Palm/Passion Sunday, March 20, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.

Journey to Vulnerability

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life

Luke 19:28–40

“Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” We heard that the whole multitude of disciples shouted this out.

Jesus is experienced as a great king by this crowd of people—the peasants, the impoverished, fishermen, the living-on-the-margins people. Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!

But who is the rightful king. Who is the king that the people will follow? That’s partly what’s being worked out here in this yelling that’s happening.

Just before we hear of Jesus’ journey on the colt into Jerusalem, Jesus tells the disciples a story about another king—a greedy king who is prone to violence and short on compassion.

Jesus said, “A certain man who was born into royalty went to a distant land to receive his kingdom and then return. He called together ten servants and gave each of them money worth four months’ wages. He said, ‘Do business with this until I return.’ His citizens hated him, so they sent a representative after him who said, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’ After receiving his kingdom, he returned and called the servants to whom he had given the money to find out how much they had earned.” (Luke 19:12–15)

The story goes on, and we hear that the first man had made a 1,000 percent return on his investment, so the king gave him ten cities to rule. The second man had made a 500 percent return on his investment, so the king gave him five cities to rule. But the third man had not made an investment but had wrapped up the money in a scarf and now gave it back to the king.

That man said, “I was afraid of you because you are a harsh man. You withdraw what you haven’t deposited and you harvest what you haven’t planted” (Luke 19:21).

So the king retaliated by taking his money away from him and giving it to the man with the most money. Even the king’s attendants who had to make the money transfer objected. But the king was unconcerned. He went on to say, “As for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in my presence” (Luke 19:27). It’s a horrific story that Jesus tells just before he goes to Jerusalem.

Jesus told this story, Luke says, “because the people thought the kingdom of God would come quickly.”

It seems Jesus is reminding them how difficult it will be to change the systems and the economic situation if this story of the cruel and greedy king represents how deeply entrenched the social problems are!

After telling this story, Jesus went on ahead to Jerusalem.

He is certainly a different kind of king. He comes into the city not on a high imperial horse but on a colt, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah, which says, “Rejoice . . . your king will come to you. He is righteous and victorious. He is humble and riding . . . on a colt. . . . He will cut off the chariot . . . and the warhorse. . . . The bow used in battle will be cut off; he will speak peace to the nations” (Zechariah 9:9–10).

No wonder the people are celebrating. People are filled with hope for that new peace, and they are shouting, “Blessed is this King!”

But that was a dangerous thing to shout in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. Perhaps it was this word King that made the Pharisees most anxious. What if the imperial soldiers heard this being shouted? They could all be in trouble. Caesar was the emperor of the land, and it was vital to their survival, the Pharisees thought, that they continued to affirm that. And they were probably right.

Resistance to the empire, after all, meant treason, and that meant suffering the death penalty, death by crucifixion, along with thousands of others who had been killed in that gruesome way.

To maintain the so-called peace of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, there was extreme violence. Not only were there the brutal crucifixions, but history shows us that sometimes whole towns were burnt to the ground if they resisted Roman rule.

So the Pharisees told Jesus to order his disciples to stop shouting about him being the king who came in the name of the Lord.

But this was a cry that Jesus did not want to stop. This was a cry for justice, and he knew it.

When he refers to the stones that would cry out if people were silent, he’s reminding his listeners of the biblical prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk described people who gathered their wealth by evil means, people who built safe homes for themselves but cut off masses of other people.

The stones of their very houses would shout out against those persons. Their greed led them to consume and consume and never be satisfied. The prophet Habakkuk spoke against them. The stones would shout.

The people who greeted Jesus that day also needed to cry out against that kind of injustice and violence that was being used against them.

Jesus understood and allowed it and maybe even encouraged them to let their voices be heard. But Jesus was not naïve. He knew that justice and peace were not coming fast. He knew that suffering was still part of the story going forward.

Change wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be quick. Not with leaders in place like the greedy king who had his enemies slaughtered in front of him.

Jesus was just beginning the confrontation, but not by military might as some thought the messiah would do. Jesus was confronting the powers and principalities not by domination, not by retaliation, not by retribution, but by . . .

Humility? Through vulnerability? How does that work?

Jesus was confronting injustice by being willing to risk himself. By putting his own body on the line.

He didn’t have to ride into Jerusalem on that day. But if he didn’t do it, then what change would come?

If he ran the other way, how long would the people suffer? How long would they have to live without hope?

Sometimes someone has to step out of the shadows and take the lead on bringing change. Jesus did that when he moved forward on his journey into Jerusalem, a journey towards his own death.

We tell the story of Jesus’ last day of life in the Stations of the Cross that are on display in Buchanan Chapel right now and all this week. Try to get up there if you can. They’ll be there until Holy Saturday, the day before Easter.

In the art show that’s up there, artists, church members from various churches, and seminarians try to tell the story of Jesus’ last day in a way that intersects with the stories of immigrants today.

After all, Jesus’s first trip on a donkey was when he was an infant and his parents had to flee the country to try to protect him from the murderous rage of King Herod, another king who was threatened by Jesus. Jesus was a refugee fleeing political persecution.

One of the stations, Station 9, was created by the seventh- and eighth-grade Sunday school class from First United Church in Oak Park. They studied the Dream Act that was being debated several years ago, and they learned about immigrant youth who faced deportation or being separated from their families.

DREAM stood for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. It would provide conditional residency for undocumented immigrants at first, and later, if they met certain conditions—a certain number of years of residency, good moral character, completed years of schooling, and so on—it might provide permanent residency to these young people who had been brought here to the states as children.

The Dream Act was never adopted at the national level, but Illinois does have its own version of the Dream Act that even seeks to provide scholarships to these young people seeking an education.

Someone recently pointed out to me that when this Dream Act was first being dreamed up, when people were advocating for it, young people were faced with a difficult decision. If they were one of the first ones to come out of the shadows, to give their names, to show their faces, it was very likely that they would be deported before the DREAM Act was adopted.

In fact, that did happen. But by coming forward, their stories also came to light. They became known as real people and not simply statistics. They risked themselves so that the situation could be changed, so that others could benefit after them.

I know that as a society we are still trying to figure out how to improve the immigration system. This art show and this meditation on the difficulties of immigration aren’t going to solve the problems, but it can help us get connected to the problems. It can make the problems more real for us and inspire our own imagination and compassion and commitment.

I think that the young dreamers who came forward early on took a step into their vulnerability. They put their bodies and their lives on the line for the benefit of others. I think it was a very Jesus-y thing to do, to step into risk like that.

Does Jesus, I wonder, call us to step into risk like that, too?

From the stories the junior high youth learned, they made the art for Station 9, which traditionally is called “Jesus Falls for the Third Time.” The youth told the stories of other kids like themselves, who had dreams like theirs but faced challenges they didn’t face.

Jesus fell three times on that last day of his life, tradition holds. Just as Jesus fell again and again on his last day of life, we too fall. The Dreamers fall. The people trying to make dreams possible fall. We are all vulnerable and limited, sometimes in different ways, and sometimes in the same ways.

But something helps us keep getting back up. Something helped Jesus keep getting back up when he was carrying his cross that day. He challenged the powers and principalities with a strength that came through facing his own vulnerability and not running from it. God was fully in him. He went with God through death and came out the other side. It wasn’t easy, but it changed everything.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr said this about the resurrection: “The revelation of the death and resurrection of Jesus forever redefines what success and winning mean, and it is not what any of us wanted or expected. On the cross, God is revealed as vulnerability itself (the Latin word vulnus means wound)” (Richard Rohr, “Vulnerability—Even in God!”, https://cac.org, 17 March 2016).

God was vulnerable. God was wounded. And Jesus followed the heart of God, aligned his will with the will of God, even when that brought him to his own death. He walked into the teeth of fear and into the hatred that comes out of fear. He did not stop doing his work. He did not run away or hide. He did not give up on the truth or soften it.

Though he floundered for a couple of moments—when he prayed, for example, that he might have this cup of suffering taken from him by God, and when he felt forsaken by God on the cross—though he floundered in his humanity in these moments, he stayed close to the heart of God.

He let the will of God be his will and the heart of God be his heart, to the point that he could say, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

Jesus entered his vulnerability full on. And if we can follow him into it, we can follow him through it and out of it on the other side.

Richard Rohr goes on to say, “The path to holiness is so different than any of us would have wished or imagined; and yet after the fact, we will all recognize that it was our littleness and wrongness that kept the door to union and love permanently wedged open every day of our life,” (Rohr, “Vulnerability”).

It’s our very need, our littleness and wrongness, as Rohr says, that keeps us aware of our connection to God. If we think we don’t need God’s forgiveness and grace, then we begin to shut that door, to close ourselves off from God.

Can we let our vulnerability save us? When we enter into it, a vulnerable space, even though it feels like we might die, we find that God is with us, in it.

This week, Holy Week, we rest in a spirit of vulnerability. We lament. We make space for mourning. We allow space for our dismay and our bafflement at the suffering and evil we see in the world. We acknowledge our woundedness.

Though Jesus began the work—though he showed us resurrection and offers it to us again and again—still there is work to do. The journey to Jerusalem is long. The road to resurrection is painful. The path to peace is arduous. The highway to justice is not a straight path.

But we are walking it with Jesus Christ.

The journey to the cross begins. Amen.