Palm Sunday 2014

This Sunday is a bit different than usual. We process in with palm branches singing "Hosanna!" and by the time we've gotten through the rest of the readings for the day we've shouted "Crucify him!" and Jesus gets the death penalty we demanded. Palm Sunday begins a week of particular Christian prayer, reflection, and worship, called Holy Week. It's the most important week for our faith. Out of all four Gospels, only two have a Christmas story (one with sheep, one with magi) and the other two don't (Mark and John start off with John the Baptist fully grown and already preaching). But the Crucifixion and Resurrection (to varying degrees) are in all four Gospel accounts. The letters of Paul remind us again and again that without the death and resurrection of Jesus we are lost.  So we enter Holy Week with the story of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem and then are plunged into the depths of what we call the Passion narrative, which is a word of intense love and suffering.
But this is not the whole story. We walk together through the week, and through the weeks ahead, to dig deeper into more of what this is all about. For now, the text of this year's Palm Sunday sermon is below:

Matthew 21:1-11
Matthew 27:11-54

What in the world just happened? How did this party get so out of hand? When did shouts of celebration and “hosanna!” turn into vile mockery and demands for crucifixion?

Today is the first day of our most important week in the Christian church. We have let our calendars dictate that we do not have time off for worship through the weekend up to Easter, so we get the big first climax of our identifying story all in one big terrible chunk this morning. Otherwise we would stay with that triumphant procession today and only reach into the darkness of the crucifixion Thursday and Friday. It seems too quick - to have these two stories so closely read, back-to-back. But, then again, they are not two stories, but one.

This is the week we tell the story that everyone knows. Whether you’ve ever been into a Christian church or not, if you’ve never heard of Christmas or the Bible, you know this story. It is the story of betrayal, of people at our worst, at our cruelest, as we hurt those who love us most and try to make our way in the world we have made. 
It doesn’t take a degree in Theology to know that when we get hurt, or frightened, or feel threatened, we lash out and hurt others. It doesn’t take any particular faith to believe that we are capable of great evil in this world. Truly, this is the story that everyone knows. From the kid down the street whose mom just lost her job so now he gets picked on for getting government assisted lunches, to the spiteful ex-spouse making a mess of things after a bad break-up, to the ways we hold back from each other when we’ve been burned one too many times, we know what Jesus is going through, how fickle the human heart is, how weak we are up against ourselves.

The problem is, we have come to believe that this is all there is to the story. We’ve gotten used to it, learned to protect ourselves from the hurt in the world by putting up blinders, putting labels and statistics on groups of people so we can deal from a distance instead of in community. There is so much hurt in the world that by the logic of averages it must simply be the way things are and the way they have always been and the way they are meant to be.

Which is why it is so important we center around this story. Because we only think we know it. We only think we understand what it means. 
We’ve heard so many preachers and teachers tell us that we’re going to burn in hell if we can’t love like Jesus. 
We’ve heard so many folk tell us that they won’t come to church because it’s full of hypocrites and irrelevant traditions that don’t impact my here and now. 
We’ve heard that the church is dying. 
We’ve heard that we’re in financial trouble. 
We’ve heard it all… we think.

But we gather to tell this story because it is only part of the story. That’s why we stretch it out over an entire week, why we tell it over and over again throughout the year in the way we celebrate the liturgical seasons. 
It is so big, so grand, so good, that we have to live deeply in it, more than just a snippet here and there.

How is this mess good? Why would we want to sit in the pain and the torture and the blood? 

Someone asked in a Confirmation class last year “can God forgive Hitler?” 
In other words: Where is the line? 
What is the point at which we deem someone irredeemable? 
You know what we used to do to people like that? 
We crucified them. 

We still have the death penalty, and it is still part of our broken system. The chair, the lethal injection… the lynching tree. Even social death, Scarlet Letter-style shunning, solitary confinement out in the open.

That sort of ‘justice’ leaves a mark on everyone. Locking people up behind bars of steel or bars of statistics, we have broken apart the living organism, the breathing ecosystem, which God created good in the beginning.

And I’m trying to get to the good news here, I really am, but we hear this story so often we’ve learned to tune it out. Like with panhandlers or telemarketers, we know what they’re going to say, so we tune out. But we cannot tune this story out any more than we can tune out the cries of our own children, or our own hearts, because it is our story. Which is why we sit with it, and find it good.

We sit with it because it is our story, and we find it good because it started with God. 

When we break it down beyond recognition, enslaving each other, taking land and food from the poor, making ourselves gods of our own design, 
when we get swallowed up by the gods of economic insecurity or xenophobia or success, 
the God of life and peace and love and creation takes the hit for us. On the cross we see him take the hit from us. 
Jesus lives the life we are meant to live, God comes among us to love us, and just like we did in the garden, we run and hide. But Jesus follows us into our shadows, follows us into our fears, and our reaction is to get caught up in hiding, and so Jesus dies not by God’s hand but by ours.

This? This is not a surprising story. When people and power get mixed up, somebody’s gonna die. When the creator of the universe lays down his power to love us where we are, there’s risk involved there, especially since God knows who he’s handing his life over to, and we don’t have the best history of treating one another kindly. God has been putting up with a lot of garbage from humanity over the generations. 

The surprising part is that God hasn’t given up on us. 
That God is actively living among us no matter what we do to him. 
Like an artist, God keeps rearranging what we’ve thrown away and making gardens and treasures out of the broken pieces. 
God stepped into our midst to do some of that creative work, and even invited us into it with him, but it wasn’t powerful and impressive, it was simple and day-to-day stuff. The surprising part of the story is that this simple day-to-day creativity of God continues despite every mishandled attempt of ours to take over the process. 

In fact, though we haven’t gotten there in today’s reading, I’ll give you a bit of a spoiler. The story isn’t over. 

And the story we’re telling isn’t just the story of Jesus, it’s our story. That means our story isn’t over, either. 

Jesus comes back from this death of ours, stronger and more alive, sending the promised Holy Spirit so this work of creation and re-creation and renewal continues to this day by the hand of God active in this world. 
A God that big, that powerful, with every authority and reason to wipe us out like the days of Noah, has decided to work with us, to live with us, to keep bringing new life out of our pain - both the pain we feel and that pain we inflict. 

We also know this story. It doesn’t make headlines or the biggest hollywood blockbusters, but it is our story, it is God’s story, it is the story of Jesus Christ, who was born in love, lived in love, died in love, rose again in love, and will come again in love.