April 14, 2019 – Palm Sunday: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
Now, as I say every Palm Sunday, we shouldn’t be reading the passion gospel at all today, and well, we actually don’t here at Christ Church, at least not as the gospel reading for the day. We stick with the story of the palms.
Now, as you all know by now, the reason that we shouldn’t be doing the passion on this Sunday is that it really doesn’t fit. It’s too soon, and it makes no sense. It began as a way of ensuring that people who did not attend Maundy Thursday & Good Friday services did not go from Palm Sunday to Easter bypassing the crucifixion, which would make Easter meaningless.
Still, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing to have the passion end this Palm Sunday service. After all, it marks the beginning of a week in which we move from the absurdly dark and hopeless to something beyond our wildest imaginations of what love can be. So, why not start this week of contrasting emotions with a service filled with them. And we are blessed to have the Dzeici theatre to engage us in a beautiful telling of the passion at the end of this service – the result being a wild rollercoaster ride of emotions – from the near carnival atmosphere of the procession of the palms, to the shouts to “Crucify him!” heard later.
But make no mistake, it isn’t any substitute for walking with Jesus through the evening of his last commandment of love & his betrayal, into the moment of his death on the cross. So, let’s return to the focus of this Sunday – this Palm Sunday – and Jesus’ ride toward his destiny.
Now, if you were paying close attention to the gospel reading, you might have noticed something is missing. We call it Palm Sunday, but guess what? No palms mentioned at all! Not in this gospel. Instead, they spread out cloaks. So, if we wanted to be true to this version, all of you would have needed to be waving your jackets around rather than the palms…but, that might have looked a bit like a sports event. So, perhaps not. At any rate, as they say on TV “The More You Know.”
But whether it is cloaks or palms, let’s take a step back to find out how this whole wild ride began. In all the gospel accounts, Jesus is riding on a colt, a baby donkey really. This was an explicit reference back to the scriptures of the Jewish people – to the very passage from Zechariah we heard before our palm procession this morning. There it says “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Hollywood might call this a fabulous plot twist, and there is so much to say about the symbolism there, but today, I want us to consider how that kid donkey got there, because it wasn’t part of the Jesus caravan.
In the synoptics of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus tells two unnamed disciples (which makes me think they might have been women, given the way women tend to go unnamed) – anyway, he tells them to go into the village nearby and they will find a colt tied up (of course, the Jesus in John just goes and gets it himself because, well, it’s the Jesus in John). Anyway, in the synoptic accounts, these disciples are to find the colt, untie it, and if asked about it (and they are asked) they were to respond “The Lord needs it.” “The Lord needs it.”
Okay, does anyone else wonder how the heck that worked? I mean, some folks show up at your house, start to steal something of yours, and when you say “What the heck are ya doin’ there?” they say “Yeah, well… about that… the Lord needs it.” My guess is that our response would be “Right. I tell ya what…why don’t you just tell that Lord of yours that I am calling 911.” “The LORD needs it. Good Lord, what is the world coming too” we’d grumble under our breath as we whipped out our iPhones. So one has to wonder why on earth the owners just seemed to go “Yeah, okay. If the LORD need it, well, ya know, that changes it. Go ahead then.”
Why did they respond that way?
Well, my guess would be that these folks were recognizable in that area by now, and when they said “The Lord” everyone knew who they were talking about. Why? Because of this clue “When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village ahead of you…”
Where was Jesus when Mary anointed him? Where was Jesus when he raised Lazarus, the one he loved, from the dead? Bethany. Jesus and his disciples are in familiar territory. This was like a second home to him – the place where his dearest friends lived. After the whole Lazarus isn’t dead anymore thing, you can bet everybody would knows who “The Lord” is. It would be like somebody grabbing a guitar backstage at Woodstock and saying “Jimi” or “Janice” needs it. You wouldn’t need a last name now would you?
But what we need most to pay attention to are those two disciples. Think about it. They are sent to go borrow a colt. It isn’t the most exciting duty, right? Heck, they don’t even get named in the whole story. But perhaps that’s the point. What they do, what they say, and who they are – it’s all so important, perhaps because it seems so mundane.
If we think about this story from their perspective, it will offer a lot to us now as we live in the world. I remember a story told by Nadia Boulanger, a French composer, conductor, and teacher, in the book Wisdom for our Time. She said “…The most humble work does not have to be boring. I remember Madame Duval, the old woman who cleaned the floor in my place in Gargenville. I think of her with profound respect and reverence. She was 80 years old. One day she knocked at my door and said, “Mademoiselle, I know you don’t like to be disturbed, but the floor, come and see it; it shines!” In my mind, Stravinsky and Madame Duval will appear before the Lord for the same reason. Each had done what he does with all his consciousness. When I said this to Stravinsky, who knew Madame Duval, he said, “How you flatter me, for when I do something, I have something to gain. But she, she has only the work to be well done.”
I think that the disciples were like Madame Duval. They were doing their humble work to the glory of God. It wasn’t what they were doing, but who asked them to do it – who sent them – that made it important.
So what does this mean for us? Well, I will guess that we aren’t likely, most of us anyway, to be encountering the foals of donkeys – though up my way in the rural part of our state, there is some opportunity for that if you feel so moved. But the colt is more foil than foal for us today. Because every day, I suspect, all of us are called to untie one. By that I mean that every day we have any number of tasks we do without much expectation of praise, or perhaps without much desire on our part for doing them. Yet how might things be different for us if we did those tasks – mowing the lawn, gardening, washing the dishes, transporting the kids, taking out the trash – like the disciples.
Think about it…they were told that when they were challenged they were to respond with “The Lord needs it.” Which means that Jesus needed them too, and needed them to do exactly what it was they were doing – even if that was just walking into town and untying a colt. In that statement, “the Lord needs it” they were reminded of the one who sent them. Jesus was brought into that moment, into what they were doing, and that they were sent to do exactly that thing. And I suspect it changed their hearts and minds as they went about finding and untying the colt – in this small task, they were giving over themselves to God.
Remember last week I was telling you all about the silence the bishop was met with when she would ask “what are your spiritual gifts?” How we sometimes can’t seem to see anything we do as a gift for or of God? Yet this story reminds us that everything we do, from the mundane to the extraordinary, if done with our minds on Christ, is a gift of God, given to God. Perhaps that is why St. Paul writes in the passage from his epistle to the Philippians we heard this morning that we should “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
How might our daily lives change if everything we did, we did with our minds on Christ. This is how monastics view work. As Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and scholar once wrote, “The requirements of a work to be done can be understood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become His instrument. He works through me.”
And so it is, and so it must be, that we also must be as those disciples, if we are not to end up as shallow as those who waved palms or cloaks in front of Jesus outside Jerusalem so long ago, only to turn their backs on him later. We cannot leave this place and him behind with it, we must bring him to mind in all we do, in all places we go, because we are also sent. Sent into our villages to do more than find a colt and untie it.
Sent by Jesus to untie the bonds of the oppressed, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to care for the stranger – because He needs it, because they are Christ himself.
And so these two disciples have much to teach us – their seemingly mundane chore was done with their minds on Christ, the one who sent them. Whether we are climbing a mountain to its peak, or doing a mountain of laundry, whether we are feeding the local youth soccer team, or feeding the ones in line at a soup kitchen. All of it we do with Christ, because what he needs most – is us.
The Lord needs us.
Needs us to be untied from the shackles of our indifference that we might be the voice for the voiceless – the Jesus crucified today.
The Lord needs us – need us to be freed from the bonds of our arrogance, that we might repent of our sinful treatment of creation and respond to God’s call of stewardship.
The Lord needs us – need us to be released from the prison of our hopelessness, that we might be the beacons of hope for a world in need.
The Lord needs – needs us to carry him in our hearts and minds in all we do.
The Lord needs us!
Let us set our minds on him, that “walking in the way of the cross, we may find it none other than the way of life and peace.”
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here:
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
April 14, 2019
Palm Sunday – Year C
The Liturgy of the Palms
Reading – Zechariah 9:9-12
The Liturgy of the Word
1st Reading – Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
2nd Reading – Philippians 2:5-11
Gospel – Luke 19:28-40
