Text: Mark 11:1-11 & Mark 15:1-47
Theme: “Try to Remember”
PALM/PASSION SUNDAY
March 29, 2015
FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau
Acts chapter 17, not in today’s hefty collection of readings, finds the
Apostle Paul, my namesake, in Athens, Greece.
There he stands in the Areopagus where all the great ideas,
philosophies, beliefs, paradigms, constructs, and so on and so forth were
presented and debated. And he quotes a
poet to them, a poet whose writings are not in the Bible. How dare he do such a thing! “(In God) we live and move and have our
being. As some of your own poets have
said, ‘We are his offspring.’”
Following the tradition of my namesake, allow me to quote
from a non-Biblical poet – or, in this instance, the lyricist, Tom Jones, who
gave us Try to Remember from the
play, “The Fantasticks”:
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember
And follow.
Before we get
too mellowed out by the soothing, literary tones of Tom Jones’ poetry, perhaps
it’s time to quote another poet who happens to be a singer and songwriter as
well. You may want to hold on to your
pew for this:
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long
year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
What's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners, saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
'Cause I'm in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
Those fictional lyrics, linguistically and poetically
“placed” in the mouth of the devil, were written before 9/11 and, obviously,
before the black box was found at the crash site of the Germanwings jet. The
cockpit voice recorder showed that this was not an accident; it was mass
murder. How would the poets who wrote
“Sympathy for the Devil” have included those events? Maybe The Rolling Stones will add new
stanzas, but I doubt it. The point is
made.
In a First Things
magazine article, Martyn Wendell Jones of Wheaton College wrote this last week:
Thousands
of words pile up in dozens of news sources to make up for Lubitz’s silence in
the cockpit. The pounding on the door behind him and the screaming of the
passengers just before impact are recognizably human; under such conditions,
his steady breathing is anything but. How much more intelligible would this act
seem if there were even a sigh, the sound of weeping, or a muttered
imprecation. Instead, Lubitz is a blank, and we are left to struggle for an
account of the contents of his mind in the moments leading up to the tragedy.
There
is a word that articulates Lubitz’s unintelligible act, one that leaves us
without any recourse to planning and preemption. That word, of course, is
“evil.”
If
we could assign a motive to Lubitz, the gears of liberal social planning would
engage to reduce the risk of such an event in the future: Pilots could be
screened, safety features could be improved, computer technology could be
developed to allow for remote control in the case of hijacking.
Without
one, we are left with emptiness. There is a good chance that we will never
arrive at a satisfactory account of what led Andreas Lubitz to throw a 150
lives into oblivion. We can say all that we want about measures to reduce the
likelihood of catastrophes like this in the future, but ultimately, the
presence of evil in this world is a given, and no amount of planning or
instrumental reasoning can rid us of its threat.
Is there any good news, Mr. Jones? I certainly cannot find any at the end of
your essay!
Mr. Jones of Wheaton College, try to remember with me and
with us. Mr. Jones of Wheaton College,
there is ultimately another presence in this world that is a given, and no
amount of planning or instrumental reasoning can rid us of His blessing! And I speak today of Jesus Christ whose
glorious entrance into Jerusalem, amid cries of “Hosanna!”, we celebrate with
festive worship and joy!
And we also celebrate, Mr. Jones of Wheaton College, that
no amount of planning or instrumental reasoning can rid us of the passion of
Jesus Christ for all of us, for this is Passion Sunday! And we try to remember this day, as ages have
before us, how He died for our sins according to the Scriptures. How the passion of His will, and His grace,
and His love have given us a new beginning and a second chance, and a third
chance, and fourth chance, and – more
than that, made of us a new creation! If
anyone be in Christ, he/she is a new creation!
Let evil rage for all the hell it wants to deliver. The message of Holy Week, for all its palms
and passion, is the grace of God is a given – and no amount of planning or
instrumental reasoning can rid us of its blessing!
And the message of this Holy Week and the tremendous
Easter Sunday to follow is that this grace is for EVERYONE! It’s even for those who threatened violence
and destruction, as reports have it, on four of our sister PCUSA congregations
in and around Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The threats came as the PCUSA allowed
her ministers to exercise conscience in the marriage of a gay or lesbian
couple.
Do you want a highly concentrated statement of the grace
of God? It’s my OWN lectionary
selection: Romans 3:23-24: “All have sinned and have fallen short of the
glory of God, but they are justified as a gift of His grace through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
The “all have sinned” and “they are justified” leave NO
ONE OUT. That is why, as long as I am
pastor of this PCUSA congregation, this sanctuary, this church, this ministry
is for everyone: for men, for women, for
children, for Republicans, for Democrats, for Libertarians, for veterans, for
draft dodgers, for the rich, for the poor, for the middle class, the sick,
homeless, hungry, naked, for those full of joy and for those who have contemplated suicide too many times, for the gay, for the lesbian, for the bisexual, for
the transgendered, for the heterosexual, for the alcoholic, for the addict, for
the abused, the neglected, for those who try so desperately (and pray so
fervently) to end the dysfunction and emotional pain they have lived with for
so very long, and, yes, even for those too busy picking specks out of their
neighbors’ eye while neglecting the logs in their own. You are all welcome here!
Try to remember, Mr. Jones of Wheaton College! Try to remember, Paul Dunklau for First
Presbyterian Church (I rarely speak of myself in the third person, but I will
today to make the point!)! Try to
remember, dear congregation gathered on this Palm/Passion Sunday: the grace of God is a given, and no amount of
planning or instrumental reasoning can rid us of its blessing! Try to remember! That IS good news, Mr. Jones. It is for
everyone!
Amen.
