Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 4, 2004 (Palm Sunday)

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It seems that religious authorities always have as much trouble as Alan Greenspan with what the Fed chairman once called "irrational exuberance." Of course, exuberance is probably not the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of a bunch of Congregationalists; but in any event authorities of all sorts dislike excessive displays of emotion. Such displays get out of hand. They’re hard to control, and worldly authorities are all about control. If irrational exuberance goes unchecked, the Holy Spirit might step in, and things might happen that the authorities don’t like. So, religious authorities don’t much like exuberance. They prefer us somber, sober, and even asleep.

We see a good example in this morning’s Gospel story about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Luke’s version of that story doesn’t have palms, but never mind. It is still the reading for Palm Sunday. In that story, as Jesus is riding into Jerusalem, a great crowd of disciples gets a little carried away. They’re shouting and singing. They were spreading their garments in the road before him to soften the way for his donkey. It was, I imagine, a crowd control officer’s nightmare. What are they going to do next? This is getting out of control! Somebody do something!

And it wasn’t just the noise and commotion. Everything that’s going on here has symbolic significance. I won’t go into all the details. The important thing is this: Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is loaded with the symbols of royalty. People thoroughly familiar with such Hebrew Scripture books as Zechariah and 1 Kings would see immediately that Jesus is being hailed here as a king, indeed even as the Messiah. This procession isn’t just a public disturbance. It is political and religious sedition.

So some Pharisees ask Jesus to rein his followers in. Now, in Luke Pharisees are often depicted as trying to protect Jesus; and, to give them their due, that’s probably what they were trying to do here. Drawing too much attention to him could only be dangerous for him, especially since the crowd was, as we have just seen, proclaiming him king and Messiah. So, whether they were trying to protect Jesus or just trying to restore order, these Pharisees said to Jesus: "Order your disciples to stop."

Now, the Jesus of most mainline Protestant churches probably would have told them to stop. After all, we are (or better until fairly recently were) the churches of the establishment, of established authority; and established authority doesn’t like irrational exuberance. The Jesus of the Gospel, however, will have none of it. He replies: "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out." Luke 19:40 You see, the Gospel, the great good news that Jesus is Lord and King and that the lords and kings of the this world are not, cannot be stopped. There’s no point trying to stop it; it will be heard. It will be spread. It cannot be silenced.

Yet people, even Christian people, are forever trying to stop it nonetheless. Today, most of the people who are trying to stop it are in fact themselves Christians. They try to stop the Gospel in two ways; or at least, they do two things that, if they were to succeed, would have the effect of stopping the Gospel. We talked about one of those things a few weeks ago when I talked to you about Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. Huge numbers of Christians today stop the Gospel by making only Jesus’ death relevant. They don’t want to talk about who he was and what he said. Who he was and what he said upsets all of our common notions of who we are and what we are to be about. Who he was and what he said is very unsettling, and very dangerous for the established powers of the world. It leads to irrational exuberance. So most Christians don’t want to talk about that. They want to talk about him dying for our sins, something that, while true, can have the effect of simply confirming us in our comfortable lives and that, in itself, does little to transform us into the people God wants us to be.

The other thing Christians do that stops the Gospel, or try to, is lock Jesus up into a book with an ancient worldview and an ancient understanding of what it means to be human. That book contains profound truth. It is our guide to the faith. I preach from it every week. I’m doing so right now. But the message of that book is that Jesus is Lord and King. The book isn’t. We are called not to worship a book, and certainly not to worship any selected passages from it, but to follow the living Christ, who can no more be locked up in a book that that crowd of disciples could have been silenced on the original Palm Sunday.

In and through the living Christ God is still speaking. That phrase--God is still speaking--is the slogan of a national identity campaign that our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is currently conducting. That campaign uses a quote from that modern wisdom woman Gracie Allen: "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." The point is this: Our faith is not static. It is dynamic, growing, expanding its understanding of the scope of God’s love. Our faith isn’t locked into an ancient worldview, an ancient view of what it means to be human, or of what God’s will for us is. God is still speaking, and God’s word cannot be stopped. We cannot put a period at the end of it, because God speaks with commas not periods. The Bible isn’t a period to God’s word. Certainly no verse or collection of verses locks in stone God’s word and will. God is still speaking, and God’s word, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of God’s love for all people, cannot be stopped. For if we were silent, the stones would shout out. Amen.