Palm Sunday (Sermon)

"Palm Sunday"

Isaiah 55:12-13 and Luke 19:29-39

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/28/21

 

¹²For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. ¹³Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.  (NRSV)

 

²⁹When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, ³⁰saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. ³¹If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’”

³²So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. ³³As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?”

³⁴They said, “The Lord needs it.” ³⁵Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. ³⁶As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. ³⁷As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, ³⁸saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

³⁹Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.”

⁴⁰He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  (NRSV)

 

         The gospel according to Luke includes several elements unique to Luke’s own telling of the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. For instance, it’s both interesting and significant that Luke makes no mention of palm or any other “leafy” branches. So, as Jesus rides toward the gates of Jerusalem, on a conscripted colt which isn’t even green-broke, people spread their cloaks along the road in front of him. Only their cloaks. That difference may seem small, but the theological implications are intentional and profound.

In ancient Rome it was tradition on days of national celebration to wave leafy green branches and to cry out, “Hosanna!”—which means, “Lord, save us!” And for Romans, Caesar was Lord. That practice finds its contemporary counterpart in a crowd of US citizens at a Fourth of July parade waving flags and crying, “God bless America!” And very recent memory reminds us of how dangerous the ideological cocktail of religion and nationalism can be. It’s particularly significant, then, that the word Hosanna is also conspicuously absent in Luke.

         Luke presents Palm Sunday as an entirely theological moment happening in the midst of a particular political, social, and economic context. Steering us away from nationalistic language and images, the storyteller helps us to imagine Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem as a revelatory moment. In Luke 19, Jesus identifies personally and intimately with creatures and the Creation.

         When Jesus enters the City of David, he does so in the midst of God’s time and space, not Rome’s. Not even Israel’s. The events to follow on the heels of this deep and holy moment will humble all human kingdoms. It will expose them as dull, distorted, and temporary. During Holy Week we learn that no earthly nation can claim Jesus, because God, in Christ, once again lays claim to the entire Creation.

         While the absence of palm branches and shouts of Hosanna is important, of all the marks that Luke puts on this story, the one that may proclaim the gospel in the most subtle and earthy way lies in the final two verses.

         When the Pharisees say to Jesus: “Teacher, order your disciples to stop,” making noise and praising God, Jesus turns to them and says, Look, if the people don’t sing praises, then the stones will do it for them.

         Come what may, says Jesus, God will provide a witness to Jesus. If it doesn’t come from the human beings who know him, then it will come from the Creation itself. The rocks, he says, will “shout out.” Or as Isaiah says: The mountains and hills will burst into song; and the trees will clap their hands.

Paul hints at similar wonders when he says, “The whole creation groans in labor pains” as the new creation wells up and springs forth.

         To us and to all this glorious earth, God is revealing the kingdom. And through the redeeming work of Jesus, we are being readied to recognize and to inhabit that kingdom.

         Have you ever heard the creation praising God? I believe that all of you are creative enough to imagine trees clapping their hands when breezes blow and cause the branches to clack one against another. And I, for one, choose to think that I’ve heard stones cry out.

         There’s a beautiful little waterfall up near Little Switzerland, NC called Grassy Creek Falls. The falls are not as spectacular as some, but there’s no less splendor in their simplicity. Our family frequents that waterfall, and the experience is almost always the same for me. After hiking the mile in, I clamber down the steep bank to the base of the falls. Sitting near the cascade, the cool, feathery spray strokes my face and arms. I close my eyes, and listen to the slap of water on rock.

         Do you know that sound? When the just right volume of water hits rock with just right force, it really does sound like human hands applauding something wonderful. Yes, this is entirely subjective, but at that little out-of-the-way waterfall, the rocks and the water together are clapping their hands, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re doing so in celebration of God’s incredibly good work—the good work of water and rock, of beautiful mountains, a rich and lively forest, life-giving relationships, and blessed solitude.

         Even when I’m like Martha, too busy and too distracted to acknowledge the holiness of the wonder of the Creation, the rocks never are. Right now, even as I speak, they continue to slap out their praise, and to invite all with ears to hear to join their celebration.

         Now, I know that our world is not all waterfalls and sunlight. The twin pandemics of racism and Covid continue to sicken, kill, and rearrange human lives. Never-ending wars continue their plodding death marches. Two mass shootings in the last two weeks claimed 18 lives. Over the last few days, violent storms damaged or destroyed people, homes, and peace of mind. And don’t most of us carry around other anxieties, as well? Things that keep us from celebrating the full joy available to us?

         If today is such a day for you or for someone you love, if you struggle to experience the joy of the Christ riding unpretentiously into your life, take heart. Just as the Holy Spirit prays for us when we do not know how to pray ourselves, the rocks cry out praise for us. When our hands are still, the trees are not. When our feet are heavy, the mountains skip in joyful celebration for us. Shut your eyes and hear the creation shout, Blessed is the one who comes in God’s name! And O, dear God, let there be peace on earth!

         Even if Luke’s gospel raises questions about whether or not the people waved palm branches as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, there are still palms to be waved and clapped—the palms of our own hands. Let your palms applaud along with the rocks and the trees, with everything wild and free, because from this celebration no one—and no thing—will be excluded.

         Let’s also remember, by Friday the celebration we enjoy today will melt into darkness and tears. This happens because, to be honest, we don’t fully understand and appreciate the grace of God or the one who reveals it. For some reason, grace often causes human beings to doubt and resist. And those things fester into betrayal and denial.

         We will begin to understand all this a little better next Sunday, but for now, on Palm Sunday, let’s join in the chorus of all creation, singing and clapping our gratitude and our hopeful praises to God.

         And let us open the gates of our hearts to welcome the One whose own palms tell us a story of love our minds have barely begun to comprehend.

The Hour of Reckless Love (Sermon)

 “The Hour of Reckless Love”

John 12:20-33

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/21/21

 

²⁰Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

²²Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.

²³Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴Very 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. ²⁵Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

²⁷“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. ²⁸Father, glorify your name.”

Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

²⁹The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”

³⁰Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. ³¹Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.³²And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  (NRSV)

 

 

         Yesterday was the first day of spring. The calendar told us, but it only confirmed what we already knew. Even before the vernal equinox, the days have been lengthening and brightening with sunshine and birdsong. Ducks and geese have paired off on riverbank and pondshore. Daffodils, crocuses, and trout lilies are blooming in yards and on damp hillsides. Maple trees are blushing with their deep, rich red. And with all that is flowering, many of us are starting to wheeze and sniffle.

Unlike July 4^th, or Labor Day, or a birthday, spring is more than a single day. It’s an unfolding, a season of change that builds toward the hot, earth-swell of summer.

         As Jesus’ third Passover approaches, signs of other changes have begun. The Jewish leaders rejected him. He wept publicly at Lazarus’ grave. In a surreal moment fraught with the tension of things to come, Mary, the sister of both Martha and Lazarus, anointed Jesus’ feet with an entire pound of expensive perfume, and wiped them with her hair. Then Jesus enters Jerusalem to shouts of “Hosanna!”

And now, among the pilgrims who have made their way to the City of David, a contingent of gentiles makes an appearance—Greeks John calls them. Finding the disciple Philip, they say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” They want to talk with this Jewish anomaly for whom neither age, nor gender, nor race, nor class, nor physical infirmity can hinder inclusion in God’s household of grace. And if, as Luke alone records, Jesus really did pray, from the cross, for forgiveness for his accusers and executioners, then Jesus’ grace embraces us even when we surrender to sin’s most merciless impulses.

That one bothers me. Something inside me would rather believe that the likes of Derek Chauvin, Dylan Roof, and Wayne Williams would feel more wrath than grace. But grace is always a stumbling block to Pharisees.

Back in John 7, the Pharisees, unwilling to accept Jesus’ authority, sent their police to arrest and silence the rabbi. Jesus put them off saying, You may know where I come from, but you don’t know where I’m going. And you can’t follow me there, either.

Stunned, these “spiritual” leaders reveal both their graceless outrage and their racial prejudice: Where’s this guy going that he thinks we can’t find him? Is he going among the Greeks? (John 7:28-36) Imagine everyone’s surprise when Greeks show up at Passover, in Jerusalem, asking for Jesus. When he learns of their presence, Jesus says, “The hour has come.”

Whether we’re observing signs of the arrival of spring or of the kingdom of God, those signs tell us that some kind of ‘hour has come.’ And Jesus says that we’ll know when the kingdom hour arrives because, like a grain of wheat, something will die. For us, it may be the death of materialism, the death of some prejudice, the death of the fear of taking a prophetic risk for the sake of others or the gospel. I’m praying that the turmoil in our culture today is a decisive wave in the all-too-slow death of racism.

Whatever deaths people or communities must die to experience greater liveliness, and wholeness, and holiness, those deaths do not come easy. Not even for Jesus. “My soul is troubled,” he says when things take an ominous turn. And after wondering if he might even pray his way out of his quandary, Jesus steels himself saying, “No,” this is my hour. I will face it for the sake of all Creation.

         Like the crosses we take up, the “hours” that truly define God’s people are not hours of our own making. One metaphor for the life of faith is a journey of openness to the various moments of consequence that God gives to us, “hours” in which we are called to respond in servant-hearted love to the people and events around us. Such faithfulness, says Jesus, demands that “Those who love their life lose it…[while]…those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

The word hate causes many of us to recoil. But we’re talking about Jesus, the incarnation of love, so, we have to understand hate in the context of Jesus’ love. In The Message, Eugene Peterson illuminates this verse by rendering it this way: “Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”

“If you let [your life] go, reckless in your love,” you will live your days emersed in the ever-arriving hour of God’s grace in Jesus, the “author and perfecter” of reckless love.

When the Greeks arrive, Jesus knows that his message has spread beyond the house of Israel. The world is knocking at his door, and Jesus knows that this will threaten Caesar. There are both ancient and modern Caesars, and they all symbolize worldly power. And Caesars will never willingly share their control with the likes of Jesus, who leads people in the ways of compassion, justice, and collaboration rather than power, wealth, and domination.

In reckless love, Jesus embraces his hour. And in the fullness of that love, he issues a call to everyone who would be his disciple. If you want to serve me, then follow me, he says. And wherever I am, you’ll be there, too, ready to embody reckless love when your hour arrives and asks of you what you can give only through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Last Thursday I heard thunder for the first time in many months. A herald of springtime, thunder stirs the heart and shakes the walls. When it’s close enough, we can literally feel it in our bones. When we hear thunder, we know that warm and cold air are colliding, and that change is at hand.

When God speaks of the glorification of God’s name through Jesus, some of those standing nearby hear thunder. Others think that an angel has spoken to Jesus. And perhaps they’re both right. Jesus makes it clear that it’s the people’sexperience that matters. “The voice has come for your sake not mine,” he says.

I hear Jesus saying: You all needed to hear this, because you need to understand that what’s going to happen in Jerusalem will reveal the ultimate impotence of the ways and means of greed-driven economics, violence-driven power, and fear-driven bigotry. Those are the ways of the ruler of this world, and they will be driven out. By grace.

As followers and servants of Jesus, we are called and empowered to participate in the ever-arriving hour of God’s kingdom on earth. That’s what salvation and new life look like—our fearless, grateful, and hopeful engagement of the Holy Spirit’s work as we declare that God does, in truth, “so love the world” that God sends the Son, not to condemn it but to redeem it. Jesus comes to make you, and me, and all things new and whole. That’s what he means by drawing all things to himself.

Christ’s hour has come, so this day and all days, let us continue to die to all that is selfish, fearful, and violent so that we may we experience and share the ever-present, always-redeeming, and recklessly-loving grace of God.

Grace: God's Antivenom (Sermon)

 

“Grace: God’s Antivenom”

Numbers 21:4-9

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/7/21

 

⁴From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. ⁵The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

⁶Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.

⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.”

So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

⁹So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. (NRSV)

 

         This is an odd and rather disturbing story. But let’s remember that the Israelites have been on the move for nearly forty years. Wandering. Belonging nowhere in particular. Sometimes not even belonging together. (e.g., Exodus 18:13-26) And all the while they’ve been waiting to be told that they have finally arrived in the coveted Promised Land flowing with milk, and honey, and sanctuary.

         After forty years, all the Hebrews seem to remember about Egypt are stories of overflowing “fleshpots.” It’s as if they’ve forgotten about the slavery—about being owned, tortured, and killed by Egyptians. Even generations beyond such an experience, neither the oppressed nor the oppressors forget that kind of thing. Nor should they. But for the Israelites, who are hungry, tired, and still waiting to find their place and purpose in the world, Egypt is an old story told by old people, and the memory of slavery has lost its sting. No longer connected to the past because of the struggles of the present, the people complain to Moses saying: If God is real, and if we’re really God’s people, then why are we so miserable? We’re sick of eating bad food and living like migratory beasts!

         That’s when God unleashes the “fiery serpents.”

         You want to know what detestable and miserable feel like? says God. Here! The bushes are going to burn with fangs and venom rather than my presence! So, listen to the screams. Bury your neighbors. Live in relentless anxiety. That’ll teach you!

         There are preachers who preach that god. If that’s what you’re looking for, though, you’ll have to go somewhere else. This preacher won’t give it to you. Jesus did not reveal a god of retributive justice—a god who gets both mad and even. Jesus revealed that God restores, reconciles, and renews the world through a grace that is often called irresistible. But that grace is really more illogical and inexplicable that irresistible. It doesn’t make sense for Jesus to offer grace to people who are as impatient and ill-tempered with him as the Israelites are with Yahweh. Maybe that’s why the Gospel of John specifically redeems this story.

Remember, in Numbers, God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole. When bitten, a person looks at the serpent, the source of their pain, and is healed. In John 3, Jesus refers to this story saying, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:15) The terrifying and scandalous cross of Christ becomes the antivenom that delivers the Creation from poisonous judgment and violent oppression.

         The connection between the bronze serpent and the wooden cross is unmistakable. Both stories declare that God becomes newly and more palpably present through our sufferings. And like Rome many generations later, the snakes don’t go away. So, while dealing with the serpents becomes a way of life for Israel, so does trusting that God remains faithful.

         Looking at the bronze serpent becomes a kind of sacrament, a way of life in relationship with God in a world that is often more of a trial to endure than a joy to inhabit. Walter Brueggemann says that God takes “the serpent…and transforms it into a stable, enduring, reliable cultic object.” Brueggemann then suggests that the bronze serpent may be “a form of transubstantiation.”¹ Like bread, wine, and water, it’s an external representation of an internal and eternal reality—the reality of God’s grace.

Here we confront one of the enduring and empowering paradoxes of the Judeo-Christian faith: While oppression and despair are dramatically symbolized in the fiery serpent and the Roman cross, so are the redeeming promises and the reconciling grace of God­—because that’s how God works. God turns sea into dry land, wandering into belonging, exile into return, swords into plowshares, water into wine, enemies into friends, and death into life.

A group of us are reading Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in Americaby Michael Eric Dyson. The book is written as a series of letters to African-Americans who have died as a result of systemic and sustained racism in our nation. It reads like a modern-day book of Lamentations. And while Dyson intentionally makes the book difficult for both black and white communities to read, his goal is to inspire restorative action. He holds up people with dark skin who, over the course of 400 years, have suffered the fiery serpents of injustice, people who have been exploited, lynched, and marginalized by fair-skinned people who have, for the most part, feared and denied the God-imaged equality of all humankind. Echoing Walter Brueggemann, Dyson lifts up those who have died, calling them “souls crushed into sainthood by the forces of evil, a ritual of sacred Black transubstantiation that turns their bodies from flesh and blood into holy hashtags and metaphysical martyrs for justice.”²

While Dyson’s words challenge many of us, his approach is thoroughly biblical. He raises up the bodies of those who have died at the hands of an unjust system, and he does so not to judge and condemn, but to invite us into God’s ongoing, gracious, and redemptive action.

I, too, wince my way through Dyson’s book because it disrupts my peace of mind. I resist the truth that I owe much of my sense of security in simply walking down the street to the privileges granted to me by a congenital lack of melanin in my skin. I don’t want to admit that. I want to think it’s because I’m a decent, hard-working, good-humored human being. And isn’t that the point? Who doesn’t want that to be the case for themselves?

That’s all the Israelites wanted. When the wilderness experience made these former slaves feel less than worthy, less than loved, less than human, they blamed a blaming God. God may have led them out of slavery, but, in their minds, God had also let them down. God had deposited them in that wasteland bereft of fleshpots and overrun with snakes and other perils. And yet through the very thing that threatened them, through the serpent itself, God creates and communicates healing.

So, too, in the Roman cross—the symbol of tyranny, abuse, and systemic violence—God creates and communicates redemption and reconciliation.

That’s God’s way. God, who chooses the foolish and the weak to bring down the clever and the strong (1Corinthians 1:27ff.), takes that which creates prejudice, fear, and even compliance with evil and turns it inside out. God lifts up those who have been wounded by suffering and injustice and reveals them as beloved children who are full of eternal grace and truth. At the same time, God exposes all that is poisonous and unjust as the slithering but withering idolatries of a broken world.

So, in the face of fiery serpents and empires of greed and violence, let us, as we prepare for Easter, look upon the empty cross of the risen Christ. And may it remind us that God is still redeeming and renewing the Creation according to the gracious ways of Jesus—the ways of justice, peace, and agapé love.

 

¹Walter Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year B. “Fourth Sunday of Lent.” Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. P. 222.

²Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2020. P. 60.