March 28 Palm Sunday
“Want it tomorrow? Order by this afternoon at 2 p.m. for next day delivery.” Words similar to those are on just about every website these days from booksellers to high-end retailers selling designer clothing. We have become a nation, indeed a world that is increasingly and immediately connected. Fly over the Memphis airport and look at the FedEx planes ready to take off to the far corners of the world each night so that those “wish fulfillment” centers can fill the holes in our wardrobes or perhaps more hopefully, fill the holes in our hearts as we buy something that will make us happy.
And it is not simply tangibles. Relationships are begun, continued, and sometimes ended online in the course of a month, whereas only a few years ago people had to take time to get to know one another personally, gradually teasing out the details of another’s life before deciding to settle down with that someone.
I have to say that the new technologies are nothing short of miraculous. And the church ought to be excited by this new world in which we live because we are in the relationship business; indeed, part of the call of the church is to restore all people to unity with each other, and it is possible to do so now in ways never before imagined.
But there is a downside. The recent financial debacle was in part the result of being able to scratch an itch all too easily. But more importantly, we have lost what I can only call contextualization. The church has become an institution where decisions made in one part of the world draw immediate responses from other parts of the world, the filters of time and context no longer operative. Governments now work on what we call the 24-hour news cycle, and voices are raised in anger before we have a chance to reflect on what is taking place. The operative position these days is to strike quickly lest we lose. It is simply a new way to wage a war of winners and losers, that age-old story that the church long argued against. We have not learned how to wait; we have not learned how to put things in perspective. And thus, in an age in which connections are so much more intricate and immediate than they used to be, the kingdom of God is just as distant as ever.
Today is the story of what it looks like to wait for the kingdom of God. It is a story that reflects the reality of our lives. Wishes are not fulfilled. Pain and disappointment are real. Death still inexorably comes. And all the technology of the world cannot overcome it. The quick fixes don’t fix anything in the end. The sword drawn in anger achieves nothing. The crowd demanding that something be done now solves little.
I find myself wanting the kingdom of God to be made apparent now. I want a church that is praised for its immediate mercy. I want a society that is just. I want relationships that are fulfilling. But the story of this day is that those things do not come when and as we want them. The kingdom of God is not here in the form that we want it and when we want it.
There is a lot that is going on in today’s gospel: holiday meals eaten together, betrayals of friends, court cases where justice is illusory, frantic bystanders calling for blood, death and destruction at its most gruesome. In some ways it is the story of our own age, and that is one reason it is Holy Scripture. But Luke says that in the midst of all that is taking place, in the midst of unbearable sorrow (perhaps like what we feel when things don’t work out as we want them to, when our wishes are not fulfilled), a guy named Joseph of Arimathea is waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. All he can do while he waits is bury the dead. No problems solved, no triumphs proclaimed; he simply does the right thing, makes the gesture as he waits expectantly for the kingdom of God.
At the end of Jesus’ life someone still waits expectantly for the kingdom of God in the midst of unbelievable calamity. It is not the first time that Luke has played on this theme. He tells us at the beginning of his gospel, when the baby Jesus, born in a stable, is brought to the Temple, that Jesus encounters Simeon, a man who is looking forward to the consolation of Israel. And then Jesus in that same Temple precinct meets Anna, who Luke tells us, has as her apparently self appointed role the act of speaking to anyone who is looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.
These are Luke’s bookends to the life of Jesus, and they are Luke’s teaching for us. At Jesus’ birth people were looking. At his death people were still looking, waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. Holy wishes not yet fulfilled, holy wishes not yet made apparent. And in your lives and my life what we ultimately do this Palm Sunday is not grand, as in a parade; we simply wait expectantly for the kingdom of God. That is what we do when we can’t have everything we want as soon as we want it. That is the holy place to be. Luke is telling us that it is a process that takes a lifetime, from the day we are born to the day we die, from the day we see a brand new infant with all the potential in the world until the day we see tombs filled with the bodies of the dead. The kingdom is not here yet, at least in the form we want it.
Today may contain a sad story, but today is about hope. It is what we have when the holes in our hearts are not filled, but we know somewhere in our gut that we are loved unconditionally. It is what we have when things don’t work out the way we had planned. Was Israel consoled during Simeon’s lifetime? Was Jerusalem redeemed during Anna’s? Read any day’s newspaper and it appears to be a wish yet to be fulfilled. Will we find the kingdom of God in our lives? I am going to tell you that it is not likely to come quickly or easily. We are going to have take part in some burials of so many kinds. But I am also going to tell you to wait expectantly. Seven days or seven months or seven years, I am not certain. When we least expect it, I am confident that there is going to be a tomb found empty, needed no more. Amen.