Sermon delivered on Passion (Palm) Sunday A, April 9, 2017, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 50.4-9a; Psalm 31.9-16; Philippians 2.5-11; Matthew 21.1-11. Passion narrative: Matthew 26.14-27.66.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In our OT lesson this morning, the so-called Servant—widely held by Christians to be Jesus—desires to faithfully preach the word of God to sustain the weary. But what does that look like and what does it have to do with our celebration of Passion Sunday today? This is what I want us to look at briefly this morning.

To help us understand what we’re dealing with, listen to this short list of news stories compiled from the past couple of days. Father Says Goodbye to His Baby Twins Killed in Syrian Attack. MIT Grad Arrested on Terror, WMD Charges. US Launches Missile Strikes on Syria Base Over Chemical Attack. 1 Dead, 2 Wounded After Shooting at Fitness Center in South Florida Mall. Terror in Stockholm: Four Dead as Hijacked Truck Plows Into Shoppers. Palm Sunday Bombings at Two Egyptian Churches kill at least 32. 11 Year-Old Boy Kills Himself in Response to Girlfriend’s Fake Suicide Prank on Social Media. I have to tell you. These stories and countless more like them make me weary. How about you? And they don’t even begin to address the things in our own lives that make us weary: life-threatening health issues with which we and/or our loved ones struggle, job and career struggles and uncertainties, chronic financial struggles that some of us face, fear of loneliness and broken relationships that don’t seem to get better. The list goes on and on. We see a world seemingly becoming more insane by the hour, not to mention parts of our lives that spin out of control with little or nothing we can do about it, and it makes us weary and afraid. When we get to this point in life—and all of us eventually do—we want to cry out to God for help. You’re all-powerful, God, so help us out here. Do something about the craziness in your world and in our lives and in ourselves!

Like us, God’s people Israel in Jesus’ day knew what it was like to be weary from evil and oppression and disorder in their lives. Their beloved land was occupied by hated foreigners. And while Solomon’s Temple, the very place where God chose to dwell with his people on earth, had been rebuilt, God had not returned to his people to live among them as promised. Neither had God’s promised Anointed One, God’s Messiah (or Christ) returned to lead God’s people. To top it all off, God’s people were assembling in Jerusalem for the great Passover festival that celebrated God’s mighty act of deliverance on behalf of his enslaved people in Egypt. Passover always raised people’s hopes and expectations that God would soon act on their behalf to expel the foreigners and restore right religious order in the land in preparation for God’s return to it.

St. Matthew wants us to see all this, of course, and like a good story teller, he lets the story itself convey his message. Jesus clearly saw himself as God’s Messiah, God’s anointed, who would lead God’s people and be their king. But not in the way the people expected. We see this in his choice to ride on a donkey and colt as he entered Jerusalem. As St. Matthew explains, this was to fulfill what the prophet Zechariah had written about how God’s promised Messiah would return to his people ahead of God’s return. In effect, God was promising his people that when his Messiah showed up, God wouldn’t be far behind, so it was time to get ready! And the people’s response clearly showed they understood the symbolism behind Jesus’s mode of entry into Jerusalem, or at least that he was proclaiming himself to be God’s Messiah. Their shouts of Hosanna to the Son of David (i.e., for the new king to save them from their occupiers), coupled with throwing their cloaks on the road and waving (presumably palm) branches, indicated that they understood something very special was happening. But did they really?

By choosing a donkey on which to enter Jerusalem instead of a warhorse, Jesus was proclaiming that he was not a Messiah who would be a conquering warrior. To be sure, Jesus did conquer Israel’s enemies that week, not to mention the world’s, but not in the way most of them or us expected. He conquered our enemies by shedding his blood for us in a way that helped fulfill the prophesy in our OT lesson this morning (cf. Isaiah 52.13-53.12). More about that in a moment. And while Jesus would clear the Temple later in the week, it was not for the reasons many of his contemporaries expected. As St. John makes clear in his gospel, this was the Word made flesh, God himself, returning to his people to announce that Jesus, instead of the Temple, would be the place to meet and know the One True and Living God. Astonishingly, God and Messiah were apparently one and the same! By his actions, Jesus was telling God’s people Israel that the Romans were not the real enemies. There were powers far more evil and sinister that had to be dealt with, and only he could do it because only he was God. Suffice it to say that this would not have been the word God’s weary people wanted to hear or what they were willing to believe. It would have violated their hopes and expectations to their very core.

Now if you want to have folks turn on you, and ferociously, all you need to do is to violate their deeply-held expectations. Do this and you can be assured that you will go from hero to villain in no time flat, and this is exactly what happened to Jesus. But violated expectations about Jesus are not unique to first-century Jews. They also apply to us. Like Jesus’ contemporaries, we cry out to the Lord to save us and our world and we expect him to answer in the way we want and demand because, well, we know better than Jesus. This is the challenge of Palm Sunday and Holy Week for us. Can we worship and follow a God and his Christ who constantly violate our expectations in how they should act to rescue us from the chaos and evil in God’s world, our lives, and ourselves? Will we let God’s word to us, spoken through an unfolding story, a story that reached its climax with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the subsequent events of Holy Week, be sufficient to relieve and sustain us in our weariness?

We would prefer God to bring in the tanks and destroy the forces of evil and their human minions, but God knows better because he knows evil runs through all of us. To destroy evil means God would have to destroy us and his entire creation because we are all that radically infected, and God simply won’t do that. So bringing in the tanks just won’t do. There has to be another way, a better way that shows God’s love for his world and its creatures, especially God’s image-bearing creatures. The better way, of course, was through Jesus’ death and resurrection. In one way or another, the NT writers all insist that on the cross, God broke the power of Sin and Evil. As we have seen this Lent, the power of Sin—the outside, alien force that is greater than and hostile toward us—had to be broken and God did that by condemning Sin in the flesh through his Son (Romans 8.3-4), who willingly obeyed his Father’s will because both love us and hate what Sin and Evil have done to us. So God acted on our behalf in and through Christ to free us from the power of Sin and Evil, and to take his own good and just judgment of our individual sins on himself, thereby enacting the justice that is so necessary, thanks be to God!

But this is hard for us to believe because as our headlines scream out (not to mention the turmoil in our lives) the power of Evil, while broken, is not yet fully vanquished. That will have to wait until our Lord’s Second Coming. But the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death have been broken and defeated as evidenced by Jesus’ resurrection (more about that next Sunday), and we are called to imitate our Lord in his suffering and humble obedience to the Father as Paul reminds us in our epistle lesson. We are to empty ourselves of our own false glory and live our lives in ways that show God’s glory revealed in his great love, mercy, compassion, and justice. In other words, we are called to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow our Lord Jesus. Only then can we reflect God’s glory out into God’s world as we await our Lord’s return. It is a daunting task, precisely because it seems so counterintuitive to the ways of the world, and if we do not have real faith that begins to appropriate God’s strange and beautiful Truth contained in the events of Holy Week, we’ll never have the needed motivation to want to live this kind of life in the power of the Spirit.

This is why I appeal to you and exhort you to make the story of Holy Week your story first-hand. Come with our Lord to the Upper Room Thursday night where he will give his disciples a meal as the means to help them understand what his impending passion and death is all about. Watch with him in the garden as he struggles and shrinks from the gigantic task of allowing the powers of evil to do their worst to him, and the prospect of having to bear the judgment of God for the sins of the entire world, your sins and mine. Our own personal sins can be a terrible burden to us. Try to imagine having to bear the sins of the entire world. Come, therefore, and venerate the cross on Good Friday as you ponder and contemplate the death of the Son of God for your sake and the sake of the world. Such contemplation demands silence, desolation, and humility. Was there ever any suffering like our Lord’s (and if you answer yes to this question, there’s a good chance you don’t really understand the magnitude of what happened on Good Friday)? Grieve with his first followers as they laid his tortured and crucified body in the tomb with no expectation of Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday is the time to do just that, culminating with the Easter Vigil and the reading of the story of God’s salvation on Saturday evening. It simply won’t do to observe any of this from afar. It’s as unedifying as listening to one of Father Gatwood’s sermons. No, if you really love your Lord and have even an inkling as to what great love has effected your salvation and changed the course of history forever, how can you possibly stay away from our Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil services? Easter Sunday will come with its great joy. But let none of us be too hasty to celebrate the great Paschal Feast without first pondering and agonizing and reflecting on the great and astonishing love of God that flows from God’s very heart as it was pierced by a Roman soldier’s spear. To be sure, it isn’t a pretty or fun thing to do. But if you commit yourself to walking with Jesus this Holy Week it will change you in ways you cannot imagine or envision, and for the good. It will change you because it is the Good News of our salvation, now and for all eternity. May we all observe a holy and blessed Holy Week together as God’s people at St. Augustine’s. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon delivered on Sunday, Lent 5A, April 2, 2017 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Ezekiel 37.1-14; Psalm 130.1-7; Romans 8. 6-11; John 11.1-45.

God takes Ezekiel to go and look at something. What this something is absolutely would have startled the Prophet as he looked out across this valley to which the Lord had brought him. As far as his eye could see there existed a grizzly sight. An horrific sight. Down in the valley, laying in piles and scattered around, were the bones of his fellow countrymen. They’re bright white from being bleached in the harsh desert sunlight, and they are so very dry. There’s nothing left on these bones, as the animals would have already come and picked these bones clean of any flesh they had on them. This scene is the stuff of nightmares. The total carnage present is troublesome, to say the least about it.

It’s a view that would bring to anyone’s mind feeling and thoughts of utter hopelessness, as if there is nothing that can be done besides sit down and weep bitterly. For here before him is a vision of his own people, completely dead, there bodies desecrated having been left out for the animals to devout. And now there very bones are brittle and dry. What was Ezekiel to do with this scene?

“Son of man, can these bones live?” Asks the Lord. What is Ezekiel to say after having seen this, and having known from his experience with his own people who had some sort of moral agency refusing at the prophets call to turn back toward the Lord even while they’re in the midst of their exilic discipline in Babylon? Ezekiel stands there, confused, not really knowing if he can come up with an appropriate answer to the Lord. So, he says: “O Lord God, you know.” For, truly, only the Lord God does know if these bones can have life within them again. From Ezekiel perspective this valley is a testament to a lost hope for any sort of restoration and salvation. But God responds: “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

As Ezekiel opened his mouth and began to preach to the bones there came a rattling from the valley. Bones clanking on bones, making an ugly sound as they shake up against each other in their dry state. It must have been a terrifying sound that would scare the most courageous of people. But Ezekiel keeps on prophesying to these bones as and they begin to come together in an awesome scene. Each bone finding its mates, connecting together in their perfect places, sinews and muscle and skin begins to form upon them. The dry, lifeless, hopeless bones have been brought back to life by God’s command, and by the breath of God being breathed back into them. They have been saved, they have been revived. This is an amazing vision of what God intends to do with Israel. There will be a resurrection and a restoration, and God’s spirit will be in them. God will be there God, and they his people again. And the promise from chapter 11 comes back around: “I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God.”

Jesus, in our Gospel lesson is headed toward the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Lazarus has taken quite ill, and on the way to his house Lazarus sadly dies. He is only resting, Jesus says. But Martha says had only Jesus been able to make it in time her brother might have been saved.

Death is the great equalizer that we all wrestle with as we lose those whom we love. Here in the Gospel lesson we hear this from the ancients the same thing we have to go through. We are all created beings, gaining our breath from the very source of our existence: God. And when his breath is withdrawn from one amongst us it causes great distress and sadness. For we are all mortal, travelling together in this world knowing that someday one of us may no longer be present to experience the goodness of the world together, to help each other through the tough times, to laugh and cry together, and to just be present with one another in the mundane. People were made for fellowship with other people. When one of us is missing it’s troubling.

Today the Scripture lesson is an acknowledgement of this. One of theirs is not with them physically. He has been called out from this life and into the next. And while this leaves them, just like us, with an inward pain that weighs down on the heart, none should lose hope. For he is not only in their memories this day, known to them alone who will one day join him in their own mortality, but he is known by the Eternal Memory of God. His memory never fades nor fails, and he remembers each one of his dearly loved children whom he has created. And here, in their grief, just like in yours, he understands and seeks to bring comfort during this time after Lazarus’ passing.

Then Jesus hits her with the full message of the truth that we have heard so many times. Listen to these words afresh in your hearts and minds: “Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.” “Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’” “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

Jesus wept with these grieving loved ones. Ordering the stone removed away from the entrance to the tomb, Jesus was warned that Lazarus had been dead for four days and the putrid smell of the body beginning to decompose has already become present. Praying first to his Father, Jesus turns toward the opened tomb and, with a loud voice says, “Lazarus, come out!” And out he walks, still wrapped in his burial cloths. Many who had saw this miraculous thing happen believed in Jesus. While this was an amazing thing, Lazarus was again to die someday. But this moment acted as a foretaste of what was to come in Jesus own death and resurrection, when his Father would call him out of the grave, solidifying for us our own resurrection when the time comes.

How about us? What do we believe? Can these bones live again? Will we? Will we find ourselves in a promised land again, when the new Jerusalem is brought down from heaven, and all things are put to rights?

O son of man, can these people whom we have lost live again? O son of man, can these loved ones live again? O son of man, when it is our time, can we live again? O son of Man, can these bones live again?

These bones will yet live again, just as Jesus gave us a foretaste of it in the resurrection of Lazarus, and more fully in his resurrection from the dead unto eternal life. And as Jesus is, we shall be in that respect. So prophesy to the dry bones, and tell them this good news: Be whole, receive the Spirit into you, and cry out with us and the Psalmist:

130:1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD.

130:2 Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

130:3 If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?

130:4 But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.

130:5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;

130:6 my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

130:7 O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem.

130:8 It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

Maybe this day you are going through a dry spell. You’re having spiritual struggles and don’t know what to do. Maybe you are struggling with your own carnal nature, and seeking to love yourself through gluttony, through pride, through sloth, lust, wrathfulness over against another, greed, or you feel yourself languishing in despair. Please remember this: a dead man has no spiritual struggles. You’re still spiritually alive, but maybe you’re still feeling dried out, cut off, in danger of being laid waste. Call out to our Lord for his help and actively wait on him, reach out to your brothers and sisters, especially our intercessors in the back today, that we may pray for healing, and gather with the saints to read the promises of God together in his Holy Scriptures and be strengthened and encouraged in our faith as we continue to live this Christian life together. See one of your priests here for a time of confession, to pray together, to hear the words of forgiveness pronounced to you by your own name. Know that God is the one who has given you his spirit. So the answer to the question is yes: The bones shall indeed live again! There is a God, whom we know, and his name is Jesus, and he shows us what is coming. His death, his broken body and blood, his resurrection are our salvation. And we, too, will someday be called forth from our graves, our bones being made alive again by him to unto eternal life. Praise the Lord! Alleluia! Prophesy to the whole earth this great and glorious news that we shall live forever in Christ, united in his love by the Holy Spirit, worshipping the one who created us and gave to us his son as a sacrifice for our sins. We shall live.

To him be the glory throughout all ages, even to the ages of ages. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.