Peter and Cornelius: God’s Answer to Our ‘Othering’ (Acts 10:1-17, 34-35; 3rd Sunday of Easter; April 19, 2015)

Peter and Cornelius: God’s Answer to Our ‘Othering’

Acts 10:1-17, 34-35
3rd Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Who are we? It’s a simple question that has no simple answer. Who are we? We’re Americans. Fine, but what does that mean, exactly? We’re Methodists. And who are Methodists? We’re Decoran. And what is a Decoran?

Who are we in an easy question with no easy answer. Maybe that’s why we are so quick to resort to “othering” when pressed for our identity. Who are we as Methodists? Well, we’re neither Catholic nor Lutheran. We’re not them; they are the Others.

Who are we as Americans? When I was growing up, the answer was, we’re not Communists, like the Soviet Union or China. They were our Others. With the collapse of the Soviet-style Communism we were left for a while with no Other, that is, until September 11, 2001, when Al Quaeda came to our rescue by providing us with a new Other. Now we’re not freedom-hating fanatical jihadists. That’s our new Other.

An Other is a mythic character, remembering my definition of a myth: a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. The Myth of the Other is the simplest myth, but it never seems to go out of style. We are not them. We love our freedom, but they don’t. We are civilized, but they are barbaric. We are kind and generous; they are mean and brutal. We value women and men as equals; they subordinate women to male oppression. We value science and reason; they are stuck in the dark ages of fear and superstition. It’s a simple myth to give a simple answer to the simple questions, Who are we?

The beauty of the Myth of the Other is that none of it needs to be objectively true for the myth to work. In fact, the less true the myth is, the more tightly we will cling to it as our way of defining who we are.

The appeal of the Myth of the Other grows when who we are is in question. I’ll risk a prediction: as we get closer to 2040 when English-speaking white people will not longer be in the majority in the United States, the Myth of the Other will kick into overdrive. In our history the Myth of the Other has always expressed as some form of racism. Therefore I predict that, the closer we get to 2040, the uglier and more common overt racism will become. As part of our country drifts into conscious racism, we would-be followers of Jesus will have to choose between going along to get along or publicly reminding folks that Jesus did not die and rise from the dead so that white folks could be in charge.

I see this coming because I know that the Myth of the Othyer gains its power from the fear people have when their group identity is threatened.

Now, if we can say anything about the Jewish people of Roman times, we can say that their group identity was threatened. In Judea, and in Galilee, too, Jewish identity was under pressure. Under Roman occupation Jews had little political or economic power and no military power at all. Greco-Roman culture was sophisticated and alluring and many Jews were simple melting into the populace at large. Any active resistance to Roman culture and rule risked bringing down the might of the legions.

Jews struggled with each other at to the best strategy to adopt. With divisions inside and threats outside, you can believe they were “othering” like crazy. Their Others were the non-Jews, the Gentiles, the “nations” or “goyim as it is in Hebrew. Mufh of their othering took the form of rule about contact with non-Jews. Jews did not have Gentiles as house guests, for example, and they didn’t enter their homes. Gentiles were ritually unclean. Jews were contaminated by contact with non-Jews and had to go through a ritual of purification. The rite was not really a burden, but it served to underscore that the division between Jews and everyone else was the same as the division between clean and unclean. Imagine that someone felt compelled to wash their hands after shaking your hand, not because it was flu season, but because of who you were. Or imagine that you felt the need for a post-handshake hand-washing because someone was black or gay or a Muslim.

If we let that sink in for a bit, we’re ready to consider the story of Peter and Cornelius. Cornelius was Peter’s Other. He was a Gentile, a Roman, a retired soldier. He had been responsible for oppressing Jews. He was everything that Peter hated about the unclean, non-Jewish world wrapped in ribbon and tied with a bow. Of course, the story says that Cornelius and his household were “God-fearers,” Gentiles who worshiped the Jewish God. I’m not sure that worked entirely in his favor, though. I’d be surprised if in some dark corner of Peter’s mind there were not a voice that said something like, “He and his kind took our land, our freedom, and our dignity. Why do they have to take our religion, too?”

The action begins with an answer to prayer, but, against our expectations it is Cornelius, the Gentile, whose prayer is answered. An angel appears with instructions to send for Peter. He is staying in Joppa with a man named Simon who is a tanner. A tanner is someone who turns animal skins into leather. Now, while leather is not unclean, animal skins are. The theme of ritual uncleanness is already firmly established in the story and it has hardly begun.

Cornelius sends servants as instructed to fetch Peter. The next day as these servants are nearing Joppa, Peter is praying while waiting for dinner. He’s on the rooftop and the cooking smells are wafting up and he’s hungry and the sun is warm and Peter falls asleep and dreams. Naturally, he dreams about food, but this is not ordinary food. Not a bit of it is kosher, clean, permitted. It’s all unclean. In this dream he is told to kill and eat something, but he refuses, protesting that he had never eaten anything unclean or impure. The food is take away. The dream repeats itself twice.

Peter is disturbed by this dream and is trying to figure it out when the messengers from Cornelius arrive. They are at the gate call out for Peter.

Gates are important in the story. They mark the boundary between inside and out, between us and them. The messengers are waiting at the gate. It’s only polite, but in this case it’s doubly important. The messengers are Gentiles. The household is Jewish. The Gentile messengers would pollute the house by entering it. Imagine that! They would render unclean a tannery, a place where animal carcasses are processed, just by walking through the gate.

Peter, hearing the commotion, is told by God to go with them without hesitation. but instead of going with them, he invites them into the house. I wonder how Simon the tanner felt about that.)

The next day they all went back to Cornelius’s house in Caesarea. Cornelius met Peter at the gate. Why? Because Cornelius knows that Peter can’t come into his house without becoming unclean. And yet Peter not only goes with Cornelius into his house, he stays for several days. Why? Because of what the voice told him when he was dreaming: “Never consider unclean what God has made pure!”

Because of this Peter invited the messengers into his host’s house, traveled with them them, went into Cornelius’s home, baptized Cornelius and his household, and stayed several days as his guest. In doing these things, Peter did not simply break a few rules. Peter dismantled his own world. He recognized his brothers and sisters in the faces of Others. The categories that he had used to make sense of his world collapsed and his world collapsed with them.

It is a kind of death, you know, when the assumptions on which we have built our world crumble. But what Peter is beginning to learn is that there is new life on the other side of that kind of death. There is resurrection on the other side of the loss of a world. There is hope even when optimism is impossible.

Peter faced a choice between keeping the safe and familiar world he had made for himself by othering Cornelius or finding his new life in the new world into which the God who makes all things clean was calling him. He chose the new world, new life, resurrection.

Again and again, as we encounter neighbors who are not middle class, not English-speaking, not white, not Christian, not straight, not a dozen other things we use to divide the world into us and them, we will face the same choice. May God grant us grace to choose new life over old comforts, strange new brothers and sisters over familiar Others, resurrection over safety.

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Unto the End of the Present Age (Matthew 28:16-20; 2nd Sunday of Easter; April 12, 2015)

Unto the End of the Present Age

Matthew 28:16-20
2nd Sunday of Easter
April 12, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” We know these workds as the Great Commission. If I’ve said them right. you were able to hear the capital letters. The Great Commission.

If you were like me you’ve had this drummed into your head since your Sunday School days: “…go and make disciples.” I heard that a lot, especially every time a missionary visited. I remember hearing it, but I didn’t really see much actual going. We collected money or used clothing or other stuff. We sent money, but someone else went. We didn’t go. We stayed. But still in some sense we saw ourselves as fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Great Commission for us was as central to what Jesus taught and who he was as the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule. “Our Father who art in heaven…” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” I got the impression that, if you got those three things right, you pretty much had being a Christian handled.

It’s strange, then, that the Great Commission is only given once in the four gospels. John’s Jesus’ last earthly act is to settle a dispute between Peter and John, or perhaps better, among their disciples. Luke’s Jesus sent the apostles to preach the forgiveness of sins to all nations, but says nothing about whether anyone will be persuaded to be Jesus’ disciple. In Mark, no one even finds out that Jesus has been raised since the women who say him “said nothing to nobody, because there were afraid.” Why, then, did we latch onto this set of instructions for how to be the Church, especdially since most of us have no intention of going anywhere?

Would it surprise you to learn that using these verses as the basis for our mission is relatively recent? This text hardly ever got mentioned when peo[ple in the ancient church talked about mission. They didn think that their mission was to make Christian disciples of everyone; they thought it was enough to have some disciples everywhere, so that God’s praise could be spoken and heard to the ends of the earth.

It wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that the idea that everyone should be converted to Christianity became popular and these verses became the basis and slogan for the modern missionary movement. We could say that we were just really slow to catch on to the obvious, that it took us eighteen hundred years to notice Jesus’ instructions. Maybe so.

I’m always a little suspicious though when a text that has languished for centuries is suddenly in vogue, suddenly becoming the foundation on which the Church builds its whole notion of what it means to be followers of Jesus. When I see that happen, I look around to see what else was going on at the time and if they are perhaps connected. When I ask why there verses because so popular in the middle of nineteenth century and what else was happening in our country at the time, I can’t hape but notice that we were in the middle of building an empire. We were finishing the centuries-long work of expelling the original inhabitants of our country, shoving them beyond the our frontiers, enclosing them in reservations, or just simply killing them. Local militias and the Army had the major roles in the effort, but the churches had their part to play, too. In reservations and scattered through the country were Iindians from various nations who had had their cultures smashed to bits and who were demoralized. Others were angry to their core, looking for some way, any way, to strike back at those who had destroyed their lives. (Let me assure that it was not because they hated our freedoms.)

Making these defeated nations in disciples of Christ not only seemed like obedience to these newly-discovered verses. It was also part of the project of “pacifying” the Indians so that we could enjoy in peace in places like Decorah the land we had taken.

Then, the continent fully under white control, we turned our eyes abroad to places like Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, and the rest of Central America. The Army, Navy, and Marines imposed our will around the world to make it safe for our companies. And everywhere they went, missionaries followed, making disciples out of heathens and “real” Christians out of the Catholics of the former Spanish colonies. It was the golden age of imperialism and the Great Commission supplied the slogans for a cheerleading Church.

When we read a text from the Bible, what it means is not the only important question. It’s also important to ask how a text has been used. This text has been used to oppress the weak, to shatter cultures, and to secure power and possessions on “our” continent and around the world.

In spite of all that, though, I think there is something here that calls us to sanity, health, and even holiness. And it hjas to do with the direction of the movement in the text. It’s in that one word, “Go!”

We used to talk a great deal about “Go and make disciples” but we never actually went. The work of securing and empire and the work of the missionary movement–and, really, they were always two sides of the same coin–were the job of specialists: sailors, soldier, and marines on the one hand, and missionanries on the other. A few people were “called” to go, but most of us were not. Instead, we stayed hojme and supported their efforts with our taxes and our offerings. The frontier–the boundary between the Christian and developed capitalist world and the un- or under-developed and non-Christian world–was far away.

In the churches we worked on getting people to come to help us support those souls brave enough–braver that we were–to actually “go and make disicples.” The rest of the time we tried to be good citizens who paid our taxes so that the frontiers could be held or maybe even pushed back.

But all of that has come unraveled. We still send our military overseas, but they only seem to make us enemies faster that we can kill them. We try to secure our borders, at least the one between us and the countries with brown-skinned people, but the frontiers feel more porous than ever. Now Christians in Korea and Africa send missionaries to us.

Maybe we had only fooled ourselves before, but our country no longer seems all that Christian. Even our little newspaper here in Decorah tell the story. On Tuesday we learned that someone who thinks about these things has rated Luther Collegew as the best of its kind in the state. How did they do that? They compared the costs of attending with the income of its graduates. Then on Tuesday we read about the unhappiness over the later start of the school year, a change mandated by the governor, not for its educational benefit but for the good of the tourism industry that needs teh cheap labor of high school students for its profitability. It’s hard to square either of these stories with the man who taught us that “you cannot serve God and money.”

The frontiers have shifted. We live in the midst of a culture that talks a great deal about God, but that has apparently never heard of the God of Jesus. The missionary frontier begins at the doors our church. Our main concern thirty years ago was how to get people to come to church. We’re still thinking that way. We worry about empty pews, last Sunday not withstanding. A parents tells me, his vboivce breaking with anxiety, that we have to entice you to come.

Mattthew’s Jesus turns our notions upside down. The point of church is not to get people to come. The point of church is for us to go. We gather so we can be formed so we can be scattered into our community and world. Matthew’s Jesus turns our attention from the struggles involved in running any church in the early twentieth-first century toward the broken world around us.

Make no mistake. It’s not a matter of taking up these verses with the pride and arrogance of the imperial age. We may find that we listen more than preach. We may find that we are the ones who are converted to Christ. We may find that far from having all the answers and taking charge, that someone else may already know what needs to be done. And all they need is one more set of hands, hands that could be ours.

Jesus turns us outward, humbler and–it is devoutly to be hoped–a little wiser. He turns us outward and gives us a promise. If we follow our path of discipleship out the doors, into the missionary frontier that is American culture in our age, Jessu promises “I myself will be with you every day until the end of the present age.”

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A Change of Plans (Matthew 28:1-10; Easter; April 5, 2015)

A Change of Plans

Matthew 28:1-10
Easter
April 5, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Our daughter, Beth, has written the shortest Easter sermon. She was visiting us at Easter time once when she was still in college and knew everything. I was working away on the Saturday before Easter and she advocating putting my sermon away and preaching what everyone had come to hear: a sermon in four sentences.

Here it is: Jesus was dead. Now he is alive. Hooray! Now go eat ham.

Short, sweet, and, I have to admit, the essence of every Easter sermon I have either heard or preached.

“Believe me, Dad,” she said, “people will thank you for it.”

Maybe she’s right. At the same time, I can’t help but feeling that there is something more that needs to be said. After all, at its heart, the Easter proclamation is about vindication; it’s about recognizing the winner; it’s about derailed plans suddenly re-railed. As humans we all tend to read into this that it’s a vindication of us, recognizingourselves as winners, and re-railing our plans. Then it is not so much Jesus who is risen from the dead; it’s us. Easter then becomes an affirmation of us and of the arrangements we have made for our lives. We move on with a will to whatever is waiting for us after church: ham, or (in our case) lamb, or (if you are a vegan or vegetarian) yams.

I can’t help the feeling that there is something else at work here, something more than the good feelings brought on by a promising spring after a long and hard winter, when we get to put away our sun lamps and can go to work and come home in daylight. I can’t help the feeling that there is news here that is so good it goes beyond our imagination. I can’t help the feeling that there is news here that is so good it has to be true.

That’s what Mary Magdalene and the “other Mary” thought. If we settle for less than that we will render their testimony false. If we settle for less than the fear and joy that they experienced we might just as well save ourselves the bother and go straight for the ham, lamb or yams.

The women, of course, did not go to the cemetary expecting Easter. Though we are not told what they planned to do once they got there, they went to see the tomb. Jesus was dead; they expected his body to be in the tomb.

Jesus had forced a showdown with the powers of Roman Jerusalem and he had lost. The rich and powerful won. Violence won. Injustice won. Hatred won. Death won. That came at no surprise, really, although they had perhaps hoped for more. Jesus had come preaching and teaching God’s care for the poor, the sick, the outcast, the sinners, in short, the losers of his world. He had stood with them and for them. He had even claimed that God favored them with special love. He had claimed that God was at work in them and among them, bringing the Kingdom of God into this world through them.

The rich, the strong, the insiders, the righteous, the winners didn’t take Jesus’ preaching very well. They felt threatened. That is, of course, because they were in fact threatened by Jesus. They reacted to him as to any one else who proclaimed God’s judgment on their comfortable arrangements of things. They killed him. All the rules were followed. Jesus was properly accused, properly convicted, properly sentenced. This is how the powers-that-be murder those who threaten their power.

Winners win and losers lose. There was nothing new about that and the women knew it. The women knew that Jesus was dead. The guards at his tomb knew he was dead. Pontius Pilate and the High Priest knew that Jesus was dead. They could all get on with their lives, whether lives of poverty or lives of privilege.

But that’s where they were wrong, all of them. That’s when there was an angel of the Lord, dazzling white and brilliant. That’s when there was an earthquake and the guards–tough Roman guards, veterans of multiple deployments–the guards fainted from fear. The women, frightened but bravely holding on to consciousness, received the message from the angel and instructions to gather the disciples and head for Galilee. And then Jesus himself met them as they ran to carry out their instructions. They touched the dead man, now alive, and heard his words.

Everyone’s plans changed in just a few moments. The Mary Magdalen and the “other Mary”, who until very recently in Matthew’s gospel had not even been mentioned, became the key figures the story. The authorities suddenly found themselves doing damage control, trying in vain to contain and control the story.

Soon the disciples did go to Galilee; they did meet Jesus there; they did receive their instructions to make disciples. “Make disciples everywhere,” Jesus told them, “even in Decorah.” Soon they found their voices; they went everywhere, even Decorah, and proclaimed that “Jesus is Lord.”

This was the outcast Jesus, the ex-peasant from Galilee, the criminal who died a shameful death, the loser, the gadfly, the one who mocked the rulers and punctured bloated egos, the lover of tax-collectors, prostitutes and other notorious persons, this Jesus is Lord.

We know that this is imperial language. Of only one other person was it said that he “is Lord” and that was the emperor. When the disciples found their voices they announced that Caesar is not Lord. All the so-called authorities are overthrown. All of them. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.

I’m not sure that a lot of Christians get this. A lot of Christians seem to think that being a Christian should get them some power and special considerations. Their version of Christian faith should have a privileged place in public life. They should get to treat people they don’t like badly as long as they claim that Jesus doesn’t like them either.

What we don’t understand is that Jesus has dethroned every authority, even ours. Caesar is not Lord. Barack Obama is not Lord; neither is Joe Biden. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner–they’re not Lord. Neither are Rachel Maddow, nor Rush Limbaugh, nor Jon Stewart, nor Bill O’Reilly. They are all dethroned. The United States is dismissed, and so it the United Nations. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Charge are not Lord; they are unseated. Monsanto and Exxon are not sovereign. We owe no final allegiance to anyone’s Commander-in-Chief. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are dethroned. The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are put down.

Now we are free to imagine a new world. We are free to dream a world where black lives matter, where the hungry eat their fill, where the earth sighs in relief from its long suffering, where love between equals is celebrated no matter who is loving whom, where the poor have all that they need to live good lives and the rich will no longer be burdened with more than they need. We are free to dream God’s dream.

Feel free to add to that list if you didn’t find something there to fill you with fear and joy. As for me, I found plenty. The news this morning is enough to unmake us all. The news this morning is enough to remake us all. The news this morning goes beyond what we have thought or felt or imagined. The news this morning is too good not to be true. And here is the news: Jesus was dead. Now he is alive! Hallelujah!! Now all we have to do is to live into this new life that has come to us. We can chew on that while we’re eating our ham, or lamb, or yams.

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The Only Thing That Makes Sense (Matthew 26:17-30; Maundy Thursday; April 2, 2015)

The Only Thing That Makes Sense

Matthew 26:17-30
Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

It had been a tough few days. Even though Jesus had never suggested that he was planning a coup of some kind, we can’t blame the disciples for hoping. Their hopes might have been buoyed by the enthusiastic response of the crowd when Jesus staged that little bit of street theater when he came into Jerusalem.

The powerful of Jerusalem–the Romans first, but also the priests and religious authorities–pushed back, of course. People who have power often like to keep it. People who carry the power of a system often believe that the system needs for them to hold on to their power. So of course the Jerusalem powerful pushed back against the threat that Jesus posed.

If Jesus had wanted to take Jerusalem, he could have used the success of Palm Sunday and moved immediately to seize the Temple, expel the Romans and set himself up as king. But he didn’t do any of that. He preached in the Temple. He healed the sick. He gave the powerful plenty of time to figure out how to get rid of him.

Without the drama of a messianic announcement, people got bored. They wandered off in search of new excitement. The sense of a storm about to break grew and the crowds dwindled. The disciples of Jesus watched as the moment passed and the clouds gathered.

Jesus, in the meantime, had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. He knew that people who challenged Rome had short life expectancies. He had done more than challeng Rome. He wasn’t out simply to shove Rome aside and rule in its place. Instead, he aimed to overthrow the system of violent power itself. He knew his own end was coming and soon.

He had tried to tell his followers, but it was hard for them to hear. It meant that they would have to become like Jesus, to take up their own crosses, to run the same risk that Jesus was running. The crowd of his followers shrank. It was smaller that it had been when Jesus entered Jerusalem and smaller than it had been when Jesus fed the folks in the wilderness–a crowd of twelve thousand or so, remembering that he fed five thousand men–with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

The crowd was down to the inner circle. Matthew tells us that it was just “the Twelve,” but I think that’s not the whole story. We know there were women traveling with Jesus. He would not have shooed them off so he and the boys could have Passover by themselves. The women were there, too. And if the women were there, children were also. Even so, it was just the inner circle now. They gathered with Jesus in an upper room–thirty or so of them, maybe–to eat a meal that was a Passover meal and something else at the same time.

They might not have caught all that was in the air, the subtexts, the overtones, but at least the meal itself made sense. It wasn’t just bread and wine. There were the ritual foods that went with the Passover: wine (four glasses of it apiece–Passover is a not a somber celebration), matzo (unleavened bread), moror (horseradish or other bitter herb), charoses (a mixture of apples, nuts, wine and cinnamon), beitzah (a roasted egg), karpas (parsely with salted water), and, of course, roasted lamb.

Eating and drinking: these are good things. Remembering former times of deliverance in the face of a deadly threat: this is good, too.

Much of Jesus’ mission didn’t make any sense. Why not continue to teach? Why stick his finger in the eye of the lion in its own den? Why pick a fight, a fight he must surely lose? Those things didn’t make any sense. But eating and drinking and telling stories–those things made sense. And that’s what Jesus did on his last night among us.

We still don’t understand it all. But we have our own gathering clouds. When we stop to listen we can hear the groaning of Creation. We can hear the cries of mothers and babies, weeping for the sons and fathers who die at the hands of other sons and fathers in decaying urban neighborhoods and in faraway mountain villages. And in the midst of all of that and more, there are many of us whose worlds have come apart from grief or pain or fear.

We live in a world that has gone astray. We are part of a church that has gone astray. We ourselves have gone astray. We have our sound-bite explanations and our talking-point evasions, but when we are honest with ourselves we realize that we are talking mostly to avoid the accusatory silence. Nothing in our world makes much sense.

But this meal still makes sense. We eat and drink. We tell stories about other meals from our past and the distant past and we draw comfort from the meal, from the stories and from each other–like Jesus did–to face what must be faced, to pick up our own crosses, and to follow in his footsteps.

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Jesus vs the Chamber of Commerce (Matthew 21:1-13; Palm Sunday; March 29, 2015)

Jesus vs the Chamber of Commerce

Matthew 21:1-13
Palm Sunday
March 29, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Everyone loves a parade. People gather with their lawn chairs along the parade route. Some people stake out space long before the parade begins. In Decorah we don’t even have to stay with our chairs; we know they’ll still be there when we get back from wandering around and saying hi to our friends. I don’t know whether the kids or the grownups enjoy a parade more. Kids chase after candy that is thrown to them from passing trucks, floats and tractors.

No one throws candy to grownups, but we get to watch the kids. We all get to wave to our friends who are actually in the parade. Our friends in the parade try to pretend that they don’t really want to be center of attention, but we don’t believe them.

In Decorah we don’t need much of a reason to have a parade. I remember in our first six months in Decorah there were four parades: Fourth of July, Nordic Fest, Homecoming, and Christmas. The day of the Christmas parade was so cold I was afraid that there would be parades right through January and February, but good sense prevails in Decorah. Maybe at the last minute, but it prevails.

Everyone loves a parade, but this parade, this entrance into Jerusalem with a donkey, coats on the road, waving palm branches and shouts of Hosanna! is something different.

Some folks loved this parade. The crowd loved it. The blind and the lame loved it. They followed Jesus right into the Temple and Jesus cured them. The children loved this parade. No one threw any candy but they loved it anyway. They really got into shouting Hosanna! and they also followed Jesus into the Temple. They kept shouting Hosanna!–an Aramaic word that means “Save!” or “Help!” They shouted “Hosanna to the Son of David!” They kept it up long after the parade was over. They were having a good time.

But not everyone loved this parade. Jesus had no permit for the parade. He hadn’t talked to law enforcement or City Hall or anyone else to ask permission to have a parade. The whole city was in turmoil. Then as now there were folks who didn’t like turmoil, especially turmoil of the unauthorized kind. They asked, “Who is this?” (Well, at least that’s the gist of what they asked. There might have been some editing.) “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee,” was their answer.

Uh oh. “The prophet Jesus,” is it? That could mean trouble. Prophets are unpredictable. No, that’s not exactly true. No, prophets predictably speak in ways that make people uncomfortable. They have little sense of propriety. They crash parties. They make scenes. They stir up crowds. They annoy the people who like things the way they are.

Prophets act like Jesus acted. This is why I never took seriously the fad of a few years ago of wearing bracelets and necklaces with the letters “WWJD,” (What would Jesus do?). That’s because the people who most wanted people to wear these bracelets seemed to me to be the people least likely to have approved of what Jesus actually did, and still less likely to approve of other people doing what he did.

Here’s what he did: He led the crowd into the outer court of the Temple and he disrupted the smooth flow of the business of religion. You probably know the drill. The Torah required sacrificial animals that were perfect specimens, animals with no deformities, scars or sores. It wasn’t right to fulfill your obligations to God with animals that you didn’t want and couldn’t sell anyway; no a sacrifice, if it’s really a sacrifice, needs to be of your best. And it was hard to travel from, say, Nazareth in Galilee with an animal, a yearling lamb, say and arrive in Jerusalem with the lamb still unblemished.

So, in the court of the Temple you could buy unblemished animals right on the spot. It was a service to pilgrims and a source of revenue to the Temple, especially during the major festivals, like Passover.

Now, to buy these animals you couldn’t use ordinary currency. The ordinary currency was Roman and Roman currency had images of the emperor stamped into them; Roman money was widely believed to be idolatrous in and of itself, no matter the intention of the one who used it. It might be okay for daily buying and selling, but it simply wouldn’t do for use even in the outer court of the Temple. So, in the court of the Temple you could exchange ordinary money for the shekels that you needed to buy the animals you needed for your sacrifice. It was another service that the Temple provided for pilgrims and tourists and, again, a source of revenue.

These businessmen were doing a brisk business. After all, it was just days before Passover. The city was packed with pilgrims, each one of whom would want to make offer a sacrifice for the things that everyone, of whatever religion, prays for: good crops, fertile marriages, healthy children, and freedom from disease.

So Jesus, “the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee,” came into the Temple with the parts of the crowd that wanted to see what would happen next. He marched up to the tables of the money changers and overturned them, scattering coins of all sorts on the ground. He knocked over the chairs that the sellers of animals were sitting on. (I don’t even know whether he did this while the sellers were still sitting on them.) He let the pigeons loose; he drove out the lambs and goats. You can imagine the scene: tables overturned, merchants shouting and shaking their fists, pigeons flying around trying avoid recapture, lambs and goats bleating and looking for a way through the crowd, and children shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”

If the turmoil in the city outside the outer court of the Temple was bad, this was far worse. This was turmoil at the very center of the ideological world of Roman Judea. If God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, as the one percent always seems to believe, it was because God lived in the Temple and the Temple functioned smoothly. It functioned smoothly, that is, until Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee showed up.

This parade, Jesus’s actions in the Temple court, indeed, everything that Jesus did during this time in Jerusalem had two effects. It caused sparks of hope to burst into flame in the hearts of some so that they shouted Hosanna. Among these were the blind, the lame and the children.

It caused the ones who liked things just fine they way they were to become angry so that they wanted Jesus dead. Among these were the Romans, their collaborators among the Jewish people, and, of course, the Chamber of Commerce.

None of this was a surprise to Jesus, not because his divinity gave him perfect knowledge of the future, but because this is what he had come to Jerusalem to do. He came to pick a fight, to draw a line between cynicism and hope, between poverty and privilege, between oppression and justice. He knew that people would make choices. Some would welcome a new hope for justice; others would cynically cling to their privilege. This is the work of a prophet. And that’s what he was.

Jesus has found the sweet spot and preachers, when we step into the pulpit and we ask “What would Jesus do?” look for that sweet spot, too. We hope when they hear what we say, that outsiders, the oppressed, the blind, the lame and children will rediscover hope and be moved to shout Hosanna! We also expect that some will get angry and want to string us up. When both of those things happen, we know we have found the sweet spot.

It’s true for the whole church. If our good news doesn’t cause some–the ones you’d least expect–to shout Hosanna and wave palm branches, our good news isn’t good enough. If our good news doesn’t cause others to wish for our destruction, our good news isn’t good enough. When there are some folks shouting Hosanna and others muttering under their breath, then we know we’re on to something that Jesus would have recognized, something that Jesus would have done, something that might be a place where new life might be found. It could happen today, perhaps, next week or sometime next year; but, whenever and wherever it happens, it will be Easter.

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