Palm --> Passion Sunday

This is one of those sermons you really want to listen to. Trust me. It was a weird week and the sermon didn't even really come together until it was coming out of my mouth (thanks be to God). You can find the video recording at this link. Or, if you must, read the manuscript below. 

Well, that escalated quickly didn’t? This is one of the most bizarre Sundays on our church calendar. We enter waving palm branches proclaiming Hosanna in the highest!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, singing praises to our God and King. That was only a few minutes ago, wasn’t it?

And then our joyful shouts of Hosanna quickly become pleas for a gruesome and painful death. Crucify, Crucify him the crowds cry out!  

This feels like absolute liturgical whiplash. 

Hosanna in the highest we shouted! Crucify him, we cry. It seems the deepest tensions of our faith are on display within minutes in a single service of worship.  

And it does sort of make us wonder: What happened? How did we get here? How did the crowds turn so quickly?  How did the tone change in just a matter of moments?

Cloaks that once paved the way for the one who comes in the name of the Lord, now stripped from Jesus the king of the Jews, as he’s mocked and beaten. Palm branches turned to reeds for striking. Tears of joy turns to weeping and mourning.  Hope smudged with fear. 

Hosanna, we shout.  Crucify him! We cry.  

What a tenuous, unnerving moment this is for our faith.  I mean it’s one thing to spend 40 days, a full season of Lent in penitence and repentance… taking on the gut-churning work of introspection… but then there is this one day when we move so quickly from triumph to anguish that as a preacher, I’m not even sure what to do with it. 

Welcome to Holy Week.  

Holy week calls us to wrestle with the uncomfortable.  To situate ourselves in the unpleasant reality of our history in faith.  There is no denying the angst that stirs-up within us as we transition abruptly from Palm Sunday to Passion Sunday. It happens in a matter of minutes.

As we do with many Bible stories, we tend to try to find ourselves within each of the characters in the narrative.  We shift uncomfortably in our seats as we think: 

I would never turn on Jesus!  How could Judas do such a thing.  No amount of money or bribe would cause me to turn on my faith… would it?  And Peter— what a coward! There’s no way I would deny Jesus… especially three times… right? And of course there’s no way you’d find me in the crowd that convicts him… crying out for his death. I mean I may not stand in opposition to the crowd, but I certainly wouldn’t be shouting “crucify him!”

This is the only week, in the entire Christian church year that we read the story of Jesus’ passion. For 6 days a year we focus on Jesus’ death.  And if we are people who proclaim both the death and resurrection of Jesus, then it seems to me that this week in our church calendar is an important one. 

We need this Holy Week. Not simply to be reminded of Jesus’ gruesome and inhumane crucifixion… but we need this tenuous, gut-wrenching week, because caught between “Hosanna in the Highest” and “Crucify him” is an entire existence of human emotion. This week is important for our faith because it gives us a space to shout. To Groan. To cry out. More than any other place in our liturgy and in our tradition, this week lets us feel all the feelings. 

As a society, we are generally not very good at feeling all the feelings. We are often given a day of two to grieve the death of our loved ones before we feel the pressure of moving on. We only get a couple of hours or maybe a day to really fully celebrate a deep joy in our life with our family and friends. We seem to live in a society that tells us that we can feel, just not too much. Not so much that it might make someone else uncomfortable. Or it might interrupt the normal productivity of the day. Perhaps you have felt this pressure before? The pressure to stifle a sob in the midst of a horrible day, or even the pressure to suppress your excitement over a new job or promotion for fear of making other’s feel bad. 

But this week… I might invite you to feel all of your feelings, like we do in the span of just an hour here in worship. Hope, anger, grief, fear, embarrassment— whatever we might need to feel in these moments, feel them. Because we are living in an odd time. We can feel the whiplash of hope and despair in our communal lives right now— the hope that as vaccines become available we might be getting closer and closer to “normal life” once again… and the despair for all that we have lost this year and the reality that nothing will every truly be normal again. The hope of new life and growth within our community, and the grief of looking around to notice who is missing. 

So whether we shout with hope, anger, or everything in between… Holy Week embraces the complexity of our deepest feelings. Our restlessness is given a voice and a place. Our grief, mourning, frustrations, and angst are heard. Holy Week empowers us to be vulnerable.   

We cry out to Jesus with a longing.  We groan for hope.  

We shout at the temptation of sin.  We cry out in fear.

God meets us here. God meets us in this tension and this vulnerability. In fact, God calls us to it. 

As we shout our way to the cross this week, don’t hold back.   

Holy Week welcomes you.  Invites you and your restless soul to cry out to the Lord.  

And whatever it stirs up within you, embrace it.  If today’s text causes you wrestle...wrestle. If it makes you tremble...then tremble. 

Because most of all, we enter Holy Week with the faith, hope, and love.  

Faith in a God who not only hears our cries, but took on our cries as his own in the flesh and blood of Christ Jesus.

Faith in a God who abides with us in our fleeing, denying, and wandering alone. 

Hope in a God who takes the groans of the world, the shouts of longing, the desperate pleas, and the cries of fear, and nails them to the cross. 

Hope in a God who on the third day bellows from an empty tomb that Jesus Christ is risen. He is not here. 

Love from a God who offers a new cry...

A new cry that will raise up and resonate across the world as voices of all times and places cry out in endless song and praise.  

On the third day God gives light and life to our longing. 

The laments of God’s people are heard. 

And so it is with sure hope and confidence in the resurrection of our Lord and Savior that we enter into Holy Week.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. 

Amen. 

John 3:16 Expanded

 John 3:14-21

Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

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This sermon was originally preached by me in a certain context, in a certain time, for a certain people. But we believe in a God who transcends time and space, so I hope that these words might speak to you here and now. 

Let us pray. Gracious and loving God, help us to understand what the words of your son mean for us in our lives. Bring to light the richness of your grace and mercy for this world, so that it might change us into witnesses to your redemptive power. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. 

John 3:16 is perhaps the most popular and well-known verse in Christianity. We see it as sort of the tagline of Christianity, and even in non-religious spaces like football games and on university campuses, we can often see the words “John 3:16” or even the whole verse scrawled across a poster or chalked onto the sidewalk. 

I think the reason that this verse is so popular is that it seems to sum up Christian belief in a way that other verses don’t quite do. In 27 words, that seem to be memorized by every Christian in the world, we get a pretty nicely packaged glimpse at the gospel. 

But of course, with any one sentence pulled out of the Bible without any sort of context, it is just waiting to be warped and morphed into something it is not. And that’s exactly what often happens to it. This verse is used to sum up Christianity, but it is also used to condemn non-Christians in this one short sentence. “Believe or perish!” It seems to shout from our posters and bumper stickers, tattoos or billboards, “Believe or perish!”

If we stop there, with just this one sentence, we miss the richness of the next verses, and we miss the richness of the meaning of what Jesus is trying to tell us. If we only hear John 3:16 as the gospel in a nutshell, then we won’t ever crack it open to see what else might be inside. 

There is so much richness in these verses— before and after the famous sixteenth verse. Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus, answering his questions about what it means to be a follower of Jesus and what it means to be born again in water and the Holy Spirit. The verses we hear this morning are right after Jesus chastises Nicodemus a bit for thinking only of earthly things and not truly understanding what he means. “How then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?” Jesus asks. Then begins Jesus’ monologue that we encounter this morning. 

…

If we move only one verse past the sixteenth, we hear that “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” When we peel back the layers, we realize that Jesus’ words are not about condemnation but a description of what it will be like to live without Jesus. 

“Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” These verses are often lifted up to condemn non-Christians or unbelievers to the place that we might call hell, but that’s not what they say at all. In fact, Jesus doesn’t mention hell or the afterlife at all. Jesus mentions eternal life, which is life experienced at a glimpse here on earth when we are baptized and when we come to the table to partake in the foretaste of the feast to come. 

What Jesus presents to Nicodemus is an image of what life will be life if we deny that gift. If we are presented with Jesus, if we are given the light of the world and we still decide to live without Jesus— well, then, we will live without him, and that, Jesus says, is a bleak life, a condemned life. 

It’s not a condemnation to hell but simply stating what life is like without Jesus. The son of God is the epitome of goodness, the absolutely best that God has to offer us. If we deny goodness, we choose evil. If we deny light, we have chosen darkness. The implication, then, is that we have an opportunity to make this choice over and over again throughout our lives. Thank God for that! 

But without the richness of the other verses, when we miss what John 3:16 really means for us— that God loves the world with such grace and mercy, that God gave us Godself in the person of Jesus to save the whole world. In the shallowness of bumper stickers, we miss the richness of God’s mercy. 

This tends to be the trouble with a shallow faith, too, right?— we miss the richness of what it would mean for us and our lives if we dove deeply into a relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation. 

It is not that God will condemn us to hell for our unbelief, but that without our deep faith and life in Christ, it is truly like living in hell. Imagine living without love itself, without love incarnate. That is what it is to live without God’s mercy and grace in our lives. 

Now that we have experienced the light of Christ, why would we want to live in any other way? How could we live in any other way but to be mirrors to that light? To enable it to shine brighter every day throughout the world with our own words and actions.

And the truth is, friends, that God so loved the world. Not just you. Not just me, not just this community, but all of creation.   

The object of God’s love is the world. And we, the believing body of Christ, are fruits of God’s salvation.  

We are active and willing participants in God’s salvific plan for the world.  

This means reflecting God’s light in a dark world, in all that we do.  

It means working to end hatred and violence.  

It means speaking out against injustice and oppression.  

It means acting with compassion and love. 

It means pushing against the current to challenge oppressive systems of power and tear down the walls and barriers of abundant life in Christ.

If John 3:16 is a proclamation of hope and promise for our world— if we claim it to be the gospel in a nutshell, the the first step in understanding that simple and rich verse is a faithful response.  

We are called to embrace and embody the confession of John 3:16 and that means being changed by the love and grace of God. 

Changed from people of darkness into people of light.  

Empowered by God to choose good in this world.  

To stand as witnesses in a world desperate for good news. Amen.