Palm Sunday (Jimmie Johnson)


Isaiah 43:16-21

Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

      -------------------------------------------------------------------

Philippians 3:4b-14

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

      --------------------------------------------------------------------

When we think of God, we think of power. We think of bigness. We think of control. That’s sad because it tells us more about us than about God.

No doubt God is big, but God’s bigness is not best seen in terms of control or power; rather God’s bigness is best seen in terms of love, which, of course, requires, if God’s love is genuine, that God, like the rest of us, learn to sing the blues. This is the shocker of Jesus as the disclosure of God. Whatever else the movement of the Word becoming Flesh means, it means that what we call Christmas mysteriously isn’t really completely birthed until this week we call Holy.

With no intellectual embarrassment but with significant intellectual humility, I tell you I believe Jesus as the human face of God is the way God learns to sing the blues. You may never have thought about his manger, his baptism, his ministry, his triumphal entry, and his cross in this way, but I am asking you to use your holy imagination boldly and frame the story of Jesus as God learning to sing like Billie Holiday, “Good morning, heartache, sit down.”

Passion/Palm Sunday really asks us to stop and think about the kind of God in whom we believe. The strange understanding of the Christian gospel which this day announces raises up to challenge all our thinking about God and power.

The God revealed in the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and days later in the Crucifixion is a very different kind of God, as Leonard Boff phrases it, a God willing to be “weak in power but strong in love,” a God willing to be vulnerable to pain in the freedom of love. There had never been a God story like this before.

In an early Greek comedy called The Frogs, Dionysius and Xanthias, the slave, both claim to be gods as they travel through Hades. They devise an empirical test: both will be beaten, flogged and “whichever of us squeals first or even bats an eyelid isn’t a god at all.” Freedom from pain and suffering is the defining idea of being a god. Such an image of God fits well with even our modern understandings of power. Power is power over others so that the one with power is not vulnerable to hurt. (William Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God)

Yet such a God of Power is contradicted by the major narratives of the Christian scriptures. The lesson of the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is that the power chose to be so different from what we would have chosen. We would have chosen triumph and victory if we had the power, but when Jesus enters the city, he triumphs in the end, yes, but not through power that prohibits suffering, rather through power that identifies with suffering and even experiences it. The Cross challenges ideas of power, whether they originate in Babylon, Israel, Rome, Beijing, London, or Washington or the Christian Church.

Here’s what I believe and have been preaching here for two decades. Jesus’ parade grinds to a halt because sooner or later our parades do as well. Our parades begin on a sun-splashed day with everyone excited for us and expecting great things from and for us. But sooner or later someone says to us, “It is malignant” or “We are going to have to close down you department” or “You didn’t get the scholarship” or “I don’t love you anymore. I’m leaving.” For our nation, it was 911. No matter how it is said, sooner or later everyone’s parade stops. It ends with a jolt and a grinding halt. I’m saying God’s parade did, too.

I know we always think that it is we who are converted, but would you be daring enough with your holy imaginations to consider that there is another conversion taking place in Holy Week, the conversion which began with what we call Christmas? I am talking about God’s conversion.

We always think the Cross is about what happens to us on this side of heaven, but I think the Cross tells us something about what is changed on the other side of Heaven, too. As singer Nancy Wilson reminds us, you don’t understand what love is until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues.

I believe this movement of God from the manger to the cross is the startling story of the God who converts power into love, a God who learns about heartache and heartbreak, a God who learns to sing the blues.

Jesus was a good man-- this no one seems to dispute, but he was not such a good God, if being God means being big and strong and out of reach. He was a suffering God, which no one had ever heard of before. He meant to transform the world by loving it, not by controlling it.
(William Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God)

Compared to the founders of other religions, Jesus had a rough time of it. Buddha died at 80, surrounded by his followers. Confucius died an old man too, while he was putting together the ancient writings of the Chinese people. Muhammad died in the arms of his favorite wife while he was the ruler of Arabia.

Jesus was not so lucky. But if he had been luckier what would he have had to offer us when our luck runs out, when our parade stops. His hard luck makes him our best company when we run into our own. (Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain). When we are singing the blues, it is God who is singing backup vocals. As I said, I can love this God. So can you.

 

 


First Presbyterian Church • 1100 Austin Avenue • Waco, TX 76701 • (254)752-1665

Questions, comments, or broken links? Please email the webmaster at bgilliam@firstpreswaco.org.

Unless otherwise stated, all material contained in this web site is Copyright © 1999-2005 First Presbyterian Church of Waco, Texas. Right is hereby granted for any congregation or governing body of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to copy and use this material only as long as proper credit is given as to its source. The scripture quotations contained within are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All quotations from the Book of Confessions are reprinted by permission and are Copyright ©1996 by the Office of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (USA).