cost | Michael Valliant

From Palms to Passion

Background: This past weekend I preached for Palm Sunday, at Christ Church Easton‘s Alive @ 5 Saturday service and at St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sudlersville (one of two churches in St. Luke’s Parish) on Sunday. The Palm/Passion Sunday readings include both Jesus’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem as well as his suffering and execution on the cross. This is the text of the sermon I gave over the weekend.

From Palms to Passion: Heartbreaking, Necessary, Life-Giving

One of the things I appreciate about the Episcopal liturgy for Palm Sunday is that we get the full story. We are not left cheering waving our palms, we also have to stare into the face of Jesus being crucified. The feeling we get, going from palms to passion in such a short time, might be whiplash. How can you go from “Hosanna” to “Crucify Him!” so quickly?

When we think back over our lectionary journey over the past few weeks: Jesus giving sight to a blind man, raising his friend Lazarus from the dead, this triumphant entrance into Jerusalem seems just right. This is a man who can perform miracles, an inspiring teacher, one who brings hope and healing to the poor and the sick. Surely, he has the power to change the direction of the people of Israel, to challenge the Roman Empire, there’s no way they have anyone equal to Jesus.

We can understand when the crowds get fired up: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Finally! We’ve got our guy—he’s here! You better look out now!

I wonder if anyone has had a period of riding high in your faith, in your life. Maybe it was soon after you found faith. You felt energized, you could feel and see God speaking to you in different ways. When you read the Bible, you always find a verse or a phrase to take with you into the day. And you think, yes, everyone needs to feel this, God is good, all the time.

Happily, we find those places and times at different points in our life. It’s not just a one-time thing. And when we are there, it’s easy to follow the crowds—the blind gaining their site, the poor and hungry being fed, Lazarus being raised. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

This Jesus guy is great!

Here he comes, his triumphant entry into Jerusalem…riding on… a donkey?

Then he goes into the Temple and flips tables and angers Temple leadership. Then he gets arrested.

Are we still with Jesus when he’s called into question? What happens when the road of our faith lives gets bumpy. When we struggle, when God seems quiet in our lives.

Do we stick with Jesus when there might be a cost we don’t like associated with following him?

For the crowds in Jerusalem, it becomes pretty clear this is not the guy: the Messiah wouldn’t be arrested and sentenced to be crucified. Why would the Messiah, the one God sends to bring victory to his people, have this happen to him? He is supposed to win.

This guy must be an imposter. So the crowds put down their palms and call for the cross, when the cross meant to put someone to death. Crucify him!

When we read the Bible from a Christian perspective, we always want to identify with Jesus and the disciples. We know we are on Jesus’s team now, so we shout “Hosanna!” and next week, “He is Risen!”

We look back on history and see things like slavery, the Holocaust; we can look back and say, those things are wrong, they should never have happened. And that is true. And at the same time, I think it helps us to realize that people go with the crowd for a lot of reasons, including personal safety, for self-preservation, to not have to pay the cost of standing up for something or someone who is challenging those in power.

That even though we are Jesus followers now, that is in part because WE KNOW that he conquered death, we know how the story turns out… Maybe as things unfolded around them, we can understand those in the crowd. Maybe I would have been one of them. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

As we walk through the passion and suffering of Jesus today and through Holy Week and Good Friday, take time to look at the different characters in the readings. Be mindful that we encounter these same kinds of characters in our lives every single day, and sometimes we are these characters—these human beings with fears, doubts, questions, and who all need grace and mercy the same way that we do.

And realize that Jesus’s walk to the cross, his suffering, his death, and resurrection were for all of us, to make everyone recipients of God’s grace and forgiveness. Even and especially those who shouted, “Crucify him!”

When we look around today, we can still see why Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross was necessary.

Writer Debie Thomas, in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” says:

“In the cross, we are forced to see what our refusal to love, our indifference to suffering, our craving for violence, our resistance to change, our hatred of difference, our addiction to judgment, and our fear of the Other must wreak. When the Son of Humanity is lifted up, we see with chilling clarity our need for a God who will take our most horrific instruments of death and transform them at great cost, for the purposes of resurrection.”

When we arrive at Easter Sunday next week, we celebrate Jesus’s victory. But for his kind of victory to happen, it had to come out of the darkness. How can we see and appreciate light without understanding what darkness is like?

How can we appreciate love without knowing what heartbreak feels like?

Palm Sunday is a day of heartbreak. It feels like a loss. The disciples scatter and it doesn’t occur to them that something that is impossible could happen. Jesus has taught them so many parables that when he tells them he will be killed and on the third day be raised, that’s got to be a metaphor, right?

The disciples feel defeated. And as we hear Jesus cry out from the cross, he too experienced what defeat feels like. Allow yourselves this week to feel that defeat, to think about Jesus’s suffering and the suffering that is real around the world and here in our community.

But we also get the blessing of knowing that this defeat is temporary; it is short lived. It is what pastor and author Frederick Buechner calls “The Magnificent Defeat.” It’s only a defeat of worldly things, including power and death, by heavenly things, by God’s love, which is eternal, which goes beyond death; by God’s light, which overcomes the darkness, by God’s truth, which not only follows but fulfills the law, and God’s mercy, which forgives even murder on a cross.

It’s the darkness of Palm Sunday and Good Friday, which give us the light of Christ. Jesus took an instrument of death, the cross, and turned it into a symbol of life and love overcoming death.

We read these readings, we have these liturgies, we gather to tell and discuss these stories to remember the sacrificial love of Jesus. We invoke the bread and wine of the Last Supper to participate in the sacrament that he asks us to continue. Not just as something that happened in the past, but as something that is present for us today.

To get to the empty tomb and the new life of Resurrection Sunday, we have to stop so that we can look at and contemplate the cross.

This is the moment where we see what taking up his cross costs Jesus.

Remember that Jesus asks his would-be followers to take up our crosses and follow him.

What does it mean for us to take up our crosses? Debie Thomas writes:

“To take up a cross as Jesus did is to stand, always, in the center of the world’s pain. Taking up the cross means recognizing Christ crucified in every suffering soul we encounter, and pouring our energies into alleviating that pain, no matter what it costs us.”

This is what is means to love like Jesus. To love when everything is on the line. To have our hearts broken. To show by our actions, that our love for God is real and that we have skin in the game. That we remember and are grateful for the new life that Jesus made possible with his own life.

Send Us Out

Lead in: I just finished my second year of seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. June 17 and 18 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for June 18 was Matthew 9:25-10:23, where Jesus calls his 12 apostles and sends them out to further the work that he has been doing: curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and casting out demons, with warnings about what will happen to them.

“Send Us Out”

In January 2017, I had just started working at the church and I remember sitting down with Fr. Bill Ortt. It was time to start Bible studies and kick off The Alpha Course and he asked how I felt about everything. I said, “it’s daunting. And exciting.”

I was starting things I hadn’t done before. Anticipation and anxiety were in the water together. And all I could do was jump in.

Saying that, I can’t imagine what was going through the minds of the 12 disciples when Jesus calls them in today’s reading. So far in Matthew’s Gospel, they have seen Jesus teach, heal, and cure diseases; they have heard him give his Sermon on the Mount. They watched Jesus make a leper clean and were afraid for their lives on a boat as he commanded a storm to stop. When they got off the boat, he drove demons out of man everyone was afraid of; and we heard last week how he cured a woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years and then he raised a leader from the synagogue’s daughter from the dead.

Now he calls the 12 together and says, okay, your turn. Now you do it. “Proclaim the good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” Wow. No nerves or pressure there.

The disciples have been riding the bus that Jesus was driving, but he was making all the stops and doing all the work. They were just along for the ride. They probably didn’t realize what “Follow me” entailed.

Let’s look at today’s text just before Jesus sends them out to see what prompts him to do this. He’s going about to all the cities and all the villages teaching and proclaiming the good news and curing every disease.

And then Matthew tells us: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” And Jesus calls his 12.

The time is now. The harvest is ready. People are lost, hurting, sick. And Jesus needs those he has called to help him, to be the laborers.

This is the first time in Matthew’s Gospel that he refers to them as “apostles,” which means those who are sent out.

What are they sent out to do? Help people. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Do what Jesus has been doing. They are to share in and further his calling, his mission, under his authority. Go to where people are hurting. Care for them, give them hope. The things you do when you love someone.

As Matthew was making the point to get these things across to his readers then, they are still intended to speak to us now. Michael Green was an international evangelist, pastor, and author. In his book, “The Message of Matthew,” he gives us a way of thinking about Jesus’s mission charge to the apostles by summarizing it in five words: see, care, pray, receive, go.

SEE: “When Jesus SAW the crowds”—this is first and foremost, the apostles had to SEE the needs of those who were suffering or in trouble. We need to do the same.

CARE: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them.” Green points out that the word Matthew used for having compassion means “he was moved in his guts,” he was stirred deep inside. For the first apostles, or for us, when we see people suffering, we are called to care deeply.

PRAY: “Ask the Lord of the harvest to send workers into his harvest.” We are not the Lord of the harvest, that’s God, and we need to ask for his help and guidance. Stay connected to Him.

RECEIVE: And what Green says here is that the apostles, and we, need to receive training from Jesus, which they do both in watching him, in being with him, and in being sent out by him; and that they also need to receive authority. “It will not be you speaking but the Spirit of the Father speaking through you.” We need to allow ourselves to be open to, and filled with God’s Spirit. It’s not about us, it is about what God can do through us.

GO: Jesus commands, “Go,” and “As you go”… that’s the thing about being sent out. They and we actually have to go out. In preparing them for what’s to come, Jesus doesn’t lecture them about weekly church attendance. He sends them out and warns them that it is going to be dangerous.

Jesus and apostles. Fresco in Cappadocia

Jesus spends some time on this warning. He goes over the rough things that are on the horizon for the apostles. It’s going to be difficult, and it is going to be costly. “But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

Debie Thomas in her book, “Into the Mess,” says when it comes to faith, “Discomfort is what success looks like.”

“If our overriding priority as Christians is to secure our own comfort, then we cannot follow Jesus. The discipleship Jesus describes will disorient and disrupt us. It will make us the neighborhood weirdos. It will shake things up in our families, our friendship circles, our churches, our communities.”

Caring is costly. As a society now, we are flooded with images and stories of worldwide suffering, violence, sickness—and what is the most common response? Change the channel. Close the laptop. Don’t think about it. Or better yet these days, find someone or a group of people who don’t agree with us and blame them. If we make it a point to care for the marginalized and cast out, we risk becoming marginalized or cast out ourselves. Jesus asks us to step out and take that risk.

When we care about those around us, we open ourselves to getting hurt. When we open our heart to love someone, sooner or later, pain is a part of that love. Love in this life also has loss lingering behind it.

The apostle Paul has a sense of that loss, of that cost, when he writes today’s reading from Romans. He finds something in this suffering:

“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:2-5)

Jesus didn’t send the apostles out alone. He was with them. He cared about them. And he doesn’t send us out alone. He cares about us. And when we go through the pain and suffering that loving God and each other can bring, Jesus shows us that suffering can point ultimately to hope, and hope in God does not disappoint us.

If we are doing the work that God has given us to do, loving like Jesus, in a world that pushes back against it, we are going to struggle. I will tell you something that is amazing to me: we have so many people in our church community, who have used the struggles, the suffering, the loss they have experienced as a launching point either for ministries that they have helped start, or who are showing up for people in new and deeper ways because of what they have been through. They don’t want others to go through the same struggles alone.

That’s part of what being sent out looks like. Seeing, Caring, Praying, Receiving, Going.

A number of years go in Fr. Bill’s 30-week Kerygma Class, he drew two circles on a white board, one that had arrows pointing inward, and one with arrows pointing out. He talked about the circles as churches, inward facing and outward facing, and asked which one looked more like Jesus’s idea of love and caring? Barbara Coleman, now the Reverend Barbara, put her hands on top of her head with her fingers facing up to show the arrows facing out. And that has been her apostolic antler reminder ever since. We don’t see Barbara as much here anymore because she discerned a call to become a Deacon. She was ordained here in this church in October 2020, and now serves multiple parishes in Dorchester County, and heads up the food pantry. She calls herself the “Deacon of Dorchester.” She’s been sent out.

“Apostolic Antlers” from Rev. Barbara, Fr. Bill, and our Kerygma Class

Another part of today’s reading that keeps stirring me up is how the apostles learned from Jesus. He didn’t ask them to do anything he wasn’t already doing. Beyond his teaching, I bet they learned as much from watching him, from being around him, and from trying to do what he did.

It’s Father’s Day weekend. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads here. I’m convinced that we learn more from watching our fathers, our parents, and who they are, than from anything they might tell us. At least I hope that is the case, as neither of my daughters seem to listen to anything I say… The story about watching who someone is that that comes to my heart happened leading up to Halloween many years ago. So you get a quick Halloween story in June. Sorry, I’ve got the microphone.

From the late 1970s to the mid-80s, Easton had an annual haunted house that was unparalleled and unrivaled. In terms of scariness, creativity, and ingenuity, Disney World fell short of the haunted houses that the Easton Kiwanis Club put on. My father was a part of the Kiwanis Club and our whole family jumped into helping, for a good chunk of September and all of October each year.

They moved from place to place—from an old house on Dutchman’s Lane, to the old Idlewild Elementary School, when it was left empty in Idlewild Park. There were spot-built hydraulic floors, an illusion where a man changed into a werewolf on stage; swinging rope bridges, chainsaws, and even a flamethrower. The last two years of the haunted house, it was on a property in the woods off Manadier Road, at the end of Dutchman’s Lane. People had to park in front of what is now Auto Zone on Dover Road, and ride buses to the haunted woods.

The last year they held it, my friends and I as teenagers were given our own area along the wooded trail, a rundown old farm building, to create our scene to scare people. It was right next to where the buses pulled in.

One night a crowd got off the buses, a big crowd, most were in their 20s, and after riding the buses out there to this dark, deserted woods, they were scared, freaked out, didn’t want to go in and started screaming and shoving, not listening to anyone—it was the beginning of a riot. No one could calm them down and things were elevating past a boiling point.

From where I was standing, I could see my Dad come out of the woods, walk right up to the guys in the front of the crowd, who no one wanted any part of dealing with, and he stepped right into the mess, right where someone was needed. He diffused the whole situation. The entire crowd calmed down, made peace, and the evening, and the show, went on.

That night was more than 35 years ago and I have never forgotten it, watching my dad help restore order out of short-fused chaos. Talking about it later, he said, “I have no idea what I would have done if it turned violent.” He didn’t think, he acted—not just sent out, he seemed shot out, going to where the critical need was. There have been times when I have called on his example in chaotic situations and tried to live into that, diffusing things, and trying to bring peace.

God connects us to people we can learn from; we are always being shaped.

I have to imagine that as Peter, John, and Matthew the tax collector were sent out, and their ministries expanded, that they had their own experiences of watching and learning from Jesus as he healed, cared, loved, and brought peace. They could call on their experiences of watching him. And as we read and discuss the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, we learn how to model ourselves after him. What would Jesus see? What would he care about? How would he love? Who would he send?

How about us? Are we ready to see, care, pray, receive, and go?