Sermon 4/1/07
The Story - Luke 19:28-40, Luke 22:14-23:56
(view lectionary notes for this text)
There’s a small mistake in the bulletin today. The bulletin is meant not to say that the title of my sermon is Reflection, but that there is no sermon per se, but a reflection. You might wonder if there is really any difference when you look in the bulletin and see different words – Sermon, Message, Reflection, Meditation. Perhaps in your mind the most telling difference is in the length of what I will say. Reflections and Meditations tend to be shorter than Sermons! But to me, the words signify a little more. When I use the word ‘Reflection’, I’m trying to convey that the main point of the whole service, the main content, isn’t in what I’m saying now. In a reflection, I’m trying to point your attention elsewhere. My words are just to highlight, or to focus your attention to the right places. Today, what you most need to know is in the story – the story of the palms, that you’ve already heard, and the story of the passion, which will come a bit later. Anything I say now is just to point you in the right direction.
Palm/Passion Sunday is a day of irony, of juxtaposition, of bringing two things together that don’t seem like they should go together. Irony is when there is a contradiction between an action or expression, and the context in which the action or expression occurs. The two passages, then, that we read today, are full of irony. Contradictions. We find disciples who were following Jesus’ command, coming into Jerusalem with him, and those same disciples denying and betraying him as soon as things got too difficult. We find crowds with Jesus in both passages, crowds shouting. First, “Hosanna,” but then, “crucify him!” Were some of the same people in both crowds? We find powerful leaders – Pharisees and High Priests – seemingly scared of Jesus and the power this man from Nazareth seems to have – and yet they were the ones with the power to arrest Jesus and put him on trial. We find Jesus called a king – first a king who is blessed because he comes in God’s name, and then a king of the Jews, those very words serving as his death sentence. We find Jesus, condemned and killed as a criminal offering forgiveness from the death chamber, the cross. We find speakers of truth, people strangely aware of who Jesus really was, in a thief on another cross, and in a centurion, a Roman participating in the crucifixion. Contradictions. Irony.
The irony, the juxtaposition, can be seen right in the symbols we take home with us this day – in the palm crosses we hold. Palm crosses – what ironic symbols! The very palms we use to welcome Christ into our midst become for us also the instrument of death. It is with the cross that Jesus is killed. And yet these crosses have become for us a welcome symbol, a symbol of faith, a symbol of life. How did we get from Palm Sunday to the Passion and beyond to Easter so quickly? Don’t forget what happens with these palm crosses – the life-cycle that they have.. Today they make crosses for us. Signs of celebration, signs of crucifixion, signs of resurrection. But these same palms will also be burned into ashes, ashes that are used on Ash Wednesday, when we begin our Lenten journey again next year. The cycle is ongoing and repeating, because without this cycle of death and ashes in turn with our celebrations of resurrection, it is too easy to forget how in need of God’s grace we are. It is easy to pretend that we have nothing to do with Christ’s crucifixion, and everything to do with his resurrection. It is to easy to claim that it was the others who put him to death, that it is the others who fail to live and love as Christ calls us to It is too easy to skip from Jesus being welcomed into Jerusalem to Jesus’ resurrection without paying attention to the contradictions – our contradictions – that lie in between.
So these palm crosses convey the message of Palm/Passion Sunday perfectly. We take the very palms that we use to praise Jesus and turn them into the thing that we use to crucify him. How like our own lives these symbols are – we take our same selves, our same souls that we use to praise and worship God, the same lips that we use to make commitments to following God, the same hearts we offer as gifts to God, and we turn them into, use them instead to break our promises, to quit our commitment, to turn off the way of discipleship, to deny who God is to us and who we are to God, to betray God for something cheaper, that really has no value, because, like the Pharisees, and the high priests, and Herod, and Pilate, and even Jesus’ disciples, we are scared of the power that Jesus has, and how he might use that power to change our comfortable, contradictory lives into uncomfortable challenging journeys of faith.
If palm crosses are ironic symbols, then perhaps Christians are in themselves are even more ironic. We are full of such hopeful faith, and yet such faltering doubts. We are so anxious to show our commitment, and yet so quick to break our covenants. So in need of love and grace, so hesitant to forgive, to understand.
So we need the palms, and we need the passion, to remind ourselves of the story – the story of how much God loves us, how God loves us through our contradictions, and how God works in God’s own ironic way, bringing life, again and again, out of our denials, out of fears, out of our anger and our betrayals, and even life out of death. Amen.