Entering the Holy City – Then and Now: A Sermon By — JERALD M. STINSON

March 16, 2008 – The Rev. Jerry Stinson
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FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
A Liberal Church, Welcoming of All,
Passionately Committed to Social Justice
241 Cedar Avenue, Long Beach, California
© 2008 Jerald M. Stinson

This sermon shows the similarities between life in Jerusalem under Roman rule in Jesus’ day and life in Occupied Palestine today under Israeli rule, which is supported by the U.S.

Following Jesus means opening our eyes to the pain of the world, it means taking seriously loving our neighbors, and it means finding more challenge than comfort.

Reading: John 3:16‐18

[Any of you who may be considering running for public office, if you have been following Barack Obama’s efforts to distance himself from some of his UCC minister‘s sermons, then you might want to start thinking about how you will distance yourself from this sermon.]

Traditionally, Christian services on the Sunday before Easter either focus on the stories of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem or on the stories of his death. Thus, this Sunday is either called Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday.

But today, I want to look at both the entry and the crucifixion. Ultimately I want to ask: “Why did Jesus end up on that cross?”

The gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew have some historical truth about Jesus interwoven with stories reflecting the theology of the early churches. Those gospels indicate Jesus made only one journey from the Galilee southward to the holy city of Jerusalem.

Jesus’ brief ministry focused upon the peasant population of the Galilee. There his teaching, especially his unique stories, focused on the Βασίλεια του Θεού, the Empire of God. In Jesus’ day, to speak of the Βασίλεια meant the Empire of Rome. Rome – ruling with an iron fist over a cluster of colonies like ancient Israel. Rome – choking the life out of landless peasants like those who gathered around Jesus. Rome – taxing its subject people into incredible suffering. Rome – not flinching at massive acts of brutality, not blinking at killing any who resisted Roman rule.

Jesus’ teaching lifted up a different kind of empire, God’s Empire, which his listeners would have contrasted with Rome’s Empire. Jesus’ stories (the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Child, the Lost Lamb, the Great Banquet) and his preaching (the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount) helped people see the difference between how those serving God would live and how those serving Rome would live.

For Jesus, the Empire of Rome was about violence, while the Empire of God was about peace.

In Rome’s empire, people were treated like objects to be used to increase the power and affluence of a few – in God’s empire, everyone was seen as a child of God, precious and sacred, held in unconditional love.

Rome’s empire divided people into classes and castes; God’s empire was one of radical equality.

Rome’s empire excluded people; God’s empire was about hospitality and extravagant welcome.

Rome’s empire was built on greed; God’s empire on sharing.

Rome’s empire affirmed vengeance and punishment; God’s empire was about forgiveness and mercy.

Rome’s empire held people in terror, especially peasants; God’s empire was about hope for all.

So Jesus went from town to town in the Galilee sharing that radical message. Through the charismatic nature of his personality, through the power of his rhetoric, through the genuine love radiating from the depth of his soul – he garnered a following of peasants.

Now he could do that in the Galilee – but Jerusalem? Jerusalem, the holy city, was the center of Roman power in ancient Israel. It was where the colonial governor ruled. It was where the frightening Roman legions were headquartered. And Rome’s imperial policies even infiltrated the religious institutions of Jerusalem. The Chief Priest at the Temple was appointed by Rome.

It took courage for Jesus to journey to Jerusalem, to enter the holy city, for he would be confronting the Roman Empire face to face. I can imagine his friends and followers urging him to stay away. But he wouldn’t. And he even chose to make his entrance some kind of demonstration drawing attention to his presence, to his message. In contrast to the stallions of war on which Roman centurions entered, Jesus rode into Jerusalem astride a small donkey. God’s empire was about peace, not war.

And Jesus did several things during those days in Jerusalem. Each day he went to the Temple to share his vision of God’s radical empire.

And one day he engaged in a carefully orchestrated act of resistance and civil disobedience. In the Temple’s outer court, he drove away the money changers who collected the hated temple tax and exploited those who had come from afar. And he drove out the dove sellers who exploited the poorest Temple visitors who could only afford a small bird for a sacrifice. This was street theater, surely catching the attention of the religious and political authorities.

Luke also says that Jesus looked out over the holy city one day and wept at what it had become.

Now where did all this lead? It could only have led to a Roman cross. Jesus was executed by the Romans for defying their authority.

But why?

Most Christians would say that Jesus died as part of God’s plan. Jesus was the sacrifice God required to atone for the sin of Adam at the beginning of creation. That perspective is summed up in familiar verses from the Gospel of John. For me, and for the biblical scholars who sat around the table at the Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar, nothing in John is historically reliable; that gospel, created perhaps a century after Jesus’ death, is about the theology of a particular group of early Christians, it is not about actual events in Jesus’ life.

Listen to John 3:16‐18 in the sexist and arcane language of the 1611 King James translation, since that version has the words many of you learned as children:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

There it is – the traditional “why” of the crucifixion, the meaning of Jesus’ death.

God’s son, a supernatural being who masqueraded as human, died in accord with the will of his divine Father, in order to save and offer those who believe in his action some kind of eternal life. Those who don’t believe are condemned.

Well, I guess I’m one of the condemned. I don’t believe those words. They are theological words from John’s community, not from the lips of Jesus.

For me, Jesus was a unique peasant sage, fully human, yet radiating God’s love with his very essence. The human Jesus was a magnet for the wounded, for those cast aside by their society. This human Jesus was a window into God’s unconditional love and a mirror showing humans what we can do and be.

Jesus died on that cross, not because God wanted that, but because living out God’s unconditional love put him on a collision course with the power of Rome. I still wear a cross on Sundays not because of a magical view of the power of Jesus’ death, but as a reminder of the cost of love, justice and peace.

The biblical stories for Passion Sunday end with a bleak kind of hopelessness.

Out of fear, Jesus’ followers perhaps fled Jerusalem because their hope had been crushed. Evil had triumphed.

Now I returned this week from a very difficult 16‐day trip to Occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem. And I experienced the triumph of evil. I experienced a holy city not unlike the Jerusalem Jesus entered. I can no longer speak of Israel and Palestine in words devoid of judgment and anger.

For I saw and experienced the pain and agony created by a cruel Israeli government and funded by the new American Empire. Our tax money will provide Israel with $30 billion dollars over the next ten years to buy weapons of death. We are part of the evil I experienced.

Just as Jesus probably saw Roman centurions at every corner of the holy city, so I saw 18‐ and 19‐year‐old soldiers of the Israeli Occupation Force holding automatic weapons at every corner, not only in Jerusalem but in every city I visited on the West Bank. I was rarely out of sight of Israeli weapons of death.

In Jesus’ day, the religious practices of ancient Israel got mixed up with the political structures of Rome – that’s why he wept over the holy city. Today, the theology of Ultra‐Orthodox Judaism and the militarism of Israeli apartheid are blended together, so that Israeli military action is seen as God’s will and any criticism of Israel is labeled anti‐Semitism.

The Old City of Jerusalem is of sacred importance to three major western religions. The Wailing Wall is a sacred site for Jews, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is sacred for Christians, and the Dome of the Rock and Al‐Aqsa Mosques are sacred for Muslims. Jerusalem should be a shared city of peace in which followers of those religions all come together as brothers and sisters, a city in which Muslims, Christians and Jews link hands and respect that which is holy for one another.

But instead Jerusalem, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza are places of bloodshed and tyranny. Israel, pursuing what must be called ethnic cleansing, wants no Palestinian Muslims or Christians in Jerusalem, in Israel nor even in the West Bank.

In Bethlehem, I attended a Greek Orthodox service and then spent the afternoon with a family from that church. It has been that family’s tradition to worship in Jerusalem each Easter Sunday. But they can’t do that now because Israel has built a wall to keep them out.

The Israelis say the wall is for security, but only 11% of the wall is on the border – the other 89% cuts deep into the West Bank, stealing Palestinian land. 14% of the land in the West Bank lies between the border and the wall, land that is currently home for more than 274,000 Palestinians trapped in closed enclaves surrounded by the wall. Another 400,000 Palestinians live on one side of the wall while their farms, jobs and services are on the other side.

At many checkpoints at the wall, Palestinians need permits issued by the Israeli military. Very few permits are granted. Banished, that Bethlehem family can’t worship in Jerusalem this Easter.

What’s more, the mother, Lamees, is from a village near Jenin, about a two‐hour drive from Bethlehem. She saw her aging mother only once last year. Because of the diabolical checkpoints, it now takes 12‐14 hours to get to Jenin, and that presupposes all the checkpoints are open and she is not turned back at any of them.

There are over 500 military checkpoints – most separating one Palestinian village or city from another. There are checkpoints in East Jerusalem separating one Palestinian neighborhood from another. They have nothing to do with security; they are about humiliation.

As the wall and thousands of illegal Jewish settlers encircle Palestinian cities, the checkpoints keep Palestinian people from working, from going to their fields, from visiting family, and from entering the holy city.

Two weeks ago, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister said Israel was willing to send a “shoah,” a holocaust, upon the people of Gaza.  Those who suffered from the worst holocaust in history now talk of sending a holocaust of their own upon some of the 750,000 Palestinians uprooted from between 400‐500 Arab villages destroyed in order to create modern Israel sixty years ago.

Let me tell me you about two other Palestinian families that I came to know. One was a Muslim family in Beit Omar. Jamal is a barber married to Saddiye; they have four children – the youngest, Ahmad, sat contentedly on my lap for a couple of hours. Jamal was shot in the head at age 15 when he was throwing stones at military vehicles; he spent several years in an Israeli prison for that crime. Now his family is the most important thing in his life and he has repudiated all uses of violence.

Jamal’s family lives in a very small house. They live in the West Bank, but they need an Israeli permit to expand their house. Israel has denied 94% of Palestinian building permit requests over the last seven years, granting only 91 requests. Meanwhile Israel approved almost 20,000 new homes in illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank in those same seven years.

Jamal decided to expand his house anyway and was served with a demolition order. He added a small room in which he takes great pride. From its window we could see a nearby illegal settlement protected by Israeli soldiers. Those soldiers showed up earlier in the week and forced Jamal and his family, at gunpoint, out of the house. The soldiers then photographed the rooms, and measured and drew diagrams of doors and windows. Bulldozers, made by America’s Caterpillar Corporation, may arrive any day to destroy the entire house.

During Ramadan, Jamal and Saddiye would love to worship at the Al‐Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, to enter the holy city, but they cannot – no permits.

John Hickox, ordained here at First Church, and I spent several hours with Dr. Anati, a Muslim physician who has chosen to remain with his wife and six children in a refugee camp outside Jerusalem. There are over 10,000 people in the camp – Dr. Anati is the only doctor.

A checkpoint just outside the camp makes it difficult for Dr. Anati’s family members to go to Jerusalem. The soldiers come into the camp on military missions almost every night, often waking up the doctor’s family, thinking he may be hiding people. The soldiers knock down doors and usually arrest young men. The day before our visit, during school hours, the Israeli army shot tear gas canisters into an elementary school where Dr. Anati’s wife teaches. Nothing was happening at the school, no one was arrested, and they gave no reasons for gassing the small children.

Now I was in Palestine during a difficult time. Israel was invading Gaza because of some home‐made rockets shot into Israel. I deplore those rockets. But the Israelis killed 126 Palestinians and injured over 300 while two Israelis were killed, one a civilian, and seven injured. The American media spoke of Israel attacking Hamas offices, failing to mention that 40 of the 126 dead Palestinians were small children bombed in apartments.

I was in Jerusalem when a Palestinian murdered eight students at a Jewish Yeshiva that trains the most Ultra‐Orthodox settlers. That killing was horrific and needs to be condemned. But I understand the despair that inspires such actions.

The holy city – the holy land – then and now.

I am tempted to end this sermon in a positive way – but Passion Sunday doesn’t end with joy, it recalls the execution of that Galilean prophet. Next week is the Sunday for speaking of hope.

We who claim today to follow that executed Jesus need to take seriously what following him means. This isn’t a message you will hear in the mega‐churches. It is not a message that draws extensive financial support for a local church. It is a message that will offend some of our members, some of you.

But discipleship is not about following a phony happy corporate Jesus comfortable with life in the affluent American suburb. No, it is about trying to understand and follow the teachings of a radical peasant preacher who wouldn’t give in to the forces of greed and power. “Come, follow me,” he said to his disciples. “Come, follow me” is his message to us.

It is not easy to follow him. Following him means opening our eyes to the pain of the world; it means taking seriously loving our neighbors – whoever they are, wherever they are – our homeless neighbors, the poor children in our city and other cities, our Iraqi and Palestinian neighbors. Following Jesus means following him into the difficult and messy places of life. Following Jesus means finding more challenge than comfort. It is not about that which is painless, but rather it is about that which is right.

This holy week, may we each reflect on what it means to follow Jesus today in our broken and wounded world. What does it mean to follow him in living God’s way? And what does it mean for this community of faith to be a community of faithfulness, a community engaged in the struggle for a just peace, a community daring to be the people God created us to be?

FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
A Liberal Church, Welcoming of All,
Passionately Committed to Social Justice
241 Cedar Avenue, Long Beach, California
© 2008 Jerald M. Stinson