Sermon: B Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021, "Which procession are we in?"

 B Palm Sunday SJUCC 2021

Mark 11:1-11

March 28, 2021

         Crowds of people descend on Jerusalem.  It is the holy time of Passover, and Jews from all over the known world, are making pilgrimage to the city.  Passover is the Jewish celebration of that archetypal story we talked about way back in the fall when I began my ministry in Jackson.  It was this crazy story which told people long held in slavery and bondage, oppression and domination, that God heard their cries, saw their suffering, and had come to deliver them.  They were not Pharaoh’s subjects.  Rather, they were the Children of Israel, God’s beloved.  This is the story the Jewish people are celebrating as they make their way to Jerusalem. 

Some, come to see the pomp and circumstance associated with the celebration.  Others, come to the city as curious onlookers.  Still others, come as a form of devotion to their God with a recognition that Jerusalem, the “City of Peace,” had a long history within Jewish faith and life. 

           Picture, from the west of Jerusalem, comes the annual imperial procession, like one that had come from the imperial rulers of Judea and Samaria before and after Rome and Rome’s Pontius Pilate.  These processions took place during the major festivals of the Jewish people, as a way of enforcing the identity of the Jewish people as Rome saw them--as conquered and occupied people.  Such imperial displays would have been incredibly important during the festival days of the Jewish Passover, a celebration remembering the Jewish liberation and deliverance from imperial power.  Passover remembers the Jewish people as liberated and delivered by God.  The imperial procession reminded the Jewish they were enslaved and occupied by Rome and its Caesar, the current boot on their neck. 

The Jewish pilgrims flocking into Jerusalem would have known this imperial procession well.  Rome wanted to make sure the Jewish people knew this procession well, that they should expect these processions every Passover. 

 

Imagine the imperial processions arrival in the city—a visual panoply of imperial power:  calvary on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold.  Sounds:  the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums, the swirling of dust.  The eyes of the silent onlookers:  some curious, some awed, some resentful.  Pilate’s procession displayed not only imperial power but also Roman imperial theology.  According to this theology, the Emperor was not only the ruler of Rome but the Son of God.[1]

 

If you can hold both the throng of Jews in Jerusalem in your imagination and the imperial procession entering in from the west of Jerusalem, the stage is now set for carefully choreographed, religio-political street theater about to take place on the other side of Jerusalem intended to critique not only  Roman State power but also Messianic triumphalism, rooted in violence, found in a strand of Judaism, within Jesus’s own people.[2]

           Another planned political procession arrives from the east.  We know it is planned because, in the gospel of Mark, Jesus tells the disciples that there is a colt in the town ahead of them, and that they are to go and retrieve that donkey and colt.  Whatever your view of prophecy in Scripture, whether Jesus is fulfilling prophecy or a gospel writer is characterizing Jesus’ actions as the fulfillment of Scripture, this processional invokes a Scripture from Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament.  Either Jesus is attempting to invoke a Scripture known to the Jewish people or the gospel writer is using the passage to define the content of Jesus’s mission and ministry.  For according to the prophet Zechariah, in Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament, a king would be coming to Jerusalem humble and riding on a colt and the foal of a donkey.[3]

            That Scripture reads as follows:

 

Rejoice, greatly, O daughter, Zion!  Shout aloud, O daughter, Jerusalem!  Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.  That king will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and the king shall command peace to the nations.[4]

 

Notice, first of all, that the title is a political one—king, one who is at the same level as a Roman Caesar.   And this king shall banish war from the earth.  Chariots and war horses shall be no more.  Bows shall be broken.  Peace shall be commanded to all the nations.  This king shall be a king of peace.

           This procession occurring on the east side of Jerusalem is to directly counter what is known to be going on to the west of Jerusalem.  Pilate’s procession incarnated the power, glory, and violence of Empire.  Jesus’s procession incarnated the Empire of a nonviolent God.  This counter, this conflict and clash between two Empires, sets the stage for all of the rest of Holy Week.  Peace by one Empire was achieved through military might, retaliatory, escalating violence, and economic domination.  All the trappings were present in this procession to remind the Jewish people how peace would be kept and pursued—armor, helmets, weapons, war horses.  Peace by the other Empire removed the remnants, the uniforms, the tools, and the mechanisms of war—chariots and war horses removed, battle bows are banished.

           Down through the centuries, that clash of Empires has offered faithful Christians those same distinct choices—two arrivals, two entrances into Jerusalem, two processions.  Biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan ask the questions: “Which procession are we in?  Which procession do we want to be in?  This is the question of Palm Sunday, and of the week that is about to unfold.”[5]  Are we still sure we want to walk that hard road Jesus is walking?  Are we still sure we went to be about that kind of faithfulness to the Christian journey—faithfulness to a king who leads with non-violent confrontation?

           Borg and Crossan go on to write, “[O]ur Christian Lent is about repentance for being in the wrong [procession] and preparation to abandon it for its alternative.”[6]  Lent is about repentance, turning and returning to a faithful path.  Lent is about preparing to abandon Pilate’s procession for the processional of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant from a small, backwater town just outside of Sepphoris.  Jesus made space for his ministry and message through creative, confrontational non-violence.  In that way of living—the mutual healing, the sharing of food, in the ne’er-do-wells and beaten down gathered around those tables, Jesus helped his followers imagine a God who was not only engaged but courageous and non-violent. 

Jesus had a ministry and message that was about sharing food and freedom, healing and hospitality—a belief that God did not look upon people and see them as Roman subjects but as Children of God.  That is how God always sees us.  No matter how we may see ourselves, God looks and sees us as dear, beloved, and a precious creation.  That title, “Child of God” is not meant to indicate that we remain children.  “Child of God” is a mythological title meaning we are birthed and re-birthed, that we turn and return time and time again to a path.   That blessed path forever communicates God’s deep and passionate love for the world.  That is God’s hope for us, that we live out that mythological title regardless of what the consequences for doing so, no matter what the Empire would do to us.

           Two processions are about to take place in Jerusalem, from opposite sides of the city.  Which one are we in?  Which one do we want to be in?  Repent.  Repent.  Amen.

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[1] John Dominic Crossan and Marcus J. Borg, The Last Week:  A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), audiobook.  This book is the basis for today’s sermon.

[2] Ched Myers, “Palm Sunday as Subversive Street Theater:  Sixth Sunday in Lent (Mk. 11:1-11),” Radical Discipleship, March 26, 2015.  https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2015/03/26/palm-sunday-as-subversive-street-theatre-sixth-sunday-in-lent-mk-111-11/. Myers goes on to say that this action by Jesus even repudiates the Messianic triumphalism found within Judaism.  Images from the parade called to mind several biblical precedents: the colt signifying triumphant Judah (Gen 49:11); the return of the Ark to Israel (I Sam 6:7ff); the declaration of Jehu as upstart king (2 Kg 9:13); a royal processional hymn (Ps 118:25f). And the fact that the parade began “near the Mount of Olives” (11:1) would have brought to mind the final apocalyptic battle between Israel and her enemies spoken of by Zechariah (see Zech 14:1-5).  This theater also alludes to more recent events. It recalls the victorious military procession of Simon Maccabaeus, the great guerilla general who liberated Palestine from Hellenistic rule some two centuries before. According to I Maccabbees 13:51 Simon entered Jerusalem “with praise and palm branches…and with hymns and songs.” And there was an incident of Messianic posturing contemporary to Mark as well. Mid-way through the Judean revolt against Rome (66- 70 C.E.), according to the Jewish historian Josephus, the guerilla captain Menahem had marched through Jerusalem heavily armed and “like a king,” in an unsuccessful attempt to become the sole leader of the rebel provisional government.  But Mark uses all of these popular Messianic images precisely in order to subvert them. This is the point of the odd story about “commandeering” a colt, which occupies fully half the parade narrative (11:2-6). Mark is consciously re-organizing the symbolism of this parade around a different Zecharian image which is expressly anti-military.   See also, Bo Sanders, “Palm Sunday Is the Most Political Sunday,” Home-Brewed Christianity, March 25, 2013.  https://homebrewedchristianity.com/2013/03/25/palm-sunday-is-the-most-political-sunday/

[3] Zecharaiah 9:9.  Scholars believe that Matthew read the passage wrong and saw two animals involved in this poetic mythology.  It is believed that Zechariah is, instead, using repetition to talk about one animal, a donkey/colt.

[4] Zechariah 9:9-10a

[5] Cross and Borg, The Last Week.

[6] Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, “Jesus Final Week:  Collision Course,” Christian Century, March 20, 2007, p. 29

Sermon: Exodus/Wilderness Series, "Spiritual but not religious? Puhhhhhlease!" October 4, 2020

A Exodus 4 SJUCC World Wide Communion 2020 
Exodus 12:1-15a 
October 4, 2020 

           Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel, a United Church of Christ author and pastor out of First Congregational Church UCC in Dubuque, Iowa, wrote a very popular column for many pastors some years ago that she parlayed into a popular book.  When it was posted on Facebook, I wrote, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  Several others wrote, “Finally!”  Or “Preach!” or “wise words.”  Her book sparked a conversation that first led to much acclaim but later went through some backlash as people started to hear her words judgmental and grumpy against people who no longer find involvement in the institutional church meaningful.

Rev. Daniel is part of a UCC writer’s group and a regular contributor to the UCC website.  This particular article was titled, “Spiritual but not religious?  Please stop boring me.”[1]  She wrote about a nightmare most any pastor has faced.  Tracy and I have each had this experience.  You end up on an airplane sitting next to a stranger who finds out you are a pastor.  Oh, no—trapped, especially if you are in a window seat.  These conversations, inevitably, go one of two ways.  One, the person believes their brand of Christianity is the same as yours and spends the rest of the plane ride telling you what’s what in the world . . . assuming you agree.  Or, two, and this is what Rev. Daniel experienced, the person tells you that they are spiritual but not religious and they can find God much more easily in a beautiful sunset.

           Rev. Daniel effectively rolls her eyes at this statement, wondering if the person recognizes that pastors and congregational members are also sometimes released out of their church buildings, into the wild, to also see beautiful sunsets.  It is easy, Rev. Daniel believes, to follow the popular culture and claim an individual and private spirituality in sunsets.  “There is nothing challenging,” she writes, “having deep thoughts all by oneself.”  The tough part is to work through and cross-stitch and darn community together in a local church setting where people can call you on your stuff, or, “heaven forbid, disagree with you.”  Please stop boring me with your culturally-laden, individualistic, private spirituality.  Do the hard work to weave together community when people have their annoying habits, call you on your stuff, and never seem to have a positive word for the things you contribute.  And do it all with declining budgets and numbers in the mainline church.  Do the hard work of using warp and weft to create a beautiful tapestry. 

           Indeed, the literal meaning of the root word for religion means “to bind together.”  So maybe Rev. Daniel has it right.  To claim to be spiritual and not religious may suggest that a person is not only interested in the private meaning a sunset can offer, but also wants to avoid all the messiness of what it means to be in human relationship.  How do we work through those oppositional, naysaying, hypocritical betrayers anyway?  Sometimes that is the very difficult work of community quilting or church.

           Part of what Rev. Daniel is saying is that one may fall out of bed and be spiritual, but being religious requires our hard work and intention.   We are a healthy community when, through hard work and intention, we learn how to bind together by how we challenge each other, sing in harmony, disagree with each other, and, finally, find mutual meaning.  Conflict in all the beauty of God’s given diversity is inevitable.  Continuing unhealthy habits, patterns, and ways of being that lead to avoiding conflict at all costs is not what brings healing, repair, and the darning we need to continue our community pilgrimage.

           I think there are very good reasons why people no longer find the institutional church meaningful.  I get that.  I do think, however, Rev. Daniel reminds us that sometimes people are leaving the institutional church out of a wider cultural narrative that wrongly lauds individualism over necessary hard communal work.  This “spirituality” too often circles the wagons to make sure me and mine are taken care of . . .  but I’m not so sure I am all that concerned about you and yours. 

I think Rev. Daniel rightly observes that sometimes institutional churches are suffering losses because community work is hard work—across race, gender, class, sexuality, and age groups.  Finding the joy in our differences takes time and effort.  And though we may be able to observe the transcendent beauty and color of a sunset alone, God created us to share in our joy and our pain, that our joy and pain might be more meaningful, truthful, and whole when that joy or pain is mutual.

           Some years ago, when we lived just outside of Rockford, Illinois, our family was honored to be invited to the family Passover meal of Rabbis Binah and Shlomoe Wing.  Binah was the first-ever female rabbi in Rockford, Illinois, and she became one of my closest colleagues

Often in contrast to the silent, individual reflection of our sacred meal, this sacred Passover meal had noisy and playful children involved, the laughter of friends and family, and the telling of communal pain and joy.  We also had good brisket!

Today we share in a mutual meal, a special meal, a meal we say is a sacrament within our tradition.  We believe this special meal says something about us corporately, as a community and a church.  In the midst of the separation and distance of pandemic, in the incredible amount of hard work and good intention found at St. John’s United Church of Christ, what does this special meal and how we celebrate it say about us? 

What do your special meals say about you and your family?  Who is invited?  Who is not?  What food is served?  Where does that food come from?  Who makes it?  How is it prepared and presented?  How does the meal begin?  What words can you expect to hear at every one of these special meals?  Is there any order to how the food is served?  How are children and youth included or not included?  How are children and youth mentored into full adulthood through placement around or at a different table, in conversation, and through questions asked of them?  What questions do children and youth get to ask?  Does the meal say something not only about your family’s identity but about your community or national identity?  (For example, a Thanksgiving Dinner can say something not only about our family but also about our religious and national history and identity.)  In the Mulberry family, historically, Thanksgiving Dinner was about plugging into your patriotism and the timing of the National Football League.  As a pastor just west of two Native American reservations, I learned that Thanksgiving Dinner meant re-lived pain and trauma.  So critical questions about meaning were always asked.

           All of these are questions the Jewish Passover seeks to answer.    After 430 years of slavery, of someone and something else telling the Children of Israel who they were and who they would be, who God is, and, most importantly, who they were and were to be in the future in relationship with God, God wants them to imagine who they are differently.  God wants the Children of Israel to memorialize what it takes to be a free and liberated people.  They are not slaves.  And they are not to develop an identity, policies and practices, that make them slaveholders.

           In the Passover, bitter herbs are eaten and food prepared to represent the bricks and mortar of slavery.  Unleavened bread is made to remind them that this holy time was also a time when they had to get-out-of-Dodge quick, no time to wait for any bread to rise, and that the whole meal  was to be eaten with a sense of trepidation and fear.  If you think the same God who would not take Pharaoh’s b.s. in cruelty and torture is somehow going to make you exceptional and take your cruelty and torture b.s., you are sadly mistaken—that’s what the trepidation and fear is all about. 

Eggs are a symbol of life and mean a multitude of things.  Eggs are a reminder of the loss of Egyptian life, the mourning done by Egyptian parents .  But the egg also represents that the longer the Hebrew people were cooked in oppression, the harder and stronger they became.

           Every year the Jewish people say words that remind them that they were once aliens and immigrants in Egypt, so they should treat aliens and immigrants with special care and protection in their land. 

Children are included and invited to ask questions so that the simple truths of the story can be told once more.  They are included in play and fun, an important part of children’s spirituality, as they hide some of the unleavened bread.  An empty chair is left to leave a place for the prophet Elijah, a prophet from another era, who re-called the people to their highest values of remembering those must vulnerable.  In leaving that empty chair, the prophet Elijah is invited to every Passover.

Rabbi Shai Held writes that the Passover, this special meal described in Exodus 12, teaches the deepest truth of who God is—“the God of the downtrodden and degraded.”[2]  By participating in the Passover meal then, Jewish people remember that they are created in the image of God, participate in that image, and become a people who care for the weak, free the wrongfully imprisoned, and raise up the cast down.

           One of the final acts of many Passover meals, not the one we attended, but many, is to eat the food reclining, a way of recognizing that the Jewish people are slaves no more and that God does not intend for them to be slaves.  God wants, intends, and desires their freedom, leisure, and rest.  So eat Passover reclining in leisure, mindful you are no longer slaves, and God desires your rest.

           The Passover, Rabbi Held writes, is a counter to the despair and hopelessness of those who say that nothing ever changes and that the status quo will hold.  Generation after generation, after hundreds of years, these slaves are dehumanized and have the dignity beaten out of them.  Nothing will change.  This is the way of the world.  But then, the meal says, after eating the bitter herbs of slavery for so long, everything changes.  And the meal is eaten year after year, and this simple story is told, Rabbi Held writes, “until every slave is freed and all oppression is rooted out.”

           Knowing that this is the special meal, Passover, out of which our special meal, the Sacrament of Holy Communion, is based, through hard work and intention, we must collectively decide not only what this special meal means for us now but what it calls us to be in the future. 

           Exodus 12 reminds the Jewish people that, in Passover, they are not only called to be a spiritual people but also a religious people, tied together in a single garment of destiny.  The signs and wonders of God are not experienced and explained isolated as individuals but tied together as a community.  As we receive communion today, celebrating with Christians around the world as we do so, what words and actions tell us who we are, who we are in relation to one another, who God is, and who God is in relation to us, and finally, what we are called to be in the world.  Told again and again, what is our simple story? 

As Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel wrote, anyone can be spiritual and think deep thoughts alone but how boring is that?   We are St. John’s United Church of Christ in Jackson, Michigan.  We call each other on our stuff.  We disagree with one another.  World Communion Sunday calls us to the table to do the hard work together.  We will work toward mutual meaning so that all of the world might know that we are Christians—not only by the deep meaning we find in sunsets alone, but in our shared joy and pain, by our love.  And as we do so, God is praised.  Amen. 

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[1]Rev. Lillian Daniel, “Spiritual but not religious?  Please stop boring me.”  http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily-devotional/spiritual-but-not-religious.html, August 31, 2011.

[2]Rabbi Shai Held, “The Deepest Truth About God:  How the Exodus teaches is about ethical passion.” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2000/01/The-Deepest-Truth-About-God.aspx