Sermons

Toward Triumph

Palm Sunday

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  April 13, 2003                                           Matthew 21:1-11

This time of year is one of my favorites, for many reasons, and two in particular. The first is the exciting culmination of NCAA basketball season – which worked out quite well for those who favor the Orange (a bandwagon I’m on, by the way, enthusiastically if not belatedly).

The second is the beginning of baseball season, which offers a sense of hope for everyone, including intrepid Chicago Cubs fans, whose team is typically mathematically eliminated about two weeks into the season. 

March Madness and Opening Day – it can’t get any better than that, can it?

Playing sports of all kinds, organized and unorganized, was such an important part of my growing up. And watching sports, even now, seems like one of the better diversions I could pursue. Writer Roger Angell once opined that “baseball was invented to explain every other thing in life,” and there are days when I come perilously close to believing that.

And yet, and every once in a while, sports, like our fascination with celebrity culture, seeps into the real world, and we take notice just a little bit more. We seem to be in one of those seasons as well, when stories on the sports pages spill over into the real world.

This weekend, the story line at the Masters Tournament has been equally shared with Tiger Woods and the membership policies of Augusta National with regards to women joining the club.

As my beloved Cincinnati Reds opened a new year in a new baseball stadium, attention focused on one of my childhood heroes, Pete Rose, and whether he would ever be reinstated into the baseball community after being banned for betting on the game.

There has been an ongoing stream of stories – college and pro – about players behaving badly, their large salaries seeming to serve as justification for disrespectful behavior, and coaches behaving badly, their incentives to win at all costs seeming to blur the very rules of sportsmanship that they are pledged to uphold.

And even recently, in the face of war – the singing or non-singing of national anthems in this country and the one to the north, the opinions that athletes and commentators carry about the war and how they share those opinions, have all created ruckuses quite beyond the pale of sports as diversion. And yet. And yet.

This day carries with it something of the feel of a giant pep rally, does it not? A large crowd gathered, screaming in adoration, throwing things, chanting things, expressing their fondest hopes and grandest expectations. I certainly mean no disrespect, and just the opposite.

It is an emotionally packed day. I remember as a college student, I was actually in Jerusalem during this week, Holy Week. Palm Sunday was observed primarily by westerners, European and North American students, singing songs, marching from the Mount of Olives into the city – seeking to emulate somehow the overwhelming sense of joy we have somehow sought to recapture this morning as we wave the palm branches and sing the familiar carols and revel in a little chaos, or at least as much chaos as can be allowed in a Presbyterian setting.

There are two kinds of pep rallies, it seems to me. One happens before the big game, in anticipation and expectation. One happens after the big game, and only if a team wins. You will read stories of thousands of fans greeting a team at an airport after a big win. You don’t read stories of such things happening to a losing team. Perhaps a player’s mom will show up, but even that’s not guaranteed.

We will experience both this week, which, if I have a point with all this sports talk, IS my point. We will experience both: the grand gathering of expectation, palms waving and “hosannas” shouting out. We will experience the other as well: the fan base evaporating in the face of the reality of death. The disciples slinking away in the night, Peter’s three-fold denial as perfect snapshot moment, the women at the cross and tomb the only followers remaining with the pre-passion hope in them.

And so if today is a day for a pep rally, which it most certainly is, it is an odd kind of pep rally. We who have the benefit of history and the full biblical witness in front of us have the full story to consider, all the pieces of the puzzle. They did not. They did not know how quickly things could change, and what their role in the drama would be – the seemingly seamless shift from shouts of “hosanna” to shouts of “crucify him.” The triumphant entry transforms, in a mere matter of days, into a scene bathed in tragedy, betrayal, despair.

And even we who have the longest view, who know about the ultimate triumph, know that the story will be eternally transformed because it moves from Sunday to Thursday to Friday to Sunday, and not simply from Sunday to Sunday. We know that anyway. The crowd should have known it as well.

If they would have been listening at all, they would have heard him talking about his own death all the way along. Every time he broached the subject, there was a kind of psychic shift in the topic of the conversation: “No, Jesus, let’s not talk about this.”

“Messianic expectation,” the biblical scholars call it. What the people wanted in a messiah. And on Palm Sunday, it’s not yet quite clear that they are not going to get what they think they want.

Theologian William Placher writes that “Jesus is a monarch unlike any other, who arrives not on a war stallion but on the foal of a donkey, no doubt looking a little ridiculous in the midst of a triumphant procession.” (Jesus the Savior, page 116)

Theologian Douglas John Hall’s wonderful book called Why Christian? serves as a kind of ongoing dialogue between a composite college student, filled with questions, and a teacher-mentor. Here are parts of one exchange. The student asks “ …isn’t it rather strange associating God with a person who not only lived so long ago but for all intents and purposes was a loser? Dead at thirty-something? Rejected by nearly everybody, even his own followers? Crying out in pain and loneliness from his cross? What sort of model of human life is this Jesus, anyway?” (Page 17)

And the teacher responds. “(...you are right…) If power and glory in the commonly understood sense were the essence of God…then God would have to be particularized by a very different sort of human mediator than Jesus was. A mediator who is identified with the powerless and inglorious of the earth; a mediator despised and rejected above all by the powerful and glorious; a mediator whose ‘kingdom’ is made up of harlots and fishermen and hated tax collectors and broken people – such a mediator is hardly your average monarchic type!” (Page 28)

We should have known this all along, had we been paying attention. Remember, this is the one who said that in order to fully live one’s life, one would have to give it away. Remember, this is the one who said that the first would be last and the last first. Remember, this is the one who said that the ones who mourn, who are poor in spirit, who are meek and merciful and persecuted and reviled – they are happy and blessed.

Remember all these things, even on a pep rally kind of day like today when we wave the palms and sing the most triumphant hymns we can find. We are not wrong to do such things. We simply need to be reminded that the triumph of Jesus is different than any other triumph, different from the triumph we seek and expect, but yet most certainly the triumph that the world needs.

I am not sure what that does to all our cherished sports analogies – “Nice guys finish last,” baseball manager Leo Durocher once said. “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” football coach Vince Lombardi once said. Those feel rather formidable, if not downright intimidating, in the face of “it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

And not to draw Jesus into the world of diversions, but there is most certainly a Palm Sunday ethic at play, which demands that the way we live our lives is a reflection of these commitments. Mercy. Meekness. Humility. Even as images of a toppled statue in downtown Baghdad defined past week, even then, can this ethic be somehow at play?

Dwight Eisenhower, general, president, baptized a Presbyterian in his adult life, has been in the news these days. At the conclusion of World War II, Eisenhower spoke in London: “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends. Conceivably a commander may have been professionally superior. He may have given everything of his heart and mind to meet the spiritual and physical needs of his comrades. He may have written a chapter that will glow forever in the pages of military history. Still, even such a man--if he existed--would sadly face the facts that his honors cannot hide in his memories the crosses marking the resting places of the dead. They cannot soothe the anguish of the widow, or the orphan, whose husband or father will not return.”

We might remember those words in the days and weeks to come, in the face of military triumph, as we seek to provide leadership in the re-building of a nation in a community of nations.

We heard a story a bit ago, all very mysterious. Jesus sends a couple of his followers off to find his mode of transportation into the city. And we are told that it was to fulfill a centuries old prophecy: “Your king is coming to you, humble…” Humble, it says, whether that is the image of this king, or our own lives, or the world in which we live. Humble – a different kind of triumph.

And he enters the city, and we are told that the whole city is in turmoil. And they don’t know the half of it.

Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “There was a time when the church was…not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society…if the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring.” (See pages 112 and 113 in Placher)

That is what this day, this week is about. That is what the journey we share, the journey Jesus shares with us, is about. Authenticity and integrity. Hope in the face of fear. Love in the face of death. Triumph, true triumph, that will make all things new and all things alive. Amen