Sermons

Cornerstone Incarnate

Palm Sunday

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  April 4, 2004                                    Luke 19:28-40

We begin an important week this morning – Holy Week as a term is something of an understatement. The schedule is printed in your bulletin. On Maundy Thursday evening, we will celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and experience through word and music the Passion story. Two joint services – one here at 12:15 with our neighbors from the Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word and one with our friends from Downtown United Presbyterian Church at Downtown Church on Friday evening at 7:00 p.m. will mark Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, we will greet the day at 6:30 a.m. at C.R.C.D.S., and then worship here at Third Church at 9:00 and 11:00. Invite a friend, and be present as you are able to experience these important days in the life of the church and the world, and in each of our lives.

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The late ethicist William Stringfellow wrote that we Christians love Palm Sunday so much because we love a parade. He may have been on to something. This is no Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade – no larger than life Barney's or Bullwinkle's or Snoopy's or Pikachu's floating down Broadway. And it is no Rose Bowl parade either – we are certainly minus the elaborate and exotic flora, unless you count the palm branches that the original parade revelers used to cover the ground and that every grade school boy since has turned into a sword or some other form of weaponry.

We love this parade, perhaps because we are participants rather then mere observers. I remember marching into the church as a kid, bright and shiny, parents beaming. Perhaps you do as well, as we have just done a moment ago.

In Jerusalem on this day, or at least more than a few years ago when I was a college student, literally thousands of students joined in a parade – European mostly, a few American. We sang and marched. It was all pretty glorious. It’s more dangerous now to march into the holy city. Somehow, I thought this week, that element of danger, real danger, is more than a little appropriate, and possibly more accurate.

One of the themes of this coming Holy Week will be memory, what we remember and how we remember and why we remember. We so love this parade, as evidently did the first crowd of branch wavers. Yet their memory, like ours, is very short term and fades quickly.

We could spend considerable time this morning on the logistics of it all – quite intricate, quite mysterious. Jesus has all the arrangements determined – echoes of Old Testament prophecy being fulfilled right in front of us. When asked about the colt, the disciples told the owner that “the Lord needs it.” They had no idea. They had no idea that he needed it so much more than as a mode of transportation.

The need has been articulated from the very beginning. Throughout his ministry Jesus has been pointed to Jerusalem. He has repeatedly told his followers that he will go there and be killed. Passion is predicted time after time after time. They either don’t get it, or barely do, and when they do get it they dismiss it as so much nonsense. And yet here they are. Setting off to find a colt, or a donkey, the inevitability of it all staring them in the face.

And still we love a parade. We would like to think that if we had been Jesus’ handlers, we would have seen through it all. Stay away from that city – it is dangerous – there are people out for you. Jesus knew that –we forgot it. And so it all unfolds.

I am not theologian enough to understand this point, but it does seem to place the issue of “blame” in an entirely different context. We believe that from the very beginning that God’s intentions, made incarnate in Jesus, the Word made flesh, God’s intentions were to have these events unfold as they do, God’s “foreordained, redemptive purposes,” scholar Alan Culpepper calls it. The Old Testament prophesies it – Jesus confirms it.

And yet we have sought to attach blame, responsibility, throughout our history. To all of us, in our better and more honest moments, our common humanity. To another group, the Jews, in our worst moments. “Christ killers,” we have called them.

Our memories are so short. The Pharisees, the Jewish authorities (who do not make out so well in Mel Gibson’s portrayal), see it coming with clarity. A mob scene is developing, that will turn quickly into another kind of mob scene in a matter of days. “Teacher, shut your followers up.”

And Jesus, who knows what is coming with crystal and poignant clarity, remembers as well. He remembers what had happened already and he remembers what will happen. He remembers for us, even as he becomes our memory. And he remembers the prophecy from the prophet Habakkuk, “the very stones will cry out from the wall.”

In the face of injustice, in the face of oppression, in the face of cynicism, in the face of intolerance, in the face of hatred, in the face of death – the stones will cry out when we cannot or will not. Our voices may be silent, from indifference or exhaustion or the mistaken belief that one lone voice cannot make a difference. But when our voices are silent, even the stones will shout and sing in protest and testimony and admiration, until we too hear them and join the chorus.

But for now our memories are short, and we love this parade, though we know that soon the one whose praises we are singing will be rejected. The psalmist reminds us that the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, and we imagine that work site, where stone after stone after stone is thrown into the slag pile because the powers that be determine that it’s inadequate for the task. And this one, hailed for a moment with jubilant “hosannas,” will soon be like those worthless stones, tossed aside or worse. “Crucify him,” we will say.

And though our memories are short, he will become our memory, and remember us. And because we love a parade, we will do well to remember that this day’s parade is in point of fact one leg of a much grander parade, that this day’s drama unfolds as a pivotal scene, but not the first and certainly not the last. It has been leading to this, and it is leading from this to events later this week. For the moment, we know he had to get there in such a way as to make the prophecy come true, and our hearts happy. We forget why he is entering and where he is headed, but perhaps that forgetting is also part of the story. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

At the risk of repeating a story, the story of this parade and its meaning came home to me quite wonderfully more than a few years ago. A response rightly made. A church school teacher approached me after worship with several of the children in her class. And she gave me this. What’s that, I asked. Why, it’s a rock. A painted rock. And then this explanation: “We have just read the Palm Sunday story, and we heard strange words about even if all of us could not talk, could not shout, could not sing, that the very rocks themselves would start to sing and shout and say how much they loved Jesus. And so we have imagined what a singing rock would look like, and this is it.” It was cute and charming, but more so, it was true.

We cannot imagine the parade and we certainly cannot imagine the rejection. And yet it is our story, and we are invited to join in, and remember, because we love it, with all its “fragile possibility” (Culpepper, page 370), and because it loves us, with a love that is deep and broad and high, wondrous love, that is our rock and our redeemer. Amen.