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April 5, 2009

This was not a normal sermon. We built our Palm Sunday service around the places where tension exists in our world.  We interspersed the stories with excerpts from the Psalms. Here is a summary.

When Jesus came into Jerusalem, it was a city filled with tension. He was coming in from the east, down from the Mount of Olives, a preacher from Galilee to the north with a following made up of peasants.

Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, was coming in from the West with an imperial army. He came from his home on the Mediterranean Sea to be there for the big Jewish festival of Passover, to make sure things were kept in order.

This was a dicey time in the city. The Jewish people were recalling their escape from slavery in Egypt. The Zealots were plotting to overthrow the Romans. The temple leaders were trying to keep the Romans happy. The temple sellers were trying to make a living at the expense of the pilgrims.

There were clashing visions in the city filled with tension.
    An imperial vision.
    A warrior’s vision.
    A vision filtered through the lenses of power and money.
    And a vision from the preacher out of Galilee about a new way people ought to live with one another, giving their highest loyalty not to season or the religious establishment or the demands of the economy, but to God. It was a vision that soon would get him killed.
    
So today, we will hear stories of other people living in the tension-filled places in our world.

Barb Gallogly-Turner just came back from a week working with Edgewood College nursing students on the Arizona-Mexico border, a border increasingly defined by walls and fences. She talked about being in a courtroom watching about 75 shackled immigrants being moved through the deportation process. She talked about being at a clinic in the midst of a drug zone, crack houses nearby. She talked about a station on the border to help care for those abused on their attempted journey across the desert.

From Psalm 31: Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away. I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.

Kristin Gorton has made a couple of trips to Juarez, Mexico, just across the Texas border from El Paso. She talked about helping a family build house, providing a bit more shelter and security in a slum filled with cardboard houses.  And she described the Good Friday gathering inside the completed house, Americans and Mexicans gathered in a circle, listening to “Amazing Grace” on a harmonica. And then she played “Amazing Grace” on her wood flute.

Sol Kelley-Jones at this time last year was working with children in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank.  She spent her summer working on the Arizona-Mexico border. And she has created a powerful play about the people she met– The Birds That Are Your Hands – which is now playing at the Broom Street Theater. She told of being in the refugee camp on a day when there was an Israeli army incursion that killed some of those who were there, flames burning the streets. She described children from her classes in the street, breaking up stones to build a wall – maybe a few inches high. They told her they were trying to stop the tanks.  And one child led her deep into the camp – a journey filled with fear for her – only to show her a little kitten the child cradled in his hands.

From Psalm 31: For I hear the whispering of many— terror all around! — as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life. But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love.

And I told a story from a Friday afternoon at Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem at the end of a week that illustrated the divisions in the region. We had crossed through Israeli checkpoints, past the 24-foot high concrete wall. We had seen Palestinian Fatah militia close the shops in Bethlehem and march around Nativity Square. We had gone to the Church of the Nativity, where Christian factions struggle for control. And then we gathered with a Jewish college student from Sweden for a Shabbat service in the church parlor, praying in Hebrew, hearing a Psalm in Arabic, singing in Swedish, people from many nations as the Muslim call to prayer rang out from the nearby mosque.

This was the vision Jesus offered as he entered the tension-filled city that Sunday. It was a vision of people living together, praying together across boundaries, creating a world where all could be treated with dignity.

From Psalm 118: I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Save us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success! The Lord is God, and he has given us light. You are my God, and I will give thanks to you; you are my God, I will extol you. O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.

We closed this portion of our service by singing “For the Healing of the Nations.”