That We All May Be One

“I am bringing you good news of a great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”(Luke 2:11)

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness on them has light shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

“Oh the majesty and magnificence of his presence! Oh, the power and the splendor of his sanctuary.” (Psalm 96:6)

“…the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” (Titus 2:11)

“Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them…” (Luke 2:9)

Light shining…magnificence and splendor…grace appearing….glory all around.

All of our Lessons from Holy Scripture tonight seem to emphasize Light! And it’s easy to see why anciently the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrated Christmas on January 6 – or what we call the Feast of the Epiphany. Because the word “epiphany” means a “shining forth” and surely the birth of Christ was a “shining forth,” an epiphany of God’s purposes in ways the world had never seen before!

Even in evening celebrations of the Christ Mass, like this one, there is an emphasis on candlelight and “candle light services”. We’ll sing Silent Night by candlelight at the end of this service. And our homes are filled with Christmas lights of all kinds. Why all this emphasis on “light” at Christmas? Well, what does light do? It “reveals”, doesn’t it? It makes things known that would otherwise be hidden. And that is exactly what the birth of Jesus Christ did for the world. It revealed, made known, manifested, something of what God is really like.

You might think that would have been unnecessary for the people of Israel who had worshipped God for nearly 2,000 years before Jesus was born. But there were still differences of opinion about what God was like. There was a Priestly understanding of a God who approved of cult and temple and sacrifice. There was a Prophetic understanding of a God who desired justice and righteousness above all else…and was quite suspicious of the sacrificial system.

There were those who saw God as vengeful and capable of destroying entire nations if they opposed the Divine Will. And others who saw God as tender and compassionate, One who brooded over this world like a mother over her children.

To this day, people have all kinds of ideas about God. Some believe in a God who sanctions violence of the most extremist kind. On the other hand, some Eastern religions have a very peaceful, tolerant view of the Divine, but don’t say much more than that about God. Seems to be a more of a Force, or a Divine Mind, rather than a Personal Being for them.

But our claim as Christians is that we know a bit more than that about what this God is like. Without wanting to say that we know everything there is to know about the Creator of the Universe (we certainly do not!) we do believe that something of the very nature of God has been revealed to us in the Person of Jesus Christ. We have been “enlightened” to some degree about that very Nature.

For example, we know that God is not callous or cruel. God does not willingly afflict or grieve human beings. We know that God is not distant from us or from the affairs of this world. For all God’s power and majesty, there is a certain vulnerability and even the possibility of being “hurt” – like a baby in a manger, our God can be vulnerable…and even wounded.

We know that God is not static and predictable by our rules and regulations, but is perfectly capable of surprising us, like the twelve year old boy in the Temple once surprised his parents by being about his Father’s business instead of being where they thought he ought to be. God “shows up” in unexpected places!

We know that God cares very deeply about what happens to us and so reaches out with a Word of wisdom and with healing, like that itinerant rabbi who once went about preaching Good News and backing up his words with actions like the healing of a paralytic, and the restoring of sight to one who had been born blind.

We know that God is capable of being betrayed by us, and delivered into the hands of sinners, for even less than the thirty pieces of silver Judas once got for betraying his friend.

But, in all this, indeed because of all this, God reigns! With all the vulnerability and unpredictability and deep compassion, God remains the creator and sustainer of the Universe, the ultimate source of all life and all that is. And this God is able and willing to bring good out of evil, and life out of death at every turn. Just as he once split open the grave and won the victory over death and hell on Easter morning.

How can we say all this? How can we believe all this with such passion? Because we believe in the essence of the Christmas story… because we believe in the “good news of great joy for all the people (for to us) is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

We know something of what God is like because we believe that the meaning of the Christmas story is what St. Luke said it was, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.”

We believe that Jesus Christ is “the grace of God…bringing salvation to all…” And his name will be called, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Light shining…magnificence and splendor…grace appearing…glory all around.  That’s what we celebrate here tonight, dear friends. I’m so glad you’re here! Merry Christmas!

Advent 4B.  This is “Mary’s Sunday.” The 4^th Sunday of the Advent season when we pause to reflect on the enormous role played by a teen-aged, Jewish peasant girl in God’s ultimate plan for history and for this world.  With what Anglicans sometimes perceive as Roman Catholic over-emphasis and Protestant under-emphasis on the Mother of Jesus, we sometimes fail to say much about her at all!

Yet, the Gospel accounts are full of Mary in the Christmas story, she is referred to a number of times in the subsequent accounts of Jesus’ life, she is there at the foot of the cross and again in the Upper Room at Pentecost. The Prayer Book has four major holy days specifically celebrating Mary’s life – The Annunciation (which we also had as our Gospel story today), the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth when both were carrying their first-born sons, the Presentation of the young Jesus in the Temple when the days of Mary’s Purification after childbirth was complete, and the Feast St. Mary the Virgin on August 15^th when Roman Catholics believe she was taken back into heaven in a special way.

Mary’s story begins, in a sense, with our Old Testament Reading today from the Second Book of Samuel. While the Hebrew people believed that their awesome God could never be seen face to face and that God did not live in a house made with hands, yet they had sensed the Divine Presence in the pillars of fire and cloud and on Mt. Sinai. They had preserved the tablets of the 10 Commandments in a “tent” called “the Ark of the Covenant” and carried it with them wherever they went, even sometimes into battle.

There was a great debate about whether eventually a Temple should be built where the Ark could find a permanent home and where the people of Israel could come to offer sacrifice and to worship and to pray and to sense the almost-physical presence of  their God whenever they wished and could get there. The great King David, quite understandably, began to believe that he was the one to build God’s great House, his great Temple.

Especially when David himself was living in very comfortable surroundings – he said, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” But the prophet, Nathan, like most of the prophets down through the ages, was a bit suspicious of this heavenly building program. He, and the other prophets, were concerned that a beautiful Temple could become an idol for the Jewish people; that something even though built to point beyond itself to the God of heaven and earth, could almost become an object of worship in and of itself.

It’s something we Christians have to be concerned about as well. Our great Cathedrals and Gothic churches can, and do, provide the space and the context for the worship of God. I cannot walk into places like this without sensing the beauty and majesty of God, that peace of God which passes all understanding. But, if we are not careful, we can find ourselves worshipping a building rather than the God the building was erected to glorify. That is now, and was then, idolatry!

So, Nathan heard God saying, “Go and tell my servant David…are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day…Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took YOU from the pasture…to be prince over my people…Moreover the Lord declares to you and the Lord will make YOU a house…your throne shall be established forever.” (2 Samuel 7 passim)

In other words, God was not interested in dwelling in a house made with hands. God was interested in dwelling in the midst of a people – the house of David was not to be a Temple. The house of David was to be a family….an inheritance…a people!

That story would have been well known to a young, Jewish girl in first century Palestine. She would have heard it read in the synagogue and would doubtless have sung these words from today’s Psalm countless times in her growing up, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one; I have sworn an oath to David my servant: I will establish your line for ever, and preserve your throne for all generations” (Psalm 126).

Those texts must have come crashing down upon her when she heard these words spoken to her as in the voice of an angel: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.” (Luke 1)

The throne of his ancestor David! David’s descendent! The Anointed One! The Messiah! And she was to bring him into the world! Truly, she was the “favored one.” Surely “the Lord was with her.” Yet it would not be so easy.

“How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Mary was not concerned here with having Gabriel explain a Doctrine called the Virgin Birth. Mary was concerned about being laughed at, scorned, cast out, perhaps even stoned as an unwed mother from a strict Jewish family and community. For them, there could be no other explanation but that, at the very least, she had become pregnant before her marriage vows to Joseph. And, at the worst, the father was someone other than Joseph.

“How can this be?” she asked. “How can I do this?” The only answer that came? God will be with you. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”  How many of us would have said “Yes,” considering the cost, on that vaguest of promises? Yet Mary did. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

No, dear friends, the Lord God does not dwell in a temple made with hands. Even so beautiful a temple as the one we are privileged to worship in here today. The Lord dwells in a midst of a people. A people who trace their history to a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. A people who trace their history to rugged tablets of stone carried through the desert in a rustic tent. But,for us, a people who have discovered the true dwelling place of God.

In the womb of a pregnant teenager. In a wooden manger and on a wooden cross. And, finally, in the hearts of his faithful people. Greetings, favored ones. The Lord is with YOU!

The season of Advent is, perhaps above all else, a season of hope and expectation. On the simplest level, of course, we look forward to the celebration of Christ’s First Coming at the Christ-Mass (Christmas). We also have the hope and the expectation that this same Christ will come into our lives daily (in Word and Prayer and Sacrament) and in all the ways he shows up in our lives on an everyday basis. And finally we hope for, and expect, one day his Final Coming at the End of time to set things right again once and for all – that his Kingdom truly will “come on earth as it is in heaven!”

These themes are seen all the way through our Lessons from Holy Scripture this morning. Isaiah looks forward to God’s Reign finally being established when he cries, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” (Isaiah 64:1). And the prophet’s yearning for this future action is not some kind of “Pollyanna optimism” but is firmly based on the fact that God has acted in Israel’s past. He writes, “When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” (64:3).

The people of Israel had seen God’s mighty acts before – not least in their liberation from slavery in Egypt centuries earlier and his manifestation on Mount Sinai in the giving of the Law. So, even though they are facing Exile once again at the hand of the Babylonians and the people are worried, Isaiah wants to give them the hope and the expectation that they have not been deserted.

“There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand…Now consider, we are all your people.” (64:7-9)

The Psalmist sings the same message in today’s Psalm 80: “Restore us, O God of hosts; show us the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”  They are suffering now, but because their God is the same God who “led Joseph like a flock” (1) in the past, they can have hope for the future: “And so will we never turn away from you; give us life, that we may call upon your Name.” (17)

Our Lord Jesus Christ preached that same message of hope and expectation hundreds of years after Isaiah and the Psalmist. The people of Israel had indeed been restored to their land after the Exile by then, but had fallen on hard times once again. Now, they are being oppressed by Rome and their land occupied once again by foreign troops, but Jesus says,

“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Mark 13:28-31)

They had certainly not passed away by the time St. Paul wrote his first letter to the  Christians in Corinth 25 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, “I give thanks to my God always for your because…you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (I Corinthians 1:4-8 passim)

How could all these prophets and mystics and apostles have had such hope and expectation and confidence in God’s coming Kingdom even in the midst of adversity and suffering? Because they had experienced God’s sovereignty in their history, and in their own lives. Isaiah not only knew the history of his people and how God had rescued them, been their hope and strength in the past, he had had a deep encounter with that God in his own personal life – a “vision” of the very throne-room of God where he heard God say, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah had said, “Here I am, send me!”

King David, who was likely the author of some of the Psalms if not all of them, knew what it was like to be rescued and redeemed, not only in wartime and battle but from his own personal sins and shortcomings as well. He was a deeply flawed servant of God, but a servant nonetheless! Jesus had encountered his heavenly Father in the waters of the Jordan River at his Baptism, on the Mount of Transfiguration, and in countless other ways during his brief, three-year public ministry. And Paul had been knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, discovering how wrong he had been in persecuting the followers of the Messiah whose faithful servant he would soon become!

Beloved, we live in frustrating and confusing times as well. The world is changing so fast we can scarcely keep up with it. Many of the things we have always thought and believed are being brought into question or are at least up for discussion. In these tough economic times, the “American dream” we used to rely on – that we would do better than our parents and our children do better than us – seems questionable at best. We despair of leaders – in the Arab world, in our own country or even in our church – who can converse with one another civilly, put their own agendas aside, and come together and find consensus for the common good. Reading the newspaper these days can be an exercise in frustration!

But, especially in days like these, it is absolutely essential that we grasp and hold on to that “theology of hope” held out to us by our forebears in the Faith. The reason we want you to learn the history of your Faith through Bible study and theological refection, the reason we want you to seek encounters with the Living God through worship and prayer; the reason we want you to look around you and find signs of God’s activity and presence in the world about you is precisely so that you can be hopeful people! Not just “optimistic” people who think things should get “better and better every day in every way,” but truly people of hope.

We want you to hope in the God who has surely acted in the past. Hope in the God who is mightily at work in the present if we only have eyes to see. And, most of all, hope in the God of the future. Which is why we say every day in Morning Prayer, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.”

God has been with us in the past. God is with us today. And God has promised to be with us always — even to the end of the ages!

All Saints’ Sunday, 2011.Last Tuesday, November 1^st, the Church celebrated All Saints’ Day. This is the day in the church calendar when we remember the outstanding heroes and heroines of our Christian faith – the Blessed Virgin Mary, the apostles and martyrs and saints right down through the ages like Francis and Clare, Benedict and Julian of Norwich, Teresa and Augustine, and all those who made lasting contributions to our history and development, and to the spread of the Gospel throughout the world.

On Wednesday, Nov. 2, we celebrated All Souls’ Day. This is the day when the Church commemorates those so–called “lesser saints.” Perhaps our ancestors and forebears who may not have made a name for themselves worthy of Church history books, but who nonetheless made their own contributions.  I think of my grandfather who read Psalm 91 every day my father was overseas in WW II, piloting his B-24 on bombing runs over Germany and flying gasoline to Field Marshall Montgomery in Northern Africa. I think of the Sunday school teachers and youth group leaders and clergy of my youth who made such lasting impressions, and who formed me in my Christian faith.

Today, on what we call All Saints Sunday, we gather all that up and remember that, in the New Testament, the word “saint,” (hagios in the Greek) refers to “all the baptized,” Christians just like you and me. When St. Paul writes to the “saints” in Rome and Corinth and Philippi he’s not writing to necessarily holy people (as the texts of those Epistles make clear!). He’s writing to people like you and me, baptized members of the Body of Christ, who are striving to be faithful, but all of whom had the same struggles, successes and failures and fears as we do.

Just last year The Episcopal Church – through our Church Publishing Company – provided a new resource to expand our knowledge and remembrance of some of these manifold saints of God. Entitled “Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints,” its Preface contains the following words. “ (This book) marks a further stage in the recovery within the Episcopal Church of the liturgical commemoration of the saints.”

“The first English Book of Common Prayer (1549) retained a small number of the many feasts contained in the calendar of the (Roman Catholic)…Missal. All but one of these were major Holy Days directly related to the New Testament; no post-Biblical saints were included. The 1662 Prayer Book, which Anglicans living in the American colonies used in the decades preceding independence, listed the names of sixty-seven saints in its Calendar, but made no provision for their liturgical commemoration.”

“The first American Book of Common Prayer (1789) listed no minor Holy Days…in its
Calendar and this continued to be the case in the 1892 and 1928 Prayer Books. Only in 1964 did things change. In that year General Convention approved the inclusion in the Calendar of more than a hundred saints’ days with liturgical (Prayers and Readings) to facilitate their commemoration in the Church’s worship.” (“HW, HM” pages ix-x). This resource was published under the name “Lesser Feasts and Fasts.”

“In 2003 General Convention called for a wide-ranging revision of (that resource)…”to reflect our increasing awareness of the ministry of all the people of God and of the cultural diversity of the Episcopal Church, of the wider Anglican Communion, of our ecumenical partners, and of our lively experiences of sainthood in local communities. Several years of extensive study and consultation led to the submission (and subsequent publication of) “Holy Women, Holy Men”… (page x)

We use that new resource here at Trinity Cathedral for our midweek services and on special occasions and I have found it to be very helpful. Previous commemorations of saints in our English Prayer Books have been overwhelmingly white, male, clergy and monastics, and – in fact – heavily weighted toward commemorating bishops (who we all know are seldom so saintly!) This new book includes such persons, of course, as well as the giants we know from the New Testament and early Church history.

But we also find in these pages prophetic witnesses like Frederick Douglass from the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Amelia Jenks Bloomer who started her work for women’s equality right here in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach is found within the pages of this book as is Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman priest in the Anglican Communion and Roman Catholic luminaries like Pope John XXIII.

So, why is all this important? I believe it is to hold up before us, on a regular basis, specific examples of what our Lessons from Holy Scripture are describing today. The vision in Revelation of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne of God, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” (Revelation 7:9)

The reminder from the Psalmist that “the angel of the Lord encompasses those who fear him, and he will deliver them.” (Psalm 34:7).  John’s challenge in the Epistle to “see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” (I John 3:1). And Jesus’ compassionate reminder in the Beatitudes that the real saints are not always heroes and heroines, but those who are “poor in spirit…those who mourn…the meek…those who hunger and thirst for righteousness….the merciful…the pure in heart…the peacemakers…those who are persecuted.” (Matthew 5)

In other words – YOU! You are the saints of God, dear friends. And if you read the biographies of some of these names in “Holy Women, Holy Men,” you’ll find that their lives were not so different from yours in many ways. They weren’t all plaster saints! They toiled and sweated and failed sometimes…just like we do. They didn’t spend all their time in church and, in fact, most of what they are remembered for took place, in the world…outside the doors of their churches.

It is no accident that each Eucharist ends with a dismissal sentence and why we no longer linger to watch the candles being put out! You and I are on a mission. We can’t wait to rise from our knees and get back out into our families and jobs and neighborhoods to share our faith in Jesus Christ and to make a difference for him in this world! We’re on a mission…and we can’t wait!

On All Saints’ Sunday, we celebrate Holy Women and Holy Men! On All Saints Sunday, we celebrate YOU!

For the last several Sundays we’ve been making our way through the 22^nd chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew in our Sunday readings. We conclude that chapter today and, once again, it makes more sense if we put it into the context of the entire chapter. Matthew 22 begins with the Parable of the Wedding Banquet with the king deciding to go out into the streets and invite the riff-raff – good and bad people alike – to attend his son’s wedding reception since the original guests were too busy with their worldly pursuits to accept his invitation.

That story is about what Dean Alan Jones calls “God’s astonishingly bad taste!” I mean God doesn’t really seem to be very discriminating about those called to the Banquet. God loves everybody. Absolutely everybody! Astonishingly bad taste, really! This description of God in Jesus’ parable so angers the Pharisees (who were always so concerned about “who was in” and “who was out,” who was clean and who was unclean) that verse 15 says that they “plotted to entrap him in what he said.”

And that led to last Sunday’s wonderful Lesson about “rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s!” Jesus turns the trick question about taxes right back on the Pharisees and gets himself out of a potential “Catch 22.” One of my friends recently said about this parable that Jesus had learned a very important lesson in life that I commend to you — just because someone asks you a question doesn’t mean you have to answer it!

That brilliant tactic shuts the Pharisees up for a while. Verse 22 says, “When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.” Yes, I suppose they did – no doubt blushing with embarrassment at how he had outfoxed them! So, next in Matthew 22 the Pharisees’ archrivals the Sadducees take over. This was the group that really didn’t believe in the possibility of resurrection from the dead or in eternal life at all. So they try to trip Jesus up with a pretty far-fetched story of a hypothetical situation where a woman was married and then widowed seven times, and then she died. (No wonder, we might say – after seven husbands!)

But their silly question was, whose wife will she be in heaven since she’d been married seven times? Jesus’ answer here was dripping with sarcasm when he says, “You are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” In other words, he’s suggesting that one of the reasons the Sadducees didn’t really even believe in resurrection was because they had such a limited view of it!

If you try to picture heaven as just a celestial version of life here on earth, you’ll always be confused. Eternal life is about a whole new plane of existence, a complete transformation of our earthly existence. Arrangements like jobs and families and neighborhoods won’t have any meaning in heaven because everyone will be in communion, in “love and charity” with God and everyone else. It will be one community of love and acceptance for us all!

Well, that silences the Sadducee party for a while and the Pharisees take over again in today’s Gospel. This is sort of a “good cop, bad cop” sort of  interrogation! “If you’re so smart,” they seem to say, “then tell us which commandment in the law is the greatest.” Now it’s important to note that they probably weren’t just talking about which of the “Ten” Commandments was most important. The rabbis and scholars by Jesus’ day had identified some 613 “mitsvot”, or commandments, scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible which people were supposed to obey. No wonder many people had given up even trying to practice their religion or even to please God!

But Jesus’ brilliant mind instantly culls through those 613 rules and lifts out two of them – one from the Ten Commandments about loving God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and one from the book of Leviticus (19:18) about loving neighbor. Rabbi Hillel (a contemporary of Jesus) had responded in somewhat the same way when he was asked the question. He said, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it!”

By now, Jesus is getting a little irritated about being hassled like this and badgered with questions, not because anybody was particularly interested in the answers, but precisely in order to trip him up. So he decides to have a little fun with his inquisitors! He turns to an obscure Psalm (110)  which begins like this, “The LORD said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.” The traditional interpretation was that the first LORD refers to God and the second “Lord” refers to the Messiah. (In other words, the Lord God said to my Lord the Messiah, sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.)

But if, as the tradition had it, David was the author of this Psalm, and the Messiah was to be a descendent of David, how could he call his descendent his “Lord?” In Jewish law, the offspring could not be regarded as greater than the ancestor, so David could not possibly be calling one of his descendents, “Lord!”

Now it is absolutely clear to me that Jesus is just playing with his adversaries here. He actually is a descendent of David, according to the genealogy in the first chapter of this very Gospel according to Matthew!  And yet David was indeed calling him, the hoped-for Messiah, “Lord.” What Jesus is saying is, “Don’t try to trip me up by your facile quoting of Scripture out of context and with evil intention.” I can quote Scripture with the best of you – and it doesn’t mean a thing!

So…what does “mean a thing?” In fact, what does “mean everything?” According to Jesus, it is the “first and great commandment” and the “second which is like unto it.” Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Leave the rest of it to others. Leave the church fights and the theological disputations and the “proof texts” and the holier-than- thou attitudes to others. As for you – fall in love with God and love other people.

On those two Commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

The rest is commentary!

Proper 21A. Trinity Cathedral.

When you are trying to understand a passage of Scripture, it’s very important always to look at the context of that passage. We have some nine or ten verses from Matthew’s Gospel this morning and they begin like this: “When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things; and who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23)

At first glance it may appear that they were questioning Jesus’ authority to teach. However, by this time Jesus was well accepted as a kind of itinerant rabbi and, in any case, it was always acceptable for a Jewish male to stand up in synagogue or Temple and comment on the Torah portion for the day. Besides, they don’t say, “by what authority are you teaching?”… They say, “by what authority are you doing these things!” They were concerned about what he was doing!

And what had he just done? Well, twelve verses earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, he had been greeted as the Son of David by crowds in the street, and he had pushed over the tables of the money-changers in the temple and driven them out for turning a house of prayer into a den of robbers!

That’s what the chief priests and the elders were upset about. Not so much about what Jesus was teaching, but about what he was doing. And what he was doing was challenging both the political and religious establishment of his day, and doing so in the heart of the political and religious capital city – Jerusalem.

According to a recent book by New Testament scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, two processions entered Jerusalem on that first “Palm Sunday.” One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. While Jesus and his followers were entering the city from the east, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor and his legions were entering the city from the west. Pilate’s entry into Jerusalem and its significance would have been well known in the Jewish homeland of the first century.

It was standard operating procedure for the Roman governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for all the major Jewish festivals. This was not out of any respect for the religious devotion of their Jewish subjects. It was to reinforce the Roman garrison permanently stationed in Fortress Antonia in case there was trouble. And there usually was trouble, especially at Passover, a festival celebrating the liberation of the Jews from an earlier oppressor, the Egyptians.  There would be trouble on this Passover as well!

By staging a “counter procession” to Pilate’s, Jesus wanted to make a specific point. His purpose was to fulfill the prophecy made by Zechariah that the Messiah would come to Jerusalem in a very specific way – not like King David, in splendor on a white horse at the head of a procession of armed men, but “humble, and riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9). Moreover, Zechariah tells us what kind of king he would be:

“He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations.” This Messiah would not be a king of war, but a prince of peace.

What a contrast to that other procession! On one side of town, Pilate was entering Jerusalem in a display of imperial power – cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, the sounds of marching feet, implicitly claiming that the Romans were the rulers of the ancient world.  On the other side of town, Jesus and his rag-tag group of followers were trotting into town on foot and on a donkey with children and the poor claiming him as representing the true Ruler of the ancient (and modern!) world – the living and true God!

That’s what the chief priests and the elders of the people were “on” about in questioning Jesus’ authority. And that’s why Jesus turns the question back on them, wanting to know what they thought about that other bold prophet, John the Baptist. “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin,” he asks.

“Uh oh,” they gulped, “If we say he was from God, he’ll want to know why we didn’t listen to him. If we say he was only speaking on his own authority, we will have a riot on our hands. Those are John’s people out there – the poor, the lost, the least and the lonely.”

And that’s why Jesus told the story about the two sons – the one who said he wouldn’t work in the vineyard but did; and the one who said he would and didn’t.  For you see, dear friends, in the final analysis, it doesn’t really matter what you profess to believe. What matters is what you actually believe!

It doesn’t really matter what you say you’re going to do. What matters is what you do. And what you actually do in this life will ultimately depend on which procession you’re in – Pilate’s or Jesus’s?

St. Paul puts the challenge to us in today’s Epistle: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

“Therefore God has highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:5-11).

Which procession are you in today – Pilate’s or Jesus’s.