Rev. Martha Koenig Stone

Palm Sunday – March 28, 2010

Luke 19:28-40

Into Jerusalem

What a strange story it is that we read each year on the Sunday that has become known as Palm Sunday! A borrowed donkey, cloaks spread on the road, disciples shouting and celebrating. Luke’s version leaves out the large crowds and the leafy branches and the cries of “hosanna” – “God save us!” that are mentioned in other gospels; here it’s just Jesus and his friends, in a hopeful, unruly, public demonstration, stumbling into town, hoping to be heard.

We know that, within a week, Jesus will have been crucified. And the gospel writers suggest that Jesus had some idea of what was about to happen. At the very least, he knew about the oppressive practices of the Roman government—he knew how they treated folks like him who refused to worship to the emperor, and so did his disciples. The Roman practice was widespread and well-known. But they venture into Jerusalem anyway, making a spectacle, singing and celebrating, come what may.

Some bible scholars suggest that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was actually intended to provoke a response—that his little parade was a kind of civil disobedience, a street theater performance, a parody of Caesar’s military leadership and a critique of his unjust regime. It reminds me of our own Roxanne Klein and the Raging Grannies when they meet downtown in Rochester, gathering at Washington Square to sing their songs of protest and call attention to social and political issues that need to be raised.

But the stakes for Jesus and the disciples were much higher than they are for the grannies, who have the benefit of citizenship in a society where freedom of speech is protected. Unlike them, Jesus had no constitutional rights, no legal protections. As non-citizens, he and his disciples faced possible torture and crucifixion, should their little parade come to the attention of the authorities.

But he rides in anyway, and his disciples go with him, shouting, “Hallelujah! Praise God! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

How were they able to do it? How did they muster the courage to stand up against such an oppressive regime? I don’t know if I’d be celebrating and singing, if I were in their shoes. I would be scared as heck. Asking for trouble? Walking into confrontation—knowing it would be dangerous and perhaps deadly? No thanks. I know that there are some people in the world who thrive on the high that comes from walking into danger, but I’m not one of them. No messiah complex here!

Still, I’d like to think that if push came to shove, if God were counting on me to stand up to injustice, I could somehow find the mettle to do it. So I wonder, where did their courage come from? How did they find the strength to raise the difficult issues? And how did Jesus find the calmness of spirit to remain nonviolent in the face of horrific violence? What was in his heart, that he was able to resist the temptation to fight violence with violence and forgive the people who did him harm?

Some might say, “Well, after all, he was the Son of God!” It’s easy to put him up on a pedestal and say, “There’s no way I could do what he did. I’m a mere mortal.”

And yet, if we want to follow Christ, then it might be a good idea to think about where he went and how he got there. If we want to be Christ’s disciples, then perhaps we are called, as he was, to take on the powers of this world and to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. We might not actively seek out trouble, but if conflict or danger approaches us, and we find ourselves standing in the midst of it, what then? Holy Week is a good chance to think about how Jesus did what he did, and what we might be called to do in our time.

As I was thinking about this question, three things came to mind for me: vision, practice and trust. So I want to look with you at the interplay of these three aspects of Jesus’ approach to conflict.

First, vision: It’s not a new idea to say that Jesus had a vision of the way the world could be that was different than the way the world was. You’ve heard it before. In Jesus’ vision of the way the world could be, leaders would be servants, not oppressors. And wealth would be shared, not hoarded. And people would be forgiven, not perfect. And each person, from the greatest to the least, would be loved and respected. That vision is incredibly important, because without it, Jesus would have had no reason to do what he did. Without a vision of peace with justice, Roman rule might have seemed as though it was just the way things would always be—the inevitable social order in a harsh and unforgiving world—a kind of hell on earth. Jesus’ vision of God’s realm and our part in—of “heaven on earth”—was essential to his choice to enter Jerusalem and shake things up.

So if we’re going to get behind him and follow along on the path he walked, we need to be working on making that vision our own. We need to start trying to see the world as God sees it. When we look at the world and see the places where people are hurting and abused, where people are oppressed and excluded, where the world is exploited and wasted, we know that that’s where God’s people are needed to speak up and offer a different vision of how things should be. Pastor Dave preached last week about how this vision has helped to shape HUCC, and how we are working to create a small piece of God’s realm right here in Henrietta, through the ministries of this church. Vision is important, because it gives direction and purpose to our lives.

Second, practice: Vision alone can’t account for Jesus’ willingness to walk headlong into danger on a donkey. Just having an idea of how things ought to be is no guarantee that you’ll be able to make that happen. When faced with threats and bodily harm, even the most visionary people can give up on their principles. How is it that Jesus was able to keep his cool under pressure, rather than giving up or lashing out? Was it just that he was special –you know, God’s Son and all that—with special powers, better than everyone else? Maybe. But maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had had a lot of practice. Jesus had a lot of practice in handling conflict along the way. The gospels recount so many times when he came into conflict with others—times when he was tempted in the wilderness, confronted by foreigners who wanted his attention, pestered by folks who wanted to be healed, questioned by religious authorities who challenged his actions and his interpretations of scripture. He had spent three years working on his teaching skills, patiently explaining and chiding and telling stories. He had a lot of practice at keeping his cool among folks who were trying to get his goat. Long before he rode into Jerusalem, he had worked hard to learn how to confront evil with love. And while practice may not make perfect, it does make things a lot easier.

Anyone who has learned to play an instrument, or learned another language or learned how to fix a car or send a text message from their cell phone knows that practice makes things easier, more automatic. The same thing is true in dealing with conflict. Sticking to your principles, staying calm in the midst of strife, explaining yourself to someone who confronts you—all that stuff become easier if you practice it. If we run away in fear whenever we face conflict, we learn to tamp down our ideas and ignore our feelings and avoid the call of God to speak out and fix what’s wrong in the world. Or, by the same token, if we run headlong into conflict, ready to lash out at anyone who gets in our way, to push and push and push until we get what we’re after, we end up forgetting about the vision of wholeness and peace and justice that is supposed to be motivating our actions in the first place. If we refuse to forgive others when we’ve been wronged, then God’s reign of peace can’t be realized.

Maybe you’ve been in a situation where you started a conversation with someone, intending to clear up a misunderstanding, but ended that conversation with angry words and accusations and the feeling that you’d really made things worse. Now imagine trying to work through a conflict at a national level – think, “health care reform,” for example—or even at an international level – think, “Israel and Palestine.” It seems clear to me that we need a lot more practice in dealing with conflict if we want to keep making progress toward God’s vision of wholeness for our world.

Which brings me to that third idea—trust. Knowing how hard it can be to live out God’s vision of wholeness, we might be tempted to give up trying altogether. And so we have to trust that it’s worth the effort, and we have to trust that, even when we mess it up, God can make something of our feeble efforts. The bottom line for Jesus was his trust in God. He had heard about God’s promise of a world of equity and peace, and he trusted that it was on the way. He trusted enough to throw his hat into the ring of God’s work, whether he would live to see the completion of the process or not. That’s the part of this story that is perhaps the most striking to me.

In fact, both Jesus and his friends must have had an amazing amount of trust in order to have done what they did. The disciples trusted Jesus when he told them to go and get the donkey. The owner of the donkey trusted them when they said that the Lord needed it. The disciples entered Jerusalem with Jesus, trusting that something good would come of it, even though the danger was huge, and even though they didn’t quite know what lay ahead.

Where does this kind of trust come from? I suspect it must have something to do with the way Jesus understood the relationship between life and death. We tend to think that death and life are somehow opposite, somehow at war with each other, and so we are afraid of death. We often see death as a cruel enemy that snatches our loved ones from us and leaves us only with loss and grief. But Jesus knows that life and death are part of the same picture, and that death can never completely snuff out life, and that neither life nor death can separate us from the love of God. And when we forget this, God finds ways to remind us—when we are silent, the very stones cry out—the rocks, the hills, the streams, the little tiny crocuses pushing up through the earth against the cold and snow, stretching toward the sun and the warmth, the whole creation pulses with growth and life.

Look for a moment at the quotation from author Susan Howatch that’s at the top of your bulletin today. She writes, “We die and we die and we die in this life, not only physically—within seven years every cell in our body is renewed—but emotionally and physically and spiritually, as change seizes us by the scruff of the neck and drags us forward into another life.” Well, if you read only this far, it could be pretty depressing. You could look at life just as a series of losses. But Howatch says that the result of this loss and change is actually new life: “We are not here simply to exist.” she writes. “We are here in order to become. It is the essence of the creative process; it is in the deepest nature of things.”

What might our lives look like, if we stopped pulling against the change that is so deeply a part of this world, and started embracing it instead, letting it lead us into new life? How might our time be spent, if we stopped trying to hold on to everything that is dear to us and started to offer it unreservedly to God’s creative process?

I read this week in the Christian Century an article (1) that described a Mexican rescue team called Los Topos de Tlatelolco, or the Gophers of Tlatelolco. They are named for a section of Mexico City that was destroyed in an earthquake in 1985. When the earthquake hit and the Mexican government was slow to respond, the local people stepped in and organized their own rescue effort. Since that time, “the Gophers have become world-renowned experts at gaining faster access to survivors by tunneling into rubble and propping up makeshift tunnels with debris.” It’s a risky technique, but it often pays off for people who are in hard-to-reach places. One of the dramatic rescues after the recent earthquake in Haiti was made by the Gophers, when they found a woman named Ena Zizi, who had been buried for a whole week: “As they pulled her dirty and injured body out on a broken piece of plywood, salvaged from the rubble and carefully passed her down over three stories of debris to the ground, the 70-year-old woman began singing. Her singing was inarticulate, as she hadn’t had any water to drink for seven days. Yet her joy was infectious. The members of the Mexican rescue team who were carrying her began crying…other rescue team members from South Africa and Mexico stopped their digging for a moment and applauded.“ The woman later described how, for the first few days she had conversed with a priest who was caught in the rubble nearby. But when he became silent after a few days, she said she “talked only to God.” Then, when she heard the Mexican team getting close to her, she started singing, and she sang until they found her. What amazing trust it must take to crawl into a fallen building for the sake of an old woman! What amazing trust it must take to keep singing and talking with God, when everything has fallen down around you!

Perhaps Jesus’ willingness to enter Jerusalem, in spite of the conflict and the danger, was a willingness to keep on becoming, a willingness to walk forward into something new, knowing that God would bring life over and over again. Jesus did not wish for death—in fact, he asked later on in the story that this “cup,” this role he was about to play, could be taken away. But he would not let fear of death keep him from living a life that was consistent with his vision of wholeness for the entire cosmos. And so he also prayed, “Thy will be done.”

As we follow Christ, we’ll need to cultivate at least a little bit of this kind of trust. If we do that, then in the words of one pastor, “we can begin right now to be “the peace and justice the world has been waiting for” (2). May our walk own walk into Jerusalem and through Holy Week be a chance to reconnect with God’s vision, to practice living in faith, and to trust that God will see us through to Easter resurrection! Amen.

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1. Jeffrey, Paul. “Out of the Rubble,” The Christian Century, March 23, 2010, p. 13.

2. Kim, Jin S. “Reflections on the Lectionary,” The Christian Century, March 23, 2010, p. 21.