Sermon — March 24, 2024 (Palm Sunday)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I spent a summer in college studying abroad in England, and while I was there, I chose to balance two parts of my brain: with one, I took a one-on-one tutorial in the history of economic thought from the Renaissance to the mid-20^th century—with the other, a creative writing seminar. The intellectual history was enlightening and engaging and became part of my senior thesis—but the creative writing seminar was where I really learned something, and it was this: the golden rule of narrative writing is “Show, don’t tell.”

For example: if you want the reader to know that little Billy is afraid of the dark, don’t write, “little Billy was afraid of the dark.” Write, ““Good night, little Billy,’ still echoed in his ears as the shadows of the willow branches swirled like ghoul-fingers on the walls.” And so on.

Holy Week is the Church’s great season of “show, don’t tell.” We don’t just say, “Hosanna,” standing primly in place. We march around the room. We don’t just hold our hymnals as we sing. We wave our palms. I don’t just read the story of the Passion to you from the center of the church: we act it out with a whole cast. And all throughout this week, we’ll do the same: in our Holy Week services, we’ll taste and touch and see reminders of the last week of Jesus’ life, and not just be told about them.

But the true expert in “show don’t tell” is not my writing teacher, and it’s not the committee who created our Book of Common Prayer. It’s Jesus, planning the ambiguous events of that first Palm Sunday.

I say “ambiguous” because, at least in the story of Palm Sunday we read this morning from the Gospel of mark, it’s not exactly clear what Jesus means.

Jesus seems to be prepared for a parade. He knows that the colt will be ready to ride. But he won’t explain what he’s doing. He tells the disciples that if anyone asks them why they’re taking the colt, they’re simply to say, “The Lord needs it.” (Mark 11:3) And nothing more. Those in the crowd who know the prophets well might recognize an allusion to the words of Zechariah, who says, “Lo, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey” (Zech. 9:9). The Gospel of Matthew helps the reader understand by quoting the text. But here, we just get Jesus, riding a small horse. He doesn’t quote Zechariah. He doesn’t quite tell you he’s the king. He just goes out and does a royal thing.

The same is true with the palms. Or the not-quite-palms, which the people don’t quite wave. Palm branches are a part of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and they’d become a patriotic symbol of redemption in the first century, such that the coins minted by the Jewish rebels against Rome a few decades later were stamped, among other symbols, with palms. To march around with palms would be the equivalent of a Fourth-of-July parade, a rebellion in the face of the occupying authorities: but simply to cut leafy branches from generic trees and lay them under his feet, as the crowd does in the Gospel of Mark: Well, is that really the same thing?

The same goes for the carefully-worded chants. “Hosanna!” the people shout. “Save us, please!” A prayer addressed to God, or a celebration of Jesus? “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” they say, which is a quotation from one of the psalms of ascent, sung by pilgrims as they processed toward the Temple. Are they saying that Jesus himself is the Messiah, the one who comes in the name of the Lord, or are they just singing a psalm? And they go on, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David,” and you’ll notice they don’t say, as our prayer book had me say when the service began, “Blessed is the King.” They’re careful to keep things abstract. The chants are as ambiguous as the palms are as ambiguous as the colt: Jesus shows those who are wise enough to recognize the signs that he is the Messiah, that this day is the long-awaited return of the King. But he doesn’t tell anyone anything.

He won’t even tell the Roman governor Pontius Pilate what’s really going on. He would seemingly rather die for a crime he’ll neither confirm nor deny than proclaim the truth of the charges to the world, and so when Pilate asks him, “Are you the King of the Jews,” Jesus answers him, with infuriating ambiguity, “You say so.” And he makes no further reply. (Mark 15:2–3)

This whole series of events sets us up for Easter morning itself, when Mary and Mary and Salome go to Jesus’ tomb. As Mark tells the story, they don’t see that Christ is risen, but they see that he is gone. A young man, sitting by the tomb, shows them that it is empty, and he tells them that Jesus has been raised. And they run away in fear, and tell no one anything.

A few days ago I was in a meeting, totally unrelated to this, where a group of people were trying to parse out the meaning of a somewhat convoluted policy. If the policy meant A we’d want to do thing #1, and if the policy meant B, we’d want to do thing #2 instead. And we struggled to figure out whether we should do thing #1 or thing #2, because it seemed the creators of the policy could choose whichever interpretation worked out best for them, even if it left us holding the bag.

After a few minutes’ discussion, one of the wiser members of the group said: “Ambiguity can be a tool.” And isn’t that the case? Ambiguity gives the interpreter flexibility; the real issue in our group was that we didn’t trust the people who’d be enforcing the rule.

But it’s exactly this flexibility that makes ambiguity such a powerful spiritual tool. It’s why Jesus teaches in parables. It’s why he keeps his identity a secret, why he only alludes to messianic prophecies, and leaves later interpreters to connect the dots. Because it’s one thing to be told the truth; it’s another to be shown everything you need, and then forced to work it out yourself.

If Palm Sunday were filled with unambiguous signs, then the story wouldn’t work. The failure would be too clear. If Jesus rode in on a donkey, quoting from Zechariah, and the people waved palm branches in the air, and said, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” then this procession would be unambiguously a coup. And imagine the disappointment they would feel when the parade reached the city, and went straight to the Temple, and instead of proclaiming that the King was finally here, and gathering an army, and throwing the Romans out, Jesus just looked around, and then went home. Jesus would still be put to death, and on the same charges of sedition. But it would look as if he’d simply got cold feet.

Instead, the ambiguity forces us to think. What is Jesus doing here? Why is he not getting ready to fight? What do the symbols in this procession really mean? And if he’s mysterious enough, it might take us long enough to figure it out that there’s time for the full picture to become clear. Because the Palm Sunday story doesn’t end with the Passion, today, with a failed attempt at revolution.   

Because Jesus isn’t quite that kind of king. His ultimate battle is not with Rome, it’s with death itself. And so he doesn’t tell the people that he’s the Messiah, and call to mind their assumptions and ideas. He shows them what the Messiah does. He shows them what true kingship means. He lays down his life, to spare them from death, and up until the last minute, they’re still trying to figure him out. And in the end, only the centurion, the commander of the soldiers who have just killed him, realizes the truth: “Truly, this man was God’s son!” (Mark 15:39)

 Palm Sunday is Jesus’ final parable, the final ambiguous story in which he shows the world what the kingdom of God is like. He doesn’t answer every question for us. He doesn’t tell us what it all means. And it’s not because he’s a bad teacher: it’s because he’s so good, and he knows that what matters for us is not a concise theological truth, but the struggle through which we try to make meaning of the text.

So make meaning of the text. Carry home your palms, and ask yourself what it means to say “Hosanna,” “Save us!” today. Think about this gentle, loving Christ, and wonder what it means to act as if he’s King. And if you don’t have any answers right away, remember that the slow work of figuring it out is the point, after all. So sing this morning, and pray, but ask yourself what it means for you, today, to join your voices with that ancient crowd, and say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

Sermon — March 17, 2024

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

In the Gospel today, there is a small rhetorical device used that carries a lot of weight. I don’t know if it is easy to miss, because I am such an avid fan of plants and ecology that it jumped out at me immediately. Jesus says that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”. I think naturally many of us intuitively know that this is how plants work, seeds in general must fall and be put into soil and die in order to grow again. But there is a beauty and majesty to the fact that one seed from an apple can grow into a tree that then produces thousands of apples, one ear of corn can seed a field of corn, one kernel of wheat grows an entire stalk of wheat, or even how a caterpillar can metamorphosize into the splendor of a butterfly. 

However, I am skipping ahead within the rhetorical device. Before we get to the new apples, the rolling field of corn, the strong stalk of wheat, or the butterfly. We must go somewhere darker–we must fall to the ground. In a very classic kindergarten project, kids will get caterpillars, watch them as they turn into cocoons, and then patiently wait until what were once caterpillars emerge as butterflies. However, what is not talked about nearly as much is that all holometabolous insects–including all butterflies and moths–dissolve and digest the vast majority of their own body in the darkness of the cocoon; leaving only the essential plans of butterfly-ness and making everything else into a kind of bug-slime. Similarly, essentially any seed of any kind of plant will experience its dark moment; for many seeds inside fruits this occurs by being actually physically eaten, humans and animals eat countless seeds that then germinate in our byproducts. Or if not that, then many seeds will experience the fruit that once housed them rotting around them as it decomposes. And like Jesus says, many other seeds will fall to the ground into the darkness of the soil and “die”. If this has been a bit gross for you, my apologies, the biologist that lives inside me got the better of me when writing this sermon, but I hope I have invigorated the notion of the darkness attending to this metaphor. There is a moment of true darkness when the seed falls away, when the seed is planted, as it waits to germinate and grow into something beautiful again. The moment of the seed “dying”. 

Importantly, Jesus seems to use this rhetorical device to qualify the surrounding statements in the Gospel reading today. Just before this metaphor he talks about how the time has come for he himself to be glorified, just after he gives the direction to the disciples that they must “lose their life”, and in the next chunk he tells the disciples how his soul is troubled even as he is going to be glorified. 

Jesus uses this metaphor to anticipate both the crucifixion and the resurrection and to help understand what is going to happen. He is indeed greatly troubled by the idea of the crucifixion, but the troubled nature passes through the understanding of the kernel of wheat metaphor. Which helps us to understand that the crucifixion is in some way necessary, but that it is also not a permanent state. It is scary, but one moment on the path to something truly greater. Like the kernel of wheat that falls, the crucifixion is one moment on the journey, not the final destination. The resurrection is anticipated in this metaphor, the kernel of wheat will naturally grow into a stalk that produces many kernels of wheat, and that is its final point on its particular journey. 

It also points Jesus into a direction of relationship and trust. Jesus even asks rhetorically if he ought to ask God to spare him this endeavor, this fear, the hardship he must endure. Ultimately, though, Jesus says that he cannot do that, and will not do that. First because it is necessary–a kernel of wheat cannot grow into a stalk if it remains on the stalk. Second, because there is trust. There is a trust in Jesus’s relationship to God that God will glorify Jesus again. Jesus trusts in the fact that in his moment of falling to the ground that God will indeed lift him up again. When Jesus finds himself heading into the fearful darkness of the soil, he does not flinch away from it, does not ask God to spare him from the moment of trial, instead he moves deeper into a relationship of trust with God. 

Returning back to our gospel story, Jesus, ever the teacher, gives his followers some direction after he says something scary and ominous. Right after he gives the metaphor of the kernel of wheat, he tells his followers that those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it forever. It does feel like a “heads I win, tails you lose” kind of scenario. With either option, I either lose the life I love or keep the life I hate forever. So personally, I think understanding the confusion of this statement requires the understanding we get from the kernel of wheat metaphor. 

To love our life in the sense of this story would mean to cling onto the stalk of wheat, to demand that God give us the easiest straight path to follow, to always do what is easy instead of what is right, to do what is efficient over what is just, to do what is profitable instead of what is loving. In this sense, to love our life as it is is not a natural thing, it would be unnatural for the kernel of wheat to remain stuck forever onto the stalk–even though that is the most secure and safe place for it to be. To love our life means to be unwilling to undergo transformation, unwilling to leave the stalk, to be unwilling to do what is just, right, and necessary. To lose our life would mean to lose ourselves to pursue love in all its forms: justice, joy, community building, mercy, and so on. 

To lose our life means to embrace the fact that there will be times where our pursuit of this love will take us off of the stalk of wheat and into the dark soil on the ground, buried and waiting for what will come next. It will almost certainly get difficult, and strange, and inconvenient, and unpleasant. It may be the wisdom behind the pessimistic adage that “no good deed goes unpunished”–following Jesus, doing good, is hard. Unlike the adage though, we have the promise that when we inevitably find ourselves in the darkness of the soil, after falling off the stalk of wheat, we have a trust in God that we will not remain there in the soil forever.

I will say with almost certainty that everyone in this church has already experienced what I am talking about. The pursuit of love is, for example, what led all of us to isolate ourselves in our houses for months on end during the various stages of COVID, an anxious and dark time where love meant separation and boredom. 

However, it is also maybe not always that large and looming. Most of the time, we live quite ordinary lives with quite mundane problems. What of the dark soil then? I also think the pursuit of this love, and the subsequent darkness of soil, manifests in smaller ways throughout our lives. Maybe not in grand gestures of dark times, but in the small inconveniences we take upon ourselves to make our community better. I see this kind of thing acutely in my life when college students give up their entire summer to get paid a few hundred bucks to sleep in cabins and care for people’s kids——when they could easily make ten times that doing almost anything else; I see it when people regularly take hours out of their week to attend building committee meetings, vestry meetings, and such things——when they could easily say “no thanks”; I see it when tiny little churches devote days and dollars to welcome dozens of people into their parish house for a free weekly meals——when simply surviving another year as a church would be considered a success. 

As we move through Lent this time around, I am reminded through the darkness that Lent entails, that we understand that a Christian life, in its pursuit of love, is not always easy. Whether it is an everyday darkness in soil–losing your life bit by bit; or a more profound darkness in the soil, and losing your life feels much bigger. BREAK As we approach Easter, I am reminded that a Christian life, through the action of Jesus, also promises a profound and powerful resurrection in return. And like Jesus did, we can place our full trust in God for this resurrection. In the name of the one who loved us first. 

Sermon — March 10, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I want to start this morning with a poll about a common English phrase. Show of hands: If you heard the news headline, “New facts have come to light in the case of the priest accused of embezzling from a local church”—this is a hypothetical situation, to be clear—How many of you would guess that the “new facts” revealed that he actually hadn’t done anything wrong? How many would think it was much worse than you’d imagined?    

Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I’d always assume it meant things were so much worse.

And maybe that makes sense. Because—as shocking as it is to hear me say it—maybe Jesus is right. When “new facts come to light” it’s because they’ve been hidden in darkness before. But who would want to cover up something that makes them look good? Maybe it’s true what Jesus says, that people who do evil deeds want to hide themselves in darkness, while people who do good are happy to have what they’ve done brought to light. But on the other hand: Does anyone really want to be scrutinized, even if they’ve done nothing wrong? I’m a pretty upstanding person, but even I still get pretty nervous when tax season rolls around: am I sure I’m really filling all those boxes out right?

“This is the judgment,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John: “that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19) This is the judgment: Not some day of judgment in the future, when Jesus will decide whether your acts are right or wrong. But this, right now. This moment when you decide whether you’re willing to be seen. If your deeds are good, Jesus says, you come to the light. You want the things you’ve done to be seen and known. (3:21) But if they’re not so good, you love the darkness instead, because in the darkness, you are hidden from view. In the darkness, no one can see what you are doing.

There’s a special edge to his words that requires a little extra context to understand. Jesus isn’t just talking to the disciples or to Christians today. These words are the second half of a conversation with a particular disciple, a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is afraid to follow Jesus, afraid to be seen with him in the light of day, so he “comes to Jesus by night” instead. (3:2) Jesus’ words here are for him: Is wanting to be my disciple such an evil act that you need to sneak around, Nicodemus, coming to meet me in the dark of night? The Gospel doesn’t record how Nicodemus responds. But Jesus’ words are for us, too. As is often the case in the Gospel of John, Jesus starts with a concrete situation and kind of wanders off into making a more general point. He goes from the specific to the general. He concludes that not just Nicodemus but “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light… 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.” (John 3:20–21)

I’m not sure that this is as easy as Jesus makes it out to be. We are not all good or all bad, after all. We’re all mixed, and sometimes, we’re not even sure which is which. One of the universal facts of human life is that sometimes, we actually just can’t know yet whether the choices we’re making are right or wrong. At different levels, from career choices to parenting decisions to foreign policy, we often find ourselves trying to judge between two less-than-perfect paths. And even if we mostly do the right things, our inner lives are often wrapped in a layer of some amount of shame. Who in this world is so confident that their deeds are good that they would publish their diary so that it could be seen in the full light of day? How confident are you that if “new facts come to light” about you, you’re going to feel good about it? Most of us are not so confident, and so we respond to this uncertainty by hiding parts of ourselves away, creeping around like Nicodemus under the cover of darkness lest we be judged for the decisions we have made.

And Jesus seems to respond with this: To be seen as we truly are is one of our great fears; but to see God as God truly is is our only hope.

In other words: It’s time to talk about the thing with the snakes.

There are whole papers that have been written about the development and the meaning of this story in Numbers: the relationship between the poisonous serpents and the seraphim we’re much more used to hearing about; the idol of a bronze serpent that was used in the Temple before the religious reforms of King Hezekiah; traditions of “apotropaic magic,” in which the poison of the serpent can only be defeated by a picture of a serpent. These are just scholarly ways of saying it’s a very odd story.

We read this story today because Jesus alludes to it in what he says. He puts himself in the place of the serpent of bronze, which is set on a pole and lifted in the air. And you can easily imagine why early Christians would have used this as an image of the Cross. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14)

The serpents afflict the people with poisonous bites—as a punishment from God for their grumbling, by the way—and God provides a solution Godself. Put the figure of a serpent on a piece of wood, and raise it up, and anyone who sees it will be healed. So, what’s the analogy here? The human condition afflicts us all with the feeling of shame and the reality of death—as a punishment from God? as the reality of our fall from grace?—and God provides a solution: Godself. Put the human being who is God on a piece of wood, and lift him up, and anyone who believes in him will be healed.

But when Jesus says “lifted up,” it means more than just this. Is Jesus “lifted up” on the cross? Yes. Is he “lifted up” from the tomb? Yes. Is he “lifted up” in his ascension into heaven? Also yes, and Jesus seems to mean all three of them: by the process of his death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus “raised us up with him,” as Paul writes to the Ephesians, lifting us out of the poisonous darkness of this world to the true light of heavenly life. And there’s something visual, almost magnetic, here: later in the Gospel Jesus says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” (12:32)

So the two halves of this strange passage are linked by the theme of sight: to be seen in the light or to hide ourselves in darkness is judgment; but to see God crucified, risen, and ascending into heaven, doesn’t only provide us an example of how we ought to live—it actually draws us up with him.

But what on earth does that mean?

The similarities between the bronze serpent and Christ takes us about three quarters of the way. But it’s actually the difference that offers us some hope. Because the Crucifixion is not an ancient magical ritual, as if simply seeing the snake on the pole could cure us. It’s a matter of belief: not belief in the theoretical or cognitive sense of accepting certain statements of truth about the world, but belief in the sense of trust: trust in who God is and what God is like.

“This is the judgment,” that light has come into the world, and we have hidden in the darkness—not so much because we’re evil as because we are ashamed or unsure, because we often don’t believe that we really are good, or because we’re just trying to make ourselves a little more perfect first. And this is the solution: to see what God is really like, to see God offering God’s own self for us in love, to see Jesus laying down his own life because what Paul says is true: because God is “rich in mercy,” because if God loved us with “great love” even when we were “dead through our trespasses,” how much more will God love us now, as we just muddle along. We can try pretending to have it all figured out, we may think that we are hiding our flaws successfully in the dark mood lighting of this world, but Jesus’ light has come into the world, and God has seen us all as we are, exactly as we are, and God has chosen to “make us alive together with Christ.” (Ephesians 2:4) “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (2:7)

God has given you the gift of light: A light in which you see God as God really is, and God can see you as you really are. Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved, wherever you have failed; whatever you have done or left undone, God is inviting you to step into the light. To know that you are forgiven. To accept that you are loved. To live in the light as a child of the light, “for we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before all time for us to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2:10)

Amen.