Sermon - No Chance of Silence

Preached on Palm Sunday, March 28, 2010 at First Congreagational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Audio of the sermon is available here

Luke 19:28-48

Dedicated to the Confirmation I Class; and always to the glory of God.

As the crowds of pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem from every direction for the Passover festival, imagine the voices of the disciples rising above the noise, shouting and singing “blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The gospel according to Luke recounts this day and tells us that they shouted for him these words of the psalms because of “all the deeds of power that they had seen.” Think of what they had seen in their time with Jesus. Here was a king they could get behind, one who was bringing about the kingdom of God, in which people received healing and mercy regardless of their wealth or purity or social status. Everyone was welcome by this king, and so they sang for him on the way to Jerusalem, and today we join in singing for him too. We also sing for the king who brings in God’s kingdom, who teaches that the grace of God meets us wherever we are and gives us new life. What a joyous day is this Palm Sunday! Who cares about the warning?

The warning is that we had better not get too carried away in our faith in Jesus, because it will cost too much. In fact, we had better just keep quiet about it all. The warning comes from some concerned Pharisees, who tell Jesus to make his disciples stop with the singing and shouting. Earlier in the gospel of Luke, when Jesus was up north in Galilee, some Pharisees had warned him there that the local Roman governor was looking to kill him. Now they are warning him again, because they know full well that you can’t ride into town with people singing “blessed is the king.” Jerusalem only recognizes the rule of Caesar, the Roman emperor, and his local stand-in Pontius Pilate. They’re in charge, and those who challenge them are not long for this world. Jesus himself had recently heard the reports of the men who had been killed by Pilate’s order in the Temple court. Pilate is a cruel and unjust ruler, but what can be done but to submit? It’s better to accept the way things are than to allow our faith to get us into trouble. “So, Jesus, if we could just get the disciples to stop.”

That warning has been repeated again and again to the followers of Christ. In the first centuries, people were warned not to admit being Christian during the Roman persecutions, because it might get you killed. You and I don’t have to worry about that anymore. In 16th century, people were warned not to own a Bible in translation, or worship in a Protestant community, because those might get you killed, and we don’t have to fear that either. In the middle of this last century, people were warned not to allow their faith to get them involved in demonstrations against the evils of segregation, because it only caused trouble and invited violence or prison. A group of white ministers asked Martin Luther King, Jr. to make them stop and be quiet, but he wrote them a letter from a Birmingham jail and told them why they could not be silent. We don’t have to worry about that danger either. But we might be warned in other ways not to go overboard with this whole business of following Christ. Some of those things he said, for instance, might really get in the way of life as we know it: his teachings about loving our enemies, and overcoming them with generosity, or turning the other cheek, carrying someone’s load the extra mile, being willing to drop our fishing nets, give away all that we have, pick up our cross, and follow him. These words are as clear as they are troubling. As someone once said, “it’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me. It’s the parts I do understand.” We had better stop our celebration before it costs us something we don’t want to give.

Which is what the Pharisees are recommending. But Jesus tells them that if the disciples were silent, the very stones would cry out. In other words, there is no chance of silence. The disciples might stop singing about a new king and a new kingdom, but what about those stones in the Temple court that are stained with blood? Will they keep silent about the need for the kingdom of God and the peace that it brings? And what about the stones of other cities, bearing witness to war and oppression, torture and apartheid? You can’t pretend that everything is all right in Jerusalem when the stones have blood on them. And that’s why Jesus has come, to proclaim a different kingdom in which the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick alike are invited to share in the riches of God’s world, where curing the sick is more urgent than religious ceremony, and feeding the poor is more important than our own wants. He has come as a different kind of king, to confront all that is not right in the name of love. And it will cost him, and it will cost those who follow him, but you can’t sit by when the stones cry out. There are some things that cry out to us no matter how much we ignore them or try to silence them.

I wonder what cries we try to silence. Perhaps it is the photograph of a brother or a daughter that you’ve hidden in a drawer because you don’t want to repair a relationship broken by anger and hurt? And yet it cries out from the drawer. Is it that email from a friend asking for some money for an agency in Africa that’s helping people to become educated and support their villages – they just need a bit of your support, but you can’t deal with one more thing, and so you’ve let the message get buried in your inbox? And yet it cries out to you still. Is it the road you drive by, where someone you know is very ill, but you are nervous around hospitals and nursing homes, so you decide that a visit from you isn’t really very important? The road cries out each time you pass it.

We don’t have time, we can’t solve anything ourselves, we’re too small to make a difference. With those words, many religious people in Jerusalem had learned to live with the blood on the stones. It was just the way things were, and in time, they stopped noticing. They didn’t weep over their city the way that Jesus came and wept over it, lamenting that its people did not know the things that make for peace.

Sometimes it takes a new eyes to see what we have become used to. This is what happened to Kevin and Joan Salwen one day when their daughter upended everything that they had tried to do as parents. The Salwens were a successful, and they had been able to provide many good things for their two children: music lessons, baseball camps, and a big house in a nice neighborhood, with plenty of room for sleepovers and games in the yard. They knew that the house was a bit over the top, but they were able to use it for good causes, like fundraisers for Habitat for Humanity, and they’d even taken in a family from New Orleans for a couple months after the hurricane, so they kind of got used to living in their dream house and didn’t think much of it.

One day, while Kevin was driving his daughter home, they pulled up at one of those intersections where the traffic is always backed up, and there on the roadside was a man holding a sign that said “homeless. hungry. please help.” Then a brand new Mercedes pulled up beside them: black, convertible. Hannah looked at the car and looked at the man with the sign, and she said “if that man had a less nice car then that man could have something to eat.”

Now, these are important moments for a parent, and so Kevin said “well honey, if we had a less nice car then that man could have something to eat.” You really have to watch what you say to your kids, because this stuck with Hannah, and she talked about it that night at dinner, and then a few days later she brought it up again and said that she didn’t want to be a family that talked about things, she wanted to be a family who did things. So her mom decided to test her conviction, which was kind of like the warning of the Pharisees about not getting carried away. She asked Hannah “would you be willing to sell our house and buy a smaller one so that we could give half of the money to the poor.” Hannah said “yes. That is absolutely what we should do.” And that’s what they did. We should not underestimate the willingness of people to accept the cost of acting when they see that something is not right in the world. (The Salwen story is told by Kevin and Hannah in The Power of Half).

And we should not underestimate ourselves. We are invited to join the joyful procession of Palm Sunday, following Jesus Christ, even though we are fully aware that he will give his life at the end of this journey, and that following him will cost us something too. But what is the alternative? Even if the procession is silenced, still we will hear the stones cry out, still we will hear the voice from somewhere deep inside us that calls us to do our little part for the kingdom of God. There’s no chance of silence.