Scripture: Matthew 21:1-17
Given on Palm Sunday, 2020
In your mind’s eye, you have to imagine that the road was long and dusty, perhaps unlike it had ever been before, as Jesus and his followers trudged along towards Jerusalem with each step feeling heavier than the one before. They had, for the previous three years, walked so many steps like this together and yet, these seemed so much more laborious. When they were giving sight to the blind or raising folks from the dead those steps had been easy as the glory of God bursting forth before their eyes, sometimes even from their own hands and mouths, but now came the other side of that coin. Because all their healing on the Sabbath, all their words of proclamation of a new realm, a new order, that would soon overtake the old order of the world, the pronouncements against the religious leadership of the day, the questioning of the righteousness of Sadducees and Pharisees, all that came at a cost, as it so often does, and they knew that at some point payment was going to be demanded. And so as they cast their eyes forward, in the distance they saw the Mount of Olives arising both as a place of respite in the evenings, where they would join other weary travelers who didn’t possess the means or the connections to secure lodging in the city, but they also each saw a symbol of the city into which they were about to enter. Jerusalem, which was never safe on its best days in these times of imperial occupation, with Imperial centurions able to have their way with the lowly Jewish people, felt especially like a trap just waiting to be sprung on Jesus and his whole collective. History tells us that Rome rarely dealt kindly with anyone seeking to challenge its occupation and Jesus had done perhaps more to systematize Jewish protest of the occupation than anyone else in recent memory. Because he had spoken of the realm of God bursting forth in their sights, his words often had a supernatural quality about them, perhaps they were even magical to a growing number of Hebrew peoples desperate to hear some kind of word of comfort in this time of struggle. But as Jesus stepped into this role, this need within the community of his people he also knew that with it came the sure resignation that it would someday cost him his life. He knew full well that it was futile for this tiny nation of people to challenge the mighty Roman armies on the battlefield of military might. To do so would have led to the mass slaughter of so many, an event that dotted the historical landscape of the Jewish people for hundreds of years. But like all those who have led tiny movements against overpowering forces, rarely do you get to see old age. And perhaps Jesus was better than most at reading the tealeaves before him, maybe he had some amount of premonition concerning what was about to befall he and his movement. Either way, with each step towards Jerusalem, he knew that he was walking towards his own death. And maybe it was in that way that Jesus sought to use this celebration with palms and cloaks, with large gatherings and shouts of, “Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the most high!” Perhaps he needed to experience some element of celebration and joy as he increasingly stared down the road to the gathering dusk, the gathering darkness. And when he sent his disciples to collect the necessary ingredients for this concoction of celebration did he realize that he was also perhaps setting fire to a fuse that would soon engulf the whole of the city? Because he must have known, he must have known that creating such a commotion, entering into the city in a manner that had theretofore been reserved for the conquering war hero or the Caesar, was only going to cement his place as a radical leader of a sect of rebels challenging at the same time the authority of the Roman occupation and the religious structures of the day. These made up the twin pillars of any society in that day. They gave meaning and purpose. They inspired religious devotion and created civic systems of governance and justice. They gave the people knowledge of the temporal and the eternal and for three years Jesus had done all he could to tear both of them down that something new and beautiful might emerge from the wreckage. But we all know that you can’t do that. You can’t be the guy that seeks to disrupt everything that gives people’s lives form and function. That questions every source of authority in the lives of the masses. No society, no culture worth its weight in salt would stand for that. So it is that as the crowds swelled both before him and after him, as many lined the streets pledging their allegiance to this chosen one of the Jews, there seemed little doubt where this would end up. Even as the people were crying out, “Hosanna!” it seems more appropriate that they cry “‘havoc’ as they ‘let slip the dogs of war.’”
And it seems that perhaps at least three of the gospel writers want to make sure that we never lose the tension between Jesus the revolutionary radical and Jesus the religious radical. Because in each case, immediately following this entrance into the city that in all likelihood sealed the deal for him with the imperial authorities, he goes straight to the Temple. And maybe it was the case that he was going to have some quiet time, to find a good place to pray. Maybe he was going because he could hide out there for a little while and collect his thoughts before beginning to take on the backlash that was sure to come from the Roman authorities, no one knows. But when he does enter into the Temple, he becomes so overwhelmed with the mockery that they have made of the religion of his childhood and his ancestors, so enraged by the manner in which there are those whose chief living is swindling poor people by pinning them to religious requirements met with their overpriced doves that he simply cannot take it anymore and drives the whole lot of them out of the Temple. And then, as he heals the blind and the lame and the crowds around him continue to swell as the number of people who are able to see, maybe for the first time, the beloved of God standing in their midst joining in with those who have followed Jesus in loud, “Hosannas!” And we have to imagine that this enraged the powerful and stoic ruling class of the Temple. We have to imagine the they longed for their followers to have this kind of devotion, passion, faith in them. And with that, the die is cast. Imperial authorities see one claiming the place of the Caesar and growing a movement around him and his disciples. Religious authorities see one challenging the notion that the faithful even needed high priests and scribes to get close to God. So it was that in this period of palms and cleansing of the Temple was also the moment in which all that had been sweltering and swelling under the surface, all the frustration with Roman occupation, all the lamentations regarding religious leadership that had long ago sought to become wealthy and powerful at the cost of their devotion to God, all the longings and the frustrations of a nation held down, the hopes and the doubts of those who had prayed prayers to God for a messiah to appear in their midst, the deepest yearnings and desires of the people who were dwelling in darkness desperate to see even the spark of a light, all came bursting forth in a single moment—a moment from which the world has never recovered. Each one putting their lives on the line in devotion to Jesus, each one destroying the relationship with the past and their elders that had sustained them for the living of this life, each one leaping out in faith in God and in faith in Jesus that whatever was out in the unseen darkness was going to catch them. Not seeing and yet believing. Not hearing and yet trusting. “‘From the mouths of children and nursing babies, you have brought forth praise’?”
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is not how any of us would have had this Sunday be. A couple of months ago, when we were planning the Lenten season at the church, we had circled this Sunday to have an Easter egg hunt for the children and the excitement around the idea of the youngest in our congregation walking all over the beautiful grounds of the church looking for strategically placed eggs was simply electric. Moreover, when it became clear that circumstances were going to dictate that we continue this period of physical separation throughout the rest of the journey, it was this week that came to mind for me as the hardest of the Sundays of the journey to the cross. For while each week that we gather together in-person is special, a reality that I vow to never take for granted again, Palm Sunday is qualifiedly different from every other Sunday in the Christian calendar. Different from Easter Sunday, in which the whole of the Western World grinds to a halt, in which families all gather around Easter table and we read the account from the Gospel of John about Mary of Magdala and the one she supposes to be the gardener, of Peter and the one whom Jesus loved literally racing through the streets of Jerusalem to get to the tomb, of one angel at the head and one at the foot, in which we see the church packed out with a virtually every member of the community with families and Easter bonnets and bow ties and seer sucker, all present to sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” while being a’washed in passion and hope , different from all that, Palm Sunday is so often, just us—a Sunday in which each community of the faithful has their own ritual, their own stories, their own character. And Palm Sunday, more than the rest of the services of the year is the most multi-sensory service that we have. It is tactile. That is we can feel the Palm in our fingers—the softness of fresh leaf cut from tree, the sharpness of the edge, the same reality experienced by those first folks some two millennia ago. It is olfactory. That is we can smell the smell of Palm filling the sanctuary and casting our minds back to 10, 20, 30, 40, 70, 80, 90 years of Palms and Sundays. It is auditory. That is, this is the one Sunday in which its ok for young and old alike to shout out with the Hosanna of a People who long for a savior to come and bring us life in the midst of despair all the while conquering, forever, the valley of the shadow of death. It is participatory. That is we each have a role to play in the unfolding drama of the arrival of the Christ into our midst again and anew, in the welcoming of the Christus Victor, in the declaration that we are the followers of Christ—in a world sorely in need of an infusion of hope, we will be those who come behind the one who is bearer and the source of all hope. All of this comes together into a singular experience of holiness, of divinity, of unity in diversity, of the story told in a thousand different places in a thousand different ways. And absent all of that, what is really left? And yet. And yet, my friends, I would contend to you that there has never been a more important time in the history of our world for the followers of Christ to declare themselves to be so, in whatever form that can possibly take. For all around us, virtually everything that grounds the West is slowly, but inexorably, either being completely deconstructed or collapsing under its own weight. Think about it, in the United States, over the past 3 weeks or so, the whole of the economy has been reduced to a whisper of a shadow of its former self. Throughout the country some 10 million folks have filed for first-time unemployment benefits and most economists agree that this represents just a fraction of the actual number. Throughout our little town, everything but the grocery, the pharmacy, and home improvement stores have been shut down. And at sometime in the future, when we are sure that it is safe to come back out, there is going to be a huge number of folks who are going to need someone, anyone, to care and to help them put back together the pieces. In the same manner, the educational system of this country has been stripped down to bare bones as one of the chief ways in which our nation has both prepared the youth of today for tomorrow and ensured that the trains would run on time, has been taken away, leaving an entire community of workers scrambling to figure out how to use zoom and keep their kid in their boxers from walking into the shot in the middle of a conference call, or maybe that’s just me. The medical system, those folks we depend on to take care of us when we are sick or injured has been pushed to the point of collapse and in some places that moment is coming in the next few days and it will happen on live television with an entire nation having nothing else to do but watch it unfold before their eyes and what comes after that is anyone’s guess. So it is that everything we thought we could depend on is slowly falling away. But in its falling away, to fill the gaping hole that has been left, many of our fellow citizens, have been turning back to the religion of their childhood to help make sense of that which is scary and uncertain and unknown. I can’t tell you the number of people I have heard on national television talk about the power of prayer, talk about their faith, talk about their belief that God continues to hold all of us in the palm of a loving hand. There is a hunger in the soul of the nation for something that is more foundational than the ability to go out to eat on Friday night or catch a show in a theater. There is a yearning in the core of the nation to rebuild our collective house of solid ground. There is a need to look beyond ourselves and our little wants and desires and truly talk about how we take care of one another in a time in which we all have been shaken. And this is why we need Palm Sunday to come right now. We need the chance for those people of faith to declare themselves to be so in whatever medium is available to you. We need those people who will follow Jesus through the gates of Jerusalem to stand and be counted and bear witness to all the people as to where we place our faith, our trust, our lives. And we need to invite others to come along and do the same. Jesus started his ministry by just reaching out to a handful of folks and saying, “follow me,” and their lives were never the same again. Today, that movement has well over 2 billion people. Don’t tell me the church is dying when it is the single largest collective of people on the planet united under one banner. We need only to be willing to reach out to one other person in our midst and bring them into the fold and if each one of us did that, our numbers would swell to 5 billion in no time. This is that time, this is that opportunity, this is our moment to shout from our rooftops or our front yards or our Facebook page, “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed in the one who comes in the name of our God!” And just let the spirit of She who passed over the water of chaos at the beginning of time, continue to move and abide in each of us, uniting us as one people, one species, one creation. The time is always right to do what is right and we have never had a better opportunity to be the people we are waiting for. And so, with the arrival of Palm Sunday, we know that we enter a time of preparation much as our Jewish brothers and sisters are doing. As they prepare their seders, as they prepare to gather around table, even if it is just as a nuclear families, just as they prepare dishes and tell the stories of old and reaffirm their commitment to never forget, so, too, do we prepare. For the journey to the upper room, to the Mount of Olives, to the Sanhedrin, to the Praetorium, to Golgotha, to the tomb, to the locked room, to Pentecost, and then out into the world, as we prepare for that, we know that just as Easter will arrive on the calendar in a week, a new day is dawning across our country and our world. A time in which we all will pick up the pieces of the lives we thought we had and try and figure out what’s next and it is into this broken and damaged world that we will be sent with both a mission anew and the mission of old. To bring good news to the poor and release to the captives. To bring sight to the blind and freedom to all those who are oppressed. To declare the year of God’s favor for all God’s children. To see that God is doing a new thing, that it springs forth all around us, that it remakes all creation into the holy and good creation that it was intended to be. To break down walls between one another. To make the crooked straight and the high places flat. To say with one voice that nothing in all of creation can separate anyone from the love of God as born witness to by Christ Jesus. To take our place in the ancient line of those who came before us just as we prepare those who come after us to pick up their cross. To live as the beloved of God and to call all of God’s children to finally come home. To declare and enact a radical recommitment to change the world with a “permanent revolution of love” from which no one will ever recover.
We are told, in song, that Jesus walked that lonely valley and that no one could walk it with him and maybe, for the first time in our lives, that makes total sense to us. We have, as a nation seen pieces of our collective self that we believed to be essential, thought to be unchanging, thought to be crucial to who we are as people fall away and open us all up to a space in which we might reground ourselves and our world in a new devotion to God through the path of Jesus. We have watched, sometimes in real time, troubling images in which death and illness have seemingly come like a thief in the night and stolen the peace of mind that we thought we had. And we have each walked, at least part of the way, alone. Much like Jesus, those who we were closest to have been, physically, at least, scattered to the wind and locked away in their own houses. And yet. And yet, today we still stand and in each of our memories we can feel the feeling of palms in hand, the sounds of singing and screaming at the top of our lungs, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of God!” We can see the dust arise from the hooves of donkey and the appearance as one-by-one folks step out of the crowd and declare their faith in Jesus. Saying we are followers of Jesus and we will not be shaken. Heaven and earth may pass away but the word of God will never pass away. Y’all get ready, for there is a time coming when we all are going to need to put the pieces back together. Let’s recommit ourselves to Christ now and always. Amen.
Image taken from: http://www.hanna-artwork.com/canvas/3561201.htm