THE PASSION TO MOVE A CITY

April 8, 1990
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture
Isaiah 50:4~-9a

Matthew 21:1-17

",..al] the city was stirred, saying, 'Who is this?'"
-Matthew 21:10b (RSV)

The story is told of a preacher who began his pastoral prayer at the
Sunday service this way: "0 Lord, have you seen the New York Times this
morning?" [The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus, p. 3]

His ecclesiastical affiliation is not identified, but I'll bet he was
a Presbyterian... And I'll bet he prayed like that on Palm Sunday. Because
today is the day when religion and life radically intersect. Today is the
day Jesus came to the city. Came that is to say, into the focal center of
human life: where human beings are at their best and worst, where life is
lived thoroughly, where the naise is louder, the colors more brilliant, the
buildings higher, the art more beautiful, and the suffering more hurtful
than anywhere else. I'll bet he prayed it on Palm Sunday from a city
pulpit because the unavoidable conclusion of this day's events is that when

Jesus and the life of the world intersect - in the city - things begin to
happen.

Karl Barth was the one who said the modern Christian should always
have the open Bible in one hand and the open newspaper in the other. Barth
also said that preaching was the “meeting of the infinite contradictions of
life and the infinite mystery of the word of God."

After three years of teaching, preaching and healing, mainly in the
towns and open rural areas of Galilee, Jesus decided to go to Jerusalem.
He wanted, he said, to celebrate the Passover in the capital, the City of
David. Thousands of people came every year from all over Judea. The city
was crowded, swollen to several times its normal size. It was both solemn
and joyful. fhe pilgrims went to the Temple, of course; a once-in-a-
lifetime opportunity to make a sacrifice in the Temple of Solomon. And so
the entrepreneurs who set up booths to change Roman money into Jewish coins
and the merchants who sold the appropriate sacrificial animals, turned the
outer court of the Temple into the first century equivalent of Water Tower
Place on a warm Saturday afternoon in April.

The authorilies always got nerveus at Passover. After al], the
pilgrims were in Jerusalem to celebrate their liberation from foreign
oppression centuries before, Passover was not simply a religious holiday:
it was also a patriotic, nationalistic celebration, always conducive to
random acts of violence if not major insurrection. So the Romans beefed up
the city guard. The Governor moved from his palace at Caesarea Philippi to
be in residence in Jerusalem during Passover. And the Temple officials,
the High Priests and their entourage, who served as the religious heads of the
nation at Rome's discretion, were the most nervous of all. They had most
to lose if something should go wrong during the Passover.

So is it any wonder that his best friends advised Jesus not to go?
He already had a minor reputation as a trouble maker. Growing crowds of
people gathered throughout Galilee to hear him talk, to receive his
blessing, te be healed, to touch his robe. And recently, wherever he went,
there were people from the Jerusalem Temple, listening carefully, taking
notes, challenging, arguing, objecting.

Common sense dictated caution, prudence. His friends were worried,
And then, on the outskirts of the city, several miles away at Bethany,
where his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived, he began to act in a way
that was even more frightening, either in absolute courage or absolute
foolishness. And now, they stumbled along behind him, full of terror,
swept along on a tide he seemed deliberately to start.

It began when he asked for a donkey. He had walked the length and
breadth of the countryside for three years and now, for the last few miles,
he wanted to ride. In fact his instructions were quite specific. When the
crowds of pilgrims saw him, they recognized the scene immediately. The
prophet Zechariah described it centuries earlier:

“Behold, your king is coming to you,
humble and mounted on an ass, and on
a colt, the foal of an ass.'

And so, in a moment of patriotic passion, they ripped the branches
from the trees and the very cloaks from their backs and they shouted:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!.-
Blessed is he who comes in
the name of the Lord"...

which, if you are the Roman governor, sounds like the beginning of an
insurrection... As I read the story again this year, I thought about how
that crowd chanting Jewish patriotic slogans must have sounded to the
Romans exactly like the crowds holding candles in Wenceslas Square must
have sounded to the tottering Communist government in Prague.

And even if it is a slight exaggeration, surely there is great

passion in Matthew's aside. "All the city was stirred, saying ‘Who is
this?' It is above all else a very Passionate scene.
2

A/g2/an

Playwright, Neil Simon, in a commencement address, told his audience
{that the secret to writing good plays, producing good art of any kind, was
passion; passion that does not act from fear of failure, passion that takes
risks and knows nothing of caution and timidity. Had he been afraid of
taking a chance, Michelangelo, Simon quipped, would have painted the
Sistine floor and it would have been rubbed out long ago.

Jesus had such a passion for this day that what he did next almost
doesn't fit into our categories of reasonable, sensible behavior. He went
directly to the Temple and there in a white hot, righteous anger,
overturned the tables of the money changers and drove out the merchants.
And, as if he had the right to the place, sat down in the Temple and
received the blind and the lame and the little children: the homeless, the
powerless, the excluded, all those ordinarily not present in that place.

And if there was any doubt about how this drama will conclude, there
is no longer.

Why do you suppose he did it? Why take all these unnecessary
chances? Why not lose himself in the crowd, slip inte the city, do what he
wanted to do discreetly, slip back out and return to his unfinished work in
Galilee? In fact, why go at all? Plenty of people did not go. Plenty of
people never took the chance of going to the city.

There are two reasons, I believe. The first is his passion for God.
Jesus lived out of a sense that he was God's man; that his calling - his
vocation - was to confront the reality of the world with the reality of
God's Kingdom. There is a sense in which you cannot do that thoroughly
until you go to the city. Jesus was possessed by a passion for God's
Kingdom, for God's reign in the world which results in a new order of
things: a new being characterized by justice and compassion... a way of
being in which all people are honored as God's children and treated with
fairness and kindness. He must, therefore, live out that passion in that
place where God's reign seems most remote and distant and fragile, namely
the city which has always been secular.

It is precisely in the city where living without passion suggests
itself as a way to cope. It is precisely in the city where we learn to
restrain our capacity fer caring deeply in order to protect ourselves from
bleeding to death over the human suffering about which we, after all, can
do nothing. What can I do about the man who regularly sleeps in the
southeast doorway, who is mentally ill, chemically addicted, physically
ijl, whe does not wish to be indoors, who wishes only for money with which
to buy another battle of cheap wine and then to be left alone? There is
not much I can do. And so I cope with him by teaching myself not to care
too much. Or what, after all, can I de about the crowd of young men on the
corner of Division and Orleans who are already passing the bottle in the
brown paper bag among them this morning so that before we hear the
benediction the pain of unemployment and meaningless despair will be
blissfully dead? Not much, actually, so we plan not to drive that way and
if we do not see them then we will not bave to care.

&

AFR ian

Apathy is a coping mechanism for Living sanely in the city. And if
it weren't for the fact that apathy is also a symptom of illness, it might
aclually work. The truth is that we are alive only to the degree that
we Can experience passion, can care deeply enough to weep as Jesus wept
over the city; to get angry enough to throw caution to the wind as he did
when he overthrew the tables of those who were trivializing religion. The
truth is you are alive to the degree that you care deeply enough to alter your
own behavior by reaching out in healing love to the unlovely, the outcast,
the powerless. Interestingly, we are not the first to conclude that apathy
might preserve our lives. In ancient Greece when the city states were
dissolving and the organizing principles of life seemed to be vanishing, a
philosopher by the name of Epicurus suggested that smart people would
withdraw from public life and political activity, arguing that everything
essential for human happiness can be found in the private sphere. To live
well privately is the way to be happy, Epicurus taught. And so it would
seem we have concluded as a culture: to buy, to consume, to fuel this
economy with an ever increasing appetite for consumer goods: to tell
ourselves we are living well when we have bought everything in sight: to
anesthetize moral sensitivity with the rhetoric of selfishness.

And it might be possible for us - except for the decision the one we
know as Lord made on this day.

In fact, religion itself — with its attention directed to the other
world, to the realm of the spirit - might even be an Epicurean alternative
to becoming passionate about life in the city, except for the fact that the
one for whom the religion is named, made a strikingly “this-worldly" and
overtly political ‘gesture on the first day of the last week of his life.

One of the books receiving a lot of scholarly attention recently is
The Political Meaning of Christianity by Glenn Tinder. Professer Tinder.
also provided a fine essay for the Atlantic Monthly last December, “Can We
Be Good Without God?"

I found it a timely commentary on the Palm Sunday story. Professor
Tinder observes:
gone
: “We are so used to thinking of spirituality as withdrawal
q from the world and human affairs that it is hard to think
of it as political. Spirituality is personal and private,
we assume, while politics is public. But such a dichotomy
drastically diminishes spirituality, construing it as a
relationship to God without implications for one's
relationship to the surrounding world. The notion that we
can be related to God and not to the world - that we can
practice a spirituality that is not political - is in 7
conflict with the Christian understanding of God." \
Cn :
I am sure that one of the things Jesus' friends warned him about was
the danper of mixing religion and politics. And I am sure that his
decision to go to the capital city was a passionate commitment to the exact
opposite, namely ta politics as the place where religion is ultimately

4/8/90

expressed. Professor Tinder, an historian, argues that the valnes around
which our body politic is organized, the dignity of the individual and
equality, come from Judeo-Christian religion. Without its religious
foundation, says Tinder, "Government comes to the aid of only the wel)
organized and influential,... Politics is left to these who find it
profitable and useful... carried out for the sake of power and influence.’
[Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 89, p. 69-85]

With you, I agonize over the plight of Ryan White, who died last
night in an Indianapolis hospital, of the AIDS he contracted by biood
transfusions. But our feelings about Ryan White are only sentimentality,
which is both cheap and ineffective - until they build to the compassion
which is passion seeking a way to change the world. For, in fact, bigotry
and benign neglect have allowed this epidemic. And we have not yet
committed ourselves te its control and eradication. There are not enough
hospital beds for the people now dying of AIDS in our cities, nor a health
care system that can begin to cope with them nor the will to talk clearly
about how people get AIDS and how they can avoid getting AIDS. The
remedies are not in the arena of emotion sentiment. They are financial and
political. And so it goes. We cannot afford to build houses for the
homeless poor. We cannot afford the economic support system to allow
affordable housing to be constructed in the private sector. But we can
afford a Stealth Bomber no one seems to want, and an astonishing number of
‘experts say doesn't work, for one billion dollars per plane. So if you
want to do something more than crying your sentiment over the plight of the
residents of Cabrini-Green, your religion will become political - as Jesus'
did.

The first responsibility of the Christian Church in the city is to
remember the day Jesus came to Jerusalem. It is to be to the city what he
was - first of all, passionate in its devotion to God's Kingdom which means
justice and compassion in the public arena, equality and inclusiveness in
the marketplace. It is to be a presence in this most secular piace in the
world, a living reminder of a God who cares deeply about individuals. And
so its job is simply to see those from whom the city averts its eyes: to
open its arms to those the city is inclined to overlook: and to advocate
the cause of those who have no voice and no power, who are not and never
will be a voting block. Its job is to feed the hungry and shelter the
homeless. Its job is to do what Jesus did that wonderful day when, after
he had claimed space, he sat down and received the blind and lame and
children.

Jesus came to the city because of his passion for God's Kingdom as it
intersects human life. But there was another reason, I think. A very
human one. 1 have never believed that Jesus was simply playing out a
script God had written for him. Nor have I been able to believe that he
knew ahead of time how it would all end. I do not believe Jesus knew about
Easter morning on Palm Sunday. In fact, I believe he faced this last week
of his life not knowing what would happen but determined to be true to
himself, ta find courage to live out his convictions. That is, I believe
Jesus had a passion for his own life.

Jesus knew a secret, namely that the significance, the meaning, of an
individual human life is determined by the degree to which that life is
lived in service of some cause higher than its own protection and
preservation. Jesus knew that you receive your life when you pive it away:
that you discover your life when you find something you love enough to die
for. German theologian Juergan Moltmann wrote:

“Where Jesus is, there is life. There is abundant life,
vigorous life, loved life, eternal life. There is life
before death." [The Passion for Life, p. 19]

So he didn't know that in five short days the crowd that welcomed him
with glad “hosannas" would be replaced by another crowd screaming for his
crucifixion. But I believe he did know it was a possibility. He did not
know how much of his life was left. Nor do we. His passion for however
much was left - five years, or five days - led him to live every day as if
it were his last; every day as if it had eternal value.

This day calls us so to live... to remember the flad, triumphant
welcome, to hear the familiar story and sing the familiar hymns and then
get up off these pews and start to live our lives with something
approaching that intentionality... and in the process change the world.

Frederick Beuchner has written beautifully about the hopefulness of
this wonderful but terrible day:

“It's like watching a movie or play you've seen many times
before. You know how it ends but in spite of what you
know, you cannot help hoping that this time the heroine
will not die... the calvary will arrive on time... so
Christians hear the story of the Passion hoping this time
Judas will be loyal: Peter will be brave; Pilate will sink
to his knees before him, the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, the
high priest himself will welcome him... the cross won't
have to happen and all history will be redeemed without
agony... and you and I will go to church, or wherever we
go, not as strangers... and we won't need any choir to sing
for us or preachers to preach because just being together
under God will be song enough." {A Room Called Remember,
p. 73]

But the cross did happen. They arrested him and tried him and
crucified him. And before we come back here next week we must enter into
the terrible reality that he died on a Friday because of his passion for
the city on a Sunday. And if we are strong enough to face that we will
feel within us that the story is far from over. In fact, the story of Palm
Sunday actually concludes in your life... as you leave this celebration and
re-enter the city... whatever city is your home. The cross does happen but
the ending is different if what you have heard and experienced today
pierces your heart and you do something passionate like shouting “Hosanna.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord."

4/8/90 6

“Something like stepping out of the watching, apathetic crowd and
falling in behind him, as he stirs the eity...

~Something like giving your life to him, and in that giving
discovering that you are, by God's grace and passionate love, alive after

all.
Blessed be the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna.

Amen.

~]