Palm Sunday Sermon

April 4, 2004

Scriptures: Luke 19:29-40

Luke 22:14 – 23:47 Selected Passages

Imagine that you are a Roman citizen living in Jerusalem.

You have been stuck in this outpost called Jerusalem longer than you imagined you would be. You are tired of being despised, and you are tired of trying to understand these barely civilized people you find yourself surrounded by. You are privileged. You have the resources and the power to get things done. And while you love the privilege you enjoy, you feel always the eyes of those who make your way of life possible. They seem to resent you.

It is not easy, this way of life.

It is particularly awful during the time of Passover. The city becomes even more filled with Jewish citizens. And they are coming together for reasons that have good cause to make your stomach clench.

They are remembering the time of their Exile. The time when they had lived so very long under the unjust power of Pharaoh. A time when they were in slavery to a power that had no respect for them or for their ways. After years and years of oppression, a leader appears in the midst of the Jewish people. A man called Moses. And this man refused to believe that God's people were called to live under the brutal power of an unjust ruler. He led his people out of slavery and into the freedom God called them to. Moses was a leader who challenged the lie of Pharaoh. He knew that his people were created to be free.

Passover celebrates the pain and power of God's people and their journey to freedom.

As a Roman, you fear this time greatly. Here the people you are manipulating to maintain your sense of order - an order that means their enslavement - are gathering at table to remember a time when they rose up against just the kind of power you represent.

Passover is always a tense time. But this year it is so very much worse.

Because a new prophet is on the loose. A man called Jesus who teaches much the same lesson that caused the Jews to rise up and follow Moses out of slavery and into a new way of living. This Jesus is raising people from the dead! He is drawing crowds and he is seemingly unconcerned about any power other than that which comes from his God.

You have heard he even unsettles the high Jewish authorities with his refusal to follow protocol.

So your sense of comfort is jostled. In a city seething with the memory of revolution. Your sense of security is challenged in these days.

Imagine now that you are a United States citizen living in... you name it. Iraq or France or Minnesota. You are privileged. You have power - the ability to get things done. And you feel the eyes of others around you who do not have such power and privilege and you are sometimes made to feel uncomfortable. And you don't like it. This feeling of dis ease.

And really, during this week called Holy, when the teachings of the church make it almost impossible to look away from the horrible pain of Jesus, the feeling of dis ease is made so much worse.

We are those citizens. Privileged folk who resist the walk to the cross on Calvary. We want to go directly from the joy and excitement of Palm Sunday to the joy and excitement of Easter.

But I beg you. Allow yourself to be present to the story of the Passion of our brother Jesus.

Because that story goes on day after day after day as people are held in bondage to systems of slavery like classism and sexism and racism and heterosexism and lookism and …

Pharaoh and Caesar and power abusers alive yet today DEPEND upon our unwillingness to be present to the reality of suffering.

In the week to come, let us be courageous enough to be aware of how it is Christ is yet nailed to the cross with each shot fired, each fist raised, each child hungry.

In the week to come, let us be courageous enough to be aware of how it is we are much like the citizens of Rome. Irritated by the insistence of those around us that they too deserve the basic human rights we claim as our due. Tempted to shut out or shut down the voices of any who share truths we don't want to hear.

And, in the week to come, let us be courageous enough to open ourselves to what the Holy has to teach us in these days.

Please. I invite you to come to worship on Thursday and Friday evenings. We need each other as we summon the courage to be honest followers of Jesus the Christ.