The Story Which Defines Us Palm Sunday Sermon April 9, 2017 Philippians 2: 5 11 McCormick United Methodist Church, McCormick, SC Paul A. Wood, Jr. Have you heard of Alexander the Great? I guess we all of us have at least heard his name. He was born about 350 years before Jesus was born. He died at age 32 or 33. Well, Jesus died at age 32 or 33, so that is something they have in common. But that is almost the only thing they had in common. To say that Alexander had a privileged upbringing is quite an understatement. As a boy, he was personally tutored by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. From the day of his birth Alexander had great wealth and power. His father was Philip II, king of Macedonia. Alexander was only twenty when his father was assassinated, so he became king and inherited a strong kingdom and a large army. From that time onward, his fame and glory took off like a rocket. Alexander was never defeated in battle. He dramatically expanded his father s empire so that it spread from Greece to faraway India as well as to northeastern Africa. But he died suddenly at the early age of 33. Soon, his kingdom began to split apart. We can contrast Alexander with Jesus. Someone put it into poetry this way: Jesus and Alexander died at 33. One lived and died for self; the other for you and me. The Greek died upon a throne, the Jew died upon a cross. One s life a triumph seemed, the other s but a loss. One walked with mighty men and the other walked alone. One shed the whole world s blood, the other gave his own. Jesus and Alexander died at age 33. The Greek died in Babylon, the Jew at Calvary. One made himself god, but the other who was God made himself less. One lived but to blast, the other but to bless. When died the Greek, forever fell his throne of swords. But Jesus died and arose to live forever, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
2 Today, Palm Sunday, is a good day to acknowledge the glory and splendor of Jesus Christ. We are joining the multitudes as they wave their palm branches and shout: Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed be the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest! Jesus was strong and heroic, but not in the ways of Alexander the Great. Jesus knew his calling. He knew that among the people who waved the palm branches the day he triumphantly entered Jerusalem, hardly a single one understood the true nature of his messiahship. Most thought that his heroism and strength would allow him to conquer the Romans and eject them from their land. He thought he would resemble King David in power and glory. But Jesus knew better than that. He had a different calling a very different calling. We know there was so much disappointment with his self-understanding that some of the same people who hailed him as king on Sunday called for his death just five days later. So, did Jesus die a failure? Of course not! His death was not the ending but the beginning. His death brought life. His death brought salvation for all who believe in him. In fact, it is his dying that brings us here today. William Faulkner was the Mississippi writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, mainly for his novels. But he also wrote short stories. Here is one that is in reality a folk tale. Faulkner heard it told by African Americans: A mother sheep had warned her little ones, Do not go near the river, for a bad tiger lives there, and he will kill you and eat you. One lamb kept toying with the thought that the grass was greener down near the river. The lamb thought its mother must be mistaken about the tiger. Finally, curiosity got the best of that lamb, and she scampered down for a drink from the river. Suddenly the lamb heard a loud, gruff voice: What are you doing, drinking from my river and muddying my water? The disobedient lamb began to excuse herself, but the tiger came closer, saying I m going to kill and eat you. As the tiger sprang toward the helpless lamb, the mother sheep ran between them. She took into her own body the death dealing blows of claws and fangs. Meanwhile, the disobedient lamb scampered up the river bank to safety.
3 In much the same way, our Lord was willing to lay down his life for us. It is that choice on the part of Jesus, that great sacrifice, that has brought us here this morning. We are here because that man, Jesus, gave up his divinity and his equality with God in heaven, to join us here on the Earth. His story defines us. The story of the cross tells us who we are. Stories have power, and the story of the cross should be the primary driving force in our lives. Through the years of his apostleship Paul spoke constantly about Jesus and the cross. The cross was at the heart of what he had to say to people. God s son went to the cross for you! That, I think, was his core message. But it wasn t just a story of Jesus and the cross. Paul lived out his own story of self-giving. Where was he, for example, when he wrote his letter to the Philippians? He was in a prison cell. He had gladly given up his freedom to serve in Christ s name. Many other people through the centuries have made similar sacrifices. They have done so because Christ first gave up all that he had to give. Christ s story can drive and should drive our own stories. Paul wrote Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. To tell the story of the cross, Paul shared with the Philippians an early Christian hymn. It tells the narrative of Jesus in a way shaped like the letter V. In the beginning of the hymn, Christ is high and exalted. Christ is at the top of the letter V. He was in the form of God; he was equal with God. But Christ gave up that equality with God and took the form of a slave. He was born in human likeness. He became obedient like a servant or a slave. He went to the cross. So, the crucifixion was the low point of the letter V. But then God highly exalted Jesus so that every knee should bend and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. The hymn ends at the top of the letter V. His humbling, that lowest point for the one equal to God, led to his taking his place again at the right hand of God. Who is God? What is God like? 1 It s crucial that we have answers to those questions. And the answers can be found at the cross. Ours is a God of giving, a God of extreme generosity, of offering one s life for another person. And that story of the self-giving God has inspired many a person since the day Christ died. The 1 If the cross stands at the center of history as Christians believe, if it is the central key to understanding the nature of God, the dilemma of man, the mystery of life and death, then we have to expound its meaning as the way in which all men are meant to live and die. Max Warren
4 scholar C. T. Studd wrote: If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him. A lot of us look at our discipleship that way. As a result, you and I are people who give of ourselves. We probably won t be called to give up our very lives. But we do give of ourselves. We do not give or make sacrifice to earn God s favor. We already have God s favor, and Christ has already died for us. The motive for our lives of sacrifice is to demonstrate our gratitude. It s like what we read in the First Letter of John: We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. (1 John 3:16) A husband and wife were in a tour group in Asia. They arrived in Korea, where a missionary acted as their guide. They spotted a boy pulling a rude plow while an old man held the plow handles and directed it through the rice paddy. The husband was amused and took a picture. That s a curious sight. I suppose they are poor, he said to their missionary guide. Yes, their guide replied. He knew the family and explained: When the church was built, they were eager to give something but they had no money. So, they sold the only ox they had and gave the money to the church. This spring they are pulling the plow themselves. The husband and wife were silent for a while. Then the wife said, That was a real sacrifice. The missionary said They did not call it that. They thought they were fortunate they had an ox to sell. That is the amazing, sometimes startling love that distinguishes Christians from all the other people of the world. You and I have witnessed that kind of sacrificial love at work in the lives of other people. And I have the privilege of seeing that kind of sacrificial love at work in your lives. It thrills me when I see you putting sacrificial love into action in your own lives. I have seen you follow the example of the humble king who went into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday not riding a mighty horse of war but a slow and humble beast of burden. You have gotten the message about discipleship. It s encouraging to me to watch this church in action.to watch you in action. I have made some sacrifices. To follow God s call and go into parish ministry has meant giving up a thing or two. It s that way for a pastor s spouse and children, too. It s not easy for them, either, and they don t have much choice in the matter! I will confess that every now and then my thoughts drift to college class-
5 mates who were in lucrative careers before I even completed seminary. My jealousy, of which I am not proud, is only occasional. I know that those thoughts do not glorify God. Sometimes I need a wake-up call about sacrifice. I realize that my sacrifices to follow Christ are puny compared to those of other people. I know many people who have served the Lord at much greater cost than I have. Their stories, their selfgiving, humbles me. Here is a story in my family which has deeply affected me since 1985. I was thirty years old that year, and Kay and I had moved to Columbia to start Grace United Methodist Church. Early on, I was interviewed by the religion editor of the State newspaper. The article helped to spark interest in the new church. The same day the article appeared I received a phone call. It was an elderly woman by the name of Katie Ward. She wanted to know if I was related to Rev. Paul T. Wood. I told her he was my grandfather, and she told me that he was her pastor when she was a teenager. I never met my grandfather, so I jumped at the chance to speak with someone who had known him. When Katie Ward invited me to her apartment, off I went. Mrs. Ward was in her eighties. She put into my hands original documents from the congregations my grandfather had served in Horry County. They were hand-written records from the years 1918 and 1919. We all know that 1918 and 1919 were the two final years of the First World War. But some of us may not know of the flu pandemic called the Spanish flu which took millions of lives around the globe the same two years. The Spanish Flu Pandemic affected a third of the population of the planet. It killed as many as fifty million people worldwide possibly a hundred million. Many more of our soldiers lost their lives to the flu than the war they were fighting. The average life expectancy of our country dropped by twelve years in the year 1918. My grandfather s notes indicated that many young men in his six congregations were overseas fighting in the war. But the bigger challenge for the churches, he wrote, was the pandemic. Several of his churches could not hold worship or Sunday School. Mrs. Ward, as I said, was a teenager at that time; and she remembered my grandfather as a kind and noble pastor. She told me he would risk his life by going into the home of a family weakened by the flu. He would take their clothes and
6 wash them by hand. He would hang them out to dry. Finally, he would pray with the family. Then he would go to the next house and offer the same ministry to that family and the next family and the next. I will never forget that description of my grandfather s service to his churches. You and I can see in his ministry a follower of Jesus Christ, a disciple of the one who went to the cross and died for all of us. We cannot help but be moved. So yes, there are people we have known and people we have heard about who followed Christ s example of sacrificial love. But Christ s sacrifice is the story which lies behind all the others. He is the one. He is the servant king. And this week, the seven days we call Holy Week, are our annual opportunity to re-tell that old, old story of Jesus. In my teenage years in Sunday School, my classmates and I would sing this hymn out of the Cokesbury hymnal. Along with Beulah Land, it was one of our favorites. Tell me the old, old story of unseen things above, of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love.