Palm Sunday 2016 - Act One, Act Two, and Act Three

Today - Palm Sunday - is the beginning of Holy Week - a seven-day immersion into the story of Jesus Christ - a story that’s also our own story. Every life is a story, after all. Every life has central characters, and minor characters. Every life has a theme - values that inform our choices and give them meaning. Every life has a plot - a sequence of events that occur - sometimes random and sometimes intentional - that don’t make sense until we look back at the end of it. And as every scholar of literature will tell you - whether the stories are from the great epics of Greek mythology, or the stories from the Bible, or from the works of Shakespeare, or even from the classic Disney movies - the stories that resonate most with us all follow a certain narrative arc. The stories of our lives follow this arc, as does the story of the church, and even the story of this congregation.

If we were to describe all of these stories like a play, it would be in three acts and it would go like this: Act One - the beginning of the story, would be about the development of the central character. You in your story, me in my story, Jesus in the Gospel story. If you think about the great Disney movies - Snow White or Cinderella, or if you think about other great movies, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars - the first bit is all about the main characters and how they grow. How they begin to take their place in the world. Snow White leaves her home and encounters the seven dwarves and begins a happy life with them. Cinderella meets her fairy godmother and goes to the ball and meets her prince and begins a new relationship. Frodo leaves his home to set out on a new path of discovery of new lands and new friends and new responsibilities. Our stories, too, include leaving our home and meeting new people and taking on new roles and growing. Jesus left his home, and met his disciples, and grew as he proclaimed forgiveness and healing to more and more people. This church found its place and grew and offered a spiritual home to more and more Lutherans. Every Act One in the human story follows the same path - growing, gaining a sense of self, becoming who we are.

And then there’s Act Two. Act Two, of course, consists of scenes of conflict, tension, obstacles. In Act Two, the central character must now share the stage with others, people who would try to stop the main character from existing. In Act Two, the time of growing and gaining is brought to a halt, and the main character faces losing everything. In Snow White, she eats the apple and falls unconscious - dead to her dear friends, and it seems as if her happy story has come to an end. In Cinderella, midnight strikes and she retreats back to her cinders and it seems as if everything was only a dream that is now as cold as the ashes in her hearth. In Lord of the Rings, the main character’s best friend and guide and mentor, Gandalf, is dead and it seems as if Frodo’s entire mission is ended before it began. In Holy Week, Jesus’ Act Two is his betrayal by Judas, the passivity of his friends as he’s led away, and his death on the cross. Death is the end of our own second act - whether it is our actual physical death, or the death of a relationship, the death of a time that brought us great joy, or even the death of a dream. 

And then, of course, there’s the final act - Act Three. The stories that make us feel good, that leave us inspired and hopeful, they all have a third act. In Act Three, Snow White wakes up and looks into the eyes of her prince. Cinderella puts on the glass slipper, and becomes a real princess. Gandalf reappears and evil is defeated. Good Friday becomes Easter Sunday. Death is followed by new life.

The thing is, we never know where in the story we are. Or, even if we have a sense that we’re in Act Two, we often feel that we don’t know whether or not there will be a third act. Have you ever watched a movie with a young child - 2 or 3 or 4 years old? They don’t know about Act Three. They haven’t lived long enough. They know about Act One, but try watching a Disney movie with a young child. It’s all great until Act Two, when Snow White eats the apple, or Cinderella’s clock tolls midnight. And then! Oh my goodness - young children are shocked by Act Two, and devastated because they don’t know about Act Three! They don’t know that nobody ever dies in a Disney movie - they don’t know that the good guy always wins and the bad guys never triumph. (If you really want to mess with the psychological development of a child, turn the TV off halfway through every Disney movie - it would be appalling!) But their experience is the experience we have of living in our own stories. Us, Jesus’ disciples - we are never certain what’s going to happen next or even where we are in the story. What we thought was Act One turns out to have been the middle of Act Two, and sometimes what we thought was the end of Act Two turns out to be still only halfway through Act One. And who knows about Act Three? Which makes life alternately thrilling or terrifying. Today is Palm Sunday - a thrilling day as Jesus entrance into Jerusalem and heralds the coming of the kingdom of God. Today is also called Passion Sunday - a terrifying day as Jesus embarks on the week that will end in his crucifixion. Our stories - our lives - are thrilling or terrifying depending on whether we expect there will be a third act. 

There is, of course, a third act to our story this week. In the story of Jesus, Act Three takes place a week from now, when the tomb is emptied and Christ is given new life. Act Three is the sun rising again after the darkness and night of Act Two. But this Act Three is not restricted just to Jesus. God has written our stories so that we, too, will experience the same Act Three. Unlike young children who don’t know how the movie will end, we do. God sent Jesus to give us a peek at the ending of our own story, so that we might be thrilled, and not terrified. Easter Sunday is the movie spoiler that tell us how things will end for us. 

And since we know what our Act Three will be, it means that we live out Acts One and Two differently. It means that we live through Act One with humility and gratitude, knowing that whatever gains we have made and growth we have achieved, none of it will last forever. Act One is not the end of the story. On the flip side, we live through Act Two with strength and endurance. All of the losses and death we experience, none of this will last forever either. Act Two is also not the end of the story. We can do all of this because Act Three is the end, and it is an ending that God writes, which means it is an ending that ends in God. Our story is Jesus’ story. Our story is the story of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and finally Easter, of celebration and achievement, of loss and death, and of new life. So, whether you in your own story are currently in Act One or Act Two or you can’t even tell, I invite you this week to enter into the story of Jesus, and to receive the comfort of knowing that God has already written *your* Act Three, and it ends, like Jesus’ story, in Easter. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Lent 4 2016 - Reconciliation and Truth

So who do you identify most with in this story? The younger brother? His story is familiar to those of us with less than stellar pasts - a life of bad decisions followed by repentance and forgiveness and undeserved grace. We’re all a little bit of the younger brother, even if only in a small way. But maybe you identify more with the older brother. You’re the responsible one, who works hard no matter what, who never asks for anything in return, and who gets upset when the lazy, irresponsible sibling gets all the credit. I suspect that each of us also has that older brother inside us too from time-to-time, maybe when we’ve worked ourselves too hard, or haven’t spent enough time taking care of ourselves and too much time taking care of others. We understand his resentment and why he has those feelings towards his father and towards his younger brother.

How many of you identify with the father in this story? It’s not something we usually do. The father is a bit of a mysterious character - we don’t know why he does anything that he does, and his behaviour isn’t always the best. He enables his younger son’s irresponsible living by giving him the money he asks for, he doesn’t go out looking for him like the shepherd does with the lost sheep or the woman does with lost coin. He doesn’t actually tell his younger son that he’s forgiven when he comes back, and, as the older brother notes, he treats his two sons unequally. Why *would* we think of ourselves as the father?

Interestingly, though, when look at the details of this story, and when we place it in its larger context, and when we hear the reading from 2 Corinthians that we heard this morning, it seems that God is actually calling us to be more like the father. God is calling us to look at things from a new point of view.

The first hint we get comes from verse 4 in Luke Chapter 15. I don’t know why the lectionary cuts out the beginning of the story, but if you look at your reading, you will see we jump from verse three to verse 11 and leave out the middle. The middle is the two stories about the shepherd who had 100 sheep and lost one and went looking for it, and about the woman who had ten coins and lost one and went to find it. And these stories start with Jesus saying, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them....” And this story of the father and the two sons is also about someone losing something. By comparing us to the shepherd in the first story, Jesus is calling us to consider ourselves as people who have lost something, and as people who are called to find what we have lost. And in the case of the father and the two sons, with the father having lost one son to “dissolute living” and in danger of losing the older son by not appreciating him, Jesus calls us to think of ourselves as the father - “There was a father who had two sons.” Specifically, Jesus calls us to be the father who welcomes the lost, dissolute son, as well as the father who goes out into the yard to search for the older son, another lost one, to bring him back into the house. Jesus calls us to be the father who searches for those who feel like they aren’t part of the family, to remind them that they always will be.

Which is what Paul is saying in his second letter to the Corinthians. Paul says that God has “given us the ministry of reconciliation,” and that “we are ambassadors for Christ.” Paul is saying that we are called, like the father in Jesus’ story, to be people who go out into the world searching for others in order to make God’s family whole again. God is calling us to be ambassadors of reconciliation. To be reconcilers.

Which sounds pretty good to me! I want to be a reconciler. I want to help people reconcile with one another. I want to be reconciled to people. I want everyone to be one big happy family. Don’t we all?

Except that it’s hard. Being a reconciler, and being reconciled with the people in our lives that we’re alienated from - it’s hard work. It’s hard because to reconcile others to one another, we need to be ourselves reconciled, with God and with those in our lives.

And that is not easy because it requires us to be truthful about our relationships with God and with one another. We have to speak the truth and listen to the truth. Reconciliation is about right relationships, and we can’t have relationships that are built on dishonesty or secrets, because we can’t be in relationships with people if we are not our true selves. So truth is critical to reconciliation. We have to face up to the truth of our own role in the breaking down of whatever relationship isn’t working, and we have to speak the truth about the other’s role in the breakdown. Psalm 32 says, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.” When we don’t speak the truth, we suffer. As painful as the truth might be, refusing to speak about it causes even more suffering. “For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” When we don’t speak the truth about a situation, resentments simmer, anger eats away at us, guilt builds. It’s toxic. Speaking the truth is the beginning of healing, the beginning of reconciliation: the younger son spoke the truth about what he had done - “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you” - and even the older son spoke the truth, “I have been working like a slave for you, and yet you have never given me even a young goat.” I don’t think that either one of them had an easy time with that. Speaking the truth is one of the bravest things we are called to do in this world because first it means admitting that we have caused pain to someone else, and then it means admitting that there are deep, unhealed wounds within ourselves. Speaking the truth about relationships means admitting that we are connected to the other, and that that connection makes us vulnerable to one another and that that vulnerability can lead to pain.

But, as the Psalm says, when we speak the truth, things change for the better. “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” Speaking the truth about the disrupted relationships in our lives, acknowledging that things are, in fact, not okay, leads to reconciliation. And when we speak the truth to God, even if that truth is “God, I am angry at you sometimes,” or, “God, I feel abandoned by you sometimes,” even when we say those things, God reaches out to us and brings us in and reconciles us to God’s self through Christ, reaffirming that no matter what, God remains in relationship with us. The same way that the father responded to the truth the older son spoke, by saying, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours,” God responds to our truth by saying, “Child, no matter what you feel towards me, you are always my child, and my grace is always with you.” God reaches out to us in reconciliation, as the father reached out to his older son. The first step in being reconciled and in being ambassadors of reconciliation is to both speak and hear the truth, and in that truth to affirm the relationship that exists.

Now - did you notice that in that one response of the father to his son, the father reminds the son of how important each person was to the family as a whole? He starts by saying, “Son, you are always with me.” Son is a reminder that the one standing outside of the house has a relationship with the father. And then he says, “we had to celebrate ... because this brother of yours...” The father doesn’t say, “because of my other son,” he says, “because of your brother.” Your brother. A reminder to the one standing in the yard that he also has a relationship with his brother. They are a family. They have relationships that needed to be reconciled - between one son and the father, between the other son and the father, and between the two sons - brothers - themselves.

God calls us first to be children reconciled with our God - to speak the truth to God and to hear God’s words of reconciliation in return - and then to be reconciled with one another, to speak the truth to one another and have compassion - and then God calls us to be the father in the story and help others to reconcile with one another - again, by speaking the truth and by reminding others of the relationships they have with each other. This is not easy work. I’m sure it was not easy for the father to leave the party for his younger son to go out and find his older son, and it certainly couldn’t have been easy for him to listen to his son tell him that he was a slave-driver who didn’t appreciate his son’s work and to hear that his other son had spent all his inheritance on prostitutes. It particularly couldn’t have been easy accept what his son told him and then to respond with love. None of this is easy. But God does all of these things for us first, coming out to look for us as we stand apart in our resentment, hearing our truth and reconciling us to God’s self through Christ, reminding us that we are God’s children forever and connected to our brothers and sisters, so that we in turn might serve the world in the same ministry of reconciliation, not counting anyone’s trespasses against them, sharing the steadfast love of God that we have first received ourselves, and reminding others that they, too, are our brothers and sisters, all together children of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.