CALLING US TO THE TABLE
A sermon preached by the
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Text: Matthew 21:1-11; 26:26-29
How do we acknowledge all the tumultuous events of this week we call holy in a single service? This is a real challenge. Some might prefer an old-fashioned Palm Sunday service with all the bells and whistles. Others might prefer to focus on the Passion of Christ as Bach does in his great musical settings or as Mel Gibson did in his movie a few years back. Should we avoid any mention of suffering and join the colorful parade as it moves into the city? Should we acknowledge the violence and pain of the events we commemorate? What should be our worship and our witness on this day? This service is not designed as “once size fits all.” I invite you to take from it what you will.
The old stories seem to bear witness to wild swings in emotion and activity during the course of the week in which Jesus journeyed to the cross as he walked the road to Easter. At least some of the excitement was precipitated by his having raised his friend, Lazarus, from the dead. Those who were familiar with Jesus, who had been tagging along as he roamed the countryside, and then set his face steadfastly toward Jerusalem, had witnessed some amazing things. But raising Lazarus, who lay rotting in the tomb, took the prize. The word spread like wildfire; the streets of the ancient city were lined with people shouting, “Hosanna,” praising God, hoping for their own miracles, whether it be healing or vindication for some slight or liberation from the hated Romans or even resurrection of a loved one. What a celebratory scene it must have been as Jesus entered the holy city, riding on that most royal of beasts, a donkey.
The situation was ripe for a major confrontation with the religious leaders in Jerusalem. This Galilean day laborer was a threat to their authority and to the fragile arrangement they had with their Roman conquerors that allowed them to maintain some semblance of power and privilege. He was stirring people up, bringing them strange hope, talking about other ways of being in the world that challenged old traditions and the established order. Fresh from the parade and the shouts of “Hosanna,” he headed straight for the temple where he threw out the moneychangers and sellers of sacrifice. “It is written,” he thundered, “‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” That surely must have won him friends among the temple rulers.
Still, he went right on gathering around him the blind and the lame, curing them, to the chagrin of the authorities. He moved in and out of the city, healing the broken, challenging the rulers and teaching the essential lessons of the reign of God. Here Matthew’s account packs in the stories of the two sons, the wicked tenants, the wedding banquet, the wise and foolish bridesmaids, and the invested and buried talents. Here he debates questions about taxes, the judgment of nations, the resurrection, and ultimate allegiance. They tried to trick him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He comes right back at them: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Curses! They couldn’t catch him in some flagrant heresy, and so they plotted to kill him on the sly, to avoid the furor of the crowd, recruiting one of his own disciples to engineer the plot.
Jesus tried to warn them of the all the pain and destruction to come. His big, overflowing heart went out to the people. He wept over the city: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a mother hen gathers her brood, and you were not willing!” At least he could gather his disciples around him, in an upper room, to spend the Passover together. And so they gathered around a table to share a sacred meal.
And so we, all these years later, remembering these old stories, while asserting the power they have to transform lives, gather from time to time around this table to share a simple, sacred meal. So we will do this Thursday night. We bring our gifts, our joys, our concerns, our selves, to this table that sits at the heart of our community. Here we are called to share with one another, in communion with God who made us, the Christ who makes us whole, and the Spirit who empowers our to journey to the cross as we walk the road to Easter.
CALLING US TO STAND WITH JESUS
Matthew 26:36-46
Look over there; Jesus is kneeling in the garden. He senses something ominous lies ahead and he is deep in prayer, confident that his friends are watching and praying with him. He has told them how much his heart is hurting, how he needs their support now more than ever. “Oh God! I don’t want to face what’s coming, but if you see it as necessary, I’ll keep on. You know I want what you want.” Then, he finds them asleep. How can this be? “Couldn’t you even stay with me for this brief time when I needed you so? I guess the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Please try to watch and pray with me.” This little drama repeats itself three times and each time Jesus finds his friends asleep.
The old hymn asks, “‘Are ye able,’ said the Master, ‘to be crucified with me?’ “Yea,’ the sturdy dreamers answered, ‘to the death we follow Thee.” Was it so? One of his own betrayed him. His staunchest defender denied three times that he even knew him. Most of his followers scattered in fear and confusion, though, of course, the faithful women gathered around the cross. And still, there was more pain and struggle to come before the promise to follow was fulfilled.
What about us? Can we watch and pray with Jesus, at least for a little while, as he struggles to bring about the healing of creation, as he faces down death, as he grapples with forces beyond our comprehension? “‘Are ye able?’ still the Master whispers down eternity, and heroic spirits answer, now as then in Galilee, ‘Lord, we are able, our spirits are Thine, remold them, make us like Thee, divine: Thy guiding radiance above us shall be a beacon to God, to faith and loyalty.’” The old language may challenge our 21st century sophistication, but the essential question of discipleship remains unchanged. Can we, will we, stand with Jesus? Can we, will we, follow? Are we able and willing to pay the price of discipleship, whatever it may be? “Oh God! we don’t want to face what’s coming, but if you see it as necessary, we’ll keep on. We want what you want. Give us the strength and courage to stand with Jesus, in the good times and the hard times. Help us on our journey to the cross as we walk the road to Easter.”
CALLING US TO STAND WITH ALL THOSE WHO SUFFER
Matthew 27: 45-51, 54-56
He said it was the core of the law and the commandments, “Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.” God is not a God who slays. God does not send God’s only child as a human sacrifice for the sins of the world. God comes as God’s own self, as the Christ, to know our human experience, to share our joys and concerns, to feel our suffering and hope, right along with us.
You may have heard before Elie Wiesel’s story about an execution at Auschwitz, but it bears repeating and remembering:
The SS hung two Jewish men and a boy before the assembled inhabitants of the camp. The men died quickly but the death struggle of the boy lasted half an hour. “Where is God? Where is he?” a man asked me. As the boy, after a long time, was still in agony on the rope, I heard the man cry again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer, “Here he is – he is hanging on this gallows…” (Elie Wiesel, Night, p.70.)
In her commentary on this tale, Dorothee Soelle, draws on the wisdom of Martin Buber, to expound on the “indwelling presence of God in the world.” Buber says that God’s “glory itself descends into the world, enters into it, into ‘exile,’ dwells in it, dwells with the troubled, the suffering creatures in the midst of their uncleanness – desiring to redeem them” (Martin Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbati Zvi, and Baal-Shem,” The Origin and Meaning of Hasidim, p. 101.)For Christians this is Christ in the world, in our midst. Soelle insists that “In his emptied, abased form, God shares the suffering of his people in exile, in prison, in martyrdom. Wandering, straying, dispersed, his indwelling rests in things and awaits the redemption of God through his creatures. God suffers where people suffer. God must be delivered from pain” (Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, p. 146.) She goes on to insist that “God has no other hands than ours” and that it is “[p]recisely for those who in suffering experience the strength of the weak, who incorporate the suffering into their lives, for whom coming through free of suffering is no longer the highest goal, precisely they are there for others who, with no choice in the matter, are crucified in lives of senseless suffering” (Soelle, p. 149.)
If the passion of Jesus is to have any meaning, if Christ’s death and even Christ’s resurrection are to stand for anything, it requires that we, as his disciples, stand in solidarity with all who suffer in an ongoing ministry of presence and hope. Pastor, actor and theological artist, Al Staggs, wrote a poem in response to Mel Gibson’s graphic and bloody movie version of the Passion. Because it is such a powerful image of standing with Jesus and standing with all who suffer, which in the end is really the same thing, I share it with you, continuing our journey to the cross as we walk the road to Easter.
Wearying are all these depictions
Of the suffering of our Lord
Whose dying and death
Are “performed” in so many plays,
Cantatas and now one big film.
All this is so tiring to my senses
And sensibilities –
These “performances” miss the point.
That is, Jesus is being oppressed,
Tortured and murdered every single day
In the lives of millions upon millions
Of the naked, sick, the hungry and thirsty
Of our world.
Did he not tell us ever so plainly
That he was embodied in all those
Who suffer in our time?
While the church has “performed” its
Ritual of remembrance of the “Passion of Christ”
Throughout her history,
Innumerable souls have tasted real torture
And very real death.
Have we in the Church, perhaps, been more concerned
With our dramatic “performance”
Than with the plight of those
Whom Jesus said he was to be?
Oberammergau’s power of performance
Continued to flourish during the Nazi regime,
When Jews were being dragged away
By the millions to death camps.
Let us weep for Jesus, yes,
But let us also weep for those
Who are being crucified this very day.