This is a tough time of the
year to preach for a couple of reasons. 1) The stories are so familiar. Who
doesn’t know the story of Jesus
entering Jerusalem with people waving their palm branches? Then, 2) This time
of the year, more than any other, requires the whole story. This is why many
churches have gone away from Palm Sunday and instead focused on the entirety of
the passion on this Sunday before Easter. The church is reacting to people who
don’t show up at Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services, as well as churches
that do not have Easter Vigil services. The church is recognizing that people
need the whole story. If you come to worship on Palm Sunday and then skip ahead
to Easter you’ve missed the stuff with weight. You’ve missed some of the stuff
that really matters. So you’ve likely
missed the point.
But, of course, we know it’s worse than that. There are a
ton of people who not only miss Maundy Thursday and Good Friday; they also miss
every other Sunday between Christmas and Easter. These folks not only miss the
hard stuff of Holy Week; they also miss the reflection and penitence of Lent
and the normal rhythm of Sunday worship. But, at least these folks are here on
Easter Sunday. There’s a whole other group who don’t even make that much
effort. For them, even the ritual of Easter is passé. So, not only have they
missed the build-up—the part that convicts us and the part that causes us to
reflect—but they’ve also chosen that the meat itself doesn’t matter either.
So, here I am, reflecting on what to say to everybody in
their various places across that spectrum over the course of the next week, and
I’m realizing that it cannot be done apart from the whole picture, because you
cannot understand Palm Sunday unless you understand that the very same people
waving palm branches one Sunday are the ones shouting “Crucify!” five days
later. You can’t get that if you are only in the Easter crowd, and there’s a
tendency among we-human-beings to just be part of the Easter crowd, to
disappear when things are challenging, to stick to Palm Sunday and then to
reappear for Easter. That’s what most people do.
It’s too easy in life to be a person who rises to the
occasion when it’s easy and when it’s fun but disappears when it gets hard, who
participates in the hard work of building bridges when things are easy but who
reverts to destruction—to anger and frustration—when things get hard. The
difference between a follower of Jesus and a crucifier of Jesus is nothing at
all. The people are the same. It’s simply that the mob mentality that led to
palm branches being waved one day led to crucifixion a few days later.
And that’s what I’m worried we’re not getting. I’m
worried that the people who are here in worship every Sunday think they are the
Palm Sunday crowd but not the Good Friday crowd, and I’m worried that the
people who are here only at Easter imagine they are the Easter crowd but don’t
know that any other crowd exists, and I’m worried that those who are never here
are so turned off by all the crowds that they imagine the best way to be a
Christian is to be set apart, to retreat off to the deer cabin or the ice house
or the tractor and worship God out there.
All of this worries me because the only way to make
certain we continue to follow Jesus is to be accountable to one another. We
need a church family who knows one another, who prays for one another, and we
need families who do the same, who bring what it means to be church into their
lives the other six days of the week. We need this because we have in us the
capacity to be the crowd shouting “Crucify!” as much as we can be the crowd
waving branches. We’re the same people.
The thing that strikes me about people is that we never
really change. I mean, there’s this very natural tendency to separate people
into “good people” and “bad people,” as in every person Nazi Germany was terrible,
every member of ISIS is the devil-incarnate, and every priest, pastor, and
prophet is holy and above reproach. But I think we’re all just ordinary people,
sometimes in extraordinary circumstances, and of course we have a choice to be
one thing or another, but most of the time it’s not that simple. We are sinners
and saints all wrapped up into one. Sometimes people just allow fear and anger
to rise to the point where humility and grace are obliterated. They remain
people, just people fundamentally wrapped up in a worldview that only death and
destruction can satisfy. Most people in Nazi Germany didn’t hate Jewish people
and other minorities, but their convictions just weren’t enough to risk
everything to oppose the mob.
This is why we have that Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote I’ve
offered several times over the last few months, where he said “When Jesus
Christ calls a disciple he bids him come and die,” because ultimately some have
to make that choice. I look at Lutherans protesting a political rally at
Lenoir-Rhyne College this week and think whatever your politics, whether you
love Donald Trump or hate him, the correct response has to be to tell people
about the love of God. This is what those Lutherans were doing and they
received some love in return, and also plenty of hate. This is what it means to
be a Christian, to stand against the mob—whatever the mob is saying. And, it
just so happens that when you stand against the mob, you risk death and you’re
all but guaranteed to be mocked and ridiculed and spat upon and beaten.
The function of the mob is always 100% contrary to the
function of the church, because the function of the mob is always to satisfy
its own needs, to be powerful, to be, in short, its own God, while the function
of the church is to point outward to the God who meets us apart from our
strength and power and might. This is how you tell if you are part of a church
or part of a mob, because in spite of everything it’s often very hard to tell
which you are: You are part of a church if you are pointing to power that you
cannot control, but you are part of a mob if you are trying to harness that
power yourselves. We need less mobs; we need more church.
Because mobs praise Jesus in one breath and kill him in
the next.
Churches understand something else: We are saints and we
are sinners. We are guilty and forgiven. We have been called not to live but to
die. Our baptismal promises tell us this: You are dead in Christ. You have to
be killed to remove that sin from your lives; you cannot be the one doing the
killing. To be a Christ-follower is not to wave the palm branches but to stand
against the mob.
This is why I worry so much about the future of the
church—not because the church is dying. That’s the story people want to tell:
That, because there are less people in the church, and because church buildings
are closing and censuses are telling us that fewer people identify as
Christians, therefore the church is dying. This narrative assumes the strength
of the church is equal to its capacity to be a mob. The strength of a mob is in
numbers, but that is not really the
strength of the church. The strength of the church is in its capacity to die.
To be a dying church is actually to be a Christian church. But not dying by
gradually losing focus on what the church is; instead, dying by standing
against the mob. My fear is not that the church is dying but that the church
isn’t dying enough or quick enough; that we are sacrificing the things we feel
we can afford—our money, our time, those kinds of things—but we’re not
sacrificing the one thing that would define us against the mob: We aren’t very
good at sacrificing our participation in the mob; we’re not, in short, willing
to sacrifice our comfort.
And that’s all that matters when confronted with the mob,
because you can refuse to give it money, you can refuse to take notice of it,
but ultimately to live out your Christian faith you have to stand against it. You
might imagine that this involves some grand kind of politics that you find
unappealing but not really. Instead, you can stand against the mob simply by
sharing what you believe with people you love: By telling your story to your
children and grandchildren, by getting to know people in your church. These are
practices that are learned. There’s nothing magical about it. But it’s the surest
way to stay out of the mob.
So, next week when you see those folks who aren’t
normally in church I have a challenge for you: Go behind “Hi.” Invite them to
be church not by telling them they should usher or be on a serving group, which
are great things, but let’s be honest: They can’t be our selling point.
Instead, invite them by inviting them. By telling them that this is the place
to get away from the mob. You see, eventually people will get tired of the mob.
It will eat them up and spit them out, and they’ll find themselves more lost
and confused than ever. Can you imagine being one of those who shouted
“Crucify!” and coming upon the risen Christ three days later? That’s what it’s
like to come back to church. Every. Single. Week. That’s the guilt the mob
instills in us. That’s what we need to help people overcome.
In order to offer anything to make a difference against
that guilt we have to be a dying church: A church full of people willing to be
more uncomfortable than the people outside who are feeling incredibly
uncomfortable as it is. We need to be the church that dies to its own desires,
because that’s what Jesus would have us do. Nowhere in the Palm Sunday story does
Jesus commend the people for waving branches. Instead he passes through on his
way to the temple where he goes about overthrowing the status quo, tossing the
tables of the moneychangers. He upsets the comfortable. Us. The mob.
Sinners-saints. He does it not to inspire disorder but to die, because that’s
what Christians do.
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