Series: April 2023
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
"Choose Your Own Adventure"
First Reading
Matthew 21:1-11
21When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2saying to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. 3If anyone says anything to you, just say this, “The Lord needs them.” And he will send them immediately.’ 4This took place to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
5 ‘Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’
6The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
‘Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!’
10When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’ 11The crowds were saying, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’
Second Reading
Philippians 2:5-8
5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death —
even death on a cross.
Choose Your Own Adventure
There used to be a book series called “Choose Your Own Adventure.” In these books, rather than reading straight through, at various points the reader got to make choices for the characters. You were subsequently sent to different pages in the book and ultimately different stories. Today, you get to choose where we start. Here are your choices: Would you rather begin with the wisdom of A) Henri Nouwen, well-known theologian and writer who taught at institutions such as Notre Dame as well as the divinity schools of Yale and Harvard, or B) Our very own Gil Brook, known for being a faithful attendee of our Wednesday class, someone you can count on sitting up front during the 8:30 service, and an all-around good guy. For being good sports, no matter which you choose I’ll also tell you why it appears Jesus is riding two donkeys in the first reading you heard.
(If choosing A, proceed below, if B just swap opening and closing, and reorder body)
You’ve chosen to go with Gil. At one of the aforementioned Wednesday classes, we were talking about the Christian notion of freedom. I had made the point that Christian freedom is not simply freedom-from, but as many theologians have pointed out, Christian freedom is also freedom-for. It’s not just freedom-from restriction, it’s freedom-for a life of Christlike love and service. Gil put it more memorably. He said, “Do you remember in the movie Braveheart”—Braveheart, that film about William Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, who led a Scottish rebellion for independence against King Edward I of England—“when Mel Gibson yells ‘Freedom’? I always want to chime in, “…and responsibility!” Freedom and responsibility belong together.
Jesus rode into Jerusalem of his own free will, just as he conducted his entire ministry of his own free will, unless you count being compelled by the Spirit. Presumably beyond the streets lined with some of his followers he would have noticed the crosses that dotted the hillside. Presumably he had the freedom to choose otherwise, to preserve his life, to avoid danger, to avoid standing up and witnessing against the systems in his time that propagated harm, that lacked integrity. He could have avoided ridicule and rejection. But, with freedom comes responsibility. With freedom comes obedience. Otherwise, freedom is just a synonym for being self-centered and short-sighted, frankly, because being self-centered eventually collapses in on the self.
A freedom-from mentality plagues our culture, and all cultures have their shortcomings and strengths. Freedom is seen only an as absence of restriction, an absence of obligation to anyone or anything else, an almost gloating permission to center one’s own desires. It’s so strong in our culture you will hear people express it without any awareness that there could even be another way. It’s assumed. That’s how you know it’s a norm.
I’ll give you a simple example, not as loaded as some of the more harmful manifestations we see in society. I was listening to sports radio one morning this week and the host was warning against professional sports leagues giving too much power to the players—an interesting topic in and of itself. He said: “Take player A, who has moved to a couple teams. He doesn’t care about this team or that team.” But that wasn’t the critique. He continued. “He cares about himself first as he should.” As he should. To the host the point was there was a need to do something to counteract self-centered behavior (of the players but not owners mind you), but there was no sense of actually questioning the notion we should be self-centered. He went on to say: “I work for ESPN [a sports network] and I’ve loved my time there, but my first responsibility is to me.” If you’re thinking, “Of course we put ourselves first,” you’re proving the point. The point it not to make your job your first priority—that’s its own sickness in our culture. The point is the individual or even individual family is not the fundamental unit of life. Humanity isn’t even the fundamental unit, but that’s a sermon for another day.
Look at Jesus, it’s virtually impossible to make the case that his message was that your life was all about you, yet that’s precisely what some Christianity has become warped to teach. Yes, there is freedom in Christ, but with that freedom comes responsibility. Yes, it is said Jesus taught as if he had the authority of God (Mt. 7:29), but he lived in obedience to something beyond himself, even if found deep within himself. Call it what you will, obedience to God, obedience to a way. Some people struggle with the notion of God—and they should—but the scriptures say God is love (1 Jn. 4:8), so work with that. People talk about love all the time, but love ultimately points beyond the self. Yes, you love yourself. It’s an important step, a necessary step, but it’s not the only fully realized in relation to others. We are more whole in whole relationship. The larger self is found in connection, in connection with God, with Spirit, with others, with creation. The small self sees itself in competition with these.
I don’t share any of this to beat up on you as individuals. This is bigger than any of us. The point is to pull us out to gain some critical distance from the stories we’ve been told about life and consider how they may not be true. Life may not, after all, be all about me my “right” to do whatever I want with no consciousness of effect on you. Rather, life is about recognizing we are fundamentally and wonderfully connected, which is what we truly want, to feel deeply and meaningfully connected. Do you know what the natural extension of a freedom-from only mentality is, the natural extension? What happened in a Christian school in Nashville this week, another school shooting. If it were not the natural extension, it would be an aberration, and if it were an aberration it wouldn’t happen so often. This was the 13thschool shooting this year[1]and the 377thor 378th(I can’t tell when that stat was tallied) since Columbine.[2] That is the natural extension of a culture that puts a freedom-from mindset at the center of its collective life.
Try telling Jesus that life is about freedom-from as he rode into Jerusalem to express his freedom-for others, obedient to a higher calling. His free path was one of obedience and responsibility. It’s not all misery, though. Remember the sermon on the mount is rooted in what makes one blessed, happy. That’s the paradox.
How will you use your freedom? That’s the question Jesus presents. The second passage for today, from Philippians, is called “The Christ Hymn” and it’s considered the oldest such hymn in the entire New Testament. In it, Christ shows us what he does with ultimate freedom and ultimate authority.
Philippians 2:5-8
5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death —
even death on a cross.
Jesus emptied himself. The Greek word is κενόωfrom which we get kenosis. Jesus empties himself of his equality with God in order to become obedient even to the point of death. His life is pledged in allegiance not to some group or figure or state, but to God, Spirit, to the reign of love.
Nobody forced this upon Jesus, and nobody is here to force you. No threat of hell or damnation. That’s small-minded religion. It negates true free choice. You can go out and live your life however you choose and face whatever the consequences of your choices, but you must know the consequences of your choices are often more powerfully felt by others. We choose hell freely with the way we choose to use our freedom, not just as individuals, but as a people.
Now, do you want to hear about why Jesus is riding two donkeys? This may sound like a change of subject, but it ties in. I may have shared this before, but it’ll be new to some of you, and at first it may feel like it’s undercutting the biblical tradition, but it’s actually quite beautiful. In Matthew’s version of the Palm Sunday story, Jesus tells his disciples to go get “a donkey tied, and a colt…they brought the donkey and the colt…and he sat onthem” (21:2, 7). Maybe it happened that way, though Mark and Luke describe it as only one animal. Likely what is happening is that Matthew is telling the Jesus story through the images and motifs of the prophets rather than providing a strictly documentary account of what happened. This is how the ancients told stories, to convey meaning. Specifically, he’s drawing on Zechariah 9:9:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
But Matthew doesn’t understand Hebrew poetry and so rather than recognizing how repetition is used, he mistakenly thinks it’s a donkey and a colt, rather than a donkey commaa colt.
This may rattle the modern hearer, but remember the point of the gospel story is not actually to describe what happened; it’s to convey a deeper truth. The question is not if the story is true, but what about the story is true. Matthew likely places Jesus within the prophecies he’s been given, just as Luke and Mark did, as an expression of his and his community’s conviction about the truth of who Jesus is. And, it also may have happened in some form in that way.
Here’s the tie in. Their way of telling the Jesus story is a perfect example of living a spiritual life of both freedom and obedience. Here are these new followers of Jesus, still existing a few decades after Jesus’ death—that’s when Matthew was written. They’ve broken free of their mother tradition to some degree, yet they don’t simply manifest their new faith as only a freedom-from. They anchor their newfound freedom in something deeper, a new understanding of their tradition. They are obedient to this way of Christ, this way which in some ways raises the ante of their obedience, and they express an obedience to their ancestors and their wisdom, by weaving their story into their own. Furthermore, they demonstrate a responsibility to those who will come after, by writing these stories down and passing them on, as they did their practices and way of life. Freedom and responsibility, authority and obedience.
When we read “Chose Your Own Adventure” books, we always kept our fingers in all the options so we could see how other choices played out, so I’ll tell you what Nouwen said, and it’s related. Nouwen said, just like we have to hold freedom and responsibility together, we have to hold authority and obedience together. If some people have all the authority and others are sentenced to all the obedience you have a perversion, oppression. Both sides exist in what Nouwen calls “great spiritual danger” because they exist in a wider imbalance.[3] The destruction we see in the world is always the result of this imbalance. Christ embodies all of the balances essential to our communal living. Follow him and you will find it.
You can choose your own adventure, but it will shape others’ journey too.
Amen.
[1]https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2023/01
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/
[3]https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/authority-and-obedience/