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Sermon

A few weeks ago I was looking at those first worship videos we made last year, when the great shutdown began. I watched the Easter video, which ended with short clips from so many in our Westminster community wishing each other a Happy Easter, and so many of us said, “See you soon!”

That felt like a punch in the gut.

We were so hopeful a year ago, or at least many of us were, that this pandemic would resolve in a month or so, that schools would reopen and we would be worshiping together by Pentecost. But the universe had other plans.

And here we are for our second virtual Palm Sunday service, and I must admit that there’s something about this Palm Sunday story that has never quite sat well with me, maybe because I know what happens next. Palm Sunday is the start of Holy Week, but this particular story, of Jesus entering Jerusalem amid shouts of acclamation and waving branches, is really the shortest of prologues. It’s not the heart of the story, and it’s not the climax of the story, and it sets the stage for something that isn’t going to happen. It’s a bit like being excited that the pandemic will be over soon, only to find yourselves online for Holy Week again a year later.

For much of the 20th century, this story was seen in the frame of a triumphant Jesus finally getting the good, praise-filled attention he deserves. The King is coming! Blessed is He! A royal carpet of branches sets the path for him! He is entering Jerusalem, the city of David, and in a mere week he will rise, triumphant again! Never mind all those pesky things that happen in between….

But scholars like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan and Ched Myers have opened our eyes to what this Palm Sunday procession was really about. They and others have likened Jesus’ entry into the great city to a piece of street theater, a great warrior king arriving without weapons or armor, not on a mighty steed but on a donkey, not with legions of soldiers following him but with a crowd of sinners and tax collectors and women. It’s as though Jesus took all the expectations the people had of their messiah and turned it upside down and inside out. And the same crowd that cheered him on would, in a matter of days, scream for him to be crucified.

So here’s what I want to say about this story and about our situation right now.

This story is of a nonviolent messiah who walks open-eyed to his death, immune to both the cheers and jeers of the fickle crowd. And our situation is one of growing despair that we’re not out of the pandemic woods yet, that as we get closer to opening up, the anxiety ramps up, and the situation of two mass shootings happening yet again in this nation which seems to love its guns so much more than peoples’ lives.

And here’s what I want to say:

• First, if all we do is pay attention to the happy-happy-joy-joy passages in the Bible, we will never deepen or grow in our faith.
• Second, that not reading the whole of the scripture leads to bad theology.
• And third, that bad theology gets us into bad trouble.

First: if all we do is pay attention to the happy-happy-joy-joy passages in the Bible, we will never deepen or grow in our faith. There is no doubt that holy scripture provides comfort and hope—I know that and I live that. God created all that is and declared it good. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen, amen to all of that.

But the Bible is a collection of stories, and poems and songs and histories and letters, about human beings’ relationship with God. And when we take our relationship with God seriously, then we have to say that sometimes God disappoints us, and sometimes God doesn’t do what we want God to do, and sometimes God asks us to do things that seem impossible or bad for our own welfare.

And if we take our relationship with God seriously, then we admit that sometimes we mess up so very badly. We eat the fruit we were commanded not to eat. We exile a mother and her son to the desert. We pretend we never knew Jesus. We crucify him. Faith demands that we see the whole of our lives and the whole of God’s presence and the whole history of the human/divine relationship. If we don’t take that in, then we give up at the first glimpse of hardship.

So, then, the second thing: not reading the whole of scripture leads to bad theology. When you begin to study the Bible, or simply to read it for some understanding, lots of people have lots of ideas about how to help. When I was confirmed, I was given a copy of The Way, a new Bible translation that had a super-groovy 1970s cover of young people wearing blue jeans reading the Bible. King James was turning over in his grave, I’m sure.

Anyway, The Way Bible had a handy chart at the beginning so you could check off how much you had read. I dutifully started with Genesis, and moved on to Exodus. And then I got to Leviticus and the whole thing went to pot. That’s not how I recommend reading the Bible!

The church father Augustine said this about reading the Bible. “…anyone who thinks [they] have understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by [their] understanding build up this double love of God and neighbor, has not succeeded in understanding them.” If studying the Bible strengthens you to love the way Jesus call us to love, that’s great.

But if reading the Bible does not lead to more love, then I would say that bad theology is at work. I, like you, was so horrified by the murder of eight people in Atlanta on March 16. The suspect is said to have murdered those people because he was having a bad day and because he blamed his sex addiction and his need to remove that temptation from his life. Some have said that all of that is a result of bad theology, the result of teachings that imply any kind of sexual urge is bad and must be purged. There is also the bad theology that women are less than men, temptresses who must be shut down.

And certainly one can read the Bible that way, from the punishment of pain in childbirth to the use of rape as a weapon of war to Paul’s own advice for celibacy. It’s a selective reading of scripture that leaves out the Song of Songs, and the story of Ruth and Boaz, the story of Dorcas and Phoebe.

So third: bad theology gets us into bad trouble. Scholars of religion have noticed that there has been a trend of conflating American values with Christian ones, leaving us with images of Jesus holding an AK-47 wrapped in an American flag. That is an unholy, vile image, as bad or maybe worse than an image of Jesus dying on the cross. How do we reconcile a nation with so many Christians being a nation with so many deaths by gun violence? Where in the Bible does it say it’s okay to kill someone whom you disagree with because of their words or lifestyle or ethnicity or race or sex or politics or whatever?

Actually, it is possible to read the Bible and find justification for violence. From the wars the people of Israel fought to Jesus’ own words that he came not to bring peace but a sword, it is possible to skew the scripture so that violence becomes an acceptable response.

But not if we follow Augustine and all of those who read the Bible through the rule of love. Love does not look like murder. Love does not look like violence. Love does not look like hate. It seems obvious to say those things, but they need to be said.

Let me wander back to Palm Sunday for a last minute or so.

If this Palm Sunday story is indeed one of Jesus’ mocking the powers of the world and especially the Roman Empire, then can we understand this as a story in which Jesus shows his love for all those who have been hurt by the Roman Empire? He mocks the emperor and his soldiers who have stolen from and imprisoned and killed ordinary folks. Jesus taunts the powers, and in doing so, sets up the course of his own death.

I don’t think God killed Jesus because God really wanted to kill us and Jesus took our place. That’s bad theology right there. I think Jesus was murdered because people in power feared his kind of power. I think Jesus was murdered because he would not give up his love for God or his love for God’s children.

God’s love doesn’t always look like what we think it will look like. We think it will look like a miraculous disappearance of COVID-19, when what it really looks like is people wearing masks and staying away from each other for a while, and it looks like people stepping outside at 7 p.m. every night to bang pots and pans to thank the medical workers.

We think God’s love will look like everyone joining together and holding hands and singing kum ba yah, when it really looks like people grieving the racism that led to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and those good souls in Atlanta and people once more stepping out into the streets demanding justice and repentance.

We think God’s love looks like a man being lauded with palms and branches and shouts of Hosanna, when it really looks like a stone rolled away from a tomb that ends up being empty.