Sermon for Palm Sunday

April 17, 2011

There is a lot going on here today. First we welcome Jesus into town with great flourishes of palm waving and music. The celebration doesn’t last long though, for as soon as we are in our seats the tone of the day shifts as we hear Isaiah’s suffering servant say that he has “set his face like flint” knowing he will not be put to shame. Then Paul tells us that Jesus humbled himself and emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. And then comes the story we all know, the story that is so difficult to listen to and to hear.

One minute we are hailing Jesus as king, inviting him into our lives and the next we are standing with the crowd yelling “crucify him.” I find it a little hard to get my bearings on Palm Sunday.

Maybe it will help to remember what this faith of ours is about on the larger scale before wading into the stories of the day. What seems to me to be the center of the Christian message, the good news that we are to spread into the world in word and action is this: that we are all loved by God who will never quit working with us to love us into being the best people we can be. That kind of sums it all up for me. I find room in that explanation for sin and forgiveness, transformation, spiritual awakening, solidarity with the poor, self-giving--all of those are a part of God loving us into being new, more complete, more God-grounded people. The gospel is about love and change. I think it is that “change” part that sets the stage for what happens here today.

Now when I say that God loves us into being the best people we can be I assume that we have a good ways to go--that we are not and will not be, in this life at least, the best we can be. I also suspect that the best out in front of us--what we may yet become--involves becoming what we may not even be able to imagine. Maybe we will find somewhere down the road that we are made happy by things we would rather avoid at this point in our lives. Who knows, maybe growing into the full stature of Christ--that’s how Paul talks about our being changed--maybe growing into the full stature of Christ could even involve becoming the kind of people we don’t really like right now, or becoming the kind of people we think are silly. Maybe we will become like people who are on the other side of the political spectrum or whose religion seems strange to us. One of the concerts we had here at St. Aidan’s featured the group, We’re About Nine. In one song the speaker is explaining to a friend that, yes, he has changed in unexpected ways. He says, “the people we called obnoxious, the ones that we thought were funny, live the dreams that I aspire to now.” The trouble with change is that it doesn’t happen to us until it happens. And, when it comes right down to it, most of us are more comfortable with what is familiar than with the idea of moving to some new place we’ve never been. Change means losing something we have known and most of us don’t sign up quickly for change and loss.

Jesus rides into town, hailed as a king. He ends up outside the city on a cross.

Sometimes it is easy for us to embrace the idea of Jesus, or growth, or spirituality, or changing our lives, but then comes the reality that in order to move in any of those areas we have to give something up. Some part of ourselves has to die in order for the “new” to come. A little “God” in the areas we want to improve is one thing, but a god who wants to weigh in on our whole life can be troubling. C.S. Lewis likened God to a dentist. He said we go in with some problem we want taken care of and that part goes ok, but then the dentist starts poking around and picking at other teeth we’d just as soon not have to work on. As soon as the pain we came in with is gone we want out of the chair. Dentists, though, are by nature concerned with the whole patient. So is Jesus. The people who welcomed Jesus wanted something, but in the end, they weren’t sure they could take what Jesus had to offer. That seems to be the theme of Palm Sunday and the theme of our lives as we work in the tension between the old life an the new one.

Of course part of the story is that the Jesus who ends up on the cross is the emissary of the one who is determined to love us into being. Jesus is living out to the extreme the transformational relationship of love he had heard about all his life. That love was the heart of the faith in which Jesus grew up, the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jesus went to the cross knowing about the patience and persistence of the God of love. Those who had known him and who saw him die came to understand that Jesus embodied the love of God in a way no one had before. Even Jesus was called to change, to leave his old life behind in hopes of living a new and promised life.

The good news is that God is determined to love us into being, that we will be changed. The hard news is that we will be changed, and sometimes the cost--to God and to us--of bringing about that new life is almost to much to imagine. JB