A Sermon
preached at
Trinity Church, Fort Worth
Palm Sunday
2012
by the Rev. Bruce Coggin
Well,
now! Doesn't it feel great at last to be getting some buzz? I mean
about keeping Lent and Holy Week. Some of us here have been plugging
diligently along now for the past five weeks or so, doing the things
Episcopalians do during Lent—coming to church Sunday by Sunday, giving stuff
up, Stations of the Cross Fridays, soup and a parable Wednesdays—and up to now
nobody beside us seems to have been paying much attention. I mean, we
have two big signs out front—Soup Supper Wednesday 6:00 P.M.—and so far as I
know, not a soul has come in off the street to eat and study with us.
Maybe they were there just to remind you! Whatever's the
case, Christians have been keeping Lent for over a month now, and nobody's paid
much attention.
 |
| Christ's Entry into Jerusalem Hippolyte 1842 |
But today that
changes. Today we're causing a little talk. Of course, Trinity got
written up in The Star-Telegram this weekend for calling
Mother Carlye, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean . . . well,
I don't know if you noticed or not, but while we were all spread out over the
lawn getting our palms here a few minutes ago, I saw two or three near wrecks
on Bellaire Drive, people on their way to the lake or the golf course or Christ
Chapel, wherever, rubbernecking and gandering and getting back in their lane
just in time to keep from hitting the next curious bunch. Maybe they
couldn't figure out why everybody didn't go on inside. But at least they
were looking at us. Tonight you’ll catch a couple of Jesus documentaries
on Discovery or National Geographic, a couple of news stories about churches
and their quaint customs. We’ve been mentioned on the telly!
St. Timothy's,
where I was rector a couple of years, has certainly done the city a service in
that department. As you likely know, for years they blocked off Mitchell
Boulevard and gathered up down the hill at the rectory, then trooped up the
street with a sho nuff real donkey under a canopy—and a monstrance on its back
one year, I'm told—a thurifer out front, and the rector and the deacon and
subdeacon right behind. The years I did it, there was some comment about
having two jackasses in the parade. But by golly, they did it year after
year, all got up like Roman soldiers standing up on the roof of the
church. And people noticed. Got on television! Don't know if
they're still doing that since most of the parish opted to go into the Roman
ordinariate, but when they did it, folks at least stopped long enough to look.
My friend
Owanah Anderson up in Wichita Falls tells about Palm Sunday at St. Mary the
Virgin in New York. Shoot, they march right out of the church onto
Forty-Third Street and into Times Square. She said people stopped, asked
for palms, genuflected, crossed themselves. Fr. Benko here's involved in
Ashes to Go; maybe it's time for Palms to Go. Who knows?
But it makes a
lot of sense. I mean, it's a great story with great drama and great
visuals. Makes a lot of sense that people can remember it and identify it
and, when they spot it from afar year after year, at least point and say, “Oh,
yeah, Palm Sunday. That has something to do with Jesus, doesn't
it?” I mean, it all looks good, looks very brave and gallant and . . .
well, kinda movie stuff, y'know? Looks pretty good. Looks right good.
And don't you
guess it looked right good when Jesus did it? I mean, the poor old
Hebrews had been waiting for the messiah for several centuries by then, and
they had plenty of applicants. There was a Messiah of the Month
Club. Take a number. First this, then the next fire-breathing
zealot would get the messiah bug and scrabble up a little band of followers and
go storming around the countryside outside Jerusalem or Capernaum or Sepphoris
causing trouble, and before long the Romans would spot him and round him up and
dispatch him in one of any great number of decidedly unpleasant ways available
to them. But Jesus had been around nearly three years by then, drew big
crowds, did amazing things, said amazing things. He had a little scrape
with trouble now and then, but for the most part he was peaceable and strangely
vulnerable. So far he hadn't made enough people mad enough to sic the
Romans on him. And that day things started out just great. He told
them he was going up to Jerusalem for the feast and that meant to the temple
and to the temple was messiah talk. At last! Big crowd, sure
enough! Lots of people. And him riding on that donkey, everybody
hanging onto him and trying to touch him. People pulling branches off the
palm trees and waving them and saying messiah stuff: Hail the Son of
David! Bless him who comes in God's name! Hosanna and hosanna and
hosanna. It looked really, really good.
Of course,
some of it was a couple of bubbles off plumb. I mean, the donkey, for
example. Would have been a little more impressive on a horse, don't you
think? Maybe when he gets up to the steps of the temple the donkey
suddenly turns into Trigger and rears and snorts. Like that. And
the palm branches. God knows, spears would have been a lot more practical
when you consider he'd have to deal with Roman soldiers. And once he
got there . . . well, he did something downright nutty. Stalked into the
temple and ran everybody out, all the decent people working there where they'd
been working for years, selling the stuff you need to worship properly, the
people who make it all run. Ran 'em all out. Said they'd turned
God's house into a cash cow! And then he let just anybody in and talked
with them and listened to them. They say he healed some of them.
Pretty nutty. Downright scandalous. And such a
disappointment! They'd had real hope in him. Everything looked so
good.
Well,
now. It's real easy along about here for a preacher to make some cheap
points on the poor old Jews, how shortsighted and fickle and dishonest and
disloyal they were, how mercenary, how given to a religion of gesture and
show. Running the streets before Jesus and hailing him as king on Sunday,
howling for his blood on Friday. And then the preacher pivots to making
us all feel guilty for being fickle and dishonest and so on, because we are,
and end up with a smug little finale about howwe know the rest of
the story. But y'know . . . ? Give 'em a break. How were they
to know? They didn't know the rest of the story, and
they were going on what they knew or believed they knew and had been taught
ever since they were big enough to think about things. They were ready to
rise up, take up arms, do anything to get the oppressors out and the Kingdom of
God which meant the Kingdom of Israel in. Serious business, dadgum
it! And this Jesus guy looked so good. Well,
looked good until he did something nutty, and then what's a zealot to do?
What they didn't know was that Jesus did exactly what he thought a messiah
should do: clean house and share God's love. Well, lotta good that'll
do ya with the Romans. How they must have longed for God to “take a hand
in things,” step in and knock skulls. Hear a good bit of that kind of
thing nowadays too, don't we? Don'teven get me started down
that road. So they turned right back to Plan A which was Might Makes
Right and went looking for the next tough guy on a tall horse. Turned
Jesus over to the Romans. They knew how to handle fools like that.
It all looked so
good there for a while . . .
Looky
here. Things are not always what they seem. You can quote me.
Depends on who's doing the looking and how. A bunch of you have been
eating good soup here on Wednesday nights and staying on to read a parable and
think about it, following the lead of Robert Capon, a priest of our church and
a writer I greatly admire. We learned that the parables aren't Aesop
fables, little allegories where everything is a secret sign of something
else. They're nutty stories about very difficult concepts which are
really easy to misinterpret, especially if you bring your own preconceived
notions to the job. Let me tell you some things we've learned about the
Kingdom of God, that long awaited historical moment the Jews longed for yet
dreaded when God would straighten things out, get rid of the stinkers, put
everything in good order, something people can understand!
First, the
kingdom is not put off. It's now. All the kingdom parables present
the kingdom as already here, full blown, “from before the foundations of the
earth were laid.” The kingdom of God, Jesus said, “is in you.”
Is. Not will be. Problem is, we are so accustomed to looking for
something sensible and . . . well . . . decent, respectable, Godlike y'know,
that we act like it's something coming down the line—and pretty scary.
Not what the parables say. They say the kingdom is now and that God
absolutely adores it. And everybody in it.
Second, who is in
it? Surprise surprise. The kingdom is not exclusive. The Jews
thought it was only for them. Lots of Christians think so too, good
people, decent people, people who live good clean lives. But the parables
say that the kingdom includes everybody—red and yellow, black and white, good
and bad, wheat and Johnson grass, benefactors and malefactors, and even the
heathen Chinee!--everybody is in the kingdom by birth. Goodness is not
required; badness doesn’t always get you kicked out. The question in the
parables is not who gets in; it's what lengths you have to go to to get
yourself kicked out! But some do.
Third, the
kingdom is hidden, veiled, not always easy to recognize in the surrounding mess
of history and human fretfulness. The kingdom is not, by our standards,
even plausible, all that about love and self-sacrifice and meek and mild and
loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above and beyond everything.
God thinks creation is lovely? We're all beloved? Yeah,
right. Tell it to the Marines.
Jesus' message
is simple. It's the same message God has been sending since we first
learned to listen for it. Contrary to popular opinion, contrary to how
things look, how we look at things most of
the time, God is not mad. Disappointed, maybe, but not mad. In
fact, God loves the world so much that he sends us Jesus; and when we trust
Jesus we stop getting ourselves thrown out of the kingdom, we are “saved” from
ourselves. That's so because God's will which is God's love in action will be
done. Shall be done. Is being done.
Right now. In you. And me. The parables teach us that the
kingdom exists in an apparently hostile environment to which God responds, to
which we must respond. But the response is not a cosmic temper
tantrum. When we disobey God, get ourselves kicked out of the kingdom of
his perfect love, his response is usually—as it was to Adam and Eve, to the
Israelites who wanted a king, is always—“Well, Sweetheart, have it your
way. When you come back to your senses, I'll be here. And I'm not
mad.” God's love does not deal with evil; it overcomes
it, folds it up into itself, supplies the love to make everything new.
Again and again and again.
Jesus' call to
us is to believe that vision of life, to believe that it is the truth, even if
what we see in our “real lives” is a portrait of Hell. Jesus asks us to
trust him, to pick up the cross of ourselves and follow him, and to live our
lives loving God above everything, loving each other the way we love ourselves,
seeking and serving Christ in everyone we meet. Of course, that can get
you in trouble. Look where it got him. Most of us do such a paltry
bit of it there's little chance we'll cause much buzz, stop much traffic; but
even the little bit we try can get us into plenty of trouble. Been in any
trouble lately as a result of your promise to live in the kingdom of God day by
day? Most of the time we do the sensible thing, the acceptable
thing. Nothing nutty. Yet God's entirely unreasonable and not
always respectable party is the only party in town. What's a feller to
do?
Is it any
wonder the people who followed Jesus along his way to the temple were
confused? They had less to go on than we do, and we're confused a whole
lot of the time. The implications of today's dramatic liturgy are both
comforting and challenging. Comforting because, well, we do know
the rest of the story. We know that Jesus' nuttiness got him raised up on
a cross and that he turned that cross into the throne from which he draws
everyone to himself. We know that God's good green earth is at least one
of the apples of his eye, that we are his beloved children, that when we live
that love out in our own lives the results can be scary at times but that
nothing else will really do. Everything shows us the way to eternal bliss
in Abraham's bosomhanded to us, shaken down, good measure running
over into our bosom. We know that and we rejoice in it, find strength in
it, cherish it. We're here to inhale that pleasing aroma.
Were you here
last Sunday to hear the three deacons talk about their vocation? Deacon
Dana mentioned the long tug of war between Christians who think worship comes
first and good works flow from worship; others say people find God in good
works done or done for them, then worship in gratitude. A false dichtomy,
of course, and Dana compared it to breathing: do you want to inhale or
exhale?
We've spent an
hour inhaling the sweetness of God's victory. Now comes the exhaling, and
that's where today's experience becomes a challenge. Those people driving
by on Bellaire, gawking at us, maybe wondering, more likely chuckling, most of
them don't have a notion of that sweet aroma that intoxicates our souls.
Not a notion. Maybe not much concern, though who's to say. What's
for sure is that, whereas it's fun to cause a little stir, get a little buzz,
the fact that thousands of people drive by this church every day who find us
and all our falderal either mildly amusing or, worse, merely
inconsequential. We've been here over a century. What have we not
done? Considerable, it seems, and that's a challenge. That's a
problem. Pray about it.
Amen.
