Palm Sunday, March 19, 2016
Texts:
Psalm 31:9-10,
Isaiah 59:4-9,
Luke 22:14 – 23:46
Philippians 2:5-11
Today I want to pull you into this array of scriptures as a participant. Being a participant is much more rewarding than being a spectator. This is the way the lectionary scriptures are chosen week by week. Each week there is a larger story and then the specific stories within that larger story. The goal of scripture is always to pull us in to be participants.
By participant I mean the texts take on meaning for us personally and as a community. A German philosopher, Martin Heidegger said, “Only that which presents itself as possibility-for-me, that is, as something I can decide, has meaning.”
Let’s think about that for a moment. When we are spectators, the action is out there whether past, present or future. When you and I are participants, we are drawn into possibility. Opportunity is given to choose something that empowers us to make a shift or a change, however slight or huge. More about this as we move along.
The lectionary scriptures are organized to draw us into meaning. I encourage you, if you do not already do so, to practice reading the four texts in combination each week and pay attention to the combination. For example, the Old Testament passages, today Psalm 31 and Isaiah 50:4ff, raise a universal human issue that appears over and over in every human life. The Gospel text brings Jesus to bear upon that universal human issue. The epistle text then pulls us into how the early church worked with this issue. Reading the lectionary texts this way over the course of a given week pulls us, if we allow it, into these passages as participants rather than as spectators. The particular issue may vary from reading to reading and person to person. The point is to look for the issue that speaks to you, that includes you and/or our community, country, etc Then the gospel and epistle texts speak the gospel to that issue.
This week the Old Testament issue that leaps out at me from Psalm 31 and Isaiah 50:4ff is weariness. Anyone here today who is loaded down with a burden of weariness? I suspect so, probably everyone of us in one way or another. It could be weariness from a specific cause like grief, an addiction, a fear or something else draining our energy. It could be the state of the world, the state of our country, the weariness of fading hope. You name it.
Psalm 31:9 speaks for everyone at one time or another: “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief … my life is spent with sorrow, my strength fails … and my bones waste away.” Alongside that despair the lectionary puts before us this magnificent hope in Isaiah 50:4: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”
The prophet speaking in Isaiah 50:4ff describes his calling to share a message which lifts the weary of his generation out of their grief, fear, hopelessness. The Word here is a message: “Salvation is near. God is with us. God is for us. God has forgiven us. Just ahead is a new beginning, indeed a new creation, a new life.” His generation is living in exile in Babylon and losing hope. His call is to speak “gospel,” God’s good news.
To the theme of weariness the prophet speaks the countertheme – that salvation is near. The gospel text from Luke, the Passion Story, brings the powerful story of the death of Jesus into the conversation. The Epistle text, Philippians 2:5, starts out, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” which speaks to how the early church worked with theme/countertheme.
Here we have the human theme of weariness and the countertheme of salvation as gift in tandem. Let me share a brief history of the word “salvation” in scripture. This powerful word comes from the root meaning of “to be wide” or “spacious," “to develop without hindrance” and ultimately “to have victory in battle.” As we make connection between dilemma and release, the future is experienced as open. There is hope. One can respond to hope with faith and allow love to flow from gratitude.
The name Jesus, in fact, means “The Lord saves.” To save another is to communicate to him the savior’s own strength. In the centuries before Christ men and women came to despair of salvation in the present order which was so evil that it could only come under condemnation and they began to look for the coming of the day when God would interpose his might in the affairs of the world, bring the old to a halt, judge everyone, and bring full salvation to those who were acquitted at that judgment. This sowed the seeds for the prevalence today of the idea that salvation applies to the next life. The New Testament describes the possibility of salvation occurring in the present—in this week’s lectionary texts—in the lifting of this deadening burden of weariness and hopelessness. In my opinion the fundamentalists got stuck in the thinking of the time before Christ and fail to do justice to the meaning of human salvation now.
Returning to the concept of “meaning,” let me share my experience after reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks book Not in God’s Name, Confronting Religious Violence and while hearing David Hilfiker’s sermon on that topic. As Sacks and David retold the Old Testament stories of Abraham and Isaac and their sons in the book of Genesis, those stories took on fresh meaning for me—that is as possibility-for-me, as something I can decide. Following Sacks, David described that in choosing the weaker and less admirable sons Isaac and Jacob over the stronger and more admirable sons Ishmael and Esau, God is not rejecting Ishmael and Esau (whom today we associate with Islam). Instead he blesses them too as well as Isaac and Jacob.
I was sitting next to Tom Brown with whom I have often been on opposite sides in theological discussions. In David’s sermon that story came across to me with such meaning that I punched Tom on the shoulder like brothers do, because I know how angry the argument of Christian exceptionalism makes Tom. My punch to Tom’s shoulder was a gesture of celebration of Tom’s witness and my liberation from the burden of Christian exceptionalism.
Christian exceptionalism claims that my embrace of Christian faith puts me in a special category of God’s favor. The counter-narrative of Genesis tells us that there is no category of favorites in the heart of God. The selection of Isaac and Jacob over their more admirable brothers is all about God’s purpose and mission to the world. To be chosen for a specific purpose is different from God playing favorites. The Apostle Paul in Romans 2:11says emphatically “For God shows no partiality.”
Christian exceptionalism is like American exceptionalism and white supremacy and male supremacy and all the other ways exceptionalism seeps into our spirits that block the way to salvation and blinds us to the depth of God’s love for his world and every creature in it.
To return to the combination of theme (weariness) to the countertheme (salvation) we all acknowledge that violence and its increasing spread is wearisome. Eve Tetaz asked me after David’s sermon if I could speak to the issue of intrinsic evil and how the Gospel answers it today. I know what she means by intrinsic evil. It is much deeper than bad actions or people doing bad things. It is like a spirit hanging there sucking susceptible people into its orbit so that the unthinkable surfaces.
The previous Sunday Helen Walker addressed another side of weariness—our weakness and lack of response. She said to me, “I think we as a community really need an altar call. Can you do something about that?” Helen and I come from a similar religious background which laid great stress on decision. It is interesting and significant today to hear secular folks speak up in public meetings when they think there has been enough discussion and the time has come for decision. Then someone speaks up and says, “OK folks this is “Come-to-Jesus time”—no more talk. We need to act.
As I thought about Helen’s request, it occurred to me that we already have an altar call every Sunday in our participation in the Lord’s Supper and remembering the Lord who has saved, is saving and will save. He is our hope. A sign that he is present within us or among us is when the witness of scripture and our response of witness from our own experience penetrates our consciousness with meaning—that is, the witness of scripture and ours to one another presents itself as possibility-for-me and possibility for us, as something we can decide.
Let’s take this a step further by linking this concept of meaning as presenting possibility at the three critical levels of human consciousness. We enter these levels when we grapple with three universal human questions that never grow old: Who am I? Who is God? Who are we?
The first question “who am I?” is pretty obvious. It accompanies us through life. I was talking with a friend of millennial age recently about these questions and she said, “My generation is more or less stuck on the first question. Identity is a big deal—personal identity, but that’s where we seem to stop.”
But life doesn’t let us stop there because who am I always also brings up who is God and who is “we” for me?
When we encounter the “who-are-we?” question, we are confronted with the issue of how wide and how deep our circle of belonging is. Is it limited to folks just like me—the same color, the same education, the same financial strata? Or does this question reflect a growing expansion of my life into wider circles of belonging? This is becoming perhaps the issue of the 21st century—the issue of belonging and otherness.
The Passion Story takes us directly into the third question: who is God? What is the character of God? On what basis can I trust him, surrender my life to him, answer my own question of who am I by ask “whose” I am?
Most people in this secular age say, “This kind of thinking gets us into theology and theology is for the birds. It’s a head trip. It really doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is what you do.”
I take issue with that view. I think it not only misleading but dangerous. Theology gives us a framework to deal with complexity. That’s what real Christian theology is. It is all about meaning and possibility. That said, let’s turn back to the Passion Story in Luke.
In the text Jesus has gathered with twelve traveling disciples in a room around a table and says, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” The term “Kingdom of God” carries the meaning of salvation.
Toward the end of this long passage, Luke 24:32-43 says, “Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him … they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved other; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, the chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”
“One of the criminals who was hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Who am I? I am both of those criminals. At times I am one of the scoffers the same as the first criminal to speak. The converted part of me is the other criminal who senses the love and greatness of Jesus and says to him, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This is the me who trusts the witness to Jesus in scripture to stand behind its promises.
Truly, each of us is participant in this story whether we recognize it or not. Each of us is free to accept Jesus’ acceptance. There are no preconditions. This is what we remember and reenact every Sunday in the altar call of the Lord’s Supper. We are saying, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
As Luke tells the story, this criminal is making a confession of faith repeated in the early church, and there is no question about the outcome. Jesus says, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” No preconditions. This very moment can be a new beginning. Yes, you and me—our identity as I-and-we, as a new creation. We don’t have to dress up. We can’t dress up. We can come as we are. This speaks meaning—the word presents itself as possibility-for-you-and-me, as something within our power to decide.
What about the other criminal? Is this his last chance? That’s where theology comes in. Luke doesn’t go there. On that matter Luke is silent. His purpose is to bring the Good News of the Gospel—the receptivity of God—no preconditions except each person’s decision of acceptance, going forward, becoming a participant.
My own theology is that this may not be the end of the story for the mocking criminal. What did Jesus mean when he said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”? What meaning was he speaking when he told the story of the father of the prodigal son who runs to receive his wayward son before his son can defend himself? Could it be that beyond the point of death as we know it there is the possibility of change? No one can say, but what we can speak to is the character of God as revealed in Jesus—the answer to who is God.
Now let us go back to the beginning of the passage where they are eating around a table in the upper room. “Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. But see, the one who betrays me is with me, and his hand is on the table.”
The bottom line of this long passage is that Jesus died for us, including Judas and the two criminals. At the time none of the disciples and the criminals knew what was really going—that a cosmic battle that Jesus had to fight alone was going on between light and darkness, love and intrinsic evil, life and death. Jesus embodied God’s own experience with the human species, offering himself in love, exposing the nakedness of intrinsic evil by absorbing all that it can throw at humankind and the creation.
Jesus died for us, and, when we eat the bread and share it with one another at his table, we who are mostly deaf, dumb and blind to the meaning of the kingdom of God accept from one another and take into our souls and bodies his victory in battle with intrinsic evil and his solidarity with us as we fight that battle ourselves. At this table we discover a new family to help us understand the meaning and the promise of Jesus’ dying for us and God’s raising of him and in due time us to see with our own eyes and hearts the Kingdom of God in its glory. And just look the combination of people with whom we share this supper—inclusive in race, gender, education, mental and physical capacity, etc, etc
Let me close with this story which takes us back to the core question: who is God? Who is Jesus as he dies on the cross? What is presenting itself as possibility for you and me?
Isaiah 50:4 says, “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.” That word is expressed in scripture in many different ways. In closing let me hold up two ways in particular – the freedom of God and Jesus which translates into the fearlessness of God and Jesus which then is offered to us as possibility, as something we can decide in the depths of our being.
When the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the mindset that enabled him and other political prisoners to overcome their interrogators in the Soviet gulags, his language echoes the Passion Story.
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself, "My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die – now or a little later … I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.
Amen.