A Fourth Church Sermon by Shannon J. Kershner

Sunday, April 14, 2019 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Lenten Sermon Series: Following Jesus through the Gospel of Matthew

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 118:1–2, 19–29
Matthew 21:1–11
Matthew 26:1–16

Palm Sunday reminds us that our world can turn on a dime, that sudden changes in our circumstances can take us straight from praise to lament. But in exercising our God-given imagination, we might also allow God to help us turn our most painful lament into praise.

Kathleen Norris, God for Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Lent and Easter

As we begin, I want to assure you of something: I have not forgotten to read the Matthew 26 passage you see listed in your bulletin. I tell you that because I know that anxiety can come up in some of us “decently and in order” Presbyterians when we think the preacher has skipped over something by mistake! I promise you this is not a mistake and we will get to the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew, eventually.

But first, let’s linger for just a bit with the text we heard in the beginning: the text about Jesus’ entry into the city of Jerusalem. For a few moments, let’s try and get back into the emotional space of that parade. We know that even before Jesus arrived, the air of Jerusalem would have already been thick with excitement. Jewish pilgrims had poured into the city to get ready to celebrate Passover, the Feast of Freedom, a celebration that marked the end of their slavery, the Exodus from Egypt, the time of their redemption. Every year, thousands upon thousands of Jews from Athens and Egypt, Babylon and Rome, Damascus and Galilee, would stream to Jerusalem for the festival (Amy Jill Levine, Entering Holy Week, p. 24).

Children would be everywhere, ingesting the energy they felt all around them. Families would be busily making the correct preparations for the Passover meal, securing the unblemished lamb for the sacrifice and the dinner, getting all the correct herbs and spices, making sure the unleavened bread was just right, filling the carafes with the wine. Anticipation would permeate the city as people got ready for the festival. So when those in the crowd heard that Jesus was also on the way, it added additional drama, and for those who did not inhabit seats of power, news of his coming brought additional joy, as well.

We always try to embody some of that excitement, that joy, in our own Palm Sunday worship each year. Everyone gets a palm as they come into the sanctuary. This year, we went all out and our children and choirs got full palm branches to carry. As our worship leaders and children walk down the center aisle, singing our processional hymn “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” everyone in the sanctuary is encouraged to wave our branches high in the air. And just like the children present for Jesus’ parade, our own children also know something is different as they walk or are carried down the center aisle. As you could probably tell, they too ingest the energy they feel around them.

Even when outside it is cold and rainy or snowy like it is today, the warmth of our hosannas and the fullness of our singing feel celebratory in a way we have been missing this season Lent—this solemn, reflective time in our church year. Every Palm Sunday the beginning of our worship acts as a lovely moment of respite—the joyful, wonderfully chaotic enactment of Jesus’ palm parade.

And yet as much as we might enjoy the palm parade, as much as we love singing hosannas, some of us also might feel a bit disingenuous as we do it. I know I always do. I feel that way because I realize that, as a congregation, we will not be able to stay contentedly in this space of celebration, because we cannot pretend that we do not know what happens next: that the hosannas we sing today will turn into cries for crucifixion by Friday, that the sound of celebration exemplified by the palm branches we victoriously and joyfully wave will soon fade into the sounds of hammer and nails into wood, the sounds of groans and gasps of suffering, by the end of the week. As a congregation, we cannot pretend that we don’t know that the one for whom we spread our cloaks will be the same one we deny, desert, and watch die. We cannot pretend that the cross does not loom just around the corner, with its smell of death that overpowers the smell of spring, and its sound of silence that swallows up our songs of praise.

And yet that is precisely the complicated and chaotic emotional and spiritual space we are meant to inhabit both this day but also throughout this week. As people who follow God in the way of Jesus, we mustn’t choose to skip from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the alleluias of Easter. We mustn’t move from the parade into Jerusalem right to the discovery of the empty tomb. Try as we might, we cannot avoid the rest of the story that unfolds this Holy Week, the story that finds Jesus entering Jerusalem, not laughing and shouting with the crowd but, here in Matthew’s Gospel, immediately making his way to the temple, ready to challenge those who opposed him, those who were threatened by him, those who were already plotting to get rid of him.

We can’t turn our faces away from what develops this week: The decision of betrayal that comes after an act of generosity. The sharing of a last supper that leads to one disappearing into the night. The agony in the garden as temptation is fought once again. The desertion at the moment of arrest and all the denials around a fire. The trials and the eventual sentencing. The duplicitous washing of hands and the shouts of crucify from the crowd. No, as much as we might like to do so—probably some years more than others—we simply cannot move from hosanna to alleluia. We cannot avoid the reality that Jesus was charged with blasphemy and sedition, taken to the cross with criminals, and killed simply for being completely who he was.

This Sunday begins Holy Week. Starting today, we are asked to endure the final days and the death of Jesus not as a movie on the screen or on some show on the History channel but as a changing reality in our lives. We are asked to read the stories in scripture and to walk with Jesus and the disciples the entire way—along the cloak-strewn road into Jerusalem, up the stairs to the upper room, pausing in the garden of Gethsemane, and finally trudging to the lonely hill of Golgotha.

During this particular space in time, we are invited to set aside our knowledge of the soon-to-be alleluias of Easter in order to pay attention to the gathering doom, the predictions of betrayal, and the grasp of death. We are invited to try to hear this familiar story again as if for the first time, in the hope that we might be changed by it, that our congregation’s life might be changed by it.

Do you remember the first time you really heard the story? I do. I was eight years old, and my father was serving in his first solo pastor position. He was in his early thirties. One year Dad decided to get dramatic as a part of his Good Friday sermon. As my father began to slowly read the account of the crucifixion, he reached beneath the pulpit where we could not see, taking a hammer, a nail, and a piece of wood into his hands. Suddenly, underneath his words, we all heard a banging noise in that cavernous space: bam, bam, bam. We heard the echo of crucifixion.

I clearly remember tears filling my young eyes for I had never encountered the full story before, at least not that way. I did not know all it meant, but I knew enough to realize I was hearing the sound of Jesus’ death. I knew enough to realize I was hearing the sound of pain for the one who loved me and all the little children of the world. And I knew that the echo of crucifixion made my little stomach hurt and my eyes burn. And that feeling, that sound, that experience has lingered in my mind and heart all these years.

Though it haunted me that night as a child, as an adult I am strangely grateful for that worship experience, because sometimes I wonder if some of us know the story so well that, even when we don’t skip it, we are rather numb to it. As a child I felt shocked as much by the biblical story my father told as I was by the sound of the hammer hitting the nails into the wood, and it is that kind of shock, that kind of fresh approach, that kind of innocent amazement into which we are all invited to plunge this Holy Week.

For the echo of crucifixion is one of the sounds of the Gospel. It is one of the sounds of our Christian faith. No other world religion worships a God who suffers. Yet for us, the cross, the symbol of God’s suffering in Jesus, stands at the center of our Christian faith—not as some sadistic symbol of an angry father exacting revenge for wayward children, but rather as a reminder of God’s powerful, vulnerable love that was willing to undergo everything in order to show us God’s embrace.

The echo of crucifixion is the sound that proclaims “No matter what, I will undergo everything for and with you. I will keep on loving you, even when you betray me, deny me, and abandon me. I will keep on loving you even when it gets me killed. I will keep on loving you no matter what. I will keep on loving you so that one day you might really believe it. I will keep on loving you until you finally rest in the knowledge that my mercy and grace, my embrace, my forgiveness, is what will win. My mercy and grace, my embrace, my forgiveness will always far outweigh your sinfulness or your brokenness and will continually offer you new life again and again and again.” That is what the echo of crucifixion can signal to us about how deeply we are loved by the One who created us.

At eight years old I did not fully understand what I was hearing. I just knew that it was an awful sound. I loved God the way only a child can. I did not want my Jesus to hurt or die. Now, as an adult, I still do not fully understand all that it means, and I still find the echo of crucifixion to be an awful sound, but by this point of my life, I have seen enough suffering, enough death, and enough pain to know that as awful as it is, the echo of crucifixion remains a vitally important sound to my faith.

It is the sound that gives me the courage to proclaim God’s living presence, even in those moments when the smell of death temporarily overtakes the smell of spring and when songs of praise seem to be swallowed up by moments of God-forsaken silence. It is a sound that reminds me that even those places, even those experiences, even those people, have been touched by God, claimed and redeemed.

Holy Week is not an easy week for us Christians. The walk to the cross and the echo of the crucifixion are gut-wrenching moments in our faith. But in our world where wars continue to rage, people hurt each other or feel completely broken and undone, and the smell of death still wafts through our air, we cannot avoid this part of our faith story. We must not avoid it, not for God’s sake but for our own sake. We must walk to the cross together. We must witness God’s pain both as the Parent who loses a child, and as the Son who feels God-forsaken and dies. Because only after we allow ourselves to remember and ingest those moments of stark truth and gospel will the alleluias of Easter have any chance of being a sustaining power in our lives and in our world, a sustaining power that lasts and takes hold even as the sound of alleluia begins to fade and the lilies start to wilt.

For it is neither a cheap grace nor an empty hope that we find at the end of the story. It is a grace, a hope, a divine love that has both endured and conquered immense suffering, grotesque tragedy, and overwhelming loss—all of it forever a part of God’s story, forever a part of God’s very self. And if we skip the honest telling of that, we will miss far too much. So now let us turn to Matthew, chapter 26:1–16. The beginning of the movement to the end . . .