Making An Entrance - A Sermon For Palm Sunday

Scriptures:       Isaiah 50:4-9a             Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

Philippians 2:1-11        Matthew 21:1-17

 Clint Eastwood fans will recognize the plot – a town in the Old West is threatened by powerful interests – cattle barons, mining companies and such – who want to run the townspeople off their land.   A mysterious stranger rides into town, takes on the bad guys, and rides off into the sunset.   Today’s gospel reading is not a script for a Clint Eastwood movie – but it might be an interesting thought exercise, to ask what Clint Eastwood’s character in Pale Rider or High Plains Drifter would have done, and compare it to what Jesus did – Jesus, the mysterious stranger whose ride into town we celebrate today.

For Jesus and his disciples, it’s the end of the road, and a long, long road it has been.  Jesus, in the company of his disciples, had healed and taught, fed and cast out demons, from Jesus’ home area of Galilee, in the Gentile cities of the Decapolis, moving south into Samaria, moving further south still into Judea.  For some time now, Jesus has been warning his disciples that they would be entering Jerusalem, where he would be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, who would condemn him to death and would hand them over to the Romans to be crucified.  He also told the disciples he would be raised on the third day, but they had no idea what Jesus might mean by that, and surely the thought of Jesus going to Jerusalem to be killed must have terrified them.  And yet they followed Jesus into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the Jewish festival of commemorating liberation from slavery in Egypt, and into what the disciples had to know would be a tense, potentially dangerous situation.   Throughout the Gospels, the disciples aren’t always the sharpest tools in the shed, but at least in this moment we have to give them credit for courage and loyalty.

It would appear that Jesus had made advance preparations.  Two disciples are sent into Bethphage, a little village just east of Jerusalem, to get a donkey and its colt, which Jesus said would be tied up near the village entrance.  Jesus told them that if anyone asks why they’re taking the donkey and colt, they are to say, “The Lord needs them.”  And it all comes to pass as Jesus says.  Jesus has arranged to enact the words of Zechariah which we read earlier today.  And so Jesus begins his ride into town.

The crowds accompanying Jesus remembered Zechariah’s words as well – under Roman occupation, Zechariah would have been one of the texts they clung to.   Remember that a warrior king would have come on a warhorse, not a donkey.  Zechariah’s images of a king who would come in peace to release the imprisoned and restore the people would have been very attractive to people living under foreign occupation.  And so the crowds shout “Save us!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

The residents of Jerusalem were not so thrilled, as they see the shouting crowds and the man on the donkey.  The English translation says “the whole city was in turmoil” – but really, this is too tame a translation.  The Greek word, eseisthe , has the same root as our English word seismic, referring to earthquakes – and so really, Matthew is telling us that Jesus’ donkey ride had Jerusalem in an upheaval, all shook up, shaken to its core.  After all, the Romans understood perfectly well that the Passover festival was a celebration of freedom among their Jewish subjects, and they didn’t want those Jewish subjects to get any crazy ideas in their heads about celebrating their freedom from Pharoah’s oppression by staging a rebellion against Roman oppression.  Indeed, Bible scholars such as Marcus Borg and Jon Dominic Crossan have suggested that there may have been two parades in Jerusalem that day.   From the west, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate would have been riding into town, surrounded by cavalry riding warhorses, soldiers marching with swords and spears, their helmets gleaming in the sun, some carrying the Roman eagles mounted on poles – all of this a show of force meant to intimidate the  populace.  Pilate wanted peace and order during the festival, the kind of coerced peace that comes at the edge of a sword or the point of a spear, among an occupied populace fearful and threatened into silence.  At the same time, in a parody of Pilate’s show of force, Jesus rode into Jerusalem from the east, not on a warhorse, but on a donkey, so small perhaps that his toes may have dragged in the dust of the road, surrounded by his followers and crowds from the countryside, and by children – clearly coming not to intimidate, but to invite . Two parades – Rome’s official parade proclaiming that, Passover festival or not, Caesar is Lord, and Jesus’ unofficial counter-parade proclaiming that God is Lord.   Two messages of peace, one from Pilate that told the Jews, “Celebrate your so-called freedom all you want, but we are still in charge; keep your head down and obey or be killed”, and the message of peace from Jesus, calling on the population to lift up their heads, for their salvation was drawing nigh.

While the religious and political establishment was quaking in their boots, the crowd was revved up – now, at long last, they thought, Jesus of Nazareth was going to kick some Roman butt and establish the Jews as an independent nation once again.  This would be a Passover to remember.  Only one problem – Jesus didn’t take on the Roman establishment.  Instead, Jesus took on the Temple religious establishment.   Oops!  Matthew’s Gospel paints quite a striking scene – immediately upon having ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey and a colt, Jesus goes to the Temple and starts kicking out the moneychangers.  Jesus knocks over the tables and as the moneychangers are running for cover, Jesus yells at them, “My house should be a house of prayer, but you’ve turned it into a den of robbers.”  The scene becomes more striking still – as the moneychangers are running for the exits, the blind and lame are entering seeking healing, and Jesus cures them.  Little children have found their way in as well, and they’re singing “Hosanna to the Son of David”.  The religious leaders are sputtering with rage, but Jesus shuts them down.  He then makes his exit and goes to Bethany, the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, to spend the evening. But he’ll be back the next day…..

Jesus surely knew how to make an entrance that was memorable, so much so that we celebrate it each year almost 2000 years later.   Indeed, perhaps in Matthew’s gospel more than the others, when Jesus drove out the moneychangers out of the Temple so that the sick and the children could come into the Temple, Jesus gave the people a glimpse of what the Temple was meant to be – a house of prayer for all people, a place of healing, a place where children could sing and be safe and loved.  But Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem made an impression on the religious leadership as well, and not a favorable one.  Jesus’ demonstration at the Temple set off an escalating series of clashes with the religious leadership that would result in his betrayal and arrest, and the events of Good Friday.

Today, Palm Sunday, begins a clash of two systems – the domination system represented by Rome and the Temple establishment – and continued by empires and religious hierarchies ever since - and the liberation brought by Jesus.  Two parades, one a show of force and the other an invitation to freedom.  Today we have a choice, as the people did in Jesus’ day - which parade will you be a part of?  Which system – domination or liberation – will you support?   By default, as sinners, we are all caught up in the domination system.  By default, apart from God’s grace – and that’s important – “apart from God’s grace” -  we all look out for our own interests, all try to grab more for ourselves, all try to look good to impress others, all try to have our own way, even if it comes at the expense of others.  To the extent that we don’t act like that, we’ve been touched by God’s grace in one way or another.  We all have to answer to all sorts of human authorities, which often don’t hear our voices or have our best interests at heart – and in dealing with those authorities, apart from God’s grace, all of us are taught to kiss up and kick down – that is, to ingratiate ourselves to the powerful and step on those less powerful.   Jesus offers a way out, not just pie in the sky when we die, but a different way of living now, today.  It’s not an easy way – Jesus bore the pain of others during his earthly ministry and the sins of the world on the cross, and as followers of Jesus we also have a cross to bear, as we find that our lives are connected to the lives of others, as we find that their pain is our pain and their struggle our struggle.   But that cross is a key that unlocks the door of the domination system, the door to the prison cell of self-centeredness and self-seeking, and allows us to unlock the prison cells of others.

What would Palm Sunday have looked like if Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name” character or “preacher” character had ridden into Jerusalem that day?  Hard to say exactly, though it probably would have involved several guns and a whole lot of bullets.  This also is part of the domination system, the myth of redemptive violence that tells us that the answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a bigger gun.  But, of course, there’s always yet another bad guy with an even bigger gun, and though we may win a battle here and there, the war against evil is never won – because evil isn’t just this bad guy or that bad guy, but a whole system, what Paul called “principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places.”  The struggle against evil is much bigger than taking out this bad guy or that bad guy, especially since evil is not only around us, but within us.  But we know what Jesus did. Jesus came to take on the forces within his own community’s religious leadership that oppressed the people, that held them down and bled them dry.  And Jesus did this, not by taking the lives of others, but by laying down his own life for his friends – and we are his friends if we do what he tells us.  (John 15:13) Jesus came, not to kill, but to die, to give his life as a ransom for many.

“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”  May we remember how blessed we have been by Jesus, who rode into town on Palm Sunday and laid down his life for us.  And may we be a blessing to others, as we follow in the way of Jesus. Amen.

Can These Bones Live?

Scriptures:     Ezekiel 37:1-7;  Psalm 130, omans 8:6-11,   John 11:1-53

Any Monty Python fans in the house?  Those of you who are fans – and those who aren’t – may remember their dead parrot comedy sketch – you can easily find it on Youtube -  in which a man walks into a pet shop wishing to return a parrot – a Norwegian Blue parrot, we’re told – and to register a complaint.  The man’s complaint is that the parrot he had purchased not an hour prior was dead.  The pet shop owner started making excuses – it’s not dead, it’s resting, it’s pining for the fyords, it likes to lie on its back.  At one point the dead parrot’s owner opens the door of the birdcage and starts shouting “Hellooooo, hello polly parrot, helloooooo, polly parrot, wake up!”, eventually grabbing the stiff dead parrot and whapping it on the counter several times before tossing it on the floor.  The man complains that that the only reason the parrot had been sitting on its perch at the time of purchase is that it had been nailed there.  The pet shop owner keeps saying that the parrot is pining, and the dead parrot’s owner comes out with the words, “It’s not pining, it’s passed on.  This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker.  This is a late parrot.  It’s a stiff, bereft of life, it rests in peace; if you hadn’t nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up daisies …..it’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”

Our reading from Ezekiel reminded me of this long-ago comedy routine.  Ezekiel, with the exiled Jews in Babylon, is granted a vision in which he is set down in a valley of dry bones – very many bones, we’re told, and very dry – and told to preach to the bones.  (Presumably he didn’t start shouting, “Helloooo, polly parrot….”)

I think any one of us would feel weirded out, skeeved out, at the thought of Ezekiel’s vision of being taken to a valley full of bones.  Not just any bones – dry bones.  As in, whoever these bones belonged to had been dead a long, long time, long enough that the vultures had long since pecked away the flesh, and whatever the vultures had left had dried up in the baking sun.   For Ezekiel, the situation would have seemed even skeevier perhaps than for us, because Ezekiel was not only a prophet, but a priest.  In that culture, priests were concerned, perhaps to the point of obsession, about the boundaries between ritual cleanness and uncleanness, taking care to avoid being made ritually unclean.  Being near anything dead – being near a bunch of corpses, or bones that had once been corpses – would have made Ezekiel about as ritually unclean as possible.  So this vision of Ezekiel’s would not have been a dream, but a nightmare, a nightmare of nightmares.  In the midst of a nightmare vision of death, Ezekiel hears the voice of God asking, “Can these bones lives?”

Now, if I had been there, I’d have said “no way” – that’s the cleaned up for Sunday morning version of what I might have said – and perhaps that would have been the end of the story.  Or perhaps God would have smited – smited? smote? smoted? - zapped me with a lightning bolt for mouthing off, and that would have been the end of the story, with smoke rising from my suddenly crispy corpse.  Again, fortunately for all of us, Ezekiel was there, not me, and though he likely felt the same as I would have, he allowed for just that glimmer of possibility:  “O Lord, you know.” 

God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, to tell them that God will cause breath to come into them so that they may live.  So imagine this scene….here’s Ezekiel preaching to a pile of dry bones.  How goofy is this picture?  Imagine you’ve and your family have just gotten done with Thanksgiving turkey, and the carcass is stripped down to the bones, and you start talking to the turkey carcass:  “O turkey carcass, breath is going to come into you, and you will be a living turkey once again.”  Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be a bad way to stretch a Thanksgiving meal – eat the bird, preach it back to life, kill it and eat it again, rinse and repeat…. So God gives Ezekiel the utterly ridiculous task of preaching to dry bones.  And Ezekiel does it!  Sometimes, that’s what obedience to God looks like……preaching to dry bones.

And after Ezekiel preached to the bones, stuff started happening.  The bones connected themselves, sinews grew to keep them in place, and skin grew over them….but they just lay there, like a bunch of department store mannequins.  They didn’t move.  So God said to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to the breath, and tell the breath to come into these bodies.”  And so Ezekiel preached to the breath, and the breath came into the bodies, and they got on their feet, we’re told, “a great army”.

Then God gives Ezekiel the meaning of the vision:  “These bones are the whole house of Israel” – Ezekiel’s own country, I’d add.  “They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, we’re cut off completely.’”  Now, they had perfectly good reason to feel this way.  It wasn’t like they were just having a collective bad hair day.  Five or more years ago, the Babylonians had taken over Judah and exiled the people – including Ezekiel – to Babylon.  At that point, Judah as an independent country had ceased to exist. Their community life had centered around worshiping at the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Babylonians had destroyed it, turned in into smoldering rubble.   Like the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch, Judah as a country was at that moment a stiff, bereft of life, pushing up daisies – it was an ex-country, and unlike the Monty Python skit, there was nothing even slightly funny about their situation.  There was nothing but profound sadness, grief, and perhaps regret that they had been so disobedient to God that their situation had come to this.  But even with the people in that hopeless state, God promises to raise them out of their grave of despair.  Now, God’s promises did not come quickly.  By tradition, the Jews were in exile for seventy years, and so even after Ezekiel’s vision, likely most who were adults at the time of the exile died in captivity.  But their children, and their children’s children, lived to see the promise become reality.

“Can these bones live?”  We’ve all been there, in one way or another, in moments of despair, when seemingly all hope has died, when the future looks like one long tunnel of hopelessness.  Illness, unemployment, addiction, the loss of a loved one who was our anchor, our rock….all can leave us feeling like our hopes for the future are nothing but a pile of dry bones.  There may be times in our marriage or family life when we feel like the relationship is going nowhere, like our hopes for our children are going nowhere, like whatever brought us together and held us together at one time has died.   If we’re inclined to involvement in organizations to benefit the community – and all of us here are involved in the church, even if just showing up on Sunday –  in those times when nobody shows up and money is low, we likely know what it is to feel in our lowest moments like all our work is for nothing, like we’re propping up a club or a community organization or church that’s as dead as the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, like we’ve just nailed it to a perch to make it pass for something that’s drawing breath – or, to use another metaphor, we may feel like we’re putting rouge and lipstick on a corpse.  In one way or another – as individuals, as spouses or parents, in community – we’ve all stood beside that pile of dry bones, with a still, small voice whispering in our ear – “Can these bones live?”.  Perhaps we can’t tell whether the words are encouraging us or mocking us.  And yet – we worship a God of hope, a God of hope beyond hope, a God of life.  We worship a God who told the childless couple Abram and Sarah, when Abram was 100 years old and his wife not much younger, not only that they would have a son, but that the descendants of that son would live and be a blessing to the earth.  We worship a God who took Moses, a fugitive wanted for the murder of an Egyptian overseer, to lead the Israelites to the land of promise. 

In our New Testament reading, we have the raising of Lazarus, who with his sisters Mary and Martha were close friends of Jesus.  Jesus had gotten word that Lazarus was ill, but was delayed in his travels, so that by the time he and his disciples reached Lazarus, he’d been dead four days.   Martha went out to meet Jesus, saying, “Lord, if  you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Jesus, if only you’d gotten here sooner.  But, like Ezekiel, Martha held on to a sliver of hope: “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”  Even now, Martha was telling Jesus, devastated as I am, I haven’t completely given up hope.  I’m holding on by a thread, but I’m holding on.

We worship a God of hope, a God of healing, a God of  miracles.  But there’s a role for us as well.  In Ezekiel’s vision, the bones came to life, but Ezekiel first had to preach to them.  In our Gospel reading, Lazarus was brought back to life, but first those who were there had to roll away the stone.  It may be that when we are at our lowest point, other members of the church may have to preach to dry bones and roll away the stones that block the sunlight.  And we can do the same for them.  We will no doubt look ridiculous at times – like Ezekiel preaching to a pile of bones.  But, as Paul put it, the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God stronger than human strength.  We worship a God of resurrection, and we in the church are in the resurrection business.

“Can these bones live?”  We worship the Lord of life, the one who was dead, and lives again.  May we hear that still small voice of hope from God, and may God use our voices to preach life into situations of death, and our hands to roll away the stones that block out the sunlight of hope from others. Amen.