SunMar282010
LUKE 19:28-40
One of the recent ministries to spring up here at Federated is a flower ministry. Each Sunday after worship, some Angel Visitors deliver the altar flowers to people who could use a lift. With those flowers comes this card that says, “Just bringing these flowers to you today from the worship service at the Federated Church, where they have listened to the songs of the people, bent their leaves in prayer, and lifted their petals in praise, so that God’s strength, comfort, and love may be shared with you.”
I love the notion of the leaves and petals worshiping and witnessing and carrying all that power with them, the sense that the flowers are themselves praising God. It’s a great reminder to me that, while human beings are clearly unique, we’re not the sole bearers of the wonders of God, that other species and entities participate in and demonstrate the glories of the God who created us all and works within us even now.
What I had never stopped to consider was the notion that, not only living beings could be in on the praise of God, but that even inanimate objects could be part of that same praise. But Jesus’ words today catch me up short and suggest that maybe the whole world, both animate and inanimate, sings the songs of praise.
As Jesus approaches Jerusalem during the last leg of his final journey, his friends and supporters put him on a colt, spread their clothes out in front of him, and follow him into the city. Jesus is their leader, the one in whom they see the wonders of God, and because of what they’ve seen in him they can’t stop doing high fives and chest bumps to celebrate his utterly unique fabulousness.
Now, as it happens, several religious zealots are standing nearby, and in a sign of the terrible things to come, they tell Jesus off, insisting he shut these raucous demonstrators up. Jesus, though, knows that the thrill of awe and gratitude bubbling up in his followers cannot be squelched and silenced. So he says to the killjoys, “If they [my followers] kept quiet, the stones would do it for them, shouting praise” (19:40, The Message).
“The stones would do it for them, shouting praise!” Who ever thought of stones praising! Maybe, just maybe, though, just as the leaves in this sanctuary pray, so do the stones everywhere witness and give praise.
I thought of that this week as I watched scenes of the burning of Euclid Avenue Congregational Church, UCC, our sister church in Cleveland. It was a horrible end for a historic church, a church my uncle had served as an interim minister a number of years ago. The pews and roof; the communion ware and table; the pipe organ and stained glass windows; the pastor’s books and stoles, many of them gifts from other churches; that space which housed so many memories of weddings and funerals and baptisms and Christmas Eve services and Easter celebrations—all of it gone “in the twinkling of an eye” (I Cor. 15:52). All that was left, in the last picture I saw, was a shell of four stone walls, as if those stones were saying, “We can’t quite give up our role yet, our role as guardians of a great and lasting tradition. We bravely soldier on, as witnesses of love.”
The stones of Euclid Avenue UCC have seen much. As have the bricks and wood of Federated. Those stones and bricks and wood have seen a huge variety of human behavior. Because they’ve stood watch over churches made of fallible people, they certainly have seen their share of travesty and faithlessness. I’m sure they’ve seen their share of backstabbing and pettiness, of pinched vision and narrowly partisan agendas. That’s inevitable. It’s there in all churches, in all human institutions. I’ve seen hatred and vitriol in churches that was so strong it could cut a diamond. I remember, in a meeting at another church, a man screaming at me that he thought he would be able to outlast me, but that he had finally given up and had to leave. And I remember being so angry myself at a woman in the first church I served that, after she had left and I was all alone in the building, I threw a wooden chair against a wall, shattering it. I’m never too quick to judge someone else, because I can see all too clearly in myself the propensity to do, as the apostle Paul once wrote, “the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15).
If our walls were honest, as I’m sure all walls are, they would certainly tell the tale of a people who have struggled to be all God wanted them to be, and who have, quite frankly, often failed.
That’s not all, though. What these walls have also seen is acts of tremendous beauty and kindness, gestures of sensitivity and love to melt even the hardest of hearts. And part of what’s so striking is that they’ve seen all that from some of the same people who were so nasty and compromised.
As we enter Holy Week today, I ask myself, as I do every year, about the meaning of those last awful days of Jesus’ life. Why does that story go from the elation of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, to the desolation of his death on Good Friday, to the spectacular victory of Christ’s resurrection on Easter? Why can’t we go straight from Palm Sunday to Easter and skip Good Friday? Why can’t we have the “thrill of victory” without “the agony of defeat”?
When I’m honest about our shared life, though, what I see is its fullness, its complexity, its compromise. I see our tendency to take short cuts and to be swayed toward what isn’t right. I see the loving father snapping in a rage at his child’s lacrosse game, the concerned mother telling the white lie to protect her daughter’s reputation. I see the blind eye we so often turn to people who are poor; the ways we use each other for selfish gain; the scathing, dehumanizing tenor of the health care debate that derails us from focusing on the real merits and demerits of the issue. There is much we do that is less than admirable.
And part of what’s so striking is that often we don’t even know our failings. We’re ignorant of our shortcomings. If I asked you, for example, to tell me which was more harmful to the environment, a golden retriever or a Toyota Land Cruiser, you would almost certainly answer, as I would, the Land Cruiser—it’s as obvious as could be. What’s utterly remarkable and entirely counter-intuitive is that the “paw-print” of the dog is actually worse than that of the Land Cruiser. The reason is the dog’s carnivorous diet. What it takes to produce food for the dog requires twice the carbon footprint of building and driving the vehicle 6200 miles. Isn’t that astounding! “More than half the world’s total greenhouse-gas emissions [it turns out] come from the methane from livestock, the clearing of rainforests for pasture and other emissions from animal agriculture” (The Christian Century, March 23, 2010, p. 9).
Now no one is recommending that we all give up our animals in order to buy bigger cars—at least I’m not. This is only to say that even our best-laid plans have about them the whiff of ignorance and compromise. We’re never as pure as we think we are, never as untainted as we imagine ourselves to be.
The figurative way to say this, of course, is to tell the story of Jesus going into the lion’s den of Jerusalem. There, everyone who matters to him will let him down, and the authorities will put him to death. It’s a terrible story of self-centeredness and denial and betrayal and fear. It’s a story of the shabby underside of human life. The stones see all this, and my guess is they weep over it.
And yet, still, even when all seems to be falling apart, this Palm Sunday journey is also a story about “deeds of power” (19:37, NRSV) and “mighty works” (The Message). It’s a story about the relentless, indefatigable faithfulness of God. It’s a story that deserves to be cheered over and sung about. It’s a story about love—love in the midst of compromised lives, to be sure, but love that nevertheless knows no bounds.
This is what the stones and bricks and wood see. And this is what they shout about. They’ve seen that love. They’ve housed it. They’ve been caught up in it. Here at Federated the bricks and wood have seen that love in Jannine Mason, soon to leave our staff to go to graduate school. What a smile and sense of humor and deep care she gives to everyone she meets. She’s one in a long line of people who have cared deeply for the children of this church. The walls have seen it. And they shout their praises.
Those walls have seen van after van leave this building to transport youth to a work camp or church members to St. Paul’s Church to serve a Loaves and Fishes meal. They’ve seen “Angel” cars departing to take a meal or a vase of flowers to someone who has been stricken in some way. They’ve seen anxious faces come to 12-step meetings sober only an hour, and leave here with a new resolve. They’ve seen people enter the sanctuary desperate, and, after prayer and song and hearing a word of hope, leave buoyed with a lightness of step. We who have bickered and shaded the truth and fallen short of our ideals have nonetheless been vessels of God’s abounding love. The bricks and wood have seen it. And they shout their praises.
And this happens all over. Through and into our sin-streaked lives come moments of surpassing grace. They’re not without their gray areas. But they are also full of wonder. While tension and discord continue in the Middle East, the U.S. and Russia agree together to limit their nuclear arsenals. Amid ugly debates about health care, a customer donates a kidney to a pleasant Filipino immigrant working as a cashier at a Jewel-Osco in Evanston, IL.
At the burned Euclid Avenue UCC church, Curt Ackley, our association minister, gives the stole he received when he was installed here eight years ago, a stole made by our own Brenda Grauer, to the church’s pastor, Terri Young. “For eight years,” he says, “I’ve worn it as a symbol of the network of all our churches holding one another in prayer. Now, it is a sign of the support that all of you have offered them.”
Even in the shadows, even on that fateful journey to Jerusalem, the light of Christ shines, and the stones see it. I heard recently of a hospice nurse who went to visit one of her dying patients for what she knew would be the last time. When she arrived, she found her patient vomiting in the bathroom. When the nausea let up, the patient sat on the floor with her back against the tub. The nurse sat next to her on the floor. The woman was sobbing uncontrollably. So, after some time, the nurse finally said to the woman, “Tell me what these tears are about?” The woman said she’d been involved with a man outside her marriage for the last fifteen years, and that, as she neared the precipice of her death, she hadn’t had the chance to say good-bye to him.
What do you do in such a case? Clearly the woman had violated her own marital vows. She had been untrue to her husband. Do you try to teach her a lesson and convey how inappropriate this is? On the other hand, she was at the very edge of her own life, and this other man had meant the world to her. So the hospice nurse said, “Let me take care of this.” She went to the woman’s husband and suggested that he take a break while she was there to watch the woman. As soon as the husband had left, the nurse handed the phone to the woman and quietly slipped into the hallway while the woman made her final good-byes. You could justifiably argue that the woman had taken vows of fidelity that she needed to honor. But it also needs to be said: what larger good would have been served by denying her the chance to say a final good-bye? Because finally it’s not for us to judge, is it. It’s only for us to bring light and comfort and hope where we can. That nurse didn’t judge. She simply acted on what she hoped would bring some peace to this dying woman. Is this not what the cross is about—that holy presence in the midst of brokenness? The bottom line is that God is always there “with just one more surprise” (“I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry,” v. 6).
There is no pure and easy answer in any of this. But might we say that even in the midst of our failings and death, Christ breathes a spirit and a mercy that make for peace. This is what these walls have seen, the bricks and stones and wood of all our churches and homes and workplaces and hospitals. Into a Good Friday world with its sometimes dank and painful lives, the Spirit of Christ bounds to life again and again. Nothing can keep that grace down. And so we shout about it. Because if we won’t, the stones certainly will. Thanks be to God.