Palm Sunday Sermon - commitment in the face of fickleness

          I realize I have falled far behind in posting my sermons lately.  I apologize and will try to get these all caught up.  Here is Palm Sunday:

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

Luke 19:28-40

We know the story.  We hear it every year.  On Palm Sunday, the people are so excited about Jesus, they line up along the streets, they wave palms, they put their cloaks on the ground, they shout out “Hosanna!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”  They treat Jesus like a King.  Within a very short time many of the same people are shouting “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”  The people had expectations, they had high hopes, they put all of their dreams onto one man.  But they wanted him to change their lives in a very specific way.  They wanted him to overthrow the control of the Roman government over their lives.  They wanted a military leader.  And when he did not live up to their expectations, when he did not do what they wanted in the way that they wanted, when he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple, when he told them that they would have to change their lives in order to be the people God called them to be, when he told them they were thinking wrongly and acting wrongly - they became so irate, so angry, so disappointed, that they had him killed.

We know this story.  But do we hear it as something that happened in the past, or do we recognize this as a story that is happening today as well?  We, too, are fickle in our attachments, in our commitments, especially when we have expectations of what those should look like that are then disappointed.  When things don’t go the way we want, we blame individuals and, if the disappointment is large enough, we want revenge: we want punishment, we want someone to pay for our disappointment, our suffering.  We know this happens politically: we can become so angry at someone who has disappointed us that we want them to be damaged, to be hurt.  I’m not really talking about individuals, but rather a wave of anger and reaction when an expectation is not met, when something different than what we expected, as a group, takes place. I know this can happen with pastors.  When a community hires a pastor, they have an expectation, they have in mind a vision of who that person will be and what they will accomplish.  There are times when pastors do not match those expectations (and note, I’m saying they don’t MATCH the expectations.  In other words, I’m talking about times when good things are happening in the church, just not what people expected) that then the pastor is summarily thrown out.

I’m also not making commentary on whether the decisions made in the face of those disappointments were justified or not.  What I am saying is that our loyalties, as groups of people, tend to be very fickle.  As a whole, as a mob, as a group, just like in Jesus’ time, when things don’t happen the way we want or expect, we find someone to blame.  We need something to attack.  We need someone to attack.  And as a mob, even if there are individuals standing up against the turn of the tide, as a group, as a whole, we go for the kill - we find a scapegoat, and we go after it.

On a smaller level this can happen as well.  When a crime has been committed, a whole community may go after an individual who has been identified as the perpetrator.  Often it doesn’t even matter what the evidence is against the person.  When we become outraged by an injustice, we feel the need for justice in the form of SOMEONE needing to pay for it.  Shades of gray disappear. We can no longer see nuances or even more than one side. We stop being able to hear or step back, to observe or truly evaluate from a aplace of the big picture. We are fickle in our loyalties. But while we are most familiar with our own behavior, while we can relate most easily to our own parts in the story, we are called, as always, to follow Jesus.  So, it is his behavior that I want to focus on today.

Jesus knew that he would be crucified.  He knew this before it happened.  And yet he allowed the people, the same people who would later be yelling for his death, to treat him as a king.  Would you do that?  Would it be easy to allow people who were going to destroy you to treat you as royalty first?  The only concession he made, the only announcement in that scene that maybe their vision of who he was to be was not in fact a true vision of who he actually would be, was that he rode in on a donkey’s colt, according to the gospel of John.  A donkey was a symbol of poverty, a symbol of humility, a symbol of passivity.  He announced to them, even as he allowed them to treat him as a king, that he would not be the kind of king they were expecting.  But it was only through that one act that he betrayed what was to come. 

What was more to the point: he remained steadfast, in the face of their fickle, cruel, crucifying behavior, he remained steadfastly loyal in his love and care for them.  He allowed them to celebrate, even as he knew they would be disappointed.  He was loyal in his love for them when he tried to confront their ways by telling them the truth about their behavior, knowing they would turn against him and kill him for the truth he was speaking.  He remained loyal to his commitment to God by not acting as a military messiah, even when the people wanted him to be something else.  He was loyal in his love for them as he continued to try to teach them about God’s love.  He was loyal in his commitment to the truth as he spoke the words that he knew would anger and offend about their hypocritical behavior.  He was loyal to his mission as he moved forward, knowing the outcome would be his death.

How steadfast are we?  How strong are we?  When we know that telling the truth will offend people we care about, do we do it anyway?  Or do we tell ourselves, “well, it won’t change them, so I may as well not say anything?”  Do we stand up to bullies, stand up to injustice when we know we might turn a friend into an enemy?  Or do we say to ourselves, “It won’t really do any good to say anything.  It’ll just cause a conflict, so I’m going to keep quiet.”  Do we

choose the higher road when we see something happening that we believe to be against God’s will?  Or do we just quietly slip away, fearing that we will be putting ourselves in danger and telling ourselves that God wouldn’t want us to do anything risky, even if that was to help someone else?  Do we love the outcast, the person no one else likes, even though it might not be as fun as hanging out with people everyone likes?  Are we steadfast in our commitments to love, to care for God’s people, even when it is unpopular and difficult?

            Aislynn and I are listening to the Harry Potter stories on tape in the car again.  Every time I hear the first story, I am struck with the courage of the kids in the books.  But the moments that strike me as the most courageous are probably not the times that most people might imagine.  For example, the first person Harry meets is Ron and he likes Ron.  But he hasn’t spent more than a few hours with Ron before he meets Draco.  Draco is friendly with Harry but within a few minutes he says that Harry needs his help picking the right people to be around and he basically indicates that Ron is not one of those people.  It is clear that Draco has friends.  It is clear that he has power and strength and a following.  But Harry chooses not to go with the crowd in that moment and instead says that he believes he can figure out for himself who are the people he should hang around.  He insults Draco and stands up for Ron.  He runs against the crowd in that moment and chooses instead to stand with the less popular, more awkward, less powerful friend.  He is loyal.  But more, he is courageous.  Draco and his friends expected Harry to go along with them.  But he chose instead to make an enemy in order to stand up for Ron, to do what was right, to be a good friend.

            For those of you who read my blog you know that this last week I posted a story of an encounter I had years ago.  Right after college I spent some time as a mission volunteer for the Presbyterian Church.  I ended up in Santa Fe and when my volunteer time was ended, I stayed another year working as a full time musician.  I accompanied the vocal classes out at the community college and I played piano and organ for several local churches.  One of those churches was St. Francis Cathedral on the square.  I was invited to come one evening to their Saturday service and to help their music director who had been both directing and playing for the praise team.  I filled in because he had broken his arm, but afterwards, he hired me (well, paid me a tiny stipend) to continue to play for them.  I loved this particular job for so many reasons, and I was happy to do it no matter what they paid or didn't pay.  The music was fun to play, but what was more important, the praise team itself was comprised of truly kind, loving, faithful people.  They were a wonderful small group and I enjoyed being with them.  As I said, we were a very small team.  One day we had two new people come join us: a young woman and her boyfriend.  We needed their voices, they sang very well and we were excited to welcome them. 

        However, the young woman took an instant dislike to me.  More, she was verbally nasty about it.  I cannot remember a single thing that she actually said.  What I remember is that she started, that very first night, to say mean and hurtful things about me to the other members of our little group.  The other members, as I said, were deeply faithful, loving people.  And so not one of them joined in with her comments.  They all looked very uneasy, uncomfortable, and said nothing.  None of the comments were said to me: they were all nasty comments said about me to the others in the group, but in a loud enough voice that I couldn't help but hear them.  There was no way to respond to these comments.  After the rehearsal, the choir director approached me and just asked me what I thought of the new couple.  I told him that I had heard her comments and didn't know what I had done to upset her so much but that they were very hurtful.

       The next time we met, she was there and her comments began almost immediately.  Again, I can remember no specifics of what she said.  But I remember with extreme clarity what happened next.  The choir director stopped the rehearsal, looked directly at this woman and said, "We are incredibly blessed to have Barbara here.  I pay her a pittance of what she deserves, but she comes every week and helps us out of the goodness of her heart and from a place of faith. We would not be the group that we are without her playing for us as she does.  I will not allow anything in this group that threatens her happiness and comfort here.  Therefore if anyone is unkind to her, they are not welcome to be part of this group."  All of us were stunned.  I was stunned most of all.  I did not expect him to be so direct, so confrontational or so strong in both his support of me and his insistence on the kindness of others.  Needless to say, the couple did not return.  The young woman’s expectation of gaining power by bullying one of the group, by making an “in” for herself with the crowd by being unkind was met with the unexpected.  She left.  But the director chose, to lose singers, to stand up for me.  I will never forget that this man stood up for me, nor that he was willing to let people go in order to maintain the health and kindness of a team whose culture had been and returned to being one of great compassion and care for one another. 

We are called to follow Jesus and so we are called to be steadfast, to be strong, to be courageous, even knowing that our behavior will disappoint, our behavior will not live up to expectations, our behavior will involve, if we are true to our God, confrontation of evil and injustice and will therefore be unpopular.  We are called to remain committed to love in the face of human fickleness.  It is the hardest thing in the world.  It is a journey that will lead us, too, to rejection, to losing support, to making enemies… to the cross.  And while the resurrection is on the other side, it can be hard to continue to believe that in the face of the pain of loss, of death.  As we walk through the passion story this week, remembering Jesus’ trial, remembering Jesus’ death, looking towards the resurrection on the far side, may we be empowered to remember that Jesus calls us to follow.  His path is our call, too.  As always, it is that simple.  And that difficult.