or all-inclusive in the event of the resurrection (although there is in its consequences). It is about Jesus. That’s what the witness of Mary insists. That is the first thing about Easter that our lessons proclaim. Easter is, above all else, about this man, and no other. It is about Jesus.

That’s the first thing, the part Mary tells us. But if we stop there, all we have is history, and that’s not enough, it’s not even enough to matter much at all. So we have that wonderful section from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, where he tells us the second thing Easter is about. Paul is talking about Easter, and about Baptism, (which is really the same thing as talking about Easter) and he tells the baptized in Colossi that they have died, and they have been raised with Christ. There is an absolute reality here—through their baptism, the essence of what happened to Jesus has happened to them. (That’s why we try to have baptisms on Easter, to help us remember this).

But today Paul isn’t talking to the people in Colossi, today Paul is talking to you. He is saying the second thing that Easter is about, the second part toward a complete vision. He is saying that Easter is about you. The past cannot contain it—and that particular life and death and resurrection that happened to one man, this is also ours, not by nature or by merit, but as a pure and gracious gift of God. We have died, we are raised with Christ. That’s who we are.

But this reality can just sit there, waiting—being true, but not making any difference. So, Paul gives us some Easter orders, “seek the things that are above”. Set you mind on those things. Now, this is not about becoming some silly, scatterbrained, head in the clouds, super-pious sort of cartoon character. It is about paying real and serious attention to the spiritual realities of your world, and of your life. It is about reaching for, and embracing the reality of God’s love, and of God’s gift to you of the same new life he gave to Jesus. To set your mind on, to seek, the things that are above means to reach for the resurrection, not as an historical claim about somebody else, but as that reality which defines you, which says who you are first, before you are all the other things you also are. It is about taking it personally, and making it personal. “Seek the things that are above”, Paul demands, “set your minds there”, notice, and grab on to it as if it matters the most—because it does.

That’s the second thing Easter is about, it is about you.

But that is not enough, and if we stop there we still haven’t gone near far enough, and our vision remains incomplete. So we hear the first reading, the one from Acts, which is part of a sermon by Peter. Now, Peter was a witness to the Resurrection, he knew that Easter was about Jesus, and, finally and after considerable pushing, he also discovered that it was about him, too. But for a while Peter was pretty much willing to stop there. The resurrection might be about Jesus and Peter, and it might even be about people who were like Jesus and Peter, but that was a far as it went.

Until now; until the time of this reading. Right before this, Peter has learned—again the hard way, (which was just about the only way Peter ever learned anything)—Peter has learned that the Gentiles, the despised others, the ones outside the covenant and outside the promise and outside the limits of real human decency and discourse, these unclean gentiles are as much the objects of God’s love and concern as were Peter and the people that were like Peter and that Peter liked. So Peter, the faithful, observant, Jew who had never let anything unclean come close to him, is preaching to the gentiles, and telling them that the message sent to Israel was also the message for them, and that Jesus was for them just as much as Jesus was for anybody.

So Peter shows the third thing that Easter is about, if we are going to have a complete vision. First, Easter is about Jesus. Second, Easter is about you. Third, and just as centrally, Easter is about them. Easter is about the others, the ones on the outside, the ones who do not belong. Not just people who haven’t heard about it; but more especially the ones we would never consider telling—because they wouldn’t understand, or they wouldn’t fit in, or they just don’t belong. Easter is for them, also. And if we leave Easter with Jesus and do not make it our own, or if we make it our own and then keep it to ourselves, if we do any of those things then we have been unfaithful to this most glorious of feasts, and we have embraced an defective vision.

It’s all there in those three readings we heard—just remember Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the pieces will be there. Easter is about Jesus, it is about you, and it is about them. In other words, Easter is about history, it is about faith, and it is about mission, all of those are needed, all of those, together, begin to give us the whole picture.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!

The Lessons for today: Acts 10.34-43, Psalm 118.14-29; Colossians 3.1-4; Luke 24.1-10