Think And Let Think

At its best, and I mean at its very best, worship reminds us, and begs us to realize, that we, even us, we are included in the myriads of the thousands in John’s vision. Worship tells us over and over again that there is nothing we can do for good or ill that can stop God from getting what God wants. Worship gives us Jesus.

Oddly enough, even with its bizarre images and confounding cassations, Revelation is an odyssey of encouragement. It tells us who we are, who God is, and what is the world is going on in the world. To put it simply, it tells us the truth.

The proclamation of Holy Week, the entry into the city, the meal on Thursday, the cross on Friday, the empty tomb on Sunday, they run counter to just about everything else in life - they don’t give us ways to be better human beings, they aren’t commandments about how to make the world more bearable. They are not about what we do, but are instead about what is done to us. And that what has a name: Jesus Christ.

Hosanna. I’ve always loved that word. It’s such a churchy word. And, every Palm Sunday, we reach into the vault of churchy words, we dust off this old familiar declaration, and we proudly put it on display. We shout it in our hymns, we put the word on the lips of our children, we hear it read in the scriptures. And then, at the conclusion of worship, we wrap it up and place it back into the church vault with our other special words only to come back one year from now. We are familiar with this word. It conjures memories and songs. Churches everywhere will join us in our shouts of Hosanna today. But do we know what it means?

Our world is built on the assumption that whatever ails us can be fixed by us. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is good and right for us to dig deep into our wallets and purses to help those in need. We do have an obligation to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves. We need to believe in a better world. We need hope. But we aren’t the hope of the world. If we were then we would not longer need newspapers to tell us what’s wrong in the world because there wouldn’t be anything wrong in the world. Transcendent hope, real hope for things not yet seen, can’t come from us, it has to be done to us. And that kind of hope has a name: Jesus.

Contrary to how we might often imagine it, the whole ministry of the Lord isn’t about the importance of our religious observances, or our spiritual proclivities, or even our bumbling moral claims. It’s about God having a good time and just dying, literally, to share it with us.

We are all fruitless fig trees standing alone in the middle of God’s vineyard. We are doing nothing and we deserve nothing. And yet (!) Jesus looks at our barren limbs, all of our fruitless works, and he says the three words we deserve not at all: “Lord, forgive them.”

Grace, what we talk about all the time, isn’t so amazing unless there’s a reason for it. Put another way - the law of God is given in order that grace might be sought, and the grace of God is given in order that the law might be fulfilled. We need rejection and election. We need law and gospel. Because that’s what life is like. Karl Barth put it this way: “There is no light which does not also know darkness, no joy which does not have within it sorrow; but the converse is also true; no fear, no rage, which does not have, far or near, peace at its side. No laughter without tears, no weeping without laughter!” Even John Wesley once said that every law contains a hidden promise. Grace abounds!

Notice: the things the devil offers to the Lord, they’re all objectively good things - bread, political power, miracles. And yet, Jesus refused them. And he even used scripture to defend his refusals! Perhaps if the devil offered Jesus an unending buffet at the golden corral, or the nuclear codes, or David Copperfield’s assortment of illusions, we could sympathize with Jesus’ dismissals. But the devil offered Jesus possibilities for transformation and Jesus said, “No, thank you.” But here’s the real kicker, the truly wild part of this story: by the end of the Gospel Jesus will, in fact, do all of the things that the devil suggests...

We can’t fix ourselves. In any other place and in an other institution and around any other people that is unmitigated bad news. But here, in the church, it’s nothing but Good News. It’s good news because nobody, not the devil, not the world, not even ourselves can take us away from the Love that refuses to let us go.

The voice from the cloud commands us to listen to Jesus. But, and it's a big but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t want to listen to Jesus. We’d rather listen to ourselves. We’d rather listen to ourselves because we are downright addicted to control. Or, at least to thinking we’re in control. And yet, do you know how God responds to those who think they’re in control? Laughter. It is humbling to be laughed at by anyone, but when God’s laughs at us it’s another thing entirely. But perhaps we need to hear that laughter, particularly when we wake and sleep believing that it’s up to us to make the world turn out right. The world has already turned out right. We know the future in the present. The tomb is empty! We don’t have to be the hope of the world because Jesus already is. The only thing we have to do is live accordingly.

Prayer is, and must be, more than bringing our wish lists to Jesus, asking him for occasional help when our bodies are no longer functioning the way they are supposed to. Prayer, instead, is the risky attempt to let Jesus speak.

I can’t prove the resurrection. No one can. "Believe this," "Believe that," we say in the church. And somehow the genuine character of one’s belief has become the litmus test for Christianity. Which is made all the more strange when we consider the amount of doubt right smack dab in the Bible! My former professor Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “What a lost people we must be to think that God really cares whether we believe in Him or not.”

"The story of Jesus Christ, the one Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians, is that God comes to us not because we are good, but because we aren’t. And when we start to see that, not just in the strange new world of the Bible, but in our very lives, it is the difference that makes all the difference..."

Heaven is the party of the streaming sunlight of the world’s final afternoon. Heaven is when all the dead beats and all the success stories, all the losers who never got anything right and all the winners who finally give up on winning, simply waltz over to the judgment seat called the Kingdom of God, with nothing to show for their lives except an eternal invitation from the host of the party that goes on forever. And the celebration is so good and so loud and so fun that it drowns out all the party poopers in the world. Which is why we should take seriously the words we say week after week in the Lord’s Prayer - thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

What we believe shapes how we behave. And if we believe that God in Christ really reveals the fullness of love, then we need not look further than that love to see how we are to be. Therefore, in the great and somewhat adapted words of John Wesley, though we may not think alike, though our differences of opinion and religious understanding may vary considerably, though we may not agree even on what it means to believe, may we not love alike? Without all doubt we may.

When the incarnate God in Jesus Christ comes to us, we nail him to the cross. And then, three days later, God gives him back to us. Which is just another way of saying: Hear the Good News, Christ died for us *while* we were yet sinners, and that prove’s God’s love toward us.

We are called to practice resurrection. That is, we Christians live according to the Good News of the Gospel which means we are different. We belong to a new age and a new time and a new kingdom in which death is not the end. Our rejoicing, therefore, is not naïveté. We don’t come here to pretend that everything out there isn’t actually out there. We come here precisely because the darkness is so overwhelming, and we need something we can cling to in the midst of it all. That something has a name: Jesus Christ.

Contrary to how it’s been portrayed in the church or even in our wider culture, we never really pick Jesus. When all is said and done, when the King of kings and Lord of lords comes to dwell among us, we nail him to the cross. We, to put it bluntly, pick Barabbas instead. Which makes some of Jesus’ final words are the more powerful: “Forgive them Lord, for they do not know what they are doing.”

No matter how wild the world might become, and no matter how poor our priests might be, there is one thing that hasn’t changed, and it never will - the power of God’s unconditional love and the call on our lives from the One who is Love.