Free-range Hope: A Palm Sunday Sermon

The dramatic fall of Brian Williams, the television journalist for NBC News, was not the result of the Chinook helicopter in which he was riding being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, for alas it wasn’t. It was all about the act of remembering. We are often under the illusion that our memories are books or photo albums on which the past is safely stored, when, in fact, the past is constantly rewritten through the lens of the present. Memory is unstable, alive. Williams violated a basic rule of reporting when he became part of the story, though if we have learned anything in the post-modern age, the age of the quantum and the cat that is at once both alive and dead, it is that the mere act of observation changes the reality.

Of course, most journalists do their best, as I believe Williams did. But humans are not perfect Newtonian machines, and people get swept up in emotions and fear. Witness the invention of an Ebola pandemic in the United States last fall when there were exactly two cases of the disease being transmitted here. Witness how that reporting played into the politics of race, no doubt impacting the 2014 elections and changing legislative policies on everything from nuclear enrichment in Iran to protections for the innocent children of illegal immigrants.

Many people will, in fact, die as a result of the mythical American Ebola crisis, but it will not be from the disease.

Even those closest to actual events understand them through the lens of their personal experience, their systems of belief, adjusting to newly acquired information and the interpretations of others.

So it is, that we look at the events of the last week of this itinerant rabbi from Galilee through memory and interpretation even in these earliest gospel accounts, displaced in time, theology and culture. We look at these events that would forever change human history, and find ourselves outside of the box, guessing about Palm Sunday like so many physicists debating the state of Schrödinger’s eponymous cat.

Here is what we know. It probably happened. It was Jesus as prophet in the Hebrew lineage following a thousand year tradition of acting out an alternative through the use of symbol. It is a latter day Amos entering Jerusalem, every bit the outsider, and declaring divine disgust. In an age when most were illiterate, paper was a luxury and Sharpie’s wouldn’t be invented for centuries, the waving palms were the placards and signs of ancient Hebrew protesters.

This is an important moment in the drama what would unfold, but we breeze past it, our sights set on Golgotha. And this story is in its own way troubling. We trip before we even enter it, on that odd exchange at the beginning, when Jesus tells two disciples to go in to the town and steal a donkey.
At least, that is what it looks like. And I don’t imagine the seething mass of humanity that was contested Jerusalem at the dawn of the first century looked any more kindly on the theft of livestock than we do today. We’ve all seen enough westerns to know what we do to horse thieves. The mob was always ready for a good stoning, and that was assuming that neither the Idumean puppet king nor the Romans got a hold of you.

So many see this through the lens of miracle, just one more mysterious way in which the universe conspired with Jesus, bending to his plan, and in so seeing we suck the juice out of the actual procession. For the procession only really makes sense if we see it as Jesus did, as symbolic. That there was a donkey conveniently waiting was not a miracle. It was a set-up.

Knowing this we can then begin to guess at what is inside of the box, uncertain as Heisenberg, but still willing to engage.

We have contradictory evidence in the gospels when it comes to how Jesus understood himself. Of course, orthodoxy demands that Jesus was fully aware of himself as a person in a tripartite godhead, but we aren’t orthodox, and we see the conflicts between his possible understandings of himself as God incarnate, as chosen by God, as messiah, as apocalyptic Son of Man. It is possible, indeed likely, that his self understanding evolved over time. So we don’t need to force every statement into a single flat interpretation.

But we have this moment, this entry into Jerusalem, where, with a little pre-planning, Jesus engages in a symbolic prophetic act. He sees himself as a Hebrew prophet.

It helps to know, as I have pointed out in the past and as the late Marcus Borg makes clear in his biographical interpretation of the historic Jesus, that this is an entry at the time of Passover, when the city was flooded with every possible sect of the Hebrew cult, when members of the Diaspora came home, when the mob was as uncontrolled and uncontrollable as the winning city after a Super Bowl. So while Jesus was entering on a donkey, surrounded by peasants, Pontius Pilate would have been entering at the head of his Roman legions from the other direction.

What is Jesus acting out? Like the Zuccotti Park protesters in 2011, Jesus is occupying Jerusalem in an act of non-violent resistance. He is acting out alternatives to the systems of violence and oppression, to crushing poverty, to colonial brutality and the complicity of the elite.

Jerusalem’s elite protected their own best interests by going along with the rule of Caesar and the puppet kings of Herod’s line, all parties in the system seeking to extract as much wealth as possible from the common people. Herod was on a massive building program, not just the Temple but entire cities. The Roman Empire did what every empire, including our own, has done, crushing the locals in some other country, making the rich at home richer while giving their own mob just enough bread and circuses to suppress dissent.

In Palestine, at the edge of the empire, more and more Hebrews were losing their ancestral land. We don’t get it, as disconnected as we are from the time when land was all you had, forgetting even as recently as the feudal age when land control was the weapon that kept so many on the edge of starvation.

Jesus, like a good commie pinko, didn’t believe in what would come to be called Social Darwinism, in which the strongest, most brutal, most cunning, clawed their way to the top of the hill and therefore deserved surplus, while those who were at the bottom deserved what they got, which was essentially nothing, because they were weak in body and in will.

The prophetic act of entering the seat of power on a donkey provided a non-violent alternative to the collaborators in the Sanhedrin, to the mad Herodian fraud, to the Centurion’s bloody sword.

This was the start of a week of non-violent resistance on the part of Jesus and his disciples. When we spin this as an acting out of some eternal divine formula, we miss the real humanness of it all, and I think in the process, lose the courage and hope, lose anything that is helpful to us. If Jesus is simply a flat figure painted onto this metaphysical canvas, what good is he to me?

But Jesus is real, the poverty is real, and the courage is real. And we can be taken up in this same movement.

You begin by recognizing that there is a problem, and that it is not God’s plan. Grinding poverty, the accumulation of obscene wealth by the few while others go hungry, while the crippled lay in the street and the insane live in cemeteries. The use of violence to maintain the system and the false narrative that claims this state of deprivation and injustice is the right ordering of society, that race and tribe must be pitted against race and tribe.

To be swept up in the gospel you must acknowledge that this is not what God has made of the world, but what humans have made of the world. We need not declare humanity broken or evil. We can simply believe that we have not yet reached our full potential, that we can do better than this. But you cannot be swept into Jerusalem singing “Hosanna!” if you are blind to the problem, wrapped in self-denial or drugged up in the opiate of a false religion, Americanism, consumerism, capitalism, the pseudo-Christianity of the right.

And I mean problems right here. Afghanistan is a mess. I’m glad we don’t have those problems. Ferguson is far away. There are no racial tensions here. Sure we have a few poor people, some unemployed, but it is because they are lazy and refuse to work, not because the system is rigged. Hogwash.

Admit there is a problem, people! You can’t be part of Jesus’ holy re-imagining of society if you can’t see that there is something wrong.

And once you have seen and accepted that there is brokenness and that it is not God smiting us like so many latter-day Jobs but that it is human smiting human, then you must dare to have enough hope to believe we can do better. You have to have faith, even on the darkest day, in us. Not on God doing it for us. God gave us everything we need.

Turn that creative re-imagining of memory in the other direction in a re-imagining of the future. Get swept up in a little holy imagination. You have to believe despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

I do not care whether you believe in the virgin birth or attest to some particular Trinitarian formula. I care whether you believe, like Jesus believed, like I believe, that a better world is possible. This is my faith. This is faith. The mystery of faith is not that we consent to some insane human formula concerning the nature of God, but that we consent to be swept up in wild hope, that we choose hope.

We see that the world is broken, that the breaking is not divine but human, we believe that we have the potential to do better and we get swept up in wild hope. And we know there will be a Good Friday. There is always a Good Friday. But there is also always an Easter, when we find that all was not lost, though we have no idea what it means.

We choose the stories we tell. In a Good Friday world, in a Job world, in a Randian world of hatred and lies and manipulation, we can choose to be swept up, prophetically acting out alternatives. We can stream into Jerusalem waving palms and proclaiming an alternative, free-range hope let lose in our towns and in our churches. We can be swept up.

This week we can retell the story of an angry god-man who demands blood and violence or we can get swept up in a story of hope and liberation, of courage and victory. This week can be a holy week, as can every week. Make memories, holy memories. Tell good stories. Give yourself over to wild hope. Then live into it.

Amen.

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