I think Palm Sunday ranks up
there as one of most fun days in the church. We get to
wave palms and sing at the top of our lungs these wonderful hymns. You could convince yourself that this is just
the beginning of one long celebration that will grow throughout the week to the
big extravaganza of Easter.
And yet, today we wave palms
to begin a week that marches inexorably to a scene of unspeakable violence
which those palms waving folks never saw coming.
Too many
believers will skip over Holy Week observances because
they too
don’t want to re-visit this week of fear and sorrow,
violence
and grief.
This week requires that each
of us look again at our expectations of God, our own broken relationship with
God and the potential for great sacrifice when following this Jesus.
The Jesus of Palm Sunday
didn’t quite turn out to be the triumphant king they expected. He wasn’t the magician who would wave his
hand and change the world into one which pleased all his followers.
He wasn’t
going to exact revenge on his enemies and pour out all manner of material
blessings
of his followers.
He was going to die….and no one saw it coming.
Which leads me to ask,: What
do
you do when God disappoints you? How do you react when your expectations
of God are dashed to the ground? It happens to everyone, you know.
Some of our disappointments
are enormous: the marriage that didn’t work out, the job that disappeared, the
diagnosis which meant an early death, the tornado that targeted your
house…..and on and on.
Our response to it all is not
rational. It doesn’t matter that you
haven’t been singled out……..it only matters that God didn’t turn out to be God
the way you wanted, the way you expected.
These are personal stories, for rarely does this kind of estrangement
come from a neighbor’s loss. This is
about us and our expectations for our own lives and for God.
We start with “If God were a God of love
then…..”
and we end up de-friending God; we leave
the Church;
we give up whatever spiritual practices
we had.
We pretend that it never mattered in the
first place.
I get it: It is hard to get
a handle on this Jesus and the coming kingdom that Jesus points to. Not only is it not fully visible to us right
now, it works with rules that confuse us.
Jesus says the last shall be
first and the first last. He calls the
religious leaders blind and the man born blind is able to see much more than
the hand in front of his face. He calls
out the very religious and welcomes sinners to his dinner table.
Occasionally we glimpse this
kingdom of God when it breaks into our reality with miracles of every
stripe. But we DONT live in Paradise. All is not as it will be, even though we
would like it to be that way now.
So we are caught: standing
between this world and the next, we want justice and mercy for others, but
first we want a large enough share to compensate for the pain and suffering of
our own lives. And THAT is God’s job.
We want less suffering….now. In the end we draw our own Pictionary sketch
of what God should be ….and ignore the God who came among us in Jesus and the
path he took to break the barrier between our world and God’s kingdom.
So when Jesus comes riding
in on a donkey, we see a chance that it will all be made great again. We want a savior so badly, we paint this
non-descript Jewish carpenter as a King.
Finally! We
say, God has come through for us and
We cut palm branches and celebrate that
finally it will all be made great again.
It’s not what Jesus talked
about but then Palm branches are so much easier than delving deep into the
mysteries of the universe with its big bang theories and black holes. Palm
branches are easier than trusting in the unseen and wrestling with the
paradoxes of life. They are so much
easier than love.
A Divine Power who can bring
life into being, and life out of death……..this is majesty beyond our
imagination, and too deep for our comprehension.
We would rather cut palm branches, or organize committees
or join a
peace march
than to truly trust that God is God and Jesus is God’s son.
AND
ALL this is easier than
being a servant to our neighbor even unto death.
Just possibly at the heart
of our disappointment is fear:
fear that the brokenness of our world is
beyond anyone’s ability to fix. And it is.
The brokenness of our world is a God
sized problem that requires a God sized solution.
Not a God to whom we dictate; but a God
who dies in order to explode the
power of death.
Palm branches are easier,
but in the end, it is a cross that we need.
Palm Sunday sermon Luther Memorial Lutheran Church April 9, 2017
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