Unbinding God

Acts 17: 22-31

Easter 6A

May 21, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Fade in on busy street.   Narrow alleys lead off from the bustling thoroughfare lined with barking merchants.
People of all ages come and go in the hurried rush of the day.
The sun beats down relentlessly on the stone pavement and dust hangs in the air.
The shot follows the main thoroughfare toward an open-air marketplace.  Beyond the open space, towering over the people and standing on the highest point in the city is a temple surrounded by sweeping stairs toped with massive columns with statues of the gods and goddesses standing guard.
Close-up on a man dressed as a leather merchant.  He stands next to one of the God like statues.
We join him in mid-sentence.
That is my ham handed attempt to write the opening scene of the movie of Acts. 17.  I still don’t have a good name for the movie yet.  “Paul Preaching to the Atheneans before the Statue of the Unnamed God” seems a bit clunky.
There are not many biblical stories I wish had a movie remake.  In fact, there are not many bible story movies I can abide at all but this is one I would give a pass because to really understand what is happening with Paul in this moment, you have to have a picture of what is happening around Paul in Athens.
Paul is preaching in the heart of the greatest political and military power on earth.  The Roman Empire is not the ONLY powerful nation in the world, but there is none greater in political and military might.
He is preaching in a society that gives lip service to religion and freely coopts religion to suit its purposes but when it comes to living up to the broader ethics of their religious beliefs, well, that’s another story.  Rome’s is a civil religion.  It is the religion of citizenship rather than religion of devotion.  They use the same words and even some of the same symbols, but the overlap stops there.
It is also a place where that civil religion has begun to be defined by a sense of moral and philosophical nihilism.  Woven into the fabric of daily life was a sense of the inevitability of inevitability; a sense that not much that we do can really impact the direction or the realities of the political and economic behemoth that was Rome.  So most people lived lives not so much of hope for the future but of tolerance of the present.
Paul, in the midst of this militaristic world power where two dimensional religion rooted in nationalism rather than devotion has given way to a sense of daily resignation, stands up to preach the gospel of the Prince of Peace who repeatedly calls us drop everything and follow him and all the while preaches a message of hope and new life.
This sermon at the Aeropagus is one of the most famous in the history of the faith.  Paul’s bold apologetic is held up as a model of how we can share the message of Christ in a multi-faith environment; how we can share the gospel of Christ with those who believe differently; how we can make Jesus make sense to people who have not yet heard or need to hear again the Good News.
It wasn’t until I spent some time with this text that I began to realize that what Paul does here is both much greater and much simpler than we often assume.
At first glance, Paul seems to use a combination of;
flattery, “I can see that you Athenians are very religious people;”
cleverness, “Among the objects of your worship, I found a statue with the inscription ‘to an unknown God’…what you worship as unknown  I will make known;”
logic, “from one ancestor, God made all nations;”
and invitation, “God commands all people everywhere to repent…”
At first glance, the sermon at Athens seems to be theologian Paul at his rhetorical and apologetic best.
And it is.  There is no arguing that all of those ingredients- flattery, cleverness, logic, and invitation- are mixed with a heavy dose of Paul’s deep and rich theology to make for a monumental sermon and a transformative moment for the early church.  This sermon is all those things.
It is also much much more.
There is something going on here, I think, with Pail’s motivation to deliver this sermon.
I couldn’t name that sense of motivation in the text until the middle of the week when I was in Little Rock and took a little time to check the news back here in Jackson.  I went to the Clarion-Ledger website and staring back at me from the screen was a headline about the death of 6 year-old Kingston Frazier taken from a Kroger parking lot in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The details were scarce but what was clear was that a child not yet old enough to have given up on Santa Claus was dead.
There is no rational or readily comprehensible way for a child to die, but for a little boy’s life to end so violently chips away at even the most steel-hardened sense of hope in the world.  The news of a child’s death, especially at the hands of violence in our culture, takes the wind out of our sails.
Children were no less frail in Paul’s day than in our own and no less immune to tragedy.  I am sure that stories like this and tragedies like this were not foreign to the great evangelist to the Gentiles, so our experience in this community is not wholly different than Paul’s. At least not in this one narrow tragic way.
But Paul didn’t have Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or the anonymous comments on news sites.
In Paul’s Athen’s, the philosophical resignation that he confronted was the logical nihilism of the Stoics and other schools of philosophical thought.
What faces us today is something much more insidious; the willing neglect of our connection to one another.
Let me say here that I am no foe of Facebook.  I have wasted as much and probably much more time on it than just about anyone in earshot this morning.  I’ve benefitted from its platform to connect with old friends, get to know new ones better, and stay connected over distance and despite busy lives.
But if we have learned one thing in recent years it is that social media does not always bring out the best in us and opinions that would never see the light of day in face to face conversation all to easily creep in from a digital distance.
It might be fair to rob the old cliché and say, “in Facebook veritas.”
Whet I saw in the hours after Kingston Frazier’s death showed the ugly side of that revealing truth. It did not take long for the conversation about a little boy’s death to come around to assessments of blame on the parents and judgments about the judgment of his mother.  I read, with no small sense of disgust, the freely shared opinions that the child’s death was somehow the fault of a grieving mother rather than the men who took a little boy’s life.  The death of this innocent child turned into a feeding frenzy for vitriol and bigotry and judgmentalism that reduced a little boy’s life to the status of a pot hole; political football for the anger of the moment.
Reading those comments it was as though compassion died in the back seat of that car with little Kingston.
I was shocked at some of the things I read and, I confess, more than a little bit angry at it.
In Facebook veritas, indeed.
On December 5, 1950, Margaret Truman, only daughter of the President, sang at Constitution Hall.  The next day appeared a review of her performance that was anything but flattering.
Having read the review of his daughter’s performance, Harry Truman penned one of the most famous letters in presidential history in which he referred to the reviewer, Washington Post music critic Paul Hume, as, “an eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay,” “a frustrated old man who wish[ed] he could be successful,” and promised that should they meet face to face, Hume would need, “a new nose, [and] a lot of beefsteak for black eyes.”
Reflecting on her days in the White House and that event in particular, Bess Truman later said that she regretted not taking away the president’s stamps.
The sermon I am preaching this morning is not the first draft of this sermon.  Let’s call the first draft the Harry Truman draft.  My initial foray in to this morning’s text in light of this week’s events was less a model of pastoral sensitivity and more an example of frustrated venting.  Paul might have preached with vigor and thoughtfulness, but I was ready to come with the fire and brimstone.
To try to make sense of the senseless death of a child is difficult enough.  To do it in a world where the kind of unceasing judgment and uncharitable callousness shown toward a grieving family is considered acceptable was frustrating and infuriating me beyond any helpful or hopeful words.
So I put the sermon aside and went back to the text to live with Paul’s words a little longer.
It doesn’t happen often, at least not for me, but this week a text I had read dozens of times- that I could quote by almost entirely from memory-changed in an instant.  
When I went back to Paul’s words to the Atheneans with my anger for many in my own community still keeping my blood up, I saw something I had never before seen in Paul’s words, or, more accurately, in Paul.
I saw the impassioned preacher.
I saw the theological tactician.
I even saw the evangelist reaching the unchurched.
But I also saw something I confess to seldom seeing in Paul or hearing from his challenging words.
I saw a brother in Christ hurting for a hurting world.
Confession being good for the soul, I confess before God, you, and every biblical studies professor I ever had that I know that it is dangerous to ascribe motives to moments like these, but I believe in my heart of hearts that part of what led Paul to preach that day was a desire not just to convert the Atheneans but to comfort them.
We so often view Paul as a theologian unlocking complex puzzles of historical and philosophical importance and he is surely that, but he is also a man who saw a world in need of hope.  And hope is something that purveyor’s of the Gospel have in ready supply.  So Paul shares the hope he knows in Christ.  And that, I think, is where the real power of this sermon resides.
When Paul stood up to preach that day he was not merely trying to overcome an argument or persuade people’s thinking, he was unbinding their understanding of God and throwing hope out in to the world like Johnny Appleseed.  He preached Christ resurrected because Paul saw in front of him a world where hope- deep, rich, life altering hope- was in short supply and where seeds of hope might take root and grow into faithfulness.
If there is s lesson for us here it is, I believe, this;
When we see a place where there is room for hope, there the Gospel must be preached.
Preaching hope is the Christian faith at its most eloquent..
Hope is what we do.
It is who we are.
It is how we live.
Or at least it should be, because friends, make no mistake about it ours is a world crying out in anguish for a word of hope and the one whose name we praise as “risen, risen indeed!” is same Lord who calls us to arise and go making disciples and proclaiming hope.
It took a little time, a gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit, and a renewed encounter with Paul’s sermon in Athens for me to really understand it, but beneath the rhetoric of division, and judgment, and hate, and blame, and fear, the soul of our community is really crying out for hope.
When Paul preached that morning, he knew that the next day Athens would still be Athens.  Like Sisyphus pushing his rock up hill, only to have it roll back at night, every day when Paul awoke the world was still the world.  Yet every day, he got up and he went to work pushing that rock called hope up the hill because Paul knew that while Sisyphus’s punishment was eternal, our work is for but a season.  And every day the Gospel is preached in the world is a day when the world knows just a little more hope.  And every day with a little more hope brings us another day closer to God’s promised tomorrow.
Paul went to Athens and proclaimed Good News.
Now it is our turn.
And, friends, as much as the Athenians needed it then, we really need it now.
Let us pray.
God of hope and promise, we hear the voices of our community cry out.  Shadowed in the language of lamentation, the vocabulary of vitriol, the dogma of division, is a still small voice crying out for hope. Make us, oh God, proclaimers of that hope.  May we listen past the words hurt and hear past the world’s fears so we might truly know the world’s pain. And knowing it, have the courage to share the abundance of hope we know in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

Stones

Acts 7:55-60

Easter 5A

May 14, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Donald McLeod, longtime professor at Princeton Seminary, enjoyed telling the story of a prayer offered in one of his classes.  Each class gathering he would ask a student to offer an opening prayer and one day he invited a prayer from a young Chinese seminarian who came to Princeton after fleeing his family and nation under threat of persecution.
The seminarian shocked his classmates when he prayed, “O God, give us something to die for, for if we have nothing to die for, we have nothing to live for.”
I heard that story in a sermon during a conference at Princeton a few years ago.  After that chapel service we went to lunch and were confronted with witnesses to three lives that lived up to that prayer.
Outside the dining room of the McKay student center there is a plaque inscribed with the names of three Princeton graduates who died for what they lived for.  It reads:
Walter Macon Lawrie – Thrown overboard by pirates in the China Sea, 1847.
John Rogers Peal – Killed with his wife by a mob at Lien Chou, China, 1905.
James Joseph Reid – Fatally beaten at Selma, Alabama, March 11, 1965.
They lived for the gospel and by all accounts died for and because of their allegiance to the gospel.
The story of Stephen in Acts 7, commonly referred to as the “Stoning of Stephen” or the “Martyrdom of Stephen,” tells the story of another of Jesus followers who was willing to put his life on the line for the gospel.  
The book of Acts tells us precious little about Stephen.  From his name we can infer that he was likely from the Greek speaking part of the community.
He was a deacon.  The church realized early on that they were becoming neglectful in caring for the widows in their midst and appointed Stephen and six others to ensure that the widows and orphans were cared for.
Though it does not give many specifics, the text goes on to tell us that Stephen was, “full of faith and the Holy Spirit (6:5),” and “full of God’s grace and power (7:8),” and that he did “great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. (7:8)”
That Stephen’s story made the cut to be included in the Book of Acts suggests that when it came to his great wonders and miraculous signs, he was probably doing more than making the Sunday fellowship meal stretch to fit the crowd or making the benevolence budget last until the end of December.
It was more likely that Stephen was healing people physically and spiritually.  He was reaching into people’s lives and, the text tells us, with the power of the Holy Spirit making people whole again.
It was that ministry of passion and compassion that aroused fierce opposition among the religious elites.
Stephen was upsetting the settled way of things.  He was disrupting the order of religious life and with it the power of the priesthood.  He was disrupting the settled way things were and were assumed to supposed to be.
In the end, it cost him his life at the hands of a mob that, the text tells us, stoned him to death.
Stoning is not something we hear about in daily life.  A quick Google search reveals one verified case in recent memory.
And martyrs?  We can all likely name some, but they seem fixed in the past fixed and memorialized like the adornment over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey where statues of Martin Luther King Jr., Maximiliian Kolb, Oscar Romero, and Deitrich Bonhoeffer join other 20th century martyrs to the faith.
As is often the case with biblical stories remote in history and context, the story of Stephen is frequently romanticized in art and narrative.  Stephen becomes a character of the faith whose death is no more real than a movie; remote and almost too much to be believed.
But Stephen’s story is true. It is real.  And it is ours to wrestle with.
And if we are to really encounter this story we have to wipe away the Hollywood veneer, unmoor it from the past, and see it for what it is; a witness to the power and danger of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A careful reading of this text not merely in its own context but in ours as well reveals a dimension that frighteningly recasts this ancient tale into our own world reality.
Stephen did not just die for his faith.
He was lynched for it.
This was a lynching.
My guess is that word brings some very specific images to mind.  It was images like those that prompted some very well meaning colleagues to warn me against using that term this morning.
Too loaded.
Too charged.
Too harsh.
Better to leave this one in the storybooks; remote, distant, easily put away until it rolls around three years from now on the fifth Sunday of Easter.
That may all be true, but it does not change the fact that Stephen was the victim of an extrajudicial killing carried out under the watch and with the tacit permission of the powers of the community.
Paula Fredrickson, Boston University Professor Emerita of the Appreciation of Scripture (isn’t that the greatest job title ever!) wrote,
“[C]rucifixion was a Roman form of a public service announcement: ‘Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar.’  The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching.  Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.”
The means of Stephen’s death may have been different, but the message was the same; keep your mouth shut and keep your head down.
Stephen, by giving his allegiance to the Gospel and rooting his compassion in the work of the Spirit threatened the structures of the world and for that he paid a price.
When we keep stories like Stephen’s safely tucked away in distant memory, it becomes tragically easy to forget that we serve a Lord who encounters us and the world at a cross-current and whose message of how things may be is all to often anathema to the way things are.
That is why Stephen met his end at the hands of the same baying crowd as Christ.  Both were killed not primarily to punish them for crimes committed but as examples to the audience of both their lives and their deaths.
The cross of Christ stands at the center of our theology precisely because of and in active opposition to this reality.
James Cone, Emeritus professor of theology at Union Seminary and widely regarded as the first great African-American liberation theologians wrote about the fundamental relationship between the cross and the lynching tree in his book of the same name.  Cone argues that there is merely a division in time between the terror of the crucifixion and the terror of lynching.  Christ, Cone argues, was lynched for the same fundamental reason as John Heath, George Meadows, and scores of others whose deaths served the purpose of terrorizing the audience into obeisance to the way things are and silence about how things ought to be.
The lynching of Emmett Till and the subsequent publicity surrounding his death shook the consciousness of the nation and had the opposite effect his murderers had hoped.  Refusing to bow to the hate that took her son’s life, Till’s mother insisted that his casket be left open for the entire world to see what had been done to her son.  She pulled back the curtain and revealed that the rhetoric of the order of the world was nothing more than a veneer of fear and hate.  Rather than paralyze the black community in fear, Till’s death came to galvanize action and passion and a sense that the fight for equality was a fight worth dying for.
The death of Stephen had a similar effect on the early church.  If the hope of the authorities was that with the stones heaped on Stephen would serve as a warning to the fledgling Jesus movement, they were in for a surprise.  As our text from today in chapter 7 closes with Stephen’s death, chapter 8 begins with acknowledgement of the harassment of the Jerusalem church and the defiant preaching of the gospel in the city and beyond.  Even in the face of Saul’s persecution, the early church would not be deterred from their mission and ministry.
They had found something to die for and because they had something to die for, they had something to live for.
So they preached and they taught and they served the poor and they built community and they shared the meal and they celebrated the resurrection and they bore witness to the kingdom of God and the power of the Holy Spirit in the world and 2000 years later…
… the cross of Christ and the stones of Stephen have been replaced by the lynching tree and nothing seems to have changed.
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect justice of Christ, yet injustice continues to infect and inflict us;
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect love of God, yet hate and intolerance continue to divide us one from the other;
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect truth of the Spirit, yet the false narratives of violence and might continue to be the refuge of the powers and principalities of the world.
It is 2000 years later and it is as if the stones are still striking Stephen.
I spent a few hours in Thursday down at Stewpot. We are fortunate to have in Jackson such an impactful and important ministry as Stewpot. From the St. Dominic clinic in the basement, to the art program, to the daily meals, Stewpot’s ministries seek to reach into our community’s troubles and touch God’s children by transforming lives and bearing witness to hope.
Stewpot and ministries like it are not single handedly changing the world, but tangibly and faithfully refusing to surrender the promise of a better tomorrow to the troubles of today.
That is the work of Jesus Christ in the world.
It is the work of hope entrusted to the people of God.
It is the work begun 2000 years ago in Jerusalem and continuing today in Jackson.  The same Lord who called Stephen and the earliest disciples calls us today.
And so, we preach.
We teach.
We serve the poor, build community, share the meal, and do all the things we have done as the body of Christ because we trust in the one who calls us to our work and we have faith in the promises of God.
We have faith that though, as Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime,” we are nonetheless saved by hope.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he was buried, rolled away the stone and declared that death has lost its sting.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he died, lives.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he came into the world in the innocence of a child, lived with the humility of a servant.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who is the true rock of our redemption.
We are saved by a hope that is worth dying for precisely because it gives us life.
Let us pray.
God of all courage and hope, you have given us something worth dying for; the promise of your kingdom and the hope of Jesus Christ.  Move us toward a more perfect faith in which we do not count the cost but instead live out our salvation with courage and love.  Amen.

Coming to Terms with Easter

Matthew 28:1-10

Easter 1A

April 16, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

         This is the way the world ends.

         This is the way the world ends.

         This is the way the world ends.

         Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

         Those often quoted lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem the Hollow Men were written to describe what many encountered as the reality of post-WWI Europe where hope seemed lost and the possibilities of the future bleak.

In retrospect, I imagine that they capture what must have felt that first Good Friday.  The day when the one confessed as the King of the Jews, the Son of God, God incarnate died upon the cross; the day when it seemed that once and for all the powers of the world had conquered the hope of God. 

There on calvary’s hill, God in the person of Jesus Christ lowered his head and died and with him the hope of the Jesus movement that had grown around his message of hope for all and peace in God’s creation.

That was how their world would end.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Or so they thought.

Theologians have, for centuries, debated why Christ would die so submissively or, more importantly, why God would allow it to happen.  I claim no special insight to that question other than to say that whatever the reason for the quiet submission of Good Friday and the silence of Holy Saturday, the world is filled to overflowing this morning with the joy of resurrection.

         Though we have done our best to domesticate and tame Easter- to strip it of its shocking, awe-inspiring, reason-defying mystical nature- one thing remains true; this day is no whimper marking the end of the world.  

It is, instead, a holy disruption; a reversal of fortune for all of creation through the providential work of God.  Death has become life, despair has become jubilation and for we who just 48 hours before were crying, “crucify him, crucify him,” Christ is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

         According to our reading from Matthew this morning, Easter comes not with the softness of an Easter bunny or the benign gentility of Easter dresses and seersucker suits, but with the shock and awe of an earthquake. 

The biblical account of Easter is not a story designed to give us a peaceful easy feeling before we head to the family brunch, it is dramatic and frightening and awe inspiring.

         Consider Matthew’s account of that morning. 

To begin with, in the fading darkness before dawn, an angel descends from heaven and alone rolls the stone away perching himself on top of it as if to say, “what do you think of that!”   This was no chubby cheeked angel, this was the brute force of the Lord descended into the world rolling the stone away to reveal what God has done.

         When the earth shook and the angel rolled the stone away, the soldiers who were keeping guard to make sure that no one stole the body were speechless.  In fact, the Greek in Matthew’s gospel says that the ones keeping guard, “were quaked and became as if dead.” 

         If nothing else, God knows how to get our attention.

         Into the midst of this scene of dramatic encounter come the women.  Mark says there were three, Matthew two, what is certain is that in the wake of the agony and horror of Good Friday, it was the women counted among his disciples who showed up that day.  They were coming to tend to the body of Jesus when they saw what was happening and looked on in wonder.

         By now God had their undivided attention. 

         As they stood there astonished, the women are addressed by the angel.  These are the first words spoken to the first of the faithful to reach the empty tomb.  This is the theological equivalent of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man” moment and the moment does not disappoint. 

In the few words the angel utters resides the fundamental message of Easter. 

         He does not say, “alleluia!” 

         He does not say, “he is risen, he is risen indeed.” 

         He says, “do not be afraid.”

         Do not be afraid.   Those are the first words uttered in the wake of the resurrection of Christ.

         Do not be afraid.

         Notice he does not say “have no fear” he says “do not be afraid.” 

         That is the first and the last message of Easter.   Do not be afraid. 

         In that moment, in those words, life begins anew.  It is a wake-up call when God gets our attention and for many of us it takes an earthquake to wake us from our dreamy slumber. 

         Life begins when we hear

                  and we see

                           and we are no longer afraid. 

         It certainly happened that day for Mary Magdelene and the other named Mary.  God had their undivided attention and in that moment gave them new life.

         It is never the end of the story when we encounter God in moments like these.  Do not be afraid, those first words of Easter morning, are only part of the story.  They are the words that prepared the women and prepare us for what comes next.

         The angel says to them, “go and tell.”

         The promises and revelations of God are never things to be held in private.  They are the spiritual inheritance of all God’s children so when we know, we tell.  So the angel tells the women to go and tell.  To loose their feet from the place they are momentarily bound in fear and go with courage to tell of this miraculous thing that has happened. 

         Now it is easy to romanticize the women and act as if in that instant they acted with faith and hope and love and without hesitation went forthwith and spread the Word never knowing fear or doubt again.   You would think that experiencing an early morning earthquake caused by an angel rolling an enormous stone away from the tomb of your friend only to have that angel tell you that God has raised that friend from the dead would be enough to get you moving and telling.  For some of us, even an earthquake does not get the whole job done.

         Evidently God thought they had to be told a second time. 

After the angel says to them, “go. Tell.” They are met on the road by yet a second messenger from God, the risen Jesus himself, who tells them to do the very same thing. 

Go and tell.

What happened to the women that day- what happens to us when we hear God’s call to go and tell- is no simple thing.  So God persists even in the face of our persistent spiritual deafness and blindness.

         Like the women, we too often have to be told more than once and even then we often do not hear. 

         There is an old story about a preacher from who found himself at home as the waters of the Pearl River began to rise.  A man in a canoe came by and said, “preacher, get in.  I’ll take you to higher ground.”  The preacher declines and says, “no.  The lord will take care of me.”  A second man comes by in a rowboat, by now the water is up to the second floor windows, and he says to the preacher, “preacher, get in. I’ll take you to higher ground.”  Again, the preacher declines saying, “no.  the Lord will take care of me.”  Finally with the waters within inches of the peak of the roof, the preacher is holding on to the chimney when a helicopter comes with a rope lowered down and a voice shouts, “preacher take the rope, we’ll take you to higher ground.”  Again the preacher declines.  Finally the preacher finds himself at heaven’s gate and he looks at St. Peter and says, “I don’t understand.  I gave my life as a preacher, why didn’t the lord save me.”  St. Peter replies and says, “we sent two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want?”

         Sometimes, no matter how many times we hear, we do not really hear.

         Year after year we hear this same story of resurrection, of hope, of promise, and we hear this call from God, “do not be afraid.  Go and tell.”  And still, we so easily go out from this place and return to our fearful living. Silent in the face of a world that desperately needs a witness.

         Perhaps part of the reason it is so hard to truly bear the Easter message without fear is that we are surrounded by voices in the world telling us that the only thing we have to fear is not being afraid. 

We are surrounded by a chorus of voices telling us that the promise that we have nothing to fear in this world because Christ is risen, he is risen indeed is just a dead letter. 

         Yet, and still here we are back again for an other Easter morning flowering the cross, singing our hymns, shouting our Alleluias, and declaring that he is risen, he is risen indeed. 

As we have in years past and will continue to do in years to come, the church stubbornly clings to the message that despite the world’s proclamations to the contrary,

peace and justice,

hope and promise,

life itself rules supreme because the tomb of death has been emptied and Christ has risen. 

And because that is true, because death has been defeated, we need not be afraid. 

         That is what Matthew wants us to see so we too might live. 

He wants us to see that we do not need to wait in order to live.  Resurrection living starts right here right now in the shadow of the rolled away stone. 

Life begins when we are able to take hold of the fear and doubt that have been given to us and run with them.   That is the truest meaning of Easter.  It is that day when fear and joy, the odd couple of the human spirit, enable us, despite the one and because of the other, to get on with the serious and glorious business of living and loving.

         Life, true Easter life, begins when we recognize that we do not have to die to live.  Life in the spirit of resurrection is not simply the quantity of time we have on this earth, it is the quality of the time we share.  So it was for the women and the men of that first Easter.  It was not about how long they would live after that miraculous morning but how they would live.  It was about how they were empowered and transformed by the risen Lord to live lives in hope and promise and without weight of their fears bearing down on them. 

         Life began for them when they stopped being afraid both of what they did know and what they did not know.  Life began for them when they could dare to believe the risen Christ, the living, walking, talking Christ made a difference in their lives; and life began for them when they believed this to be true even if they could neither explain it nor understand it. 

         Do not be afraid. 

         These are the empowering words of Easter.  Freedom from fear is the victory of the resurrection- not merely freedom from death but freedom from the paralyzing force of fear; from the voices of the world that seek to draw us away from the promises of Christ and deter us from bearing witness to Christ’s command to, “go and tell.”  Our Easter freedom charges us to stand in the face of those forces in the world and, in the words of our closing hymn today, “Tell its grim demonic chorus: ‘Christ is risen! Get you gone!’” 

         So, my friends, do not be afraid. 

                  The stone is rolled away.

                           Do not be afraid.

                                    Death is no more. 

                                             Do not be afraid.

                                                      Hope is alive. 

                                                               Do not be afraid, but go and tell. 

For Christ is risen. 

He is risen indeed.

Alleluia, alleluia.  Amen.

Let us pray, Glory be to you, God, our strength and our redeemer.  The vacant cross and the empty tomb vindicate your claim that the love which suffers is the love which saves.  So fill your people with joy nad your Church with celebration that the world may know that your holy Son Jesus is not a dead hero we commemorate but the living Lord we worship, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, we give our praise forever and ever.  Amen.[i]

---

[i] From the Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland.  St. Andrews Press 1994.

As If Palm Sunday Never Happened

Palm/Passion Sunday Year A

Matthew 21:1-11

Matthew 27:11-26

April 9, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

           Frederick Buechner, the teacher of preachers, once said, "anyone who preaches a sermon without realizing they are heading straight for Scylla and Charybdis ought to try a safer and more productive line of work, like laying eggs, for example."  There are few times when those two sea monsters of Greek lore who guard the narrow strait of Messina and menace every ship that dares pass between them feel as close as they do when preaching between the twin shoals of Palms and Passion.   Making the waters choppier still is our rapidly unfolding political and world circumstance of the last few days.

            From time to time a Sunday morning will conspire to remind us that ours is a complex world and we worship a complex and nuanced God who is present with and for us even on days when the rocky shoals seem dangerously close.

            Like Christians in so many places around the world, we began our worship today by waving palm branches in sacred imitation of the crowd in Jerusalem who welcomed Jesus.  That palm branches were used was no mistake.  It was tradition in ancient near eastern custom to cover the ground for the feet of one held in high esteem and often that was done with palm branches and even the cloaks of those standing by.  That is exactly what happens to Jesus according to the gospel accounts.  The palms carry another meaning as well.  Palm is one of the four species carried for rejoicing during the Jewish festival of Sukkot.

            When Jesus comes into Jerusalem, the people welcome him with shouts of “hosanna, loud hosanna,” a carpet of palm befitting a king, and the waving of holy branches of rejoicing.  It must have been a sight to see.

            For most of the history of the church and in almost all the artistic interpretations of that scene, our interpretation stops there with the celebration.  It’s a parade, and who doesn’t like a parade?  This moment seems like a time when the Jewish people welcomed their Messiah into the Holy City and for an instant all was right with the world.

            We know from the fullness of Jesus’ ministry that the complexities of the world and the very real issues facing God’s children are never absent from Jesus’ thoughts and rarely at a distance from his work in the world. 

            Was it anyone else riding that donkey, we might be able to leave it at “who doesn’t like a parade?”  But riding that donkey is not anyone else, it is Immanuel, God with us, and when God with us rides in our midst something more must be afoot.

            In recent years, scholars of different theological stripes have begun to come to consensus that in addition to a moment of celebration in the believing community, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was a piece of first century political theater.  Jesus had to know that by parading into the city the way he did he was poking his finger in the eye of Imperial Rome. 

            First, he rides in like a conqueror but leaves out the chariot, the legions, and the spoils.  Instead he rides a lowly donkey demonstrating that his power flows from something other than the spring of violence and force that provides the Pax Romana.   

            He rides over a blanket of palms and cloaks like a king but not just any king, a JEWISH king.  Cue a finger in the eye of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. 

            The people shout Hosanna thus tying this king to the king of heaven in direct defiance of the imperial cult, which declares Caesar the only living deity.

            When we take a step back and look at this whole unfolding scene, we see that Jesus is the little boy in the street who shouts out that the emperor has no clothes.  He has, in the time it took a donkey to walk down the street, cut imperial Rome down to size and proclaimed that the true power in the world is the power of the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

            It was divine political theater and the crowds ate it up.

            Until.

            We don’t know exactly how many days elapsed between the entry to Jerusalem and the crucifixion, but it was less than a week.  In less than a week, the people who had been shouting, “Hosanna, hosanna!” and throwing their cloaks on the ground so even the donkey would not walk on the bare earth began their shouts of, “Crucify him, crucify him!”

            If Palm Sunday was divine political theater demonstrating the true power of the gentleness and mercy of God, Rome answered with some theater of its own. 

            It was tradition during the Passover for the Roman governor to show mercy and pardon someone as a gesture of goodwill to the Jews.  With great pageantry and solemnity, Pontius Pilate appears before the people and asks who they wish to be freed. 

            Pilate was a savvy political player.   You did not rise in the ranks of Roman leadership without being able to read the crowd. 

            According to the gospel accounts, Pilate reviewed Jesus’ case and interviewed him face to face and found no fault with him.  He was kept in jail only because the Saducees and Pharisees wanted it and that was the deal with Imperial Rome. 

            When the time comes to free a prisoner and thus parole him from his fate of crucifixion, Pilate offers up the innocent one called Jesus.  Whether motivated by a sense of justice to free an innocent man or more venal political motives thinking he was freeing a leader of the people, his offer is met with only cries of, “crucify him!”

            The people want someone else, so Pilate relents.  He tries to show mercy through the power he has as Roman governor, but in the end he is powerless to free even the innocent man.  The people want Jesus so Pilate famously washes his hands of the whole thing.

            If the theater of the street showed the power of mercy in the person of the lowly Christ, the theater of the consul’s courtyard showed the powerlessness of power in Pilate, the embodiment of Rome.

            When the time comes for the sentences against the condemned to be carried out, we get the penultimate act in this unfolding political drama.  Jesus, nailed to the cross and life slowly ebbing from his body, finds himself confronted by two thieves, one on either side, each suffering his own fate.

            One mocks Jesus and asks why he cannot save himself.  The other asks Jesus forgiveness and is assured by the voice of Christ that he will be with him today in paradise. 

            With his final breaths on the cross, Jesus once again rejects the temptation to seize power as it is understood in the world- the power to save yourself- and instead embraces the true power he has from God- the power to show mercy, even mercy to a thief on a cross. 

            Sanitized and evacuated of their comment on the state of our world, these stories are easily left to remain on the page and their transformative power is easily tamed. 

            The only problem with doing that is that ours is not a past tense God.  The same one who came riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and whose words brought comfort on a cross stands with us today.  The same God who bore witness to the political situation in that day bears witness in this day.

            And thank God for that because this is a moment that needs a witness; it needs a witness to the power of mercy and hope in a world seduced by violence and power.

            Recent days have brought the heartbreaking news that the humanitarian crisis in Syria has escalated.

            That Syria is in crisis is not news.  At least it should not be.  For half a decade the nation has been in a civil war and a civilian humanitarian crisis caused by the brutality of ISIS, the terror of the Assad regime, the ongoing violence of the rebel groups, and the staggering indifference of many western nations including and especially the United States. 

            There have been over the last few years dozens of pleas for assistance with the refugee crisis. For a time it looked like the United States would step up and assist with resettlement, however in recent weeks the Syrian people have been subject to a wholesale ban from the United States and our commitment to the United Nations refugee program has been eliminated.

            In response to the recent gassing of civilians by the Syrian government, the United States by order of the President launched fifty missiles at the airbase from which the attack was thought to come. 

            When mercy was an invited, our doors were closed.  When violence became feasible, we were ready in an instant.  

            As I heard commentators and anchors on television describing the missiles being fired at Syria as beautiful and as the President stood with righteous indignation promising greater shows of force, I became acutely aware of exactly how fully we have been seduced as a culture by the pageantry and power of Rome; how fully we have become convinced that violence is the only viable option and answer.  It is as if Palm Sunday never happened.

It wasn’t long until I found myself wringing my hands as if to wash my hands of the whole business.

It not long after dawned on me that my attempts to wash off the blood of suffering men, women, and children half way around the world would work for me no better than it did for Pilate.

Though I would like to point to others and say, “they are the ones!  Don’t look at me.  I didn’t launch any missiles at anyone.”  If I am honest I also have to say that though I may not be guilty for what I have done, I am most certainly guilty for what I have left undone. 

Christ entrusted the church with the proclamation of the gospel and if we do not live into that promise in and for the world, who will?

There are no short cuts on path to resurrection and righteousness.  It leads only through the justice of the one who, even in death, showed mercy.

The one who came riding into Jerusalem that day proclaiming the gentleness and mercy of God, is with us even now as the hymn writer said, “granting us wisdom and granting us courage for the living of this hour.”  As disciples of Christ, it is on us to bear that mercy into the world.   

To borrow the old saying about preaching the gospel, “Show mercy at all times.  When necessary, use words.”

Let us pray.

Humbling, gentle, God, hear the prayers of our hearts and illumine the paths of our living.  Give us the courage to be a Palm Sunday people, shouting Hosanna and welcoming Christ into our lives and our world.  Give us also the fortitude to be people of the Passion recognizing through the veil of worldly power the gentleness and mercy of Christ.  Amen.