Sermons

The Gates

Palm Sunday

John Wilkinson                               Third Presbyterian Church  March 20, 2005                        Psalm 118:19-29, Luke 19:28-40

Now begins the most uplifting, powerful, poignant, joyous, heartbreaking, profound, transformative week of the year, of human history. Holy Week. Allow me to rehearse the events. Thursday evening, we will celebrate the Lord’s Supper, on that night particularly as a remembrance of the Last Supper, and then we will rehearse those last minutes with a service of Tenebrae, a progressive extinguishing of light that is very moving. On Friday, we will have two worship opportunities: at 12:15 next door with our neighbors at the Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word and here at 7:30 p.m. with our friends from the Downtown United Presbyterian Church. Many of you will remember former Third Church Associate Pastor Pat Youngdahl, who now serves as Interim Co-Pastor at Downtown Church, and who will preach Friday evening. On Sunday, we will gather with many other churches at 6:30 a.m. on the hill at the divinity school, and then we will worship here in celebration of the resurrection at 9:00 and 11:00. Please attend as you are able, and use this week, perhaps, as a time to introduce a friend or neighbor or co-worker to life at Third Presbyterian Church. And may these days hold for you blessing and hope.

The artists called it “saffron,” but pundits referred it as everything from “traffic cone orange” to the color of “orange sherbet.” “Saffron” it will be for me today. I do not know how many of you actually saw it. I speak, of course, of a project called “The Gates,” installed in Central Park for 16 days in February. The gates were actually steel frames with orange colored, saffron colored, material hanging from them. 7,503 gates to be exact, 16 feet tall, varying in width from 5 ½ to 18 feet on 23 miles of walkways in Central Park.

The artists, Christo and Jean-Claude, have done similar, large, textile works of art before, to equal response. Parts scorn, indifference, bemusement. Two of David Letterman’s Top Ten questions about The Gates included “will it improve my cell phone reception?” and “when I get mugged by a guy hiding behind a giant curtained arch, which city agency should I sue?”

After the fact, though, reports were generally favorable. New York City residents, who work hard not to appear to be enthusiastic about anything, actually showed up and looked, walking through the park with a kind of quiet appreciation. Tourists were equally pleased.

I, for one, appreciated the effort. An appreciator of art, though not particualry a connisseuer, I have come to value things like this. Not unlike our Horses on Parade project several years back, they create a sense of public commonality, whimsy, conversation.

But I valued The Gates for other reasons as well. Did you know that Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed Central Park and who designed Rochester’s Mt. Hope Cemetery, intended for Central Park to have a series of gates? They were never built. Still, the names continue: Mariners Gate; Boys and Girls Gate; Artists Gate; Emigrants Gate; Explorers Gate; Inventors Gate.

Did you know that the Old City of Jerusalem, the city to which, and through which, Jesus marched on that Palm Sunday so long ago, also had gates, whose names are still in use today. The location of shops in the Old City is indicated by proximity to a particular gate. Tourists meet tourists at a particular gate. Religious and ethnic groups will enter certain gates and not others. There is the Sheep Gate, also known as Stephen's Gate, or the Lions Gate. There is the Old Gate, near the location of the present-day Holy Sepulcher. The Valley Gate, the Beautiful Gate, the Golden Gate, which was later sealed. The New Gate, the Jaffa Gate, the Damascus Gate, Herod’s Gate.

The point is architectural as well as theological. Gates, like doors, are things in themselves, but their function truly is to be ignored. They are portals to something else. The gates in Central Park or Old Jerusalem or at our homes lead us from one place to another. They are entryways, or exits.

This building has some extraordinary doors, wood and stained glass of great beauty. Take a moment to notice them sometime. Their function, though, is to let people in, primarily, or to keep them out at certain times, and to keep the warm air in or out, or the cold air, depending on the season.

We function with gates all the time. Some are more useful, or effective, or faithful, than others.

As some of you know, I lived in Chicago for many years. The church I served was located in a portion of the city called the Gold Coast. Just a mile west of us was a public housing development called Cabrini-Green, in its day one of the most notorious housing projects in the nation. When one drove from the Gold Coast to Cabrini, one could detect an unofficial, though by no means insignificant, “gate,” that kept people of means, typically white, out, and kept people with little access to resources, in this case African-American, in.

Cabrini buildings themselves had an unofficial gate function to them as well. Buildings had gang affiliations, and if you were not a member of a particular gang, you would not enter those gates without fear of gun violence. I had permission to enter a specific building, unofficial permission, that is, given by a gang, frisked, not by police but by a gang member, but that meant I was persona non grata in any other Cabrini building.

Denominations serve as gates, it seems to me, sometimes beneficially, sometimes less so.

At a memorial service yesterday afternoon, we heard an adult child recount one of the last questions uttered by the then-dying parent. “What’s the biggest problem we face today?” I spent a few moments answering it in my own mind. One way to answer the question is “gates.” Who’s in? Who’s out? We live in a tension between “y’all come” on the one hand and “we can’t let just anyone in” on the other. Racially, ethnically, globally, economically. Certainly religiously. Think about all the ways in which our world functions, either to welcome people in or shut them out.

In baseball, the past decade, a glorious one by all counts, will now be marked by an asterisk, real or otherwise, based on the question whether a player used steroids or not to accomplish their amazing feats. It would be a trivial question but only up to the point when high school baseball players are known for the same qualities. Do you “juice” or not?

Who’s in or who’s out, and are the gates we construct ones of welcome or ones of exclusion? And from what do we exit and into what do we enter? We each have our own gates, do we not? Some perform admirably for us, some less so, regardless of our functional awareness. Our emotions. Our relationships. Our awarenesses. Our gifts and talents. Our behaviors.

We know the story very well. The mysterious location of an animal to ride, the triumphant entry, the waving branches, the shouts of acclamation. We know the story well. The story itself does not say which gate he entered, though one suspects that he entered from the east, given the geography of it all.

It was certainly a gate of mixed emotions and mixed messages. A gate marked “hosanna” this day and “crucify” in but a few short hours. Luke’s account this morning continues with the poignant reminder that Jesus wept when he entered the city. He knew what was coming, and the weight of the news must have been so great.

We are spending a great deal of time these days, in the life of the church and beyond, on that very question. Why? Traditional answers intermingle with more contemporary ones. Making restitution to a vengeful God intermingles with an understanding of Jesus’ suffering, his solidarity, with all of us. Atonement theories, they are called, and none is complete and all are useful.

Fred Craddock, the well-known preacher and teacher of preachers answers the “why” question honestly: “I don’t know.”

We are called to think on that question with humility and integrity, and will attempt to do so this week. Nonetheless, while we face the mystery of the “why” question, we also face the inevitability of the event itself. Even as Jesus entered through the gates of the city in triumph, he knew, and if we have been paying attention, we know. Every so often in the gospel narrative, Jesus speaks a word about the inevitability of his death. We ignore them because we do not want to think of such things, but they are there nonetheless.

So he knew, as he entered through the gates of the city, what would happen, and that it would be painful and shameful. We do not yet know. We are awestruck at the possibilities, as writes scholar Alan Culpepper. (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX, page 370 and ff.)

What might be! Political power and religious triumph. He knew, but they did not, that the possibility gathered up in this event was fragile at best, and even more than that. Who this messiah, this king, would be, would defy expectations and set the definition on its head.

The crowd was not wrong, therefore, to wave its palms and throw their clothing on the ground and shout joyously. They were not wrong, nor are we. We must engage this drama of triumph in order to engage fully all of the drama that is to come. That is what this day does for us. It allows us to throw a parade, and we do love a parade.

At the head of that parade is one who will defy all expectations, and who will make all things new. At the head of that parade is one whose business it has been to knock down certain gates and build others; who said “knock and the door will be open to you,” who said “for the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life,” who said “I am the gate for the sheep...Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

This day is about the one who enters the city through this gate, a gate of tears as well as a gate of triumph, that whatever its name, is called love and justice and hope.

But it is also about the rest of us, who initially watch the parade from the sidelines, sitting on the curb, but who at some point get up, fold up our lawn chairs, and join in. We realize that whatever gates there are that define our lives, that the right ones will not open and the wrong ones will not close if we do not join in. We know that by joining in, life will never be the same again. Rocky spots will not be averted, but they will be traversed differently, hopefully, in community.

And we will learn with poet Joyce Killmer that not only will our journey through the gate transform us, but all the world: “So let the gate swing open/However poor the yard,/Lest weary people visit you/And find their passage barred;/Unlatch the door at midnight/And let your lantern's glow/Shine out to guide the traveler's feet/ To you across the snow./ Unlock the door this evening/And let your gate swing wide,/ Let all who ask for shelter/ Come speedily inside./ ”

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates,” the Psalmist wrote, “and be lifted up.” An invitation to join a parade, and more so, a promise, that the gates of righteousness will be open to us, the gates of peace and love, hope and joy, even the gates of life. Blessed be the one that comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Amen.