Stoned

 

Stoned

 

Luke 19:28-40

Entrance into the final days 

 

19:28 After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.

 

19:29 When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples,

 

19:30 saying, "Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here.

 

19:31 If anyone asks you, 'Why are you untying it?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it.'"

 

19:32 So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them.

 

19:33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?"

 

19:34 They said, "The Lord needs it."

 

19:35 Then they brought it to Jesus, and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.

 

19:36 As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.

 

19:37 Now as he was approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen,

 

19:38 saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!"

 

19:39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop."

 

19:40 He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."

 

I’ve been to this place on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus started his trek down the mountain, on the winding, cobblestone path, down through the cemetery into the Kidron Valley, and then up into the gate into the walled city of Jerusalem. This is where the “parade” occurred, and where Luke tells us the locals laid down their cloaks for Jesus to ride over, as he was upon a donkey. It is the Gospel of Matthew that says the crowd spread palm branches along with the cloaks, not Luke. Possibly both were employed? We have no eyewitnesses, other than the gospel writers. Matthew’s account has always cracked me up—he’s concerned that Jesus “fits” into the various Hebrew Bible prophecies that he either force-feeds the events to do so, or just turns the prophecies themselves into “alternative facts.” So much so that when Matthew reads in the Old Testament that the “king” (Messiah) will come into Jerusalem “riding on a colt, the foal of an ass,” the tax collector turned author thinks that these are two separate animals, not an appositional description of the same animal. Hence, Matthew says he rode BOTH animals, in a truly godly act rivaling Circ de Sole. 

 

On my only trip to the Holy Land, our guides walked us down this historic path in what was certainly a moving experience, realizing that Jesus had done this. We were walking, of course, although for a few shekels, one could rent a donkey from one of the local purveyors, and ride a few yards to mug for the cameras, but we walked. Part way down the mount, we detoured through the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed his famous “resignation” prayer, alongside the olive trees. I had heard that the ones here today are the same ones that would have been there when Jesus experienced his catharsis, but the locals said that, no, the ROOTS would have been the same, but that new branches had been grafted onto them, and had now grown into the current fruit-bearing trees. In the Kidron Valley, we passed through the above-ground tombs of the cemetery, just before we started up the valley toward the city. Visitors to each tomb had left stones on the crypts to signify their visit, and it was sad to see many stones on one grave, while others were nearly barren. Our “religious” crowd (this was, after all, an Educational Opportunities tour, so most of us where either pastors or dedicated church folk) couldn’t bear to see the slight, so we each left stones on the previously bare crypts. Next, we saw some of the garbage heaps just outside the city gates of the Old City of Jerusalem. These two juxtaposed scenes of cemetery and earthly discards explain the biblical phrase about being “thrown outside where there is weeping and gnashing of teach.” The weeping was happening by the grieving visitors to the cemetery for the recently departed; the gnashing of teeth were courtesy of the “junkyard dogs” who were going through the trash for scraps of food. Most interesting.

 

And the massive gates into the Old City certainly explained how the arrival of Jesus and his band of followers felt like “kings,” as they entered the city “triumphally.” The gates are grand, and entering the protected city was an impressive experience, even for us educational pilgrims bearing cameras and backpacks, rather than palm branches and sacrificial cloaks. The locals smiled at our American band as we entered, mirroring the crowd that cheered Jesus on, back in the day of the gospel telling. They, because they had hoped that Jesus would now proclaim himself the warrior king who would banish the oppressive Roman government and restore Jerusalem to Jewish rule, and our modern townies because we carried American dollars along with our cameras, and were not being stingy with them. If they had something or a service to sell, they were doing so, and we were buying. Imagine their disappointment when, rather than lead a revolt, Jesus simply submitted to a “trial,” a beating, and succumbed to capital punishment. Imagine our disappointment when the olive wood camel purchased had “Made in China” stamped on the belly. Either way, the joy turned to mourning, and there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

 

In our visit, the only real damper on the crowd were the Israeli guards marching around in abundant numbers, each carrying an Uzi submachine gun with extended barrels and stocks. But in Jesus’ day, the proverbial wet blanket was wielded by the Pharisees, who saw the adulation being heaped on Jesus by his follows as blasphemous. They “ordered” Jesus to tell them to stop. Jesus’ response was an interesting one: I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out. I think what Jesus was communicating was that THIS IS A BIG DEAL going on here! With a particular word of pungent profanity being left off, this is what then Vice President Joe Biden told President Barack Obama when he signed into law the Affordable Care Act, which has come to be called “Obamacare.” Biden recognized the magnitude of this affair that meant accessible healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans. And while it was just a beginning, current affairs in Washington are truly highlighting how BIG a deal it was, especially in light of it again being threatened with extinction.

 

Jesus and the unfolding affairs in Jerusalem were a BIG DEAL because God was introducing a whole new era in God’s relationship with the world. Forgiveness and redemption would now be an act of GRACE, or “God’s unmerited favor.” God was wrapping up God’s love for humanity and all of the creation in one great “Hail Mary” pass (interesting metaphor, isn’t it?) to redeem us all. God’s great YES to the world (a Karl Barth phrase) was about to be revealed, leaving humanity with a “get out of jail free” card that never expires. This WAS a BIG DEAL, and one worthy of creation’s praise!

 

I say creation’s praise, for Jesus told the Pharisees that if his followers stopped praising God for what was about to be gifted to them, the very CREATION—the rocks—would shout out. Now, while it may be a stretch to relate this next metaphor (camel “Made in China”?), it moved me, personally, so I’ll relate it. Many years ago, when I was tussling with God over a call to ministry, I made a trip to the fledgling 700 Club broadcasting ministry in Virginia Beach, Virginia, led by Pat Robertson, before he later lost his mind, ran for President, and became a right-wing loon. At that time in the early 1970s, Robertson was doing something new and innovative—preaching the gospel using a nightly TV interview show as the vehicle. Since I was working in media at that time in my life, I thought maybe God’s call was to media-related ministry, and what better place to visit than one of its most innovative and rapidly growing “mission fields.” After contacting the 700 Club people, I was invited to spend a week observing what they did, and touring their WYAH television facility (do you see the God reference here—WYAH for “Yahweh,” the Hebrew word for the Almighty?). They were most gracious to welcome me, and I spent several days with Ben Kinchlow and Henry Harrison, early on-air principals with Robertson, and Don Hawkinson, the nightly show’s producer. It was truly a wonderful experience, but one that ultimately sealed a NON-TV related calling into church ministry. That’s a story for another day; maybe I was already seeing the seeds of Robertson’s ego explosion?

 

Anyway, one of the technicians said something to me during my time there that impacted me deeply. He was just one of the behind-the-scenes engineers whose job it was to keep feeding the massive 2-inch wide video tape reels to two huge videotape machines (known in the industry a “quads,” due to the four video heads reading the tape, each machine costing many tens of thousands of dollars). These machines were essentially copying the 700 Club program onto tapes which were then sent out on what was called “the bicycle” to other TV stations to be played. This is how a program like the 700 Club was “syndicated” in the days before SATCOM and other geosynchronous satellites became available to send the program out “live” as it was being telecast. This technician, who was, like all Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) employees in those early days, a committed Christian, had an interesting answer to my question about how he handled the tedium of changing the tape reels for 10 hours a day. He said that he just kept recalling today’s text from Luke about how, if the Christ followers didn’t keep praising God, the ROCKS would cry out. He explained to me that, as the church was beginning to hit its early “crisis” phase when more and more people were skipping church for other activities on Sundays, the rocks WERE beginning to cry out, as video tape is made from MAGNATITE, a rock that is simply crushed up and bonded to a plastic backing. SO, he said, “How can I get bored when I’m fulfilling a prophecy of Jesus?” Even today, as I recall his moving testimony (which really grabbed a science & technology geek like me), I realize that the myriad of ways the Word of God and the testimonies of faith and praise are being shared through the Internet, podcasts, and MP3 files, the rocks are STILL crying out, as all of these devices and pathways rely on SILICON to exist! In effect, some of the best ways the gospel is transmitted today is that it is STONED! After all, YOU are reading this sermon via bits of silicon “doing their thing,” and for those of you who may enjoy worship and praise via STREAMING, guess what? More rocks crying out!

 

I confess to being a bit “saddened” by occupying a pulpit instead of a TV studio over the 36-plus years of my ministry, but what “goes around…” as they say. COVID saw Pastor Karen Slusser and me, sitting in front of the Communion table in the chancel of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, “interviewing” each other and leading worship over a little camera called a “Mevo” to hundreds of our folk over the Internet. I can’t imagine all of the “rocks” crying out to make that happen. I WAS back in a TV studio, and was praising God along with the stones! And even today, post-COVID, our humble little worship services at Faith Community UMC are being “streamed” over the silicon rocks to more people than inhabit the Jefferson Street sanctuary, on an average Sunday. Amazing. 

 

Friends, it’s time for us flesh-and-blood humans to take a lesson from the stones and start praising the Living God with our bodies, minds, and hearts! Who wants to be beat out by a few rocks? Let’s be what the author of I Peter called “living stones” for Christ Jesus, our Lord! HOSANNA! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!!! Amen.

Full-Court Press

 

Full Court Press

 

Philippians 3:4b-14

To know Christ and his resurrection 

 

3:4b If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:

 

3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;

 

3:6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

 

3:7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.

 

3:8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

 

3:9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

 

3:10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,

 

3:11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

 

3:12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. 

 

3:13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,

 

3:14 I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

 

Throughout most of my years in public school, I was a bookworm and a science geek. As I’ve stated before, I grew up in the generation of the space program and Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, but my interests in science went far beyond Neil Armstrong, into chemistry, astronomy, electronics, and the general study of physics. I was reading about Albert Einstein’s work when my classmates were reading Superman comics and collecting baseball cards. Even when I finally started noticing the opposite sex, I went for the smart ones, asking out the two highest ranked girls in my class. I loved to talk about life, the universe, and everything, and while this made me a safe date for the women I dated, and they offered great conversation about these esoteric subjects, it didn’t really engender lasting relationships, which was probably a good thing. My longest lasting relationship in high school actually started during my senior year, when I noticed a new sophomore girl in the clarinet section of the band, and we began dating. We shared the band experience, and while she was no Alberta Einstein, she had other “qualities,” shall we say, that caught my attention. After all, even we geeks have hormones. We did break up, though, just before I went off to college. I figured she should be cut loose to date others in her class, and I fully expected to resume my “smart girls” pursuit in an institution of higher learning. There is an epilogue to this “coming of age,” story: I wound up spending my life with the smartest of all of the girls I knew, and we DO like to talk about life, the universe, and everything! Wasn’t the only thing that caught my attention about her, though…

 

I tell this story to lead into another story: part of my “coming of age” also involved a sudden interest in sports, something I really had never had much of, other than growing up in a family of Pirate fans, and throwing a baseball around in the side yard with my brothers. I played in the “swing band,” as our jazz ensemble was known at Oil City High School, and this peppy team became the pep band at our school’s home basketball games. This led to an interest in the games, themselves, and Oil City put a pretty good team on the floor in those days, winning the section title every one of my three years, and the district title in at least one of them, as I recall. The basketball “Oilers” claim to fame was a really good and relentless “full-court press,” which is a basketball defense that pressures the other team when it has the ball, hoping to turn the ball over. Our coach, Bob Lynch, was an advocate for this defense, and we had quick, very athletic players who made it work very well. The full-court press enabled us to beat teams that were better shooters than we were, AND who had taller players. There was one game, when we played a weaker rival, that “the press” worked so well that the other team hardly scored—21 points, as I recall, to our 100 points—and the resulting turnovers were fed to our top scorer, who set a school record that night. Anyway, having to be there for all of those games not only got me enthused about basketball, but whetted my appetite for a wider variety of sports. I would later try actually playing baseball on a Colt League team, but found out that I couldn’t hit a baseball to save my life. I did become a distance runner, and lost 40 of my “bookworm” pounds the Summer after my senior year. I also became a decent tennis player. I guess you could say my continuing interest in certain sports I owe to the full-court press?

 

One of the Apostle Paul’s most celebrated phrases of all of his epistles occurs in today’s passage, and it is HIS “full-court press,” so to speak. It is in the last verse of this pericope: “I PRESS ON TOWARD THE GOAL…the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” I don’t know how many sermons or teachings I have heard about this challenge to “press on,” but it has been a lot. So many times when life deals a hard hand, I have urged friends, and parishioners, family members, and even myself in the mirror, to PRESS ON toward the goal. And every time I hear the phrase, I think of that high school basketball team and their full-court press, for “pressing on” is not just a defense, or a shield against the “attacks,” but it is a “turn the ball around” tactic that makes something positive out of a negative happening. “Pressing on” means not just “getting through” the muck of life, but also still focusing on the goal ahead and finding a way to use even the “muck” as fuel for moving forward. 

 

Paul’s text also reminds us that once we “steal the ball” from the opposing forces, we do best to feed the hot hand! Now, I’ll be honest—my sudden interest in basketball in high school DID lead to me learning to play the game a bit. Not having played it while growing up meant that I really never learned the art and coordination of “ball handling,” although through much practice on the neighbor’s driveway where they had a hoop set up DID help me become a decent shot. Of course this meant that when I tried to actually play the game, I tended to be a “chucker,” as they call it, meaning I liked to shoot, rather than to pass the ball off to someone who is closer to the basket. There is a lesson in this, and Paul’s text touches on it, for sure. 

 

You see, Jesus is the hotter hand, to use the basketball illustration. Paul makes a case for why it would be easy for him to become a “chucker”: he was a legitimate member of the Jewish community and upheld its beliefs and doctrines, even to the point of engaging in the persecution of Christians, because he believed them to be a threat to “legitimate” faith. He would later allude to his superior education under Gamaliel, an outstanding teacher of his day, to defend his “credentials.” However, he tells the Philippian Christians that he counts it all LITERALLY as “garbage,” compared to the life he has found in Jesus Christ. God’s acceptance of him means far more than any recognition he could earn with his book-learning and accomplishments. 

 

Jumping back into the sports metaphor for a moment, I must say that I have come to value more the players on any team who don’t make the game all about themselves—you know, the ones who are “unselfish” on the court, the field, or the ice—the ones who “feed the hot hand,” with the goal of winning the contest. This is EXACTLY what Paul is talking about here. And the “hot hand” is Jesus Christ AND the “team”—the BODY of CHRIST, or the gathering of Christ-followers we call “the church.” We have come to put Paul in our faith “Hall of Fame” precisely because he fed the church. Some would even say he was its architect. Paul didn’t make it about himself, but constantly played a “full-court press” for Jesus!

 

I guess my main point in this message is to suggest that “pressing on” is much more than just “gutting it out,” which is the usual rendering of what some think Paul meant. When we keep our eyes on the goal of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, we don’t just “make do” or persevere. With each passing of the ball, we are looking to turn things around and score one for the home team. Right now, as United Methodists, our “team” is undergoing a huge restructuring, due to the disaffiliation we have experienced. The church I serve—Faith Community UMC in Rochester, PA—lost its pastor, its partner church in the charge, AND its full-time pastor, not to mention a good portion of its own congregation. They were told by some that they wouldn’t last three months. Yet, here they are, over two years later, still alive, still engaged in meaningful community ministry, AND about to receive a full-time pastor again, in July! They are proud of what they have accomplished as a “team,” and have continued to “press on” against the opposing, or at least denigrating, forces. They have a gospel-oriented mission and a Christ-centered goal. As their pastor over the past year, I’ve done what I always did best—I played in the pep band for them. And while Dara and I must move on, we will continue to be their prayer partners and rooters (Dara was, after all, a cheerleader!). I know that with God’s help, and the tremendously sacrificial and capable leaders they have at Faith Community, they can “swing” it!

 

How about you? Are you resigned to just “hang on,” or will you take up Paul’s challenge to run a full-court press when the “competition” looks ominous? I remember our high school team going up against our chief rival back in the day—Meadville High School. As the game began against them, the Oilers laid back to see what Meadville’s game plan would be. Meadville always had a team of very fast players, and they moved the ball around extremely well. When it was evident that this would be their tact, Coach Lynch signaled to “begin the press,” and Meadville didn’t know how to handle Oil City’s quite effective full-court press that not only slowed the game down, but began to turn the ball over to Oil City’s scoring advantage. It’s a great metaphor for what Mr. Wesley called “organizing to beat the devil.” Don’t just “press on,” but make it a FULL-COURT press! I believe that if the United Methodist Church heeds Paul’s advice here in Philippians 3, it will also “turn the tide” and thrive as a church by realizing the goal of the gospel as set forth by Jesus, our “leading scorer.” I can still hear the cheer in my head: “Here we go, Oilers, HERE WE GO!” Amen.