The Stones Will Cry Out

March 28, 2010 - Palm Sunday

The Rev. Laurie Vischer
 Luke 19:28-43

"The Stones Will Cry Out"

     It really wasn’t that long ago–only three months ago, that the Angel Choir and children of Westminster presented our Christmas eve early service.  And in that service, we had a shining star. . .Emily beamed and twinkled as she walked down the main aisle, and the children sang “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill among the people.”  We had a vision of stars, a great host singing  the glorious good news.  Stars singing.

     That’s  the opening of Luke’s Gospel.  And that’s still the strong message of  Luke in our reading today: Not palms, as in the other gospels, but cloaks.  Not “hosanna” as in the other Gospels, but “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”                     

    In today’s passage,  Jesus declares  that if the multitude of disciples were silent, even the stones would cry out.    What is it that the stones would cry?  What is it that just can’t keep silent?
       This past week, over spring break, Aaron and Alex and I enjoyed some time in Newport, Oregon.  The highlight for me was the Mark Hatfield Marine Science Center, which we’d never visited before.  We watched a reddish orange Pacific Octopus wait to be fed, its long tentacles gracefully moving in the water.     It  had skin that was unbelievably wrinkled and tender looking.  Its eyes watched us now and then. There were about 60 or so people gathered around to watch. .  I heard a young woman behind me say, with reverence: “Isn’t it beautiful?”   

    I was so touched by her reverence.  Maybe we all felt that just in being so close to this wild creature (which is supposed to go back into the wild), somehow we were connected with this species that seems so alien to us.
      I’ve felt this same yearning many times, and perhaps you have, too: the longing to understand  the octopus, to communicate with the cat,  to speak with the crow.  It seems to boil down to the desire for connection–for recognition.    Annie Dillard, in her essay “Teaching a Stone to Talk” wrote:
  “We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.  Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise?  Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few.  Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl. . . But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and the thunders break the air in lightning storms. . . It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breeches and smacks the water–and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind. . ..
 What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us?”

    What is it that the stones would cry?

    There’s a clue in the very next verse:
      In Luke 19:44, at the gate of the city, Jesus weeps for Jerusalem. . .knowing “You will be crushed, not one stone left upon another. . .because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”  The first hearers of this gospel knew that Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 C.E.
There were barely stones left to stand.  Jesus wept: “You did not recognize your visitation.”
 Have we failed to recognize God with us?  Have we kept silent when we should have cried out?  As we enter Holy Week, these are good questions to ponder.

    The gospel of Luke is chock-full of people who cry out in recognition of Jesus, beginning with Elizabeth,  the cousin of Mary.  She cries out with joy, when she sees Mary with child:
     “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child in you!” Others, who recognize Jesus as an infant are Mary, Simeon, Zechariah. And then there is the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, Elizabeth’s son.  John the Baptist cries:   Repent!   Turn back! Salvation is at hand.”    Each cry is a cry of recognition.

    But others recognize Jesus, too.  There are some surprises:
    Demons and lepers.  The blind beggar by the gate of Jericho cries out, over those who want to silence him: “Son of David, have mercy on me!”  Cry and recognition.  Some things are so important they have to be shouted out.   

    And there is the parable in Luke 18, in which Jesus praises the persistent widow who cries for justice, to the unjust judge.  The judge finally relents, and does the right thing.  Jesus says “Won’t God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?”  Cries for justice; cries of joyous recognition.  This is how the Prince of Peace is heralded.

    Entering Jerusalem that day, for that multitude of disciples–definitely more than a dozen were gathered–for those first century people familiar with the prophets, these words from  Zechariah 9:9ff came to life:

 “Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem.  Lo, your King comes to you, triumphant and victorious.
 Humble is he, and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.  He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem, and the battlebow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations.”

    Did you know that on that first “Palm Sunday”-- at the same time Jesus was humbly processing into the city on a  young colt; the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate was entering the city by the  gate at the other end of town?  John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg have written a very interesting book about Jesus,  called The Last Week, which gives an evocative description of Pilate’s entry into Jerusalem.   
    It was the custom for the Roman rulers to come to Jerusalem at the time of Jewish festivals, mostly to keep the peace.  That would be the pax Romana, –the kind of peace kept with weapons and  armor, war horses and foot soldiers.  Imagine the glint of hot sun on the metal;  the golden eagles mounted on poles, the bright banners, as Pilate entered, with scores of troops.  You can almost hear the marching feet, the pounding of the drums, the smell of the horses and crowd.
 These sights, sounds, and smells were all familiar to that multitude of followers of Jesus, as they participated in his counter-procession. 
    At one gate,  the procession of Empire; and at  the other, the procession of the Prince of Peace.

         The way was crowded and dusty.  There were joyous shouts,  and those who wanted to hush things up,  “Silence your disciples!” they rebuked Jesus.  But some things are too important to keep quiet.  And no matter how hard you try to ignore them, they don’t go away.  In fact, they get bigger and more unwieldy, the longer they are ignored.

     Sister Joan Chittister wrote this about Palm Sunday: “It is a shattering moment, this confrontation with the inevitable, in the middle of this Lenten,  40-day retreat into the self. Just when it would be so much more comfortable to sink into the symbolism, we are required to face reality. Just when we would like to put it all down for awhile -- all the clamor, all the dirty business around us, all the ecclesiastical arm-wrestling, all the social issues -- and concentrate simply on the "spiritual" life, on "Jesus," we find ourselves in a crowd on the noisy, sweaty road to Jerusalem. . .Caught between the keepers of the system and the word of God.
 Caught between the stability of the past and the painful beginning of a new future where, deep down, we know we hear the deniers denying him and mourners crying for his absence and the question hanging in the air: Who will cry out? Who will cry out? Who will cry out?”   

      So, now, we stand at the beginning of Holy Week.  Like ancient Jerusalem, reality confronts us with contradictory ways.  What would the stones cry?  What is it that is begging to be cried?
That is a question for each of us.  For me, this comes to mind:  We  recently passed the seven year anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.  The news is no longer on the front page.    But if we are silent . . .Even the stones will cry out. 

In 2007, Alice Walker wrote a powerful book called: Why War is Never A Good Idea.
I’d like to close with her writing:

“Though War speaks
Every language
It never knows
What to say to frogs.
Picture frogs beside a pond
Holding their annual pre-rainy season convention.
They do not see War
Huge tires of a camouflaged vehicle
About to squash them flat.
Though War has a mind of its own
War never knows Who It is going to hit. . .
Though War has eyes of its own and can see oil and gas and mahogany trees
and every shining thing under the earth
When it comes to nursing mothers, it is blind. . .
. . . [The woman and the baby]. . .
They do not smell War dressed in green and brown
Imitating their fields
Marching slowly toward them Up the steep hill.
Though war is old, it has not become wise.
It will not hesitate to destroy
Things that do not belong to it,
Things very much older than itself.
Picture the forest with its rivers and rocks,
Its parakeets
Its turtles, leopards and snakes.
High above them war has turned itself into a white cloud
trailing an airplane that dusts everything below with a powder   that kills.
War has bad manners
War eats everything in its path and what It doesn’t Eat it Dribbles On:
Here War is Munching on a village
Its missiles Taking chunks  Big bites out of it.
War’s leftover Gunk Seeps Like Saliva Into the Ground.
It is finding Its Way Into the Village Well.
War tastes terrible and smells bad. . .
When added to water it makes you sick sip by sip.
You could die while Choking and holding your Nose
Now, suppose You Become War
It happens to some of the nicest People on earth:
and one day You have to drink the Water in this place.”

What would the stones did cry out?
What if we did?  What would we cry? 
Where might we see Jesus this Holy Week?  Will we recognize him?