A Sermon from Falmouth Congregational Church…

A Sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship service of the Falmouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Falmouth, Maine on Palm/Passion Sunday, March 28, 2010. The scripture readings were Luke 19:29-40; 23:1-25, 32-46.

“Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” (Luke 23:39)

The passion narrative bequeaths to us three timeless questions: Shall I remember Jesus’ cross? Shall I also recognize its reflection in the burdens of my own life? Shall his passion be relegated only to the familiar words of the church’s worship or shall I also hear him speak and reach out to him in the sufferings and aches and needs of my brothers and sisters?

“At the Heart of the Gospel”

A really powerful drama puts you in touch, at times painfully so, with the depths of human life, sometimes in spite of yourself. On Palm/Passion Sunday, year after year, we are told again the essential Christian narrative, the story by which we are formed, the story of the Passion (from the Latin, meaning “Suffering”) of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

This is the story that the faithful have told to one another down through the centuries. This is the story that is at the heart of the gospel. This is the story, and everything else comes from it. This is the essence of the good news; and you cannot fast-forward to the end, for there is no end without this story. The telling of Christ’s last days and hours prepares us for the good news of Easter.

We are called to remember the passion of Jesus. We are called beyond pious sentiments and sympathetic reflections concerning the pain he must have suffered and the manner in which he died. To enter into the mystery of his suffering is to enter into the suffering of humankind. He died once for all of us.

We have a religion that reckons with living in a dangerous world and does not turn a jaded or a blind eye to the vicious and violent streak in human nature. Faith has to mean something more than “looking on the bright side” or “hoping for the best.” If there is a divine Lord in whom I put my trust it must be a Lord who knows what it is to be at the mercy of human violence and who can assure me that, in spite of the terrible things that human hate can do, there is a love that is stronger still. The one who speaks to me about heaven must know what it is to go through hell. And this is whom and what I find at the heart of the Gospel.

The Gospels are not simple biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. They were written as handbooks or survival manuals for the faithful as they faced the onslaughts of the world, the flesh, the devil, the Roman Empire, and sought to remain loyal to their Lord. Although our world is often politely indifferent rather than actively hostile towards us, we need exactly the same kind of encounter with the real Jesus, who wins through the events of Holy Week to a Resurrection victory on Easter.

It is never easy even for seasoned Christians to understand, especially in a time of relative comfort and security. Although it may be that we are more able, more ready, to listen now as our personal comforts and security wane.

It is of Jesus that we are told this terrifying tale of the six days in Jerusalem when, quite literally, he went through hell for us. Since the 6th century, the Apostles’ Creed has stated, “He descended into hell.” I never hear or read that sentence without thinking of what happened to Jesus from the moment of the ironic triumph of Palm Sunday to the his last words spoken from the cross on Good Friday.

For me, “Hell” is more a descriptive term or condition of human living than a place. It is one short word that covers the dark side of human experience – the pains of body, mind and spirit, the sense of meaninglessness, isolation, and abandonment, the fear of the irrational and the demonic, and the abyss of nothingness where God seems to be absent. For me the compelling power of the Christ lies in the fact that he has been there. He descended through every circle of that hell, and there is no blow he did not take and feel, no horror he did not stare upon, and no death he did not die. And he went through it all here on this planet, where we now live, and not in some mythical time and place.

There are moments when all of us go through the hell of loneliness. “Nobody understands,” we say. I am not talking about the person who mopes through life complaining all of the time, but of the inevitable moment when we have to accept that we are alone with our inner self that no one else can penetrate. Do we realize what it means to say that the God we worship has been there and therefore is with us now as the One who truly understands?

This is the “hell” that every sensitive man or woman passes through when the world we know and love turns ugly, when we feel the ordinary decencies of life threatened by forces we did not know were there, when we are aware of the dark forces that surface through the veneer of our civilization of law and order. The point is that the more sensitive people are to the Word of God and the claims of Christ, the more aware they are of the powers of evil, and the more they suffer themselves.

No two of us respond in exactly the same way to the story of the Passion. There is no one formula by which we acknowledge this suffering Savior. But we know our need, and we glimpse a Savior who can meet that need and be with us in our suffering.

The church’s call is a call to holiness, to an ability to take the ambiguity, even the confusion and conflict of emotion, and endure, and see in the whole that the only reconciliation possible between them is the reconciling love of God in Jesus Christ. That is the only reality: that God’s love is the one thing that makes sense out of suffering, conflict and tragedy. God’s love does not do away with conflict, or suffering, or tragedy; the cross teaches us that. God’s love does not do away with any of it. God’s love is the thing that makes it possible to bear it, to see it, to share in it, to understand it, and to pass through and beyond it. That is the heart of the Gospel that is the essence of the Passion.

Let us remember the story of the Passion. With quiet courage and a growing conviction in the belief that life under oppression could be transformed, Jesus of Nazareth rode into town. He had a transformational impact that is helping us still to keep at the ways of peace and justice. Most of the work still pending is not necessarily heroic, but begins with someone taking notice of the way things are and accepting the call to make a personal difference, in one’s own time and place, with a vision of the way it could be. We begin by doing what Archbishop Desmond Tutu once described as “our little bit of good in the world.”

Jesus did not die in vain. He did not die to spare us the indignities of the wounded creation. He died that we might see those wounds as our own. He died that we might live, and live fully, fairly and hopefully not in some far away time and place or in some fantastic, futuristic setting, but in the often times ambiguous here and now.

Prayer…

God of faithfulness and mercy, stay near to us this Holy Week and fill our hearts with the assurance that we are yours forever. We give thanks for the great gift of love that is our through Jesus, your Christ. Amen.

Hans Kung, the noted Swiss Catholic scholar, says, “Hell in any case is not to be understood mythologically as a place in the upper or underworld, but theologically as an exclusion from the fellowship of the living God…as the absolutely final possibility of distance from God….(We) can shut (ourselves) out of God’s fellowship.”