March 13, 2016 Fiddler: Far From Home Rev. Dr. Allen Hilton Bible Reference: Mark 11:1-11, John 19: Allen enters with Palm a frond in his hand.

Transcription

1 March 13, 2016 Fiddler: Far From Home Rev. Dr. Allen Hilton Bible Reference: Mark 11:1-11, John 19:16-22 Allen enters with Palm a frond in his hand. Allen: We enter two celebratory scenes. How many of you have been to Fiddler? Okay; so, you know the To Life/L Chaim scene. Others of you have seen the movie and know it. The stage lights up with celebration that Lazar Wolf has found a match. Yenta has put a match together for Lazar, and the whole town drinks to it and celebrates. We re going to hear the song in a little bit, and the passage in the Bible that that most reminded me of, oddly enough, is the Palm Sunday passage. Because I want you to go with me to Bethany. You re going to hear the passage. Mike Fink is going to read it out in a little bit. Bethany is the place where Jesus and the disciples stayed during the last week while they were in Jerusalem. So on that heady day, when palms were being waved and everybody was celebrating the coming of Jesus who was the coming king of our ancestor David. On that big day, they finished by going out to Bethany, and I want you to picture yourselves in Bethany at the end of a long Palm Sunday. I want you to picture yourselves as one of the disciples. You re Peter or Andrew or James or John or Matthew or one of the others. Your life before Jesus had been fishing in the Sea of Galilee or collecting taxes along the streets of Galilee. Your life had been, Okay, I go to work; I catch fish; I come home. And all of a sudden this strange man approaches you out of no where and says, Hey, follow me, and I ll make you fish for people. Follow me, and I ll turn your life around, and they somehow saw that they should do this, and they left everything, and then they were a part of this rock and roll road show, because what started as just a few fishermen a few kind of low people on the totem pole became this HIT. Right? Suddenly everybody was following Jesus around in Galilee and they were coming out in droves, so that one day he tried to teach the parables. He stepped up, but there were too many people along this whole shoreline, and he had to step out into a boat so he could teach them. Right? They had to be pushed off from shore so that everyone could hear him because he would be smothered by the crowd. Jesus became a rock star, and these guys had bought good stock. Right? They started with, I don t know about this guy, but he seems good, and by the time the middle of the Gospel of Mark comes, everybody is flying to find Jesus. They re coming from all corners of the world to see Jesus, and hear him teach and be healed by him and be taught by him. Right? These disciples have already experienced what it is to be roadies for a rock star, but now, for the first time in their lives, these country boys are going to go to the big city. They go to the capital of the religion and the capital of the nation. They are going to Jerusalem, and you can imagine I don t know how many of you grew up in the country or grew up in a part of the world that made it a big deal for you to go to the first city you saw or go to the first big city you saw, but these guys were like that. They were back-woods boys who followed Jesus, and finally, because of Passover, he takes them to Jerusalem, and they look around and they go, Whoa, look at the size of these buildings. At the end of the passage you re going to hear, Jesus is going to take them on a prep trip. Jesus is going to take them to the temple, and they re going to say things like, Wow, look at the size of the stones in this place, and on their way in, as they enter, with I m sure some nervousness - tap your own first visit to some city I m sure with some

2 nervousness, they re kind of not sure what s going to happen, and as they approach the city, what happens? People start waving palms and saying things like, Hosanna. Blessed is the coming king of our ancestor David. Blessed is the one who is going to completely turn the world over. Blessed is the one who s going to throw off Rome and put Israel back on the throne. Imagine you were a fisherman three years ago, and you go to the big city, and that s not enough, you go to the big city and the big city comes out, and it claims your guy in ways like that. And now imagine it s Bethany. We ve been through that day, but there s no way we re going to sleep because our eyes are big and our lives are lit up. So, we are all gathered around raising a toast to the amazing day and the amazing man we chose to follow and the amazing things that start to come. We re going to rise with the sky, and we re all ready choosing our seats in the kingdom. Right? To Life! To Life! L Chaim. Blessed is the coming kingdom or our ancestor David. Michael s going to read us that passage now from Mark, Chapter 11. Let s listen together for the word of God. (The passage is read and then the cast from Fiddler on the Roof sings To Life (L chaim). After the cast sings, Allen continues his sermon: Now imagine disciples doing that. Right? Do you see it? Do you see this? And you know, and you who came to the show or have come, know that there are drinks being hoisted and toasts being made. This spirit is undoubtedly what was in the disciples at the end of Palm Sunday, but now we go to another point of view. One of the illustrations to me of how we get soaked in things we pay a lot of attention to is the way you come out of an endeavor like being in a musical seeing the world differently, and I want to illustrate it by Mike who just read the passage. I handed him the book yesterday, you know the script so he could go over it and get ready. And he took it and went away. He went away, but he came back and said, Allen And he had read it in a way that you don t understand unless they know that early in the play, there s a report by Tevye that this town is very peaceful. Anatevka is very peaceful. Oh, we had a little conflict once, about a guy who sold, as a horse, something that may have been something like a mule. Right? But that s all done. It s all peaceful now, but then the guy stands up and says, It was a mule. (The other guy), It was a horse. And the whole town divides. Right? Half are the horse people. Half are the mule people, and it doesn t seem like it s quite gone as a conflict. Right? That horse/donkey/that mule, reminds us of the character in the story of Palm Sunday that we sometimes forget the donkey. And this gets us to Jesus perspective of the Palm Sunday event and of what s coming. Mary Oliver wrote a poem called The Poet Thinks of the Donkey. Poets help us see nuance or what s behind the lines. But let s listen to Mary Oliver as she pictures the experience of this donkey, which is really the experience of Jesus as he rides into Jerusalem. Allen reads the poem: On the outskirts of Jerusalem, the donkey waited, not especially brave or filled with understanding. He stood and waited. I hope finally he felt brave. I hope finally he loves the man who rode so lightly on him as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped as he had to to move forward.

3 Mary Oliver captures the hesitance, the hesitation, at the edge of the city, by the donkey, which is to say the hesitation of Jesus. So, let s go back to Bethany. Let s go back To Life flying all over the place and toasts being made and Jesus sitting in a corner not at all exhilarated. (Allen goes to right of stage and sits.) He s kind of looking wistfully at all of this. Jesus sees the merriment, and he s glad for them, but he knows what s coming. He knows that they may have thought the little trip to the temple was about sight seeing. He was going because he was casing the place to challenge the authorities there the next day. He knew that he was going to face opposition from powerful leaders in the city. He knew how the week was going to go. So, he wasn t flying high on Palm Sunday in the way that the disciples were. He was wondering, Am I up for this? And so, he stepped one dusty foot forward into a week that would be the most testing in his life, perhaps the most testing in human history. As we absorb that truth, the difference between the disciples experience of euphoria and Jesus experience of apprehension as he looks forward to those conflicts, with tradition, by the way, as he looks forward to that Thursday night when a disciple is going to betray him and another one is going to deny him, as he looks forward to the trial and the beatings and the cross, he sees it all in one swoop and still steps forward. You know there s a tradition in Christian churches to take the palms that we wave on Sunday, on Palm Sunday (Allen raises palm frond over his head and waves it) to take them and raise them so high in triumph and exultation and to take them and burn them all together. And you know what we make out of them? We make the ashes for next Ash Wednesday, because in the moment of Holy Week, we see our best and our worst. We see our celebratory claim that God has come, and we see our weakness so that by Friday, we ve given up on God and have gone with the crowd. In the palm you and I see ourselves, fickle, faithful people. In the palm we re reminded that the God who loves us has to love us through our faults and warts and failings, and still on Friday, we re going to get Jesus on the cross, far from the home he loves. We re going to hear that now in scripture, and then we re going to hear it in song. Let s listen to the word of God. Scripture of the crucifixion account is read by Sarah Zuber, a cast member of Fiddler on the Roof, John 19:16-22, 25-30: The soldiers took Jesus, and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called the place of the skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with two others, one on either side with Jesus in between them. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Many of the Jews read this inscription because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew in Latin and in Greek. Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, Do not write the King of the Jews, but that this man said I am the King of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written, I have written. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved, standing beside her, he said to his mother, Woman, here is your son. And he said to the disciple, Here is your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her into his own

4 home. After this, when Jesus knew that all was not finished, he said, in order to fulfill the scripture, I am thirsty. A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So, they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine he said, It is finished. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. After the Gospel reading, Sarah Zuber and Rick Treece sing Far From the Home I Love from Fiddler on the Roof. After the song, Allen returns and finishes the sermon: We ve been at a Bethany camp fire with euphoric disciples, and we ve been through Holy Week with Jesus wariness and realism about what s going to happen. In Fiddler, we ve been to the toast to the man who s made a match, and we ve been to longing and the pain mixed that go with moving far from the home she (Hodel) loved and far from the home Jesus loved. Now we turn to Mary. Did you hear in the scripture that Mary is at the foot of the cross as Jesus is dying? And it brings to mind something that is oddly true about pastors. We like memorial services. Tragedies precede them, but down the line, we love memorial services because we get to retrospect with the family and friends a life that we may have taken for granted in ways along the road, but we get to hold it up in all its glory at the end. So, when I picture Mary at the foot of the cross, I don t picture her actually thinking about Jerusalem or judges or convictions or a cross. The most famous song maybe in Fiddler is Sunrise, Sunset in which the parents rehash, or remember, one of their daughter s life all the way through. I think Mary would have thought back to the time when Jesus was twelve, and the family was at Passover, and Joseph and Mary and the rest of the gang went away, but they found out after a day s journey that Jesus was not with them. So, they had to rush back (Do you remember this scene?) to the temple and found him in there, and the brash little twelve-year-old said, after they had just looked every where and scoured and asked, Where were you?, he said, Did you not know that I would be at my Father s house? I imagine Mother Mary, who didn t understand that then, and probably bawled him out for it, stepping back and realizing something at the cross, that somehow he was already living love, and then she d remember all of those confusing things that happened her boy growing up to draw crowds, her boy growing up to heal people, her boy growing up so important, her boy growing up and teaching, living, healing, speaking love, love, love. It filtered back to her, Mom, that when he was in front of challenging opponents when asked, what s the greatest command of all of them, all of the Hebrew Scriptures, what s the greatest command, he said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and the second is just like it love your neighbor as yourself. Love, drumming through this life. She didn t connect the dots until there she was in front of him in his last moment, looking up and running the film, running the memories, reminiscing, one by one, through things that confused her, like isolated stars that you can t quite catch the constellation of. Mary at the cross remembering sunrise, sunset, remembering love here, love there. Love here, love there. And now, in his resounding moment of recognition, love here.

5 We all get to sing Sunrise, Sunset in a moment. I want you to enter that world of Mary as she stands at the foot of the cross. We would think her bereft, but there s got to be something in her that sees back and notices that this life is too big and too much and too strong even for death to stop it. Sunrise, Sunset. Jesus on the cross. Love lived out. Love poured out. Love bled out. Amen.