Mount Up

Mount Up The Dover Church
April 1, 2012 – Palm Sunday Scripture: Mark 11:1-11

It was just about this time three years ago when I first set foot inside The Dover Church. I remember that first interview with the whole Search Committee gathered around a really long table in the Music Room. I was placed at one end for viewing purposes. At the other end of the table, sitting face to face with me, fifteen feet away or so but still face to face, sat a very quiet man who didn’t say much as the rest of the committee ran me through my paces. When his turn came, Rein Uritam asked me what I thought about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It caught me a little off guard, to be honest, after all the questions about myself, my style of ministry, my goals, my interest in The Dover Church, and so on.
Eventually my longwinded display of off the cuff Biblical erudition petered out and I returned serve with a question of my own for the committee: what is your favorite church holiday or Bible story? Some people picked Christmas. Some picked Easter. Some picked Maundy Thursday. Rein smiled and said, “Palm Sunday. I like the ambiguity of it.” Now I am hardly an obsessive compulsive, but I have been thinking about Rein’s answer ever since. “Palm Sunday. I like the ambiguity of it.”
And so, here’s some Palm Sunday ambiguity for you. I apologize to those of you who have heard parts of what I am about to say before, but I only have so many stories on certain subjects. I had a very happy childhood, at least that’s how I remember it, until about 15, when, among other simultaneous catastrophes my parents started down the road towards a messy divorce which basically consumed most of the rest of my high school years as “the thing no one's going to talk about but which is on everyone’s mind,” aka “The Pink Elephant in the Room.” Things went so badly from my point of view that I didn’t speak to my father for the next thirty years. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. Through high school, learning how to shave and proms, graduation, college, rowing competitions, graduate school, life and study overseas, Ph.D., being a professor, seminary, a first church, ordination, courtship, a second church, marriage, a third church, fatherhood, a fourth church, and all the really great stuff in between…my dad and I missed out on sharing a lot of my life with each other. My cutting ties with my father was the smoldering, inextinguishable, way too hot to the touch fire that I didn’t want to get too near to, let alone spend much time looking at.
More than two years ago, my wife, Marie-Laure started encouraging me to mount up and ride my donkey into my Jerusalem. “Call your father. You can’t preach love and forgiveness and not practice it in the place where it really hurts. Call your father. He’s an old man and you will regret it if he dies without reconciling. Call your father. You are a father yourself and you’ll need to work this out to be a really great father. Call your father. Your sons have the right to know who their grandfather is. Call your father. Like it or not, he gave you half of your life.”
Rather than talk about the reconciliation, however, I want to talk about my reluctance to get on that donkey. This is Palm Sunday after all and not Easter yet. Why didn’t I want to call my father? Well, a cocktail of love, love lost, resentment and anger, sadness and fear of more pain, fermented over years, is a potent drink. Maybe he wouldn’t care after all these years? I had given him every reason not to. Maybe he had moved on? Sure he had moved on, but had I? Maybe I had wasted my life living in the past? Maybe everything wasn’t so black and white? Maybe I was partly responsible for what happened? The past had hurt a lot, more than I cared to admit that I felt. Maybe this was going to be more of the same? I had stood by my mother through all of it…would I be betraying her now? Would she forgive me? Family therapy hadn’t been an option back then and I really didn’t want to revisit it all now. Could we move forward without looking back? I was torn between honesty and accountability, and forgiveness. It looked a lot like I might be jumping into an open cesspool laced with broken glass.
Well, I took the leap and all of those questions ended up being pretty much beside the point. All of those fears and reservations ended up being mirages, thoughts without substance. It all sort of dissolved in the face of no strings attached forgiveness and reconciliation. It wasn't a Hollywood happy ending, but it was what we Swedes call lagom, good enough.
Of course, I didn’t know it was going to go that way. So why did I do it? Why did I actually dare to ride my donkey into my Jerusalem? I love the fact that Jesus rode a donkey and not a horse, let alone a chariot or walked on his own two feet, because I find a donkey absolutely apropos. When you are about to ride into fear, anger, regret, jealousy, spiritual or physical danger of any kind, with only love, forgiveness and reconciliation up your sleeve, you can feel a little bit like a donkey…you all know the vulgar word…for taking such a foolish, unguarded, completely self exposing risk…and for what? What's in it for you? Such generosity of spirit?
So, why did I do it? Sure Marie-Laure had pushed me from time to time, but she’ll be the first to tell you that I can be one stubborn Swede when I feel strongly about something. And I felt strongly about this. There was probably nothing in my life I felt more strongly about, which is pretty sad when you think about it. The thing one is most committed to is a negative. So what could have possibly moved me to do something different than what I had been doing for most of my life?
In a word: faith. In a few more words: my mature faith in the power of Jesus Christ to save me and all Creation. By this point I had been a pastor for a decade. We pastors get to do a lot of fun things, but we are also the people who hold other peoples’ hands as they walk into their Jerusalem's. Pastors walk alongside into tragedy and loss of all shapes and sizes: incapacitation, divorce, cancer, suicide, alzheimers, bankruptcy, drug and alcohol addiction, wayward children. It’s not because we like it or get a kick out of it. It’s all for one simple reason....because we believe in the Resurrection.
My friends, my brothers and sisters, I know my calling you my brothers and sisters makes a lot of you uncomfortable, but I am really serious about this, I am here to tell you one thing this morning. In all the years of handholding and walking alongside I have known the power of the Resurrection. I have had any number of people tell me of their experience of the powerfully comforting and healing presence of God in their particular nightmare. They have shared their confidence with me that God was bringing them through their worst case scenario. All the Gospel promises are true. I know. I have been there on any number of Good Fridays and Easters. I have been in the darkness, felt the power and seen the glory.
As I sat there, holding my phone in my hand, my father’s phone number dialed with my finger poised above the Call button, I knew that this is what to had to happen if I was going to get to the Resurrection on the other side. This was the big one for me. Not much in the scope of world tragedy, but big for me. We Christians think that Jesus on Palm Sunday must have been some sort world changing event at the time. But let’s get real. Jesus riding his donkey into Jerusalem? Another country Rabbi riding into the city for Passover with a small bunch of ecstatic followers? Another Jewish troublemaker stirring up trouble with the Romans? A small fish in a small pond. Not much in the scope of world tragedy for those who didn’t know what was really going on.
But we know. We're on the other side of the Resurrection. This is the way into life, real life, not the bed of roses life we wish life was, not the rose colored glasses life we try our best to see life as, not the Technicolor extravaganza life everyone’s trying to sell us. Real life is often messy and painful. When life isn't going the way we think it ought to, most of us either strike out against life in anger, run away from life in fear, or protectively pull up walls around ourselves to block out life. But as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to ride humbly into that messy, painful, threatening life, in love, in peace, either on a proverbial donkey or feeling like one, not because it's the right thing to do. Not for any oughtas or shouldas. But because it is there that we will find God, know the power and experience something Jesus called eternal life but which he never meant to mean something that happens after you die but rather a quality of life right here and right now.
I hope you see the ambiguity of it all. I actually think it's pretty paradoxical as well. Here's this great present and future promised to each of us and all of us, new and abundant life which death cannot touch right here and right now, but the road leading up to it looks really unappealing, downright repulsive, a Cross. You mean I have to go through Good Friday to get to Easter? But you see, the victory is already won, so there's nothing to fear. And yet, you still have to go through the battle to know the victory. The question is as straight forward as they get, are you ready to mount up and ride into the ambiguity and paradox of it all?