St. Paul’s
United Church Palm Sunday, March 20, 2005
Joyful
Obedience – Rev. David Mundy
Isaiah 50:
4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11 Matthew 27:
11-54
Not long ago I was taken to a
restaurant by friends who wanted me to “experience” a place frequented by the
university crowd where they live. We went on a Friday night because the
weekends are the busiest.
Well, this establishment is definitely
the place to be for university students, with an energy level and a noise level
which almost defies description. If it were possible to hold a parade sitting
down, this would be the location. I asked the two young hosts how many people
the restaurant held and was informed that about three hundred people could be
seated at the tables, but they pointed out that there were easily another
hundred in the waiting area.
The din was so great that we weren’t
expected to hear our names called when the table was ready. We were given a
pager, a box with lights that flashed when it was our turn to eat. I’m not so
sure that this was the place to be for the parent of university students
although the food was good and the experience did turn into a sermon
illustration! During the hour we waited to be seated I decided that I might be
too old for this sort of thing, fifty-year-old fossil that I am.
There is an expression which some of
you will know”: So loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.” I’m here to
tell you that this expression is painfully true! It was not only next to
impossible to carry on a conversation but I found I just couldn’t focus my
addled brain. For most of the meal I looked around the room rather than even
trying to listen to my companions. It was a graphic reminder that what we
assume is the simple act of listening can be a tremendous challenge.
This morning is Palm Sunday and we are
reminded in our worship that there was a parade a few days before Jesus’ death,
which was supposedly a celebration of his life and all the possibilities of his
leadership. All four of the gospels tell us about this procession in which
Jesus made his way down the Mount of Olives and into the city of Jerusalem
along what is still called the Palm Sunday road.
We can imagine the crowds milling
around Jesus and the excitement which is probably enough that they didn’t
notice the comic picture of his feet dragging the ground as he rode on a
donkey. They shout out
Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the
name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven
No doubt their shouts of acclamation
and joy are loud enough to catch the attention of the Roman authorities and the
garrison situated just to the other side of the valley so that they were
alerted to this “person of interest” to use the phrase preferred by police
forces these days. For all the excitement and the party atmosphere there is an
ominous tone to the moment.
This is also Passion Sunday and we
heard in our Passion Narrative a few minutes ago that sometime during the next
few days Jesus found himself back on the Mount of Olives, this time under cover
of darkness. He has just shared his last meal with his followers during which
he takes bread and breaks it and lifts up a cup of Passover wine and says that
these are his body and blood broken for them.
They go out from that meal to an olive
grove called the Garden of Gethsemane to join other poor pilgrims who camp out
there for the night during their time in Jerusalem. The disciples who had
pledged their loyalty to Jesus fall asleep around him and alone he prays. It is
not a calm and serene time for Jesus. As he listens for God’s direction, he
implores God.“My Father, if it is possible,
let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
According to one of the gospels Jesus was so troubled in his spirit that he
sweat drops of blood. Whether this was literally the case or not, it gives us a
graphic image of the anguish he went through.
Because of what he heard in his time
of prayer Jesus does not flee and he doesn’t fight back when the soldiers came
to arrest him. Instead, in this “crucial” moment he prepares himself for all
that will lead to the cross. When the authorities arrive to arrest him, he
drinks deeply of the cup rather than tossing it aside.
Are we good listeners? Do we
obediently “incline our ear” to God and seek direction even though we may not
always hear what we desire to hear? Our hope is that God is always listening to
us and loving us in all circumstances. Let’s be honest though. We aren’t so
sure about what it means to be obedient in response. The marriage vows once
called on brides to promise that they would “love, honour, and obey”
their husbands and no one agrees with those words anymore!
Yet we might consider obedience in a
very different way. The late Christian writer Henri Nouwen
once observed that the word obedience has as its root the notion of listening.
To be obedient to God is not to slavishly follow. It is to listen to God with
our ears and our spirits as best as we are able with the freedom of choice.
Nouwen contended
that the opposite of obedience is not disobedience, but absurdity, which means
to be deaf. When we are deaf to the voice of God then our world becomes truly
absurd. It becomes a place of betrayal, and denial and crowds that are fickle,
enthusiastic one moment and condemning the next. We don’t know which way to
turn when life loses its meaning
We will never experience what Jesus
went through that night in Gethsemane, but we all have our crucial times when
we need to hear what God is saying to us. These are our “passion” moments and
we hope to listen, even in the midst of pain and fear and confusion.
We have those circumstances in our
personal relationships or at work when it is difficult to hear and we may even
feel that God has forsaken us. Just recently a dear friend came to visit us
because his marriage of twenty years had come to an end. While their
relationship as a couple had been quietly strained for a long time, when his
wife asked him to leave he was taken off guard and suddenly his stable world
was turned upside down. As we talked, he admitted that when he awakens into the
loneliness of the night the temptation is to be bitter and find some way to
retaliate, emotionally. But he doesn’t want to become angry for his children’s
sake and his own and even for his wife. As a Christian he is praying and asking
for the strength to find his way through the sadness and the sense of betrayal
to something meaningful.
You may wonder where the joy is in all
of this. If the message of Christ is new life, why dwell on the suffering? We
are people of Good News, but it can take time to get there.
I have mentioned before that Henri Nouwen became an extremely popular writer and speaker in
the nineteen seventies and eighties and his book The Wounded Healer was
an international bestseller. Despite his popularity he went through a crisis of
meaning and an extremely dark period in his life. When he emerged on the other
side he left the academic life and went to work in a L’Arche
group home north of Toronto. While there, he wrote a book with the title Can
You Drink the Cup?, which reflects on Jesus’ “prayer of the heart” in
Gethsemane.
Our cup is
often so full of pain that joy seems completely unreachable. When we are
crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become. The sorrow
overwhelms us, makes us through ourselves on the ground, face down, and sweat
drops of blood. Then we need to be reminded that our cup of sorrow is also our
cup of joy and that one day we will be able to taste the joy as fully as we now
taste the sorrow.
God’s invitation, always, is to be
able to “hear ourselves think” and, more importantly to hear God’s call into
new life. And we don’t have to do this alone. We have the story encouraging us
not to fall asleep when others are in need, nor to abandon one another. That
same story also reminds us that even when we think we have failed we are still
loved and accepted.
We also have one another. As the
church we can become a community of joyful obedience, if we understand that to
be joyful listening. This is the place we come to hear God in a noisy world.
And every time we pray for one another and comfort one another and laugh with
one another we share the cup which gives us life. Please believe that the choices
we make as individuals and as a community make a difference.
During this holiest of weeks in the
Christian year we will remember that Jesus’ obedience ends, not at the cross,
but with the empty tomb and the gift of new life for each one of us. There is
another passage for this day which we didn’t read because there is so much in
this service. In the second chapter of the apostle Paul’s letter to the church
in Philippi there is a hymn of the early church which tells the story of Jesus,
human and divine.
Let the same mind be in you that was
in Christ Jesus
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as
something to be exploited,
but emptied himself, taking the form
of a slave
being born in human likeness
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient
to the point of death
– even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name,
that is above every name...
We are grateful this morning for
Christ’s joyful obedience and we hear the call to follow.