When Stones Cry Out - Palm Sunday; Luke 19:28-40

Many of you know that my favorite way to forget about the anxieties and dilemmas that life is throwing at us these days is to ride my bike. Sometimes it is Fridays, most often on Saturdays, and when I can on Sundays if I return home in time after a visit to a church. The routes I usually take are either somewhere along or adjacent to the River Trail or a ride to and around the airport, the latter taking place because, well, the road around an airport is going to be flat. 

 For the most part the rides are a lot of fun, but there is one patch that always makes me a little uneasy, and that is at the corner of Cross and Markham Streets. That is where the Salvation Army is located, and there are always people outside it, rain or shine, cold or hot, some of them tucked under an overhead covering at a doorway and others on the sidewalk with all their possessions on display. It is an assemblage of blankets and sleeping bags and rain tarps and clamshell food containers. I am uneasy not because I am afraid, but because I can see them, and they can see me, they with so little and me with so much. I am always wishing that they would be inside the Salvation Army building, where the walls would hide the great gulf that separates them from me. Then my unease would disappear.  

 Walls are such convenient things. Behind them we feel safe. They hide that which we don’t want to see as well as that which we don’t want seen. Down the street from me a new house is being built, and at one point what seemed to be the future living room window facing the street is now bricked in, a window turned into a wall. A very nice pattern that the brick mason has made of the bricks, I might add, but I wonder what the buyer wants to be protected from: being seen or seeing.  

 For thousands of years cities had literal walls that kept those on the inside safe from those on the outside. It is such a wall surrounding Jerusalem that Jesus and his disciples pass through as they enter the city amidst the shouts of a people who want something better in their lives than what those in power are willing to give. Listen carefully to that last sentence: people who want something better in their lives than those in power are willing to give.  

 It had been a long and intentional trip toward Jerusalem for Jesus, taking somewhere between one and three years, if we trust the narrative of the gospels, and what Jesus’ presence inside the walls does is to offer an uncomfortable vision of the future that those in power do not want to face. They want to keep their own kingdom safe from those want something better. It is why, when the people shout that the king is coming in the name of the Lord, those inside the walls tell Jesus to command his followers to shut up. And did you notice what Jesus replies? “If these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  

 In the gospels, the words attributed to Jesus are often a play on Old Testament themes. In this case, the reference to stones shouting is to the book of the prophet Habakkuk, whose writings, although relatively old at the time, were looked on in the era just prior to Jesus as commentaries on the life of the contemporary community and the occupying Romans. As usual, scripture is not historical relic, but current commentary. Habakkuk says that what will expose the unjust (that is, what will expose sinful humanity) is when the stones from the wall cry out, or literally when the dissembling stones crash down with a loud noise, and what had been hidden on the other side of the wall will be seen.  

 That is what Jesus is telling those in power: his entry into Jerusalem and all that will happen there, including his own suffering, is a precursor to sin being laid bare. Injustice won’t be able to hide forever. The ultimate good news of the story of Jesus and his love for those who stand outside the wall is that stones will shout and walls will come tumbling down. Or as I must tell myself, there will be no wall at the corner of Cross and Markham to hide from my own eyes the uncomfortable disparity between those who have much and those who have little. It is ultimately impossible to remain blind to the plight of people found unacceptable by the those who use their power to their own advantage. And, no, this is not a sermon about the wall between this country and Mexico; it is a sermon much closer to home, about what is blind and what is insightful in our own actions. 

 That is what this Sunday of the Passion and Holy Week are about: it is a story of what happens when human walls are built too high. People die. Come to church on Good Friday and hear the story of our own blindness, our own lack of lovingkindness made clear in the crucifixion of one who loves too much, who reaches out too far, who refuses to allow walls to continue to stand. 

 It is hard to preach a sermon on Palm Sunday or on any day of Holy Week. The reason is that for most of us Episcopal preachers, we were taught that sermons need to focus on metanoia, that change in orientation, that turning around that comes when we realize what the good news of resurrection is about. For many of us preachers, metanoia ends up meaning discovering happiness, or more generically, feeling good about ourselves, as if we have made a discovery in therapy. But the good news refuses to be focused on how we feel about ourselves. 

There is not much good news in Holy Week, just as there is not much good news in many weeks as we continue to observe, and often participate in, a world gone mad.  I will be honest. I am not certain when stones will shout, when walls in this society will come tumbling down, when everyone will be seen as a child of God. Way too many of us love walls and prefer silence.  

 But all the same, we wait and we hope. There is even hope in what we will hear in the Good Friday prayers: that people might seek justice, that the will to serve will be stirred up in us, that hearts will be opened.  And I am hopeful that there is at least one more stone that will shout. It is the stone that will groan as it rolls away from the face of a tomb and allows us to look on the other side at what unconditional love can do: that is, give new life to what we have too long assumed was hidden and worthless and not worth keeping alive. Amen.