Palm Sunday - A
Matthew 21:1-11
April 17, 2011
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
I love parades. One of my earliest childhood memories is watching Thanksgiving Day parades on television. We like our parades in Decorah. There are the Fourth of July parade and the parade during Nordic Fest. Give us a decent excuse we’ll have others besides. Every town that I’ve ever lived in has its parades. We once lived in a town so small that we had the Fourth of July parade twice so everyone could be in it and see it. (I’m mostly kidding about that. But it would have been a good idea!)
In a time without video entertainment I imagine that parades attracted even more attention than they do now. Jerusalem had its share of parades. They had processionals for the major religious holidays. They had military parades on Roman holidays, like the emperor’s birthday. I’m sure that these parades were a welcome relief from the dullness of ordinary life.
But parades aren’t just fun. Whether it is a military parade that puts the armed might of an occupying power on display before a subject people or a religious processional that declares and celebrates the power and providence of God, parades are messages in motion. They place an imagined world before the spectators’ eyes. There is a certain order to even the most informal parade. They tell stories.
As members of the SisterParish delegation last month, we got to be part of a parade. It was a commemorative processional. The thirty-first anniversary of the assassination of Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero fell during the time that we were in El Salvador. On the Saturday before the anniversary, there was a processional in San Salvador. It began at the hospital were he was shot and killed while he celebrating mass and made its way downtown to the Cathedral of San Salvador where he is entombed.
There were seven or eight thousand of us. Most people were carrying candles. Many were carrying signs. There were people walking alone, in families, or in small groups. There were organized groups: church youth groups chanting slogans at the top of their lungs, members of political parties ranging from liberals to unembarrassed leftists. There were children—some of them being carried—and old people with canes. There were trucks with speakers mounted on them blaring live broadcasts of radio stations. All to celebrate the witness Archbishop Romero, that outspoken prophet of peace and justice.
Everyone there knows the story: of how Father Romero, the son of one of the ruling families in El Salvador, a priest with impeccable conservative credentials, was elevated to be the bishop of the most important diocese in El Salvador. He was supposed to have been a safe choice who could be counted on to support the regime. He was supposed to spend his time as a sort of chaplain to the ruling families, attending tea parties and raising money for charitable work that would provide some relief for the poor but also keep them firmly in their place.
Then the government started killing his priests, the ones who were preaching that the poor were God’s beloved and had a right to be able to earn with their labor a decent and secure living. Some of these priests were killed and some were “disappeared” by shadowy paramilitary squads. Somehow it became clear to Monseñor Romero that the government was making war on the poor and somehow—in one of those very rare grace-filled moments in the human story—he was converted. He met a different Jesus than he had been raised on. He met the Jesus who sided with the poor, with the widow, with the orphan, with the stranger. He met the Jesus who spoke out against the abuse of the poor by the rich and the mighty. He heard this Jesus calling to him to follow him. And follow he did. For the next two and a half years, Monseñor Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor of El Salvador and against the abuses of the ruling regime. The poor heard him gladly. They saw him as making a different kind of church available to them, a church they had never experienced before, una iglesia del pueblo, a People’s Church.
He condemned violence of both the right and the left, but also the violence of the system that left so many in such suffering. He called for an end to the killings and the kidnappings. He called on the Army and the ruling families to be converted.
They did not listen. Instead they complained to Rome and did everything they could to silence him. When other measures failed, a squad of assassins entered the hospital chapel and shot and killed him. Everyone in El Salvador knows this. They also know that the officers who commanded these men—officers who have never been brought to justice—were trained in the United States. They know this. And it was obvious to them as we walked with them through the streets of San Salvador in the falling night that we were North Americans. If nothing else we were given away by the presence of a rather tall Viking with us. We were North Americans and yet no one looked on us with anything less than an open welcome. There is room in the People’s Church, la iglesia del pueblo, even for us.
This processional was many things. It was a religious event as the participants remembered the faith and witness of this Christian martyr. It was a social event. Groups enjoyed being together. I dare say that there were young people who used the opportunity to perform the complicated dance of flirtation. It was also a political event, as the crowd asserted its right to control Monseñor Romero’s legacy and its right to tap into the power of that legacy so that they can withstand the forces that threaten them today as the U.S.-backed regime threatened them some three decades ago.
In very much the same way, the parade that Jesus led into Jerusalem was a mixture of all sorts of things. It was religious in nature, as the people appealed to God with that ancient prayer shout: Hosanna!, which seems to have been either Hebrew or Aramaic and meant roughly, “Help!” or “Save!”1 It was a social event, as people seized an chance to see or be a part of something out of the ordinary. It was most certainly a political event. In fact, it was a piece of political theater as Jesus laid hold of and reinterpreted the legacy of King David. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the traditional mount of royalty was a deep criticism of the ruling regime.
People have sometimes complained to me about “religion getting mixed up in politics.” I try very hard to keep the proclamation of the good news from becoming a part of any partisan platform. The Christian church is neither the Republican nor the Democratic party at prayer. Or, as Jim Wallis has put it, God is not a Republican or a Democrat. But if by keeping religion out of politics or politics out of religion, they mean that I or anyone else who is a Jesus follower should criticize neither the policies of any government (ours included), nor the values being served, nor the gods being worshiped, then I will have to refer them to Jesus who not only mixed up religion and politics, but beat them into an emulsified froth. On Palm Sunday, I’m afraid, we are invited to mix up our religion and our politics and join Jesus’ parade.
Seeing that invitation has led me to be able to see something else in the two stories—the story of Jesus on Palm Sunday and of Monseñor Romero’s witness. I have often thought of the Palm Sunday parade as a metaphor for Christian life. Being invited to be a Christian is, in effect, being invited to join in Jesus’ parade. But I’ve been reflecting on the incarnation and on two parades and now I’m wondering.
There is room for all sorts of Jesus-followers. But we Jesus-followers who are also Christians have always said that in Jesus we meet none other than God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all. We say that God was incarnate in a human being, that God became flesh, that God became one of us. And we Christians have always said that this act on God’s part is the source of the power of the good news to set our world and us aright. In Jesus God comes into our story. In Jesus God comes alongside us as one of us. God accompanies us, journies with us.
In one meeting in El Salvador I heard an organization refer to its role as “accompanying” others, especially women, in finding their collective power and learning to use it well. As I have reflected on these things, something has clicked into place—the vital importance of what I am calling acompañamiento, roughly translated as “accompaniment.” It means the act of “accompanying” others in their journey.
We tend to think of God as someone of whom we can ask favors. We tend to regard prayer as one way to tap into some sort of divine treasury. We may pray for ourselves or we may pray for others, but we see God as rich and us as poor. And we see our well-being in God’s gift to us of some of God’s wealth.
But it may be that our health and well-being, or what we used to call “our salvation,” don’t depend on what God gives us. We depend instead on God’s decision to live alongside of us into our story. Our lives depend on God’s decision to live with us in acompañamiento.
When I’ve told people why I was going to El Salvador or why I had been, and I told them that I was going with a church group, the next question was always, “What are you building?” The assumption, of course, is that since we are rich and they are poor, we go there to do something for them. Our relationship will be defined as donor and recipient. We will come away having given them something. As donors we will be the ones with the power and those who are poor precisely because they have been denied the power that is theirs by God’s gift, will continue in their powerlessness and their poverty. And the common assumption is that this is way it is and even the way it’s supposed to be.
But I’m wondering if Jesus didn’t tell a different tale on that day in Jerusalem when he started a parade. He did not so much lay out his agenda that day as he acted out the agenda of the deepest hopes and longings of the poor and powerless of his day. He did not so much invite people to join his parade as he offered his willingness to join theirs. Jesus did not so much offer an invitation to join his church as he offered his blessing on la iglesia del pueblo, the People’s Church. He offered them his acompañamiento. That was the most important thing that he had to offer. Acompañamiento is so powerful that it can change the world. The ones who liked the world just the way it was were willing to kill to keep it that way. They still are.
Monseñor Romero offered his people something that no bishop of San Salvador had ever offered before: acompañamiento. And the government killed him for it.
Acompañamiento is the most powerful and important move that God can make. Acompañamiento is the most important and powerful thing that you and I can do for each other. Acompañamiento is the most important and powerful thing that North Americans and Salvadorans can do for each other.
People ask me what I did in El Salvador and I tell them, I helped to maintain and strengthen a bridge. They nod in approving understanding. And then I tell them that it’s not a bridge to move people across a river; still less is it a bridge to move drugs north from Columbia or weapons and money south from the United States. It’s a bridge that can carry only one thing: acompañamiento.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
1F. Wilber Gringrich, Shorter Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
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