I have already welcomed visitors and church members to this worship service. I repeat that welcome now and elaborate on it a little. The print advertisements we ran this past week and the ones we will run this coming week ask the question, "Looking for more meaning in your life?" The question is followed by a statement, "At Easter and all through the year Rutgers Presbyterian Church celebrates God's radically inclusive, affirming, unconditional love."
There is no doubt in my mind that experiencing unconditional love is necessary to emotional and spiritual health. Some people, the fortunate ones, experience unconditional love as children. An awful lot of other people, maybe most people, don't experience unconditional love as children and spend many days or years, and often many dollars looking for it. If they look in the right places, there is a good possibility they will experience something close enough to unconditional love so that they can lead healthy and productive lives as adults.
At its best, and that is an important qualification, the Christian Church can be a place where people experience unconditional love. The simple truth is that the Christian Church too often has not been at its best. In many of its present manifestations the Christian Church is certainly not at its best. Many people experience the Church as regressive, repressive, judgmental, and irrelevant.
Acknowledging that, I want to make the radical claim to anyone who has come here because of our ads, that if you stick around Rutgers Presbyterian Church for a few weeks, which means for a few Sundays at least, you will not only hear about God's unconditional love, there's a good chance you will experience something close to unconditional acceptance and love. At least that's what we aim for.
The focus of our Sunday morning gatherings is the telling and re-telling what one song writer calls "the old, old stories of Jesus and his love." Somehow in the hearing of those stories and the stories of God's dealings with Israel, in thinking about them, people come to an awareness of God's love as the foundation for building a life. And their lives take on deep meaning. There are no shortcuts, no magic formulas. Spending time in a community that takes the Gospels seriously is the best way I know to find deeper meaning in life.
Today we begin what is traditionally called Holy Week, which starts with Palm Sunday and ends with Easter. The events we remember in Holy Week are the central events of the Christian faith.
According to the Gospels, Jesus spent three years in the Palestinian countryside, teaching people and healing them in different ways. His teaching was a representation of God's love, which he said was more inclusive than most religious people had said it was. He warned against trusting material possessions to bring deep and lasting satisfaction, and he went out of his way to address the hurt and humiliation suffered by men and women often pushed aside by the wealthy and powerful people of his time. He presented God as a loving and merciful parent of all people on earth.
There was opposition to Jesus' teaching, and the religious leaders of his time criticized him for helping and healing people on the Sabbath, a day they set aside for highly restricted activities. The opposition to Jesus was centered in Jerusalem, in and around the Temple. At the time of Passover, thousands of Jesus' fellow Jews went to Jerusalem to celebrate that special occasion. Jesus decided to go to Jerusalem, even though there was considerable risk in his doing so because the religious leaders wanted to get rid of him.
Knowing some writings of a Hebrew prophet who portrayed the Messiah coming on the back of a donkey, Jesus arranged to enter Jerusalem at Passover that way. (Matthew takes very literally the poetry of the Old Testament prophet Zechariah, who used parallelism to express his idea, and so has Jesus riding on two animals.)
In his Gospel, Matthew says a large crowd, probably some of the people who had been touched by Jesus' love and healing ways, spread garments and leafy branches in his path and shouted out their gratitude to God. John, who wrote the fourth Gospel, says the people used palm branches. That is where the name Palm Sunday comes from. Some people shouted "Hosanna," which means "save" or "save us now." They welcomed Jesus as a king who would save them from oppression. Basically, that's what Palm Sunday is all about.
It's a mistake to celebrate Palm Sunday as a little Easter. There was an element of foreboding on that first Palm Sunday. Jesus had a good idea of what lay ahead, and it wasn't pretty. In fact it was grim. The parade itself was insignificant, even pathetic, in terms of what parades can be. Most of Jerusalem didn't even know it was happening. What Matthew calls a very large crowd was a small fraction of the people in the city for Passover.
Three hundred years earlier, Alexander the Great had entered Jerusalem as a conquering hero, and his parade had been spectacular—prancing horses, marching soldiers, and rolling chariots. In contrast, there was Jesus bumping along on the back of a swaying, blinking donkey.
The religious leaders who opposed Jesus' teachings were not very happy about the Palm Sunday parade. They resented Jesus' popularity with the people, and they couldn't bring themselves to re-think their expectation of a Messiah. They wanted someone who would demonstrate power like that of the legendary King David. They couldn't accept a prophet who advocated peace and justice for the poor, a deliverer without an army.
Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem had an interesting result. It threw the city into turmoil. People were asking, "Who is this Jesus?" "What are we to make of him?" Jerusalem was in turmoil, according to Matthew.
What threw the city of Jerusalem into turmoil was the question "Who is Jesus?" It's a question that won't go away. It's at the heart of the Christian religion. In Thursday's New York Times there was an article about this year's winner of the 1.6 million dollar Templeton Prize. He is Michael Heller, "a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life [in Poland exploring] some of humanity's most profound concepts." He is quoted as saying, "I always wanted to do the most important things, and what could be more important than science and religion. Science gives us knowledge and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence" which I take to mean "a meaningful life."
Two thousand years ago people who expected a Messiah who would be a revolutionary hero or a heroic king were disappointed. Their hearts must have sunk as they watched Jesus weep over the city he loved so much. (Heroic kings don't weep.) They must have been disappointed as they watched him in the Temple focus his attention on the blind and the lame, rather than on the sports and entertainment celebrities who wanted to be photographed with him. Jesus was not what many people expected.
I wonder who Jesus is for us, for you and for me. What does it mean to shout "Hosanna" in a culture described as being obsessed with money, power, and sex? I believe money, power, and sex can have positive value, although I don't have much personal experience with money and power. But if we let them dominate our lives, if we make gods of them, they will enslave us and leave us empty and disillusioned.
It's tempting to market Jesus as someone who will give us whatever we want, if only we pray hard enough and believe hard enough. I keep reading about success-oriented churches that are growing on the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America. They emulate the model of some American churches that operate like businesses, and hold out stories of wealth and prosperity coming to people who follow their particular brand of Christianity. Jesus as the one who will give you your heart's desire hasn't worked for me. But I can tell you He has given me so much more.
For me, Jesus is someone who didn't shrink from what life held for him. He dealt with life as it happened—a mixture of pleasure and pain. He didn't numb himself with drugs or withdraw into escapist fantasies. He was open to life, and it wasn't always good. Did you notice the words of the hymn we sang right before the first lesson? "Ride on, ride on in majesty; in lowly pomp ride on to die." Jesus knew the religious leaders wanted him out of the way. And he kept on going. He prayed that if possible, God would spare him from the cross on the horizon. But he prayed, "Nevertheless, Your will be done"—the heart of prayer and the essence of faith.
In Mitch Album's small but powerful book Tuesdays with Morrie, the professor dying of a slow, deteriorative disease told his young student Mitch, "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live." I connect that with Jesus as he moves through Palm Sunday into what follows. Knowing how to live, asking only that God's will be done, he also knew how to die.
The last thing he said as he experienced the end of his life was, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." Whatever else I see in Jesus, I see in him someone who can show me, and all of us, how to live and how to die, trusting in the goodness of God no matter what happens.
On the first Palm Sunday two thousand years ago Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. Because of him, the city was in turmoil. Turmoil can be the seedbed of faith, the setting for discovering who Jesus really is—and letting him teach us how to sing Hosanna a different way. We can sing it so that it means "Save us now. Save us from feeling empty, from being blind to the needs of the world around us. Save us from superficiality, from looking for love in all the wrong places. Save us by letting us trust in your unconditional love, so that we become healthy lovers of other people, ourselves, and the world."
Hosanna. Keep loving us, God, and lead us to a deeper level of meaning.
Thanks be to God.