Gratitude from The Beginning to The End!

Text:  Psalm 118:1-2, 29-29

Theme:  "Gratitude from the Beginning to the End"

Palm Sunday

April 13, 2014

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Denton, Texas

Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

+In the Name of Jesus+

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.

² Let Israel say:
    “His love endures forever.”

Open for me the gates of the righteous;
    I will enter and give thanks to the Lord.
²⁰ This is the gate of the Lord
    through which the righteous may enter.
²¹ I will give you thanks, for you answered me;
    you have become my salvation.

²² The stone the builders rejected
    has become the cornerstone;
²³ the Lord has done this,
    and it is marvelous in our eyes.
²⁴ The Lord has done it this very day;
    let us rejoice today and be glad.

²⁵ Lord, save us!
    Lord, grant us success!

²⁶ Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
    From the house of the Lord we bless you.^[b]
27 The Lord is God,
    and he has made his light shine on us.
With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession
    up^[c] to the horns of the altar.

²⁸ You are my God, and I will praise you;
    you are my God, and I will exalt you.

²⁹ Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.

Holy Week begins with a parade and ends in a grave.  Weird, isn't it?  Holy Week begins with the sounds of the crowd shouting their "Hosanna"s to Jesus.  Holy Week ends with a bloodthirsty "Crucify Him".  As the song says:

Sometimes they strew His way, and His sweet praises sing;

Resounding all the day Hosannas to their King.

Then "Crucify!" is all their breath,

And for His death they thirst and cry.

What a difference one week can make.  On Sunday, it's "Yip,Yip, Yahoo and Hip Hip Hooray" for Jesus.  On Friday, just days later, it's "Away with Him!  Crucify Him!"  It's the week that changed the world forever.  The question is:  has it/will it change us?  "Were you there when the crucified the Lord?  Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble."

Holy Week begins with "Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord."  It ends with the sound of a large stone being rolled into place in front of a borrowed grave.   There Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea laid down the lifeless corpse of Jesus -- and the government put a seal on the sepulcher for good measure. They even stationed guards there.

Psalm 118 -- or at least selected verses of Psalm 118 -- is our guide for meditation and prayer today.  It begins and ends with gratitude.  Gratitude is its structure; gratitude is its punctuation; gratitude is its animation.  Why is there such a call to be grateful?  That's tough stuff for a culture that has gone all in for cynicism and pessimism.   What is the cause, the impetus, for such gratitude?  Sometimes we hear people say, ever-so-nicely and with a smile:  "Thank you so much!"  Do they really mean it and are they truly grateful, or is it just a polite way to end a conversation?

Looking around, one might say that reasons for gratitude are too few and too far between. They've lost what they thought were the pings coming from the black box on the vanished Malaysian airliner; the batteries are said to last only about a month, so the media reports.  The Nasdaq index has nose-dived in our schizophrenic economy; biotech stocks have been hit the worst. You blue-chippers can breathe easy -- at least for a little while.  The takeaway, overall, is that your savings, your retirement, is on shakier ground, on losing ground.  They tell you that it will take seven days to fix your hail-damaged car only to call back and say it will be more like three weeks.  Our church is covered, but there is that little item called the "deductible".   But hey, at least Longhorn -- and Presbyterian! -- Jordan Spieth, who is too young to drink alcohol legally, may just win the Masters' green jacked this afternoon.   Here you can plug in your own examples of things that make you feel less than grateful or only a tiny bit grateful.   It takes a special kind of person that can sing and pray Psalm 118 when they just learned of a cancer diagnosis, or the doctor has written a prescription for hospice. 

Our feelings, however, no matter how intense they may be, are not the cause for gratitude.  No, the cause, or the grounding, for gratitude -- if the Word of God has anything to say --  is simply this:  because "the Lord  is good", declares the psalmist.  In the same breath, we are told that God's "mercy endures forever." That's it, period.  End the discussion. 

Some of you might recall the table prayer of your childhood.  After the meal, you returned thanks and said:  "O, give thanks to the Lord; for He is good; for His mercy endureth forever.  Amen."  This is where it comes from:  Psalm 118.  Hesed -- that's the original Hebrew for "mercy", or "loving-kindness" -- is the great Gospel word of the Old Testament.  There it is -- salted and peppered all over Psalm 118.

Along with gratitude for God's hesed from beginning to end, Psalm 118 has Holy Week written all over it.  The references to Palm Sunday all but jump off the page.  "With branches in hand,  join in the festal procession," says verse 27.  "Lord, save us", or "Hosanna", is there the verse 25.  I read too much.  Based on that, I can tell you that we have so many of these modern historians and pseudo/crypto/neo-theologians who, with an air of sophistication, question the truthfulness, the veracity, and the historical accuracy of the Bible's narrative.  But rarely do they notice how interconnected the Scriptures are. The Bible does a fine job interpreting itself!

That said, Psalm 118 must have been the air they all breathed on that first Palm Sunday.  There was Jesus, poised and ready for the week to come, at Bethphage.  He had "set His face to go to Jerusalem" (that's Luke 9:51), and now he was about to enter.   Seated onboard a donkey, a lowly beast of burden, the Lord, with crowds all-around, makes His way down the Mount of Olives, through the Kidron Valley, unto the gates of the holy city.  "Open for me the gates of the righteous," says the psalmist, in verse 2. 

"This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."  That's Psalm 118 as well -- and it's another snippet of verse that has been shouted down through the centuries.  But saying that is one thing; saying it and really meaning it is another.  One day a minister began the service with:  "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."  He then enjoined the worshippers to turn to one another and give to each other what he called "a happy hug in the name of Jesus."  What the minister didn't know is that the elderly lady, the visitor who had sat down quietly in the back pew, had just learned, the week prior, that her husband of over fifty years, had only six months or less to live. Do you think she was in the mood for rejoicing, gladness, and choreographed hugging?  Maybe she came to give God a good piece of her mind.

No.  So we have to do some pushback on this psalm; we need to press it further. We have to squeeze it; we need to ring it out. Like Jacob of old wrestling with the angel, we need to grapple with the text until it blesses us.

Verse 22 is a great place to grab on.  "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes."

Jesus Christ is that stone.  He is our "Ebeneezer", our "rock of help".  "On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand." 

His oath, His covenant, and blood support me in the whelming flood;

When ev-'ry earthly prop gives way, He then is all my Hope and Stay.

On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.

The builders rejected that rock. The religious leaders of His own people condemned Him to death.  Pilate, the representative of the Roman government, washed his hands and sealed his fate.  In other words, church and state had Jesus executed.  But all of them forgot something;  they forgot someone.  They could reject Jesus and have Him executed a thousand times, but there was someone who had yet to weigh in.  And weigh in He did.

"Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here; He is risen -- even as He said."  He was raised from the grave "by the glory of His Father" (that's Romans 6).  In other words, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes."

Now there's something the elderly lady in the back pew can grab onto and celebrate -- "that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

"O, give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good.  His mercy endureth forever."

Amen.