Sermons

I Love a Parade

“I love a parade,

the tramping of feet,

I love every beat I hear of a drum.”

“I love a parade, when I hear a band

I just want to stand and cheer as they come.”

It was a grand parade;  not the Easter Parade though.

Welcome to ‘Leafy Branch Sunday’.”

When our daughter, Kathryn, was four she took a whack at being a theologian.  That pleased her father, who nonetheless could take no credit for it.   Her Lutheran cousin had a book that someone read to her.  There she was given the idea that God is up “in the sky.”

Her father had done his best to lead her toward his point of view, the correct one of course, that God is everything that is, the creative point, or the power, that holds all in being, loves all into being.

I cannot tell you if he was entirely successful, but he tried.

One evening, all those years ago, Kathryn and her parents got into a conflict.  She did not eat her supper, and played around instead.  Finally she was asked if she wanted it.  “No,” she said.

As soon as her dinner had been given to the dog, she decided that she wanted to eat it after all.  What she got, not without great protest, was to bed on the little that she had chosen to eat.  We had it on good authority that despite her objections, she would not starve to death before morning.

The next morning she came and crawled into our bed.  She began to discuss with her father where God was to be found:  Was God in the trees?  “Yes.”  Was God in the dog?  “Well, yes.”  Was God in the snow?  “Yes.”

And so the conversation went.  Then she said, “I want to be God!” It seemed worth pursuing.  So I asked, “Why do you want to be God?” Her reply was swift and certain, “Because God gets to do whatever he wants!”

The obvious sexism would bear some attention later on.  “I want to be God because God gets to do whatever he wants to do.”

There are days when that is all that I want too; lots of days, most days.

We have been through most of the forty days of Lent now that we have arrived at Palm Sunday.  Arriving at Holy Week unprepared is the common condition for most Americans.  As people, we seem more attracted to the Oscars, Disneyland, and the NBA Basketball Finals than toward the longing of the human spirit. More hours will be spent this weekend watching basketball than on spiritual endeavors; more watching television than in church.

That is not the sort of the spirit in which Jesus was surfed into town on a bed of palm fronds, although it may be as ignorant of the results.  — Well, yes, there were no palm branches.  Jerusalem had no palm trees at that time; that was an invention of the author of the Gospel of John.  His story was written later enough to be well embroidered.  The Gospel of Mark says it simply:  they spread “leafy branches that they cut in the fields.” And they followed him into Jerusalem, shouting and proclaiming the coming of King David again.  It is an irony – a parade of irony. (Please don’t get me wrong – I am not a purist:  there were no Christmas trees at Bethlehem and I am also in favor of those.)

From the triumph of that entry, the story turns rather grim:  confrontation, trickery, a cat- and-mouse game of accusation, betrayal, and death.  You know the story:  the people seeing and then becoming blind to Christ the King and killing him.

From Jesus’ point of view, it is rather a different matter.  He arrives in Jerusalem as it were on a wave of success.  At least things were going better for him than they had in recent months; but to tell the truth, it was almost a last gasp to keep alive his ministry, going right to the heart of Jerusalem.  He had already found rejection in his hometown of Nazareth.

Now in Jerusalem, he throws out the moneychangers, popular with the common people perhaps, but not popular with the religious establishment.  He bandies the trick questions with which those authorities ply him.

In a moment of great frustration, he looks at a fig tree that will not provide him with something to eat when he wants it because it is the wrong season, and he withers it.

It is a human thing to do.  It is as though the city of Jerusalem had better do as he wishes, or it too will be withered.  Still, by the time that he gets to the Passover meal with his disciples, he knows it is not going well.

He has been telling them he is going to die.  It is here that his humanity shows most.  Like any one of us, he has, figuratively speaking, gotten his life insurance policies together; got the will out; made the arrangements for the funeral director; gathered the family around to give the last-minute instructions about what to do when he is gone; factual dealing in the real world.

Then he goes to Gethsemane to pray.  There, the damn disciples fall asleep.  He is alone with something:  his sense of failure, his emptiness, his grand pronouncements ring in his ears sounding false, vacant, and meaningless.  The power over the fig tree had been a fiction; the world would not do what he wanted.

Finally, he knows the complete and utter otherness of God.  Even though he comprehends how it has to end, he does not want it to end that way.  He prays, “God, You can do anything.  Take this cup from me.  But let it not be as I want it, but as You want it.” Here is the humanity in Christ.

This is finally the prayer that all humankind utters.  The bargaining with God in gravest moments, when we think that if we just admit that God, something bigger than we are, is in control, if we feign belief, much belief is feigned, we can bargain this off to get what we want.

Every step from there to Golgotha is a step toward what every human must learn.  Jesus jettisons all his baggage, personal and theological, until he arrives at the cross, naked, his spirit most naked of all.  On the cross come the final words, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”  “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”  From the cross, he laments that even God has abandoned him. Not much of a parade.

At the deepest level of our being, every human is propelled down that path, fighting and dragging our feet, clinging by our fingernails to whatever we can find to hold onto.  It is life’s hardest and most telling lesson:  we do not get to do what we want, and what we want turns out when we do get it, to be a very hollow triumph.

Some would put Christ’s divinity here; ignore his humanity. Say Jesus really knew that he was going to be resurrected, he was God after all; he was not forsaken.

That is not what I am here to tell you.  This is what I hold: What was happening to Jesus is what happens to us if we are spiritually alive – and it is not very nice.  God dies in us.  The god which is ourselves, that as my daughter put it so well, wants to do “whatever I want to do.”  That god must die before there can be a real resurrection.

People, ignorant of the spiritual life, suppose that sitting in church will make you feel better.  Somehow the quest for spirituality will make our lives fluffier, easier, feel smooth and lovely.  That is not the promise that I bring you this morning.

The spiritual life is painful and traumatic.  It is not easy but is hard, full of hurt and discomfort.  It means calling our lives into question at their very core – every moment of our lives.  Sitting in the pew comfortably is not being spiritual.

If we begin to see our lives in the light of the holy, we are bound to discover things that were hidden in the darkness of our private selves.  Living the spiritual life is a series of ongoing battles that require rooting out successive layers of the dead god that is in us that wants its own way.

We are speaking of revolution, not a once and done revolution, but a continuous one.  Liberation is the action, liberation from the greatest tyrant of them all – the tyrant that lives within us.  The tyrants of the world may enslave a person’s body, stop their speech, but only the tyrant within can finally enslave the heart and spirit.  We are talking of a revolution that is bloody, that tears at the things that we want to keep safely clandestine in ourselves, a revolution that becomes never ending and joyous.

Many people come to churches have already come to a theological point of view. Finding a church that confirms it, they stay. We don’t come to be converted.  Not a few of us cling tenaciously to what we arrived believing, never going deeper, content to live in the place where we are merely comfortable, but perhaps not fully alive.  Too often we look to have our prejudices confirmed, rather than confounded.

Many of us try to strike a bargain with the spiritual life, with God:  ”I’ll believe –sort of – if you keep me from harm.”  What we most often find is that, thought we are very good at keeping our part of the bargain, God isn’t, doesn’t.  We smash; we are smashed into a greater reality of which we are a part.

Perhaps I am wrong about other people’s lives, I can only tell you about my own.  But I have found that living a spiritual life, or living on the edge of one, which is what I often do, is not an easy road.  Everything that I value, hope for, work for, love, is constantly called into question, challenged, found wanting – mostly myself.  There are triumphs when for a time I think that I have made a breakthrough, only to find that Grace that had come in one way has slipped out another as I thought “Now I know the Truth, which must be taught.”

The truth that I would teach, have taught, is not always a wrong truth.  It rather becomes an archaic god, whose death must come before a new truth, perhaps deeper, perhaps in another place, perhaps truer than I dared to believe, arrives.

Jesus, who turned his life over to “God, Your will be done,” hanging from the cross, deserted by his friends, alone, in pain, mocked, everything washed away, utters “Why have you forsaken me?”

It is ourselves that are put up on that cross again and again.  We are put up there until we let go of our dead gods, until we are broken open.

Can you avoid this? Absolutely! We can believe that God thinks we are just swell; or one that promises us that if we just think right, positively, that everything will come to us; or we can go to one of those churches or/and political causes that insists that “man” will build on earth some approximation of what God has failed to do.

We can accumulate wealth and position and power, or we can fill our lives with money or status or sex, or food, or self-aggrandizement, or drugs and alcohol. We can march in our own parade.  And it will all be fine – until maybe the end.  It will all be fine, but we may only live a portion of the reality that surrounds us.  The one that conforms to us…but the rest of it we will have missed.

Paul Tillich tells us, “Out of the death of the old, the new arises.” The new is created not out of the old, not out of the best of the old.  It is not the old which creates the new.  That which creates the new is that which is beyond old and new, the Eternal.

Easter is already coming; we may miss it if we wait for only sunny days.

While death is going out, life is pouring in.  While what I want is leaving, things that I never expected pour in.  While defeat is happening, triumph is stalking in.  It is like opening floodgates:  Who knew it was there?

You may have come in pain, hurt, lonely, despairing this morning.  We all do from time to time, for our little gods are always dying.  Whether we know it or not, Easter is beginning to happen for you; even more, perhaps, than for those who came seeking nothing.  But you have to be willing to go deep to let the old gods die.  We have to jettison our baggage.

There are those who argue whether Easter ever really happened.  But I tell you whether or not it did happen, it will happen.  You and I cannot stop it from happening.  Cannot stop it from happening until we are broken open to life that is worth living, and we act on it.  Until we are broken open to give thanks, to appreciate, to cherish this holy world.  Until this day is too glorious for grudges, makes forgiveness such a little thing to do, opens our hearts.  Until we are humble enough not to try to run life but to espouse it, to live it – not to deny life but choose it.

Easter only matters if it happens in you and in me. That is the real parade – the one to love.

Amen and amen.