Palm Sunday 2018: Jesus in the Spotlight

Today's texts: Philippians 2:5-11 and Mark 12: 28-34

Today we get to experience the joy of the crowd. People cheering for Jesus, spreading palm branches on the roads, even their cloaks for the donkey to walk on.

There was lots of joy in Jerusalem in this story. There were cries of Hosanna! We just sang about the hosannas. How about one more Hosanna?

Hosanna!

This day, this Palm Sunday, is the gateway to what we call Holy Week. And much like our everyday lives, it is a week filled with swirling emotions –

joy today,

frustration and anger tomorrow,

confusion and confrontation on Tuesday,

care and betrayal on Wednesday,

comfort and anxiety on Thursday,

pain, suffering, death and grief on Friday,

despair on Saturday.

And then, a week from today, as the sun rises on Easter morning, another swirl of emotions – grief, confusion, joy, fear and finally, hope.

Talk about an emotional roller coaster ride. It makes you just want to take off this week and go to the beach and hang out. But if you are willing to ride the emotional roller coaster – and the spiritual roller coaster – there is a chance for insights into our lives and maybe even a sense of where God fits into all of this.

In watching Jesus ride this roller coaster, I think we get some glimpses into his life and message and what that says to us.  This is the week that Jesus really is in the spotlight.

After all, as Paul told the people of Philippi in the section of his letter that we heard today, Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…being born in human likeness…becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

Jesus knew about our human condition. Jesus experienced the full range of our human emotions.  And then he rose beyond them so that today, his name is exalted, above every name.

If Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God, then the stories of this week tell us not only about Jesus’ humanity, but they also tell us some things about God. That’s what makes them sacred stories.

Today’s story is pretty straightforward. Jesus has been working his way across the countryside towards Jerusalem. His reputation as a teacher and a healer – perhaps even as the long-awaited Messiah – had preceded him.

In the days right before Palm Sunday, people bring children to see him and his disciples tried to keep the kids away. Jesus had some stern words for his followers about that as he took the kids in his arms.

A rich man came to Jesus seeking the key to eternal life. Surely Jesus must have a fountain of youth that he could give this guy the secret code for, right? So Jesus told the rich man to give away all that he had and become one of Jesus’ band of itinerant followers. Nope, no can do.

But even Jesus’ followers still struggled with what being a disciple meant. James and John asked for a special place next to Jesus when he would come in glory. That, in turn, engendered anger and jealousy among the other followers. Jesus reminded them all that to be great, they must serve one another, not seek honored positions.

And so it went. Bring in the kids, give up what you have, serve one another. Then, it’s time to enter Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, not some majestic horse like Pilate, the Roman governor, coming into the city with his troops from the west. Jesus was coming from the east with a rag tag crowd cheering him on.

Notice their unabashed enthusiasm. They went all out for Jesus. They did not worry what others might think – the Romans who could threaten them, the temple officials who could banish them. They sang at the top of their lungs, they waved branches.

At the end of Mark’s version of the Palm Sunday story, as the procession winds down, Mark writes: “Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. After he looked around at everything, because it was already late in the evening, he returned to Bethany with the Twelve.” You get the sense something more is about to happen.

As the dawn came on Monday, Jesus and his followers began to head back the mile and a half into Jerusalem. No mob scene this time, just a stroll towards the temple. Apparently his hosts in Bethany did not give them breakfast and Mark tells us that Jesus was hungry. He saw a fig tree in the distance and hoped to find a fig or two. But it was the wrong season. So he cursed the fig tree.

Do you know that feeling? The cereal box is empty, the line at the drive-in extends out to the street, the traffic on the Interstate is at a standstill. Frustration. Curses. Jesus knew that feeling. He did not hold back.

And he was just getting warmed up. He returned to the temple and began flipping over the tables of the money changers – the payday loan stores of his era, the vultures who were taking advantage of the poor and doing it right there in the sacred space of the temple with the blessing – and perhaps the enrichment - of the temple authorities.

This was more than personal frustration, like with the fig tree. This was full-on anger at the injustices in the world. Jesus knew there would be a cost to his actions. Mark writes: “When the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him.” Jesus knew there would be a cost. But he did not hold back.

On Tuesday, the mood is a bit calmer, the messages of Jesus no less pointed.

The day starts with Jesus’ followers walking past the cursed fig tree. It has withered away to its roots and that startles the group. What’s with that, they ask Jesus. He does not answer directly (confusing them even further) but talks about prayer and then about forgiveness – neither of which seemed to be in play when he cursed the fig tree. And that confuses us as well. But we don’t get to linger in our confusion.

The temple leaders challenge his authority and he spars with them verbally, one-upping them time after time. This probably did not endear him to them, but they were trying to undermine his authority and get the crowd to turn on him. No such luck.

Finally they asked him the question we heard in the Gospel reading today: Which commandment is the greatest? You know the answer – love God, love your neighbor as yourself. And the scribe who asked the question had to agree with him. And that’s a really good answer for us to keep attached to our lives.

He denounced the scribes “who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market places and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

Whew! Jesus is on a roll. He is not holding back. He tells his followers about the poor woman who gave abundantly out of her poverty, the persecution that his followers would face because they stood by him, the day when God would renew the earth and all would be well.

A day that began in confusion moved into confrontation and ended with Jesus challenging his followers about how they were to live, even when they faced rejection and danger. Hang in there - even when you’re confused, even when you are uncomfortable with confrontations, even when you face danger. Don’t hold back. Know that the roller coaster will keep moving.

On to Wednesday. There’s a dramatic contrast in emotions on this day.

Jesus goes to have dinner at the home of Simon the leper. Once again he was hanging out with the wrong type of people, breaking bread with the outcasts, with a leper, no less. And he did not seem to care that others might think poorly of him for crossing the strict social boundaries of his era.

A woman enters, breaks open a jar of ointment and pours it on Jesus’ head. It’s a loving anointing, a sign of respect and care. So here is Jesus eating with a leper, anointed by a woman, embraced by those on the outside of the social structures of his day.

His followers are grumbling about the wasted oil. They could have used the money to help the poor, they say. Jesus – who spent plenty of time with and caring for the poor – moved right past that objection to foreshadow what was to come, saying, “She has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.” That must have left his followers both puzzled and worried.

Judas, meanwhile, decides he can no longer cast his fate with Jesus. He goes to those in power and makes a deal – I’ll lead you to Jesus. They promise him a finder’s fee. And the plot is in motion. Care is being replaced by betrayal – that terrible feeling when someone you trusted turns against you.

Then we get to Thursday, sometimes called Maundy Thursday based on the Latin word mandatum that means command, as in Jesus commanding his followers to love one another as he has loved them. In some traditions, it’s called “Holy Thursday.” I like to call it the Night of the Lord’s Supper, because it is a time when we remember a very special meal.

Before the meal, he shocked his followers by washing their feet, not something they thought their leader should be doing. That’s when he told them that “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” He was calling them – and us – to a mission of service, not of domination.

Then he broke bread just as his body soon would be broken and he poured wine just as his life soon would be poured out. They all left the table and sang hymns on their way to the Mount of Olives where Jesus went off by himself to pray, asking God to spare him from the agony that is about to come. His anxiety mirrors ours as we stare into one of those abysses of life, wishing we could avoid it, knowing we can’t.

Which brings us to Friday. You know the basic story of Jesus being executed on a cross, the Romans’ best symbol of how threats to their power will be dealt with. Ruling powers often have ways not just to eliminate perceived troublemakers but to intimidate others.

For the Romans, it was the cross.

For the white power structure from after the Civil War until well into the mid-1900s, it was the lynching tree.

For ISIS in our time, it has been the horrible videos of beheadings.

The deaths are bad enough.

The messages they carry are horrendous.

So Jesus died on a cross. If he is the ultimate revelation of God to us, then God knows what it is like to be rejected, to be executed, to be turned into a symbol of intimidation.

As Jesus is dying on the cross, he cries out the words from Psalm 22 – “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.”

While his family and followers were in agony watching his painful death, he was feeling abandoned, even by the God in whom he had trusted. He did not hold back his emotions. He cried out.

But here’s the thing about Psalm 22. It does not end with a cry of abandonment. It goes on to discover hope. It says that God “did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted, God did not hide God’s face from me, but heard when I cried to God.”

Jesus’ followers were not so sure of that on Saturday. The world seemed like a pretty glum place. They were in despair, fearful of what might happen to them. 

And then came Sunday. We know what’s coming then. But they didn’t. They clung to one another in their grief and tried to remember the promises Jesus had made to them.

That’s where I’ll leave the story for today. Come back next Sunday for the exciting conclusion!

I hope that during the week ahead, you’ll let the emotions of these stories, the emotions in your lives, swirl together.

And I hope you remember that part of what brings us together here is the story of Jesus –
a story rooted in God’s love
and sustained by God’s love,
a story of hope carrying people throughout the ages through all the hard times in life,
a story that recognizes that Jesus – the ultimate revelation of God – lived all those emotions
and offered us a new day beyond whatever constrains us now.

This is indeed the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it.

Amen.

Bringing bones to life

March 18, 2018, Edgerton Congregational UCC

Today's texts: Ezekiel37: 1-14 and John 12: 20-24

I suspect for many folks, the most vivid connection they have to the story we heard from the Prophet Ezekiel this morning about the dry bones in the valley is the old spiritual –

“Them bones,  them bones, them dry bones,

“Them bones,  them bones, them dry bones,
“Them bones, them bones, them dry bones,

“Now hear the word of the Lord.”

But there is so much more to this story than a lively song. And as we will see, it even connects to that reading we also heard today from the Gospel according to John.

Have you ever felt like you were wandering in a valley filled with dry bones? It’s a pretty stark image. It’s not a place where I’d like to linger. I can’t imagine how I could bring those bones back to life.

Yes, I know Jesus talked about a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying before it could come to life, but these bones seem really dead. Where is there any sign of life in this scene?

Let’s take just a moment to get some context for this reading from Ezekiel.

He was a Jewish prophet who lived about 600 years before Jesus. He was part of the staff of the Temple in Jerusalem. And then the army of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, swarmed into Jerusalem, captured the city, destroyed the Temple and sent the leaders like Ezekiel into exile in Babylon – the place we know today as Iraq.

Now Ezekiel was a bit of an eccentric. Maybe the whole experience of exile spun him out of what we might consider normal.

In the writings attributed to him in the Hebrew Bible, he talks about eating manure – not exactly a tasty meal – and about lying on one side for years before switching to the other side for many more years. He did not speak at all for a long time after the destruction of Jerusalem and when his wife died, he writes that he did not take time to mourn her because he was so focused on the loss of his people.

Out of all that, though, he began to create these vibrant images rooted in the destruction of the past and his hope for the future. If you read them, you might think he was hallucinating, maybe on a psychedelic trip. But keep in mind some of the vivid imagery that has shaped literature in our own time – the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, A Wrinkle in Time or The Black Panther.  He will end his book with a vision of a glorious new temple in Jerusalem.

That’s because what Ezekiel was writing about was not only the devastation of the past – the dry bones scattered about the valley – but his trust that God would bring the people back home, that the dead bones would live again.

Even thought that famous spiritual makes it sound as if all the bones will be reconnected and an individual will live again, even if we think of this story in the context of Jesus’ promise of resurrection, that’s not what this story is about. It’s not about an individual returning to life. The Jewish people in that time had no concept of a life after death. It is about a society being restored to the way God had envisioned it to be.

In the chapter just before the passage we heard today, Ezekiel channels these words from God:

“I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land…A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you…I will put my spirit within you, and make you … careful to observe my laws. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

It’s a call away from desolation and into life. It’s God’s breath, God’s spirit bringing life out of what seemed hopeless.

As I was thinking about the story of the dry bones, I spent some time with an illustration in what is known as the St. John’s Bible.  This is an amazing 21^st century version of the Bible with the words written in calligraphy and the highly artistic illustrations giving a new depth of understanding to some of the passages in the Bible.

There is a two-page illumination by artist Donald Jackson of the story of the dry bones. Let me describe it and in the process, I hope as it did for me, this will help widen your view of this classic story and give it life in our time.

Across the bottom of the two pages, Donald Jackson has created what seems like a long junk pile. What is in that junk pile, however, tells a good part of the story.

At the far left are stacked skulls, images from the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s when the regime of Pol Pot killed about 25 percent of his country’s population.

On the far right are starved corpses, representing the Armenian genocide in Turkey that killed some 1 million people between 1914 and 1918.

Across the whole bottom of the picture are piles of dry bones, representing more current wars in Rwanda and Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Heaped up near the center is a pile of eyeglasses, a symbol of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

There is broken glass from windows shattered in buildings during suicide bombings and terrorist attacks.

There are the empty buildings of a desolate urban landscape and a junked car symbolic of the environmental disaster that has become part of our valley of dry bones.

Along the same lines, there is an oil slick in the lower right part of this scene.

Friends, we know well what it is like to live in the valley of dry bones. It is part of our world today. And it can feel overwhelming, hopeless.

These bones seem really dead. Where is there any sign of life in this scene?

If you look a little closer at the oil slick, though, you can see something common to oil slicks. There is a rainbow of colors reflected on its surface.

Wait. Is there a glimmer of hope in the midst of all this?

And then as you look across the grayness of the skulls and bones, the shattered glass and piled eyeglasses, you see seven gold squares.  In the St. John’s Bible, a gold square is how the artists portray the divine. God is here even in the midst of all this suffering. The words across the bottom come straight from our Ezekiel reading: “I will put my spirit within you and you shall live.”

All is not lost, even in a world where far too often, death and destruction seem to be dominating our consciousness.

Consider this story. Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch citizen who helped Jews escape from the Nazi Holocaust until she herself was imprisoned. She was in a very real valley of dry bones. She made famous the last words of her sister who died while with her in prison: “There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still.”

Across the top of the pages are the brilliant colors of a rainbow, many gold squares, and five Jewish menorahs, symbolizing God’s covenant with God’s people.

“I will put my spirit within you and you shall live.”

Out of the valley of dry bones, there is indeed the promise of life.

But here’s something else to note in this story. God brought life through the words and work of Ezekiel. So that suggests to me that we have something to do with bringing life and hope to the gray places in our world.

Within the wider church that we are part of – the United Church of Christ – people are using a something called the Three GreatLoves as a way to do some of the work that God has for us as we try to transform the world so it comes closer to God’s vision, as we help those dry bones to live.

They are simple phrases – Love of Neighbor, Love of Children, Love of Creation. Living out those loves is not always easy and it can be controversial.

How do we love our neighbor when there seem to barriers between us? Maybe it’s politics or maybe it’s race. Maybe it’s gender or maybe it’s immigration status.

How do we do that as individuals? How do we do that as a congregation of people who gather together to follow Jesus? How do we do that when I’ll bet there are some widely differing ideas about how best to live out the love of neighbor.

Let me suggest that whatever our differences, we ought to able to start from the notion that Jesus calls on us to love our neighbors in the broadest sense of that word.

And what about loving our children? The focus on school shootings over the past month, indeed over the past years, is one place that demands a response as we try to bring life to the valley.

So too does the extent of child poverty in our state and nation. The Wisconsin Council of Churches along with several other groups has launched a campaign to cut child poverty in half in Wisconsin in the next decade. Right now, 250,000 of Wisconsin children live in poverty.

Again, there are lots of ways to tackle those issues. But can we come together around the central call to love children?

Then there is loving creation. We in this state know well the beauty of God’s creation and the many ways it enriches our lives. We also have become more and more aware of the many ways we put  God’s creation at risk.

When the Southwest Association of the United Church of Christ gathers for its annual meeting on April 14 in Verona, the theme will be “Ask the Earth and It Will Teach You: Your Congregation’s Part in Creation.”

That’s a place where you may hear about seeds dying in the ground before they create the beginning of new life.  That’s an appropriate image for all of this, because the work of bringing dry bones back to life, the work of bringing life to a world that struggles with death and desolation is hard work. It’s work where we often have to give up a little bit of ourselves, to die to ourselves in effect, to bring life to the valley.

Remember those words from Jesus that we heard today?

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

 Jesus is not talking about self-hatred here. He’s not trying to encourage us to have a bad self-image. He’s encouraging us to not be quite so self-centered, so we can be focused on those in our world who need to experience God’s love through our actions.

One last thought from the story in the Gospel according to John.

The passage we heard today opened with two of Jesus’ closest followers – Philip and Andrew.  When Jesus first met them early in the Gospel according to John, they led others to Jesus. Andrew told his brother Simon, who we know as Peter, “We have found the Messiah.”

Philip told his friend Nathaniel about Jesus and when Nathaniel doubted that anything good could come out of Nazareth, Philip issued a simple invitation – “Come and see.”

So in John’s telling of the story, Philip and Andrew brought the first of their fellow Jews to Jesus to become his disciples. In today’s story, Philip and Andrew are the ones who bring the first Greek or Gentile – non-Jewish – disciples to Jesus. They are the bridge between the Jews and the Gentiles who follow Jesus.

The arrival of the Greeks symbolizes the drawing of all people to Jesus, the winds carrying them from the north and the south, from the east and the west. When Jesus saw that his band of followers has grown in its diversity, he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

That expansion of Jesus’ followers would continue with story of Pentecost when peoples from many lands felt God’s Spirit in their midst, when Peter welcomed a Roman centurion into the community, when Paul carried Jesus’ message to Gentiles throughout the Mediterranean region.

Jesus and his followers crossed the religious and ethnic and gender boundaries of their time and in the process, brought new life to the world.

I’m left, then, with this question: If these bones are to live, how do we build bridges in our time? How do we make the three great loves of neighbor, children and creation infuse our world – and our lives – with hope?

Let’s keep our ears – and our minds - open as we hear the word of the Lord.

Amen.