Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025

There Is No Stopping This

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Psalm 13:1–9
Luke 19:29–40

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In Fredrik Backman’s novel Us against You, he describes the challenge and the hope that is parenting. He says it this way:

“A mother is standing outside a house. She’s packing her child’s things into a car. How many times does that happen while they’re growing up? How many toys do you pick up from the floor, how many stuffed animals do you have to form search parties for at bedtime, how many mittens do you give up on at preschool? How many times do you think that if nature really does want people to reproduce, then perhaps evolution should have let all parents grow extra sets of arms so they can reach under all the wretched sofas and fridges? How many gray hairs do they give us? How many lifetimes do we devote to their single [lifetime]? What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything” (Fredrick Backman, Us against You, p. 4).

More than that, we don’t do these things because we know what we are doing, and we don’t do these things because we know who our children will grow up to become. We do them because everything is at stake, and when you love, you live for the good. When you love, your choices today are shaped by a hope that tomorrow will be a better day. When you love, hope is hard to give up on.

I think that’s why Jesus rode that donkey.

It was a parade, and like all parades, this one was exuberant. Yet unlike most parades, this one was unforgettable, as we still remember it today. There was an air of excitement, even expectation. All the Gospel writers report the exaltation in the crowd. Luke says the disciples joyfully praised God. This moving crowd was part parade and part march. Change was coming, at least that was the hope in the crowd. The oppression of the Roman occupation was harsh and hated, and the people on the bottom, like people on the bottom in every age, prayed for change. They dreamed of a promised day when life would be a little easier, and kindness would eat away hate, and fairness would rule. But like most ages, change is slow in coming, but on this parade day, change seemed possible.

They experienced Jesus as a leader who could see them, I mean really see ordinary people. The fulfillment of their hope was riding into Jerusalem — this was God’s plan, and the joy could not be contained. Songs of hosanna filled the air.

But there was also tension in the air. Luke says some of the Pharisees in the crowd came to Jesus and pleaded with him, “Tell your disciples to quiet down.” Perhaps they recognized this was more march than parade and feared that Roman soldiers would come to put a stop to this act of treason. Perhaps they feared that repression would follow. They feared a crackdown on this rebellious march. The religious leaders pleaded, “For goodness’ sake, get them to stop.”

But this parade is God’s parade, and there is no power that can stop what is happening here. Jesus says, “I hear you, and there is a part of me that wants this to stop too, but the reality is, there is no stopping this. If my followers were silent, the stones themselves would preach.”

Jesus sounds a bit like he is living the love a parent lives for a child: you just do today whatever needs to be done to allow a better tomorrow, because love like that just doesn’t give up on hope.

There’s something comforting in this curious promise that the stones would preach. This parade, like all parades, will quiet. The light of day will dissolve into evening, and the crowds will go home. They will gather their cloaks, and they will sweep up the confetti, and the songs will fade. The donkey will be returned. But does the meaning of this day continue; does it still live?

I am grateful for this hopeful promise that Jesus makes that even if the disciples are silent or even silenced, the stones will preach.

Reverend William Klein asks an intriguing question: What would God have these stones say? These stones that have witnessed many a parade and many a march, these stones that have witnessed the flexing of powers. These stones “that could tell of the river of tears and blood spilled here and there as a result of any number of brutal campaigns” (Fredrick Bachman, Us against You, p. 4). These stones that have witnessed the brutality of human living. If God commanded the stones to talk, they would speak the truth of the world as it is. But I think they would also preach a world redeemed. They would describe the way God’s love remakes this world. The same love that brought you and me and the stones of the ground into being in creation brings new creation in this Christ who rides into the city, and there is no power that can stop that love.

Perhaps as much as any, this is the week that reveals just how much courage love requires.

With courage they shouted hosanna! With courage they dared to live like they trusted that there was no stopping this.

That was a long time ago. And our hymns invite us too to join the hosanna chorus, but I wouldn’t blame you if you found it difficult to maintain hope this week. Not for a particular reason, but just because we live in times when cruelty is common and cynicism is confused for wisdom and incivility is seen as a political tool. Not for any particular reason, but because every week brings us just one more reason to give up. To assume that hope has lost, that love is powerless, that kindness is weakness. Over time, life teaches us to wise up.

Hope is too risky.

I was meeting with a young woman preparing for her wedding. She was excited. I asked what I thought was an innocent question. I asked, “Will your father be walking you down the aisle?” She began to cry. I could tell it caught her by surprise.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t expect this. My father won’t be at the wedding.” “Oh my. Why not?” I asked.

“Well, he wasn’t at my sixteenth birthday party.”

“He said he would be at graduation but evidently something else came up.”

“When I had surgery on my back, he wasn’t there.”

“The truth is he hasn’t been part of my life for twelve years now. … He won’t be at the wedding.”

“Have you asked him,” I said? As soon as I asked, I wished I hadn’t. It seemed insensitive.

“No. I know what he will say. If I have learned anything, it is that I can’t fix this.”

You don’t have to live long to learn that in this world hope takes a beating.

Jesus said, “There is no stopping this,” but Jesus was a young man. Did he really understand the beating that hope takes over time?

John Lewis marched across the Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and later became a US Representative from Georgia and later a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and through it all lived as a conscience of the culture. John Lewis, in a violent and seemingly hopeless time, was going to Alabama to participate in the Freedom Rides of the mid-1960s. Lewis received calls from friends telling him not to go. The Kennedy White House dispatched John Seigenthaler to meet with Lewis to implore him not to go. “Don’t go,” they were told. “It’s a bloodbath. Be assured, someone will be killed if you [go to Alabama].”

In Jon Meacham’s biography of Lewis, he describes it this way: “But they couldn’t stay away. Lewis said, ‘Mob violence … must not stop [our] striving toward right.’” Meacham interpreted this moment: “They weren’t thinking pragmatically or even rationally, for their thought was shaped not by the fears of the world they knew but by the hopes of the one they were seeking” (Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On, pp. 97–98).

I think that is why Jesus rode that donkey. As people of faith, we never deny the reality of the world we know, but we never give up on the world we are seeking. We don’t lose hope, because God has not given up.

And this parade day is a reminder that God will not stop.

I stood with her in the narthex of the church. She was crying again. She said, “It seems all I do around you is cry.” It was her wedding day and standing at the other end of that sanctuary aisle was the man who would promise to love her in plenty and want, in joy and sorrow, in sickness and in health.

Standing next to her was another man who, truth be told, gave her every reason to believe she didn’t matter to him at all. But he was there. For the first time in a long time, he was there. I was glad he chose to come, but I was more impressed by her.

She could have let her disappointment control her. She could have let her injury define all that could be, because neither of them could fix all that had gone wrong.

But she risked it one more time.

“Daddy, I want you to be there. I need you to be there.”

And he was there. I wish I could tell you that all was well after that, but you know these matters are more complex than that. But it was a moment of grace, a glimpse of a better day.

And I don’t know how she could risk that, unless she trusted that the love of God can be trusted and that God will not stop, even working in ordinary people like us.

Like Fredrick Backman asks, how many times does a mother prepare after-school snacks, and how many times does a father find the liquid Tylenol at 2 a.m., and how many times does a mother hang artwork on the fridge, and how many times does the parent sort the laundry and drill the multiplication tables and remind the little one to make his bed and teach them to tell the truth and to use words and not fists and to share their toys? How many times …

All in the hope that the children we have brought into the world will grow to become not just successful, but good. All in the hope that the children we have brought into the world will have a chance to grow up to be “neither the destroyers nor the destroyed” (Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, p. 299).

How many times?

Parents never count. Because when you love like that, you sacrifice for your hope.

Jesus says God is a mother like that, who never counts how many times, who knows no end to sacrifice, who will not give up.

So, church, do not lose hope. Do not give up. Do not stop, because God will not, and even if we grow silent or are silenced, the stones themselves will preach.

Our king has come, and he will make any sacrifice love requires, and he will not stop.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church