Palm Sunday -- Crucify Him

                                                               Palm Sunday 2015

                                       Isaiah50:4-9; Psalm 31; Phil 2:5-11; Mark 14-15

Father Adam Trambley

March 29, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

Often we come to church and the liturgy is focused on giving a sense of peace.  We feel better as we experience the music and the readings and the Eucharist.  On Palm Sunday, however, the liturgy has many profound elements, but some of them can make us decidedly uncomfortable.  One of those very uncomfortable moments in the liturgy comes as we read the passion narrative and come to the part where we all have to say “Crucify him,” and we have to say it more than once.

I don’t know anybody who likes having to read that line.  I know many people, including myself, who at various times have not said those words, or said them softly, or maybe changed the line and whispered “Let him go” instead.  Yet coming to church on Palm Sunday or Good Friday and reciting these words is important.  Shouting “Crucify Him” in liturgy forces us to acknowledge in a very visceral way our own participation in the death of Jesus.

We all have a hand in the crucifixion, because when Jesus comes right up close to us as Son of God, we have only two choices: to worship, follow and obey him, or to kill him and set ourselves up in his place as gods of our lives.  The Palm Sunday journey is the journey to realize that we have only those two alternatives, and to be forced to choose one or the other.

Everything seems OK when we start out, just like it did for the inhabitants of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  Jesus was coming into to town, but he wasn’t here yet.  The Messiah was entering the Holy City on a donkey, but he wasn’t cleansing the temple or causing any trouble.  The Son of God was coming to set things right, but everyone could still believe that he was going to set things right the way they thought he should. 

We can think that way, as well, as long as we are looking at God from a distance and not being confronted by the demands of the King we are so busy waving palm branches for.  We can believe that he will reward us when we are good, and look away when we are bad.  We can expect him to bless us when we are generous and be understanding when we aren’t.  We can look for warmth and comfort and to be heard when we take the time to pray and still given everything we need when we don’t.  We can anticipate coming out to celebrate God’s powerful victories on our behalf when convenient for us, sure that when we have other priorities, God will still be undertaking whatever significant work needs to be done.  We can continue to pretend as we wave our palms that the world can be redeemed, sins forgiven, and souls saved with no significant cost or sacrifice, at least not to ourselves.  Such is the joy of being in the Palm Sunday crowds, excited that God’s anointed is coming.

But our liturgy continues from Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the night in the garden where he was betrayed to the next day when the crowds, stirred up by the religious leaders, shouted, “Crucify him.”  And we shout along with him. 

We shout with words today because so often we shout it with our lives.  Like the crowds who welcomed Jesus into the city, we realize, sometimes too late, what we have done by welcoming Jesus into our hearts and lives.  We have allowed him to make demands on us that we don’t always want to have made.  Love your enemies.  Pray for those who persecute you.  Turn the other cheek.  Don’t look with lust in your heart.  Sell all you have and give to the poor.  Go baptize all nations and teach them all that Jesus commanded.  Husbands and wives be subject to one another, and children to their parents.  Pray, fast and give alms.  Do not neglect to meet together and encourage one another.  Sing hymns, psalms and spiritual songs.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.  Did anybody really think they were signing onto all this when they decided to pick up their palm branches?  The Jerusalem crowds certainly didn’t – that’s why they can be led astray.

Now I know somebody here is thinking, “Isn’t there something between obedience and crucifixion? How about I just take the cross of the wall and stick it in a drawer and then go sin for a while? Doesn’t ‘Send Jesus out for a walk’ sound better than ‘crucify him’?”  Sort of like the old days when certain priests would smoke, but only after they took off their collar. 

Fortunately for us, Jesus doesn’t stay locked in a drawer or out for a walk.  Once we have invited the Son of God into our life, he holds us and loves us and does everything in his power, including having died for us, to bring us to the fullness of eternal life.  Since the eternal life of Jesus has no place for sin or addictions or resentments or idolatries or any of the other fear and hatred based activities we too often engage in, we find ourselves unable both to let Jesus hang around and to ignore what he teaches us.  So we have to crucify him.  Just like Jesus remained a threat to the political and religious programs of the Jerusalem leaders as long as he hung around, Jesus remains a huge threat to any of our sins and failings that we would like to commit.  We might wish that there were a less drastic way.  We might really wish that Jesus would just get with the program and do what we want before it’s too late.  And we almost certainly hope that we don’t have to be really aware of the consequences of what we too often do.  But as we read the passion today, we are forced to face the unpleasant facts that some parts of us continue to cry “Crucify him” instead of simply following him.

The good news, of course, is that this does bother us.  We don’t want to crucify Jesus.  We want to do what he commands, even when we fall short, even when we are afraid, even when we can’t manage to do so.  That good part of us that strives for the Kingdom of God is what we strengthen as we read the passion and it is where we gain wisdom and insight in our own discomfort as we read it.  And that good part of us cooperates with Jesus as he overcomes the power of sin and death in our lives.

Because – spoiler alert – Jesus doesn’t stay crucified. To get the rest of the story, you’ll need to come back next week, but Jesus doesn’t stay dead when the Jerusalem crowds shout crucify him and the Romans soldiers carry out that command.  Our own sinful lives aren’t effective at keeping Jesus dead either, and the Lord of life is continually calling us to follow him.  But on occasion it is helpful for us to stop and confront our own failure to recognize Jesus as the Lord of our life.  The Palm Sunday passion reading is one of those times. Today, in church, with our lips, we shout “Crucify him,” in the hopes that tomorrow, outside of church, with our lives, we won’t. 

Lent 5 -- Melchizedek

                                                                   Lent 5B 2015

                               Jeremiah31:31-34; Ps 119; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

Father Adam Trambley

March 22, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek. Now Melchizedek is one of the more interesting Bible characters.  He has one short cameo in Genesis and is mentioned Psalm 110.  Then seemingly out of nowhere he shows up in the letter to the Hebrews.  So here’s his story.

Abram, before his name gets changed to Abraham, is hanging out by the Oaks of Mamre.  His nephew Lot was living in Sodom, before it was destroyed.  Four local kings decided to get together and attack five other kings, including the king of Sodom.  Sodom and its allies lost, and the attackers carried away Lot and all his people and all his stuff.  Someone who escaped the attack finds Abram.  So Abram takes all his people, defeats the four kings, rescues Lot and his family, and gets back all the stuff that had belonged to the other five kings.  Then Melchizedek shows up. 

This mosaic is below the tabernacle in the Mary of theAngels chapel at the St. Rose Convent on the campus of Viterbo University inLaCrosse, WI.

Melchizedek is King of Salem.  He didn’t participate in the fight, but is called a priest of God Most High.  He wasn’t Jewish.  Nobody knew his people.  All that we know is that his name means, literally, “King of righteousness,” and he is king of Salem, which means, literally, “King of peace.”  Righteousness and peace are good things to be king of, and we can already see how this might point ahead to Jesus.  Melchizedek brings out bread and wine, which you might remember Jesus used, as well.  Then he blesses Abram, and Abram gave him one-tenth of everything.     

The letter to the Hebrews notes that in this way Melchizedek is more important that Abram, because he blessed Abram, not the other way around, and Abram gave tithes to Melchizedek, recognizing him as a holy man of God Most High.  I’d make a couple additional notes on Abram’s tithing.  First, Abram tithed not only his money, but he also tithed the stuff of the five kings that he had reclaimed.  Only after he had tithed on it did he returned every remaining cent, or whatever the equivalent was in those days, to the five kings and kept nothing for himself. But first he tithed it.  Second, he tithed the first fruits of what he had received back to God through the instrument of God Most High who appeared before him.  Melchizedek served God most high, and he happened to have shown up with a blessing, and Abram tithed to him.  He gave his offering to God through  some foreigner who was king of a different country.  Abram wasn’t going to benefit directly from any later spiritual services from Melchizedek, or get to vote for Melchizedek’s vestry members, or have a say on what colors would get woven into the oriental rug in Melchizedek’s tent.  He just gave one-tenth of everything back to God because God had given it to him and that is what God asks us to do.  Just like for us today, how and where we give is much less important than the fact that we do give.

And that is the story of Melchizedek.  Or at least it would be the story, except that Psalm 110 says that “You are priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek” shortly after it says, “The LORD said to my Lord, ‘sit at my right hand’” and “Princely state has been yours from the day of your birth; in the beauty of holiness have I begotten you.”  If you think it sounds like the Psalmist is talking about Jesus, we read the same idea in Hebrews.  The question then becomes what it might mean to be a priest according to the order of Melchizedek, and what implications that holds for us.

Hebrews talks about Jesus being a high priest after the order of Melchizedek as one who made one sacrifice for all time to bring us back to God.  According to the Old Testament law, the priest mediates the covenant between God and God’s people. He takes the people’s prayers to God and lets the people know God’s commandments.  The priests also made sacrifices of animals as atonement for the sins of the people.  Jesus is the great high priest that makes atonement for all people by his one sacrifice of himself once offered.  Unlike earthly priests under the old covenant, who had to keep offering sacrifices again and again, Jesus offered the perfect sacrifice, himself, and no other sacrifices are ever needed to atone for sins.  Through Jesus passion, death and resurrection, atonement is made for the sins of the whole world, and, as we hear in our reading from Hebrews this morning, Jesus is “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”

For the argument being made in the book of Hebrews, being a priest like Melchizedek is important because Melchizedek was a priest, but wasn’t a descendent of Aaron, the first Jewish High Priest, and he wasn’t under the law at all, having lived long before Moses was even born.  Yet if Melchizedek was a high priest recognized by Abram, than we can imagine other high priests not descended from Aaron or keeping all the sacrifices laid out by the Law of Moses.  Jesus can be a priest according to the order of Melchizedek, instead of a priest according to the order of Aaron.  But Jesus is like Melchizedek in another way, and this other similarity appears in our gospel today and is relevant to us.  Like Melchizedek, Jesus served as a priest of God to people who were not his own.   Just like Melchizedek allows the foreigner Abram to enter a relationship with God, Jesus allows those who are of a different people to enter a relationship with God through his High Priestly ministry. 

On the one hand, Jesus comes down from heaven.  He is the eternal Word through whom all things were made.  That Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, taking the form of a slave like us, means that Jesus work is with creatures a lot more different from him than Abram was from Melchizedek.  But on the other hand, Jesus is also very clearly acting as high priest to people who were not the Jewish people that he came from on his mother’s side.  The beginning of John’s Gospel says that he came to his own, but his own did not know him.  Then in today’s Gospel passage we have a reading at a key turning point in Jesus’ ministry.

Our reading is from chapter twelve of John’s gospel.  In chapter eleven, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.  This caused many people to believe in him, and worried the authorities.  The Jewish officials are concerned that Jesus is becoming too famous and will stir up enough trouble that Rome will take away their power.  So they decide to kill Jesus, and also to kill Lazarus, which seems highly unfair since he just came back from the dead.  Then in today’s reading, something else happens that cements Jesus’ understanding that it is now time for him to be lifted up to his glorious death and resurrection.  The trigger is not what the chief priests and scribes think.  Instead, some Greeks come to Philip, a disciple of Jesus with a Greek name, and ask to see Jesus.  Philip gets Andrew and together they go to Jesus.  Jesus response is, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.”  Not only Jews, but also non-Jews – the Greeks, the sheep Jesus has in other folds – have heard his voice and have come to him.  So now the hour has come for Jesus to bless the people he has humbled and emptied himself to become one of, the people that include both his own Jewish people and the people of every race, tribe, nation, and tongue.  Like Melchizedek, Jesus is going outside of his own to reconcile other people to God, and Jesus is doing it at great cost to himself.  Jesus ministry is that of the grain of wheat falling to the ground to give life, and it happens after the Greeks come looking for him.

From the Chapel of St. Paul in Damascus

We are all called to follow Jesus’ example and be priests according to the order of Melchizedek.  The Great Commission instructs us to baptize all nations, teaching them what Jesus commands.  We are called to use our own particular gifts to help bring people closer to God in whatever ways we can.  Like Jesus and Melchizedek, many of those people we are called to help will not be our own people.  Now who those other people will be is probably different for each of us.  Some folks here might be called to minister to people outside of our networks of family and friends.  Other folk might be called to help people outside of the church know about God – in fact if you are going to evangelize people, we almost always have to do that work outside of Sunday morning church.  That work might entail working with Randy to build relationships with guests at the Saturday lunches, or going to Cana’s Corner on Friday nights, or volunteering with West Hill Ministries or in other non-churchy places where we meet new people and begin to love them the way Jesus loved them.  Still others here might actually be called to be part of a mission trip to another city or another nation.  If we are going to spread the gospel everywhere, at least somebody here is certainly called to reach people with different languages and cultures in this country and in other countries. 

When we follow the examples of Melchizedek and Jesus to go out to others in ministry, we will also end up following Jesus’ example to be a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies so that it bears much fruit.  In some extreme cases, this dying is literal, and many people are being persecuted and killed throughout the world for sharing the good news of Jesus in oppressive lands.  But more often this dying is a dying to self as we have to give up a whole lot of what we want if we are going to be able to love people in another situation.  Just spending time with new people can make many of our introverts uncomfortable, and people can seem scared to death of talking with strangers.  To help others find God, we usually have to let go of things that might be important to us, or comfortable to us, or the way we like things, so that we can meet people where they are, in their comfort zones, and meet their needs instead of our own.  Those sacrifices are part of planting of the seeds of our own lives that have the potential to bear fruit thirty, sixty and a hundred-fold for the Kingdom of God.

What God Most High spoke to Jesus, he also says to each of us.  “You are my beloved child” and “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”  Do not hesitate to go to other people to help them find God, and do not be afraid to fall to the ground and die, just like Jesus, in order to bear much fruit.        

Lent 3 -- Transforming Our Communities

                                                                   Lent 3B 2015

                              Exodus 20:1-17; Ps19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Father Adam Trambley

March 8, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

“Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”  In the Gospel today, Jesus comes into the Temple and sees people selling animals for sacrifices and profiting by changing the people’s Roman coins for ones without images on them.  Jesus saw people using people to get things.  As Jesus’ disciples, we are supposed to use things to get people. 

Our prayer focus this week is for God’s transformation of our communities.  Our Seek God for the City prayer booklets (which you can find near the entrances if you don’t already have one) have us praying for devastated cities to be restored, for injustice to be turned to generosity, for the lifting up of the poor in our communities, for a turning aside from violence, and for God’s truth and justice and righteousness to fill our communities.  Among other ways, we can pray for the transformation of our communities using these Lenten booklets or by joining together on Thursday at 5:15 at the Sharon High School Parking lot.  Last week a half dozen people prayed at the Sharon Municipal Building in what felt like a powerful time of prayer.  

Where we prayed last week (only with less green and more snow)

To look at some ways that God is transforming people and communities, I want to unpack what it means to use things to get people and then share two stories about ways that God is using his Church as an agent of transformation.

If we think about a basic marketplace, the focus is using people to get things.  Sellers are using the people coming in to make money, while buyers are using sellers to acquire goods and services.  Sellers raise prices as high as they can and buyers try to cut deals.  Throughout much of history, and in many places today, even people are bought and sold as commodities.  When Jesus showed up in Jerusalem, the people in the Temple were using the faithful coming to worship as a way to make as much money as they could.  Jesus didn’t want them using his people to get things, so he drove out the animals and poured the coins on the floor.  The one exception was the people selling doves, whom he told to take the animals outside.  Jesus was mad, but still practical enough not to open the cages of dozens of pigeons inside the temple.

Instead of using people to get things, we are called to use things to get people and bring those people into a relationship with Jesus Christ and his church.  All that we have are tools to do the work of the gospel.  We have a beautiful worship space not because we need it or are entitled to it, but because when we use it correctly, people can come in and experience a deeper relationship with God.  We give a “thank you” to Laura Peretic and Bob Verholek and Katherine Huff who have been painting and rehabbing the carillon room so that as people come into the entryway to the sanctuary, they are already entering an environment that says something about God, our care for his worship, and our care for those coming to worship.  The use of all of facilities for ECS, for the lunches, for AA, and for a variety of other community meetings, and the care we take in keeping them up, comes out of the same call.  We are going to use what we have to bring people in, not bring people in to raise money to support what we have.  We do need resources for ministry, but we trust God to provide those resources as we invite people to partner with us in his work and bring them into our community.  Trust me, the world can tell the difference between a church that shows up to make a buck like a carnival vendor and a church that shows up because they love people and want to reach out to them.  The ways in which people in our community want to partner with us tells us that they see us as bringing what we have to love them instead of using them to get more things.  The fact that people keep visiting and finding God here is also a testament to our primary desire to love the people we encounter and help them as best we can to meet their needs and to find God.     

Let me share a couple of other examples of a church using what it has to reach people.  The firsthappened in Bradford, PA.  On February 23, a 24-inch water main broke, emptying the five million gallons of water in the city’s two reserve tanks onto the Bradford campus of the University of Pittsburgh.  The city had no water for about two days.  Over 18,000 people were affected.  Supplies of bottled water ran out, and the only way to flush toilets was with melted snow. 

On Thursdays, the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Bradford serves a free soup lunch.  Without water, however, it is hard to make soup.  So Deacon Gail Winslow made one of his famous soups in Warren and drove it over thirty miles to Bradford, while others brought in bread, fruit and cookies.  Volunteers drove in from other communities with bottled water for coffee and tea, and were even able to give bottles to the guests to take home.  Instead of serving 40 people that day, they served 60, including both those struggling economically and the Kiwanis club that probably couldn’t meet anywhere else.  A great story, even if it ended there.

But the story continues.  Given the total lack of water, and the conservation restrictions and need to boil water to use it for days even after initial service was restored, almost everything in Bradford was closed for about a week.  Schools, businesses, factories, day cares, and restaurants – even McDonalds – were forced to shut their doors.  While such a shutdown was inconvenient for many, for hourly-wage workers it meant that they lost about a quarter of their monthly income.  Again, the Episcopal Church decided to step in and help.  Mother Stacey, the rector of Church of the Ascension, talked with Episcopal Relief and Development.  We know ERD, and have donated to them as church at various times in the past.  ERD is giving Church of the Ascension a grant for between $8-10,000 as income replacement for hourly-wage workers in the community who haven’t been able to work during this crisis.  The Episcopal Church is making sure that people who couldn’t shower for a week are still able to pay their rent, make their car payments, feed their children and afford their medication.  Use things to win people. 

The second example is from Operation Capital City.  Operation Capital City is a ministry begun by Pastor Carol Missik that initially went to all thirty-two capitals of the states in Mexico and brought local pastors together to pray.  After that initial work was completed, OCC has hosted conferences in Mexico and taken pastors to pray in Central and South America.  I have been on two mission trips with OCC, and they have used Allen Hall for their annual meeting a couple times.  This summer, OCC is sponsoring a special international bus trip for pastors from the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. 

Part of what makes this particular trip so exciting is the way it is equipping the saints for ministry.  In Mexico, there is a saying, “somos pobres,” which means “we are poor.”  This attitude of poverty was thrust upon the native people as nominally-Christian Spanish conquistadors came and stripped the country of most of its wealth.  This mindset continues as Mexico relates to its wealthy northern neighbor, and it has been reinforced by the attitudes of many North American missionaries over the years that have been happy to bring their money and their gifts in return for a church mission that is entirely dependent on the resources and leadership of their gringo mother church.  Somos pobres means that even the churches believed that they needed to use people from other churches to get the things they needed, and that they didn’t have enough themselves to dedicate to mission and ministry.  Operation Capital City has come and said, “No mas ‘somos pobres’” – “no more, ‘we are poor’.”  Instead Mexico can be a driver of mission to the rest of the world, especially to Central and South America, and to places like the Middle East that are more accessible to Mexicans than to those from the United States.

OCC is sponsoring a bus trip for pastors in a region of Mexico where most folks are descended from the Mayans.  You may remember the Mayans – somebody misread their calendar a few years back and decided the world would end in 2012.  From about 250-900 AD the Mayans were one of the world’s most advanced civilizations, and maintained a high degree of learning and wealth until the arrival of the Spanish.  Mayan religious practices were not as enlightened as their astronomy, however.  In ancient times, human sacrifice was practiced.  Even today, pagan superstitions are too often part of the area’s culture and dark magic is practiced in some of the mountains of Mayan areas. 

From June 23 to July 4 this summer, a couple busloads of Christian pastors descended from the Mayans are going to go pray to bring Christ’s light into many traditional Mayan areas.  Beginning in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, they will drive through Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras.  A couple times a day, they will stop in some community and over a hundred pastors will jump off the buses and go throughout the area praying for everyone and everything they can find.  Then they’ll get back on the bus and go to the next town.  They will experience themselves not as poor, but as people with important gifts to offer those in their communities and even in other countries.  They will see God show up and perform miracles, because God always shows up and does miracles when that many people from a variety of churches and denominations dedicate two weeks of their time to pray for God to do amazing things for other people.  They will be praying for God to transform their communities, and I have no doubt that God will be doing some serious transforming. 

The Mexican Mayan pastors will be learning what the people of Ascension Episcopal Church in Bradford have learned and what we at St. John’s have come to know.  We are not poor.  We don’t need to use people to get things.  Instead, we can use our abundant blessings to let people feel the extravagant love of God and to enter a relationship with his Son, Jesus.