Scripture: Mark 11:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30; John 13:36; John 16:7 Series: 2021
A Palm Sunday sermon on Mark’s account of Jesus entering Jerusalem. Beginning with his sons imitating each other, the preacher frames discipleship as ‘practicing living.’ He argues the crowd that sang Hosanna was right to do so even though they would later cry ‘crucify,’ because our actions are not invalidated by later failure; fear of failure is a greater sin than failure itself (cf. Peter’s denial, the parable of the Talents). Drawing on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, he shows that the answer to the problem of evil and to struggle is not perfect argument but embracing others and looking to the saints, who are ‘visible gospels’ that point to the God present in us. He calls hearers to imitate the saints in their lives and to sing Hosanna anyway, closing with Mother Teresa’s ‘Do It Anyway’ poem.
Illustrations: ephraim-imitating-dominic, family-meal-falls-apart, theudas-roman-crackdown, brothers-karamazov-ivan-alexei, father-zosima-decay, francis-xavier-mission, mother-teresa-anyway-poem
Palm Sunday 2021
Palm Sunday Practice
Ephraim and Dominic are at this wonderful age when they still love each other. It is amazing. It is amazing. Siblings who love each other. Ephraim loves his brother. He gets so excited to see his brother. If Alina or I go out with Dominic, he says ‘where Domi go’.
We tell Domi at the dinner table, “Domi, your brother is watching you. Show him how you can sit.” Then Dominic may or may sit, but if Dominic twirls his fork, Ephraim will immediately try to do what his brother did. It is amazing how long it takes to instill a good behavior and how swiftly Ephraim can pick up a bad behavior. Dominic may look outside, Ephraim gets up to look outside. Dominic starts babbling, Ephraim starts babbling.
The good and the bad.
Ephraim is trying out how to be a human, how to be a boy from his brother, from the closest person to him. He is practicing living. That is what growing up is, it is practicing living. And I think it doesn’t stop. We continue to try to practice to live.
We practice on our own and so often we fall short.
It is like when we have a really good meal as a family. Every sits and eats everything. It is amazing. And the next meal will be like the boys have never seen a fork or a table or food in their life and it will be like we haven’t taught them anything.
Ephraim is trying to be a big kid. Alina and I are trying to be parents, and sometimes it does not work out.
I think this sense of trying helps us understand what is going on in this passage for today from the gospel of Mark. We have one of the great holy days of the year. A day that has its own name: Palm Sunday. It is the day Jesus enters Jerusalem. It is one of the rare texts that is found in all four of the gospels.
Mark is really into Holy Week. He has Holy Week Down. You can tell in the hand out. See how each day in Holy Week has a reading. Everything has been a build up until this. And we see with the people crying Hosanna. We see this with the disciples going out to get the donkey. And it is weird, there is more detail in Mark about acquiring the Donkey than actually entering Jerusalem. So they do that. They acquire the donkey and the people sing Hosanna to the king.
These rallies in Jerusalem happened every once in a while. What is interesting about Palm Sunday is what doesn’t happen. When Theadeus led a large number of people from Jerusalem to the Jordan the Romans called him seditious and sent out a thousand troops to crush him and behead him. The entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem did not lead to a Roman intervention so it did not lead to a Roman panic. What happened to the people who cheered Hosanna?
That is the question for us today? What happened to those people? Where did they go? Many of us know that we will see them again in a couple of days screaming, crucify him. What fickle people!
It is so tempting to disassociate ourselves from them. And yet, they still should have sung Hosanna. Our actions are not invalidated by the subsequent failure. We think too highly of ourselves when we cannot imagine life without perfect action.
This is the perfection of the world. The perfection of flawless ness. The perfection of the world. The perfection of a robot. Not the perfection of love. Not the perfection of the love shown by Jesus who forgives failures. We will see in a few days Peter deny Jesus three times. Is Peter forsaken for this? No. Peter is still lifted up as the greatest of the apostles. Failure does not get one kicked out of the kingdom of God. As we see in the parable of the Talents from Matthew 25. Usually fear of failure is a far greater sin than failure itself. The fear of failing God keeps us from loving. WHereas failure helps us to see where we are going wrong and to correct it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s greatest novel is called the Brother’s Karamazov. In many ways, it is a novel about failure. It is about three brothers and their faither. And their father is killed. Their abusive and cruel father is killed and the oldest brother is accused of the murder, but it is so much more than that
The epigraph to the novel is one of my favorite quotes:
Man is a mystery. If you spend your entire life trying to figure him out, do not think that you have wasted your time. Because I occupy myself with this mystery. Because I want to be a man.
That is the question guiding the Brother’s Karamazov.
The center of the novel is the relationship between these brothers and one of the most poignant scenes takes place in the middle of the novel. It is a conversation between the middle brother, Ivan, and the younger brother Alexei. Alexei is a novice monk while Ivan is an intellectual atheist. In the conversation, Ivan goes into this masterful argument from the problem of evil: the best presentation imaginable for why the suffering of innocents shows that God doesn’t exist. Ivan talks about news stories of these children who are tortured and killed by their parents. The stories are true, from real newspapers.
Dostoevsky wrote to his editor that he wanted Ivan’s speech to be the best argument possible. He didn’t want Ivan to present a straw man that could easily be refuted.
So what is Alexei’s respond? First, he is flabbergasted, he doesn’t know what to do. But after a while, Alexei doesn’t go through a point by point refutation of Ivan. He comes forward and embraces his brother.
Alexei struggles, and so his first response is to embrace his brother, and then he leaves, and he goes to the person who respects most in his life, the saint in his life, Father Zosima. And it is through seeking out the pillars of his faith that he is able to come to grips with experiencing God anew in light of Ivan’s challenge.
We always start where we are with going through the motions. As Christians, we also start by looking at the saints in our life and in our history. Who are the people who showed you how to respond in hard times? Who are the people who showed you how to worship? How you should praise God? How you should pray? How you should receive communion?
As well, there are the saints in history. For me, one of the most powerful saints in history is Francis Xavier, who joining the society of Jesus when it was nothing and went to Goa, India. There he found out that Christians were already present in the Church of St Thomas, so he kept on going all the way to Japan. He read the Great Commission, and said yes to God.
The power of the saints is found in the fact that they are visible gospels. When Alexei’s faith is challenged, he goes to the saint in his life, the man who helps show him that God is real.
And the irony of the moment is that Father Zosima dies, and then his body decays like other bodies and Alexei is struck by how putrid he smells. He was challenged when he discovered that this man whom he admired and held up as holy would decay. In this challenge, Alexei finally comes to a moment of spiritual awakening.
The saints lead us on a journey, they don’t take the journey for us. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, where I am going, you cannot follow, but I am sending the Holy Spirit to you.
The saints in our life cannot give us all the answers to the problem to the challenge of the problem of evil. What we see, though, with faith is a way of reframing those challenges, reframing our position in the world.
Who is a saint in your life that is showing you Jesus? How can you act like them? Who is someone you respect in the faith? What is something they do that you can imitate? How do we respond to challenge and struggle? We respond by acting in love as Alyosha did. We respond by looking to the saints in our life, as Alyosha did. We respond by listening to Jesus and doing the things he asks us before we understand them. As he asks the disciples to go into the village and find the colt, a request that seems absurd on the surface and only makes since because of who is doing the asking.
It may not seem like much just to imitate someone. It may not seem like much to give just a hug or a kiss but it is more than we imagine. Because in that action, when you embrace a friend who is hurting, it is not just you, it is God with you. The answer doesn’t come from you. The solution doesn’t come from you. Resolution doesn’t come from you. but from the God who sends you.
And yes it feels like it is not enough, and that is where faith comes in. The faith that reminds us that on our own is never enough. Having all the right answers to Ivan would not resolve Ivan’s issues with God. Having all the right answers with a tragedy, with a diagnosis, with a job hunt, all the right answers does not resolve the human heart. And imitating the saints doesn’t, in itself, do that. But what it does do is point to the God who is present in us.
When we sing Hosanna, yes Good Friday is coming, yes Jesus is going to die, but there is still a blessing in naively singing Hosanna. And we should do it anyway.
I want to end today with a poem that Mother Teresa had on her wall in Calcutta.
People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.