familiar. Systems organized around power are Gary Hall Trinity, Santa Barbara Palm Sunday, 2018 essentially reactive: when they are threatened, they

Transcription

1 1 Gary Hall Trinity, Santa Barbara Palm Sunday, 2018 On Palm Sunday, we enter Jerusalem with Jesus and then go with him to the cross. We have just taken part in a dramatic, liturgical reading of Mark s account of the Passion story. We have been with Jesus through his betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and now death. Though we believe and hope that the story will have a surprising ending, for now Jesus is simply dead. He has come up against the imperial systems of state and religion, and he has been crushed by them. familiar. Systems organized around power are essentially reactive: when they are threatened, they respond aggressively. Jesus s offense seems not to have been anything overtly political or theological. He did not challenge established government or religious orthodoxy. His offense was more subtle, and therefore more dangerous. He taught people how to live under oppressive authority without giving themselves over to it. The system knows what to do to freedom fighters. It does not know what to do to people who simply choose to live freely. So it kills them. For those of us who live in the 21 st century especially in the time of so much unrest in our nation and world the spectacle of a person being obliterated by When the earliest Christians reflected on the passion of Jesus, they turned to the Hebrew Bible and borrowed these words from Isaiah: oppressive, powerful forces should feel somewhat

2 2 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [Isaiah 53.6] The earliest Christians saw in the betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus something that subsequent generations have understood as well: they saw that even though you and I were not literally there, we might as well have been. They saw that, like it or not, you and I are implicated in what went on there. If we see this as a story only about a good person being crushed by a bunch of bad guys, we will have missed the point. This is a story about us about the ways we combine innocence and guilt within ourselves. In this story we are both Jesus and the ones who betray him. The reason the Passion speaks to us so deeply and so powerfully is that it gets at the complex duality of our nature as human beings. All of us are a mixture of both sinner and saint. You and I are not only the crowd in this story. We are Jesus, too. One of the hardest things about Palm Sunday is the way it enacts both the rejection of Jesus s ideas and the destruction of his body. We tend, as post-modern people, to think of religion as a history of ideas. But the Bible comes to us from a pre-modern world, a place and a time when people saw that, to use Emerson s words, Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. [Nature, Chapter IV, Language ] The betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and death of Jesus are events acted out in a real, physical, human life. You and I are right to see ourselves figured not only in that One s betrayers, but also in that One himself.

3 3 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [Isaiah 53.6] Christianity proclaims the inseparable connection between God and human beings. With the Jews, we believe that God made human beings in God s image. We take that belief one step further, though, in our assertion that God was uniquely present in the life and ministry of Jesus. In other words, we believe that God became one of us in Jesus. And if God became one of us in Jesus, it means that, in Jesus s passion in his betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and death God has experienced what you and I experience over the course of our lives. After the events of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday, God knows what it is like to be us. And if God knows what it is like to be us, this knowledge changes the relationship dramatically. We can no longer picture God either as a divine monarch or a gaseous abstraction. We can only picture God as someone embodied, someone who has lived and died as one of us. In her groundbreaking treatment of environmental theology, The Body of God, the theologian Sallie McFague asserts, The world is our meeting place with God...as the body of God, it is wondrously, awesomely, divinely mysterious. Sallie McFague thinks, and I agree with her, that our confusion about our relationship to our own bodies leads to a similar confusion about the world. The ambivalence and at times abhorrence that we see... in regard to the body in all its manifestations indicates a deep sickness in our culture: self-hatred. To the extent we do not like bodies, we do not like ourselves. Whatever more

4 4 or other we may be, we are bodies, made up of the same stuff as all other life-forms on our planet...[p. 16] Jesus got into trouble with the authorities not because he preached rebellion but because he questioned the fundamental self-hatred on which all oppressive systems are built. In his day, this self-hatred was manifested in appeals to various kinds of religious, political, or ethnic exclusivity: Roman is better than Jew, Jew is better than Samaritan, Pharisee is better than Sadducee, and so on. In our day, this self-hatred is manifested in appeals to ethnic and racial superiority and also in all forms of commercialism. Don t like yourself? At least you re better than those people. And you ll be better still if you buy Brand X. Self-hatred is attitude exploited by all oppressive systems. It holds out a false vision of what an acceptable person looks, sounds, dresses, and acts like. What if, like Jesus, we actually didn t hate ourselves? What if, like Jesus, we actually loved and accepted ourselves? What if we saw the totality of who we are gifts, abilities, weird habits, personal tics, shortcomings what if we saw the totality of who we are as worthy of love and blessing and acceptance? If we did that, we d probably stop stigmatizing or blaming other people for our problems. If we did that, we would treat others and ourselves more respectfully. If we did that, we would not be sitting ducks for every new gadget, cosmetic, deodorant, or demagogue that comes along. If we lived like Jesus we would be happy, peaceful, and

5 5 fulfilled. And we d also be a threat to a system that still operates by appealing to self-hatred. able to make him become someone other than who he was. Gathering with Jesus at the cross can be a meaningless exercise in self-flagellation, or it can be a call into new life. Jesus goes to the cross not so you will feel bad about it. Jesus goes to the cross because he was perhaps the first person in human history perhaps the only person in human history who fully accepted himself as he was, who was not willing to sign on to a bad program or idea simply to assuage his sense of personal inferiority. Jesus lived joyfully, fully, authentically. The human system in which we are all enmeshed responded reactively. But even with all the power and cruelty at its command, that system was not Our task this Palm Sunday is still the task of his followers in every time and place. It is to try the best we can to live as he did, to live as those who know and love and accept ourselves and God s world, as those who refuse to give in to the siren song of self-hatred. The oppressive forces of the world imperial, political, commercial beckon to you to escape yourself by trying to become something you re not. The love and compassion of God in Christ beckon you to something else: to love yourself, accept yourself as you are, and secure in that knowledge commit yourself to loving and blessing God as God is made manifest in the world and all its bodies the planet itself, other people, all the non-

6 6 human creatures we share creation with, and that most particular and precious body of all, your own. Today, Palm Sunday we remember how we and people like us defiled and desecrated Jesus in his person and his body. As we take in and mourn his death, let us also take in how we also did this to ourselves. Jesus gave his body that you might love yours. And loving yourself now as he loves you, you are free to love and embrace your brother and sister human beings, our plant and animal siblings, and God s world. Amen.