Palm
Sunday
March
24, 2002
St.
George’s Episcopal Church
Le
Mars, Iowa
Rev.
Karen A. H. Wacome, Presiding
Dr.
Donald H. Wacome, Lay Preacher
Matthew
21.1-11, 26.36-27.66.
Philippians
2.5-11
Isaiah
45.21-25
Psalm 22.1-11
College students, laboring under constraint of time,
ignorance and acute confusion, sometimes write strange things. An essay was
once submitted to a colleague of mine that contained the following assertion: “Hell,
much like Christianity, is a place for those who reject the faith.” Who knows what this poor student was trying
to say? But there’s a kind of truth in
what he did say. We Christians are persons of faith. We’re here today because
we want to accept the God who comes to us in Jesus. We’re hoping to find
ourselves in those Palm Sunday crowds, welcoming Jesus as king. We’re trying to
hear our voices among those crying out “Hosanna to the son of David!”
At the same time Christianity, like hell, is a place for those who lack faith, who reject God. That’s a good thing because we too are the ones who reject Jesus. The boundary that divides hell from heaven, damnation from salvation, those who accept God from those who reject him, is not out there somewhere, with those other people on the wrong side. It’s a line that cuts through each of our hearts. It’s the border on which we always live. We are, as Luther said, simul justus et peccator: at the same time justified and sinners. All at once totally hopeless and rejecting God and completely rescued, never - despite ourselves – rejected by him.
Our reading this morning all too effectively makes us know our complicity in the rejection, abandonment, betrayal and murder of Jesus. It focuses our minds upon the death of God we put into practice when we live as though the world were Godless. Whatever manifests our forgetfulness of one another as God’s very image is a rejection of the God who made us. Every person I put down, exploit, hold in contempt, hate, leave hungry, leave to cry alone, leave to die…represents my betrayal of the God who gives himself in Jesus. All my confidence in my own strength, good will, intelligence, power, wealth, religion, power, heritage, innocence, good looks… you name it, in it I’m finding something to trust other than the trustworthy God. Without respite, and usually without a thought, we turn away from the God who offers himself in a love both demanding and without condition.
It’s too easy to think in terms of the ‘good’ people for whom Jesus dies and the ‘bad’ people who mock him, spit on him and put him to death. But of course Jesus is humiliated for, suffers for, dies for those who need him. He dies for Peter who hedges his bets and then denies him. He dies for the other disciples who run away. He dies for the self-assured chief priests, the efficient Roman bureaucrats and casually brutal soldiers. He dies for Judas who sells him for 30 pieces of silver. For the ungodly, not the godly; for us.
That story about Judas repenting, trying to give the money back to the priests and then killing himself, with the follow up about them buying a field to bury foreigners seems like an historical footnote. But this little story contains the whole story. We see what the death of Jesus buys: a resting place for foreigners in God’s land. A share in the life of God for the least deserving. Who could be more low down, more unclean and unwanted than a dead foreigner in the land of Israel? What could be more hopeless, and seem more God-forsaken, than a gentile corpse in need of disposal in the holy land of Judah? That blood money buys the foreigner a plot in God’s land of promise. Jesus’ death – and the resurrection we look ahead to – delivers us from the land of death and makes for us a life with God, a life we already have and still hope for.
Of course we cannot think about this today without being vividly aware of the bitterness and blood that stain that very same land of Israel, where insane hatreds are inflamed in an unholy union of politics and religion that kills the innocent. Who owns the land? Who’s the unwelcome foreigner? We see hates and fears and wounds that only a crucified God can heal. Like the nameless dead long gone to dust in that potters field, our whole world lies in death, longing for the resurrection of all in Christ and the life his death gives us.
We know ourselves in that crowd that yells “Crucify him Crucify him!” Yet we trust in the Crucified, that in his grace the last word about us will be that we welcome him as the one who loves and saves, that the last word from us will be not the angry, self-righteous cry of Good Friday, but the joyful, welcoming shout of Palm Sunday. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
Recounting the beginning of his conversion to faith in Christ in his autobiography The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner tells how, as a young writer living in New York, he started attending a church. It was on the block he lived on, he had nothing else to do with his lonely weekends, and he had heard that George Buttrick, the minister, was a witty and eloquent preacher. Then one Sunday Buechner heard the words that grabbed hold of him and planted the seed of faith: Buttrick told the congregation that “‘Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness…but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crowned in the hearts of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place,’ Buttrick said, ‘among confession, and tears, and great laughter.’”
We pray this morning that with that sorrow that turns to joy we will welcome him as our crucified king.
Amen.
Georges Rouault
Christ Among The Poor, 1935