Walking in Your Footsteps
Palm Sunday
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
April 9, 2006
Luke
19: 28-40
It was, and may yet be again, a great American city. New Orleans.
It is a cultural Mecca: the music – Preservation Hall
and Tipatina’s and the great roaming funerals. The cuisine
– beignets at Café Du Monde and breakfast at Brennan’s
and jambalaya and crawfish etoufee. The wrought iron scrollwork
of the French Quarter and a streetcar named “Desire.”
Writers – Walker Percy and William Faulkner and Tennessee
Williams and Anne Rice. The extraordinary people, and the extraordinary
mix of people. An American microcosm. A global microcosm.
It was, and may yet be again, a great American city. Not perfect,
but great. So much so that Hurricane Katrina will stand as an
iconic moment in our shared history. It revealed a great deal
about a great deal. One of the wonderful things it revealed
was the strength of the human spirit.
Lent, as you know, is preceded by Mardi Gras. Explanations
about the origins of Mardi Gras – Fat Tuesday –
abound. Some are theological – one eats as much “bad”
food as one can because austerity begins the next day. Some
are economic – because one cannot eat “bad”
food beginning the next day, one must consume every last drop
of butter imaginable so that it will not go bad in the next
40 days.
Mardi Gras has evolved into something quite remarkable. If
you think our party down in the Celebration Center is rowdy,
wait until you experience the real thing. You all should know,
in fact, that in the months leading up to our first trip to
the Gulf Coast, we planned and planned, strategized and prioritized.
It was not until much later that I realized that the first team
chose the date it did to go down to New Orleans because they
wanted to experience Mardi Gras. Very clever, I thought, though
they will deny this.
At any rate, this Mardi Gras was unlike any other in recent
history. There were some who argued that it should not happen
at all, that because of the devastation of the hurricane, the
toll of human suffering, the extreme price tag, that it would
be more prudent to lay low. No way, said the city’s residents
and thousands and thousands of others who streamed into the
city, including 14 fairly well behaved Rochesterians. “Laissez
les bon temps roulez – let the good times roll.”
And they did – a combination of music, consumption, government
parody.
Some of the parades were little and focused on individual neighborhoods.
Some were grander, floats and music and plastic beads flying
everywhere. Parades witnessing, to be sure, to the devastation
and political dysfunction and cultural fissures, but witnessing
also, and more strongly than could be imagined, to the power
of the human spirit, and persistence, and perseverance.
Parades are generally happy occasions, filled with ebullient
music and floats and balloons. We Protestants have managed to
keep today’s Palm Sunday parade in that state, upbeat,
and we then fast forward to next Sunday with nary a pause in
between. But what happens between this Sunday and next defines
the events of seven days hence, and those events stand in the
shadows even today as we wave palms and sing wonderfully joyous
hymns. That is to say, you can’t get to Easter without
going through Good Friday, as much as we’d like it to
be otherwise.
The big question is why do we do it at all. Not this Sunday:
this Sunday is obvious. But why do we engage the full range
of events from triumphal entry to final meal to betrayal to
ignominious death? Why?
Part of the reason could be found in New Orleans just a few
days less than 40 ago. Laughing and partying in the face of
natural disaster, in the face of broken homes and broken families,
in the face of government response.
“Death, where is thy sting?” our story asks, so
that even as Jesus enters the great city to wild acclaim, he
knows what is coming. We don’t, yet, though we have heard
rumblings and intimations. We have chosen to ignore them. Not
Jesus. I will die, I will die, I will die, he had said, repeatedly.
No, no, no, we have replied.
And even today, all the pieces have fallen into place. Each
gospel offers a slight variation. A bittersweet and ironic entry.
We should trace the pattern in Luke just a bit more. The triumphal
entry, the machinations to obtain the colt, the cloaks on the
ground and the palms in the air, the disciples getting nervous
because the crowd is getting out of control.
Jesus then looks out over the city and cries. That seems about
right, does it not? He then enters the temple and creates a
ruckus, a seeming demonstration against religious profiteering.
Luke tells us that the people were spellbound by his actions
and his teachings. Luke also tells us that the religious leaders
and the political leaders were looking continually for a reason
to have him killed. It will be quite a week, for him, for us.
Scholar Alan Culpepper writes: “Jesus was a king, but
no ordinary one – the king of fishermen, tax collectors,
Samaritans, harlots, blind men, demoniacs, and cripples. Those
who followed Jesus were a ragtag bunch, pathetically unfit for
the grand hopes that danced in their imaginations…Jesus’
entry into Jerusalem was a moment filled with possibility,”
Culpepper writes. “Their last hope was riding on that
borrowed donkey.” (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume
IX, page 370)
I will die, he said. No, we said.
Even now, we should not be too concerned that we missed the
mark. Messianic expectation, the scholars called it –
what we expect from our messiah. The people then wanted someone
to come in, preferably on a great animal rather than a borrowed
one, preferably with regal garments rather than the old clothing
that we place before him. A powerful king to clean theological
house and take no political prisoners, to return Israel to religious
and political prominence. Wouldn’t that be our expectation
as well?
“Christian triumphalism,” theologian Douglas John
Hall calls it. Hall writes that we want to build our theology
– a theology of glory – on the abstractions of faith.
That will not work, because the specific story is a theology
of the cross. We need not speculate about God, Hall asserts.
Rather, we have this specific witness, the suffering of the
crucified Christ, intimated throughout the gospel story and
made plain and clear by this morning’s entrance into the
city. (The Cross in Our Context, pages 111-113)
The theology of the cross, Hall writes, maintains a “unique
representation of God occurring…through this genuinely
human life…One glimpses the God whom Jesus represents
as one follows the human life that he leads, the relationships
he forms, the responses he makes to power, to weakness, to illness
and death, to sin, to the demonic.” (Page 124)
That is why this parade is so important – it captures
the full humanity of Jesus even as it reflects the true humanity
of the rest of us. That is why we might connect this 2000-year-old
parade with a more recent New Orleans one. The people were not
living it up to ignore the devastation they had experienced.
They were living it up because of the devastation they had experienced,
and to give witness to the fact that despite every hardship,
their vision was of rebuilding rather than retrenchment, new
life rather than death.
Several days ago, more than a half a million people marched
in Los Angeles – quite a parade – to protest immigration
policy and to raise the cause of immigrants in a difficult political
environment. Thousands more will march in U.S. cities today
and tomorrow, including Rochester. It is a complex issue, to
be sure, but it seems also to be an opportunity to rise to our
better selves, and to live into our deepest faith commitments.
What I have realized is how little I know about the immigrant
situation in our own region. I mean not to proscribe, but I
do resonate with the comments of Bishop Matthew Clark, who said
this past week that we should seek humane solutions as the national
debate escalates and that our actions should be marked by the
values of justice and compassion. (Democrat and Chronicle, April
6, 2006, online edition)
I do not know what we should do about this, but I would invite
others to think about this with me, to learn more, to consider
a faithful response. To think about justice and compassion and
fairness, yes, and the nature of our economy and the deeper
meaning of citizenship. But also to think ever more deeply about
the one who said “whatsoever you do to the least of these,
that you do unto me,” the same one who wandered from place
to place, who entered the city in triumph with no resources,
with no power, with no home.
That is the true power of the parade this day. We gather and
give witness to the good news that even though we know what
is coming, we march in the face of it, because hope is stronger
that death, love is stronger than death, resurrection is stronger
than death. We march not to avoid reality, but to head straight
on into it, with a confidence born of this hope.
In a fine new book called What Jesus Meant, historian and author
Garry Wills writes that “the expectation created…was
of a military Messiah who would extrude the foreign rulers;
but Jesus has undercut all political pretexts. His reign is
not of this order…He comes as a thief in the night to
steal the dominion from earthly and Satanic powers by a universal
solvent of love…While others were carried away on Palm
Sunday,” Wills writes, “Jesus knew that the plaudits
would turn into shocked and disappointed anger and violence.
He rode in a swirl of acclaim to his foreseen degradation, and
he rode in fear.” (Pages 97-100)
That is our task today – to be neither over enthused
nor under enthused by the waving palms. To recognize Jesus’
sheer humanity in the rhythm of this next seven days, and to
claim our sheer humanity in the participation of all that will
happen to him.
And when the moment comes:
· To march, even when all signs would indicate otherwise.
· To march in the face of disaster and injustice and
death.
· To march through gates of righteousness and light.
· To march in the footsteps of the one to whom we will
cry out “Hosanna,” save us, even when we are not
so sure where this journey, this parade, will take us.
· To march in love and for love.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Amen.
