Creekside Church Sermon of April 8, 2001 "Have a Disturbing Day! " Luke 22-23	Rev. David Bibbee
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Some very significant events took place in 1964. Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater to become the nation's 36th president. The World's Fair opened in New York City. A young man from Louisville, Kentucky named Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston to become the new heavyweight-boxing champion of the world. Reverend Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was quite a year. There were trouble spots, but not enough to cause alarm. Yet in the span of four years, things changed dramatically.

A dejected President Lyndon Baines Johnson said he would not seek a second term due to criticism of his policies in Vietnam. New York City hung on the precipice of bankruptcy. Mohamed Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to serve when drafted into military service. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a Memphis hotel balcony and for days afterward, cities across the country burned.

People are fickle. One day you're King of the Hill. The next they run you out of town on a rail. The line which separates "Bravo!" from, "Booooo!" is a thin one. The line is thin that separates acclaim from disdain. It doesn't take long for sentiments to shift.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the whirlwind of Jesus' final days. Shifts of sentiment, which can take months or even years to develop, happened to Jesus in five days. Only five days to get from "Hosanna in the highest!" to "Crucify him!" Just five days for cheerleaders to become executioners. On Palm Sunday we hasten the pace even more by compressing those two moods into a single service. In some churches this is Palm Sunday. Others call it Passion Sunday. This is why the mood shifts from waving palms to psalms of praise to a sober, somber mood.

This is not the memory I have of Palm Sunday as a boy. Holy week was a happy week. On Palm Sunday we waved palms for all we were worth, imagining Jesus would appear at any moment riding a spindly-legged donkey down the center aisle. On Easter we would gather at church extra early to sing, eat a traditional Easter breakfast prepared by the guys consisting of eggs, bacon, and Bill Young's pancakes with blueberry syrup. Then we would go upstairs to worship and hear the story of Jesus raised from the dead, and the promise that we will as well. I don't recall much about the "passion portion" of the story. No Good Friday gore. No Saturday grief. Holy week began with a parade and ended with a promise. There was nothing in between to disturb us.

Now I realize that worship on Palm Sunday is like being caught in a crossfire. There is reason to rejoice, but there is reason as well for sorrow and the need to be honest with ourselves about ourselves, and turn our lives over to Christ's saving love.

A pastor friend of mine visited the Crystal Cathedral in Pasadena, California several years ago. He was not a fan of Robert Schuller. Nothing personal…he just objected to Reverend Schuller's constant emphasis upon thinking positive and emphasizing be-happy attitudes. He visited the Cathedral on the first Sunday of Lent. On the way into the incredible building he mused about the message he thought he would hear that Sunday. Probably a feel-good pep talk. But when he sat and started the bulletin he saw that the morning's sermon title was, "Lent." "Well, maybe I made a premature judgment. Maybe it will be an introspective message about our flawed state." What he didn't know at the time was that the word Lent was being used as an acronym. "Let's eliminate negative thinking!"

Is this what Jesus came to do…make life better by "thinking positively"? He did say, "These things I have spoken unto you that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full." How many times have you heard others, or maybe even heard yourself give reasons like this for coming to church… "I feel better afterward." "Things go smoother when I do." "My blood pressure drops 10 points." This may happen. There are times when we limp in to church as casualties of the previous week but in worship we are blessed and somehow manage to leap out. But is feeling good the test to judge if worship is worthwhile? Sometimes it is good to feel bad.

Someone has noted that somewhere along the way "The modern world exchanged wanting to be saved for only wanting to feel a bit better." Salvation, however, isn't a painless process. How many of you have ever been told by a doctor, "I can help you, but you're going to feel worse before you feel better."? When a friend cares enough to make you aware of something about you that is a concern, the truth hurts. While people hunt Easter eggs, shop for bonnets and chocolate bunnies, the church hands out lab reports and recommends surgery. We go under the scalpel of the word of God that Hebrews says, "Is living an active, sharper than any two edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow. It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (4:11.)

Last week I heard a bluegrass song with a mournful story written in minor key. It is sung from the vantage point of a young man whose father gave him explicit warnings never to go near Dolly Madison. She was an odd, quiet sort who was suspected of having killed her husband. He hadn't been seen in months. She claimed to have no idea of his whereabouts. No grave was ever found. "Watch out, son. She is a dangerous woman!"

As fate would have it the young man and Dolly met. He was injured in a fall and the only one who heard his pleas for help was Dolly. She risked her own life to pull him to safety. He lost consciousness just as a group of townspeople approached and found Dolly leaning over his body. When he came to he was in bed. His father knelt beside him. "Thank God they found you before she killed you! But not to worry… Dolly has just been hung." "But daddy… Dolly didn't hurt me. She saved my life!" "Dear God forgive us all for the terrible sin we have committed," the father cried. The whole town was mourning. Then a man returned who hadn't been seen for a long time. He said he just had an urge to get away for a while. It was Dolly's husband.

Ignorance had taken a life. It wasn't just for Dolly that they wept. It was for themselves and what they had done.

As Jesus took his last painful, heavy steps toward his crucifixion, Luke tells us that Jesus said to the weeping women, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me but for yourselves and your children." Ignorance and sin took another life. They didn't know what they were doing. In a P.D. James murder mystery a character says of himself, "All of us need to be in control of our lives, and so we shrink them until we're small and mean enough to feel in control."

Instead of salvation we decided we would rather feel better and in control. It is to people like this we extend Palm Sunday wishes, "Have a disturbing day!" We need more than palms today. We need passion. We should feel caught in the crossfire between "Hosanna!" and "Crucify!" It wasn't two different crowds that cried out to Jesus, one for and one against. It was the same people. The steadfast disciples who promised to be with Jesus through thick and thin were the same disciples who deserted and denied him. Event he thief crucified next to Jesus saw the opposites colliding. "If you are so good, what are you doing up here?"

Why do we care one moment and criticize the next? Why are we kind and cruel? Why are we heroes and cowards? Why love a person, then loath them? Why be sacrificial and then self-serving? How can we befriend people, then betray them? Why? Because we can! Imagine for a moment that instead of navels, people had doorknobs. What door hanger would you most likely see…one requesting "Housekeeping", or one saying "Do not disturb."? Would people rather be made clean inside, or left alone? The 22nd and 23rd chapters of Luke are like a maid who ignores the "do not disturb" sign, barges in without knocking and proceeds to upset you with this tragic tale.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it was broken. The city and its people were not what they were supposed to be. He saw the suffering, the violence, and depravity, and he wept. He took it all unto himself on the cross, not to spare us from these things, but that we might participate in his passion. He sacrificed himself to crack open the shell of our mean manageable lives and break our hearts if necessary. He gave his life so we would know the power of God's love and find ourselves not by sparing ourselves but by sacrificing them for God and others.

I read about a catholic priest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina who placed a number of crosses on the lawn in front of the church during Lent. On Good Friday he draped them all in black. He then got a call from someone at the Chamber of Commerce who said in a terse voice, "Father, we have received several calls from people complaining about the crosses in your church yard. You can have all the crosses you want inside the church, but too many people find the ones outside offensive. The retired people don't like them. We have a lot of tourists and they don't like them, either. We take pride in our city's appearance. It could be bad for business. You must understand, father, that people come here to enjoy themselves, not to get depressed."

I know a man with an addiction that controlled most of his life. He had come from a Christian home, but rejected faith as the foundation of his life. Rather than fixing his problem, he opted for feeling good. Fortunately for him he had Christian friends who loved him into becoming a Christian. Gone was his desire for drinking and drugs. He felt like a million bucks, right? Wrong!

His thinking cleared. He remembered what he had done and to whom. He thought about those he damaged in the wake of his addiction. He remembered the lies. He remembered the people he cheated; those from whom he had stolen. He remembered the ways he used and abused people…especially his own family. He was deeply disturbed.

He faithfully attended AA meetings, working through the 12 steps and came to step number 9, the part that says, "Make a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all." He did the hard work of expressing remorse. He drove many miles and made many phone calls. Some of the people he sought were dead.

Looking back at those first years, he describes them with a paraphrase of Jesus. "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you miserable." But he also knows, despite the difficulty of facing the ugly aspects of ourselves, that what initially disturbs us, is also that which sets us free.

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