we want a winner

 We want a winner 041314

Matthew 21:1-11

We all want to win.  We all want a winner on our side or as our leader or our President or as our child. 

Our society has taught us that what’s important is power and control and winning and living large.  And we’ve made that our theology…..what one writer calls a theology of glory, which shows up in our need to have God be in control and always winning, punishing with eventual hell and rewarding with eventual heaven.  Pain and suffering are necessary to win.

No pain no gain…..Winning in athletics, for example, of course costs something:  not just sore muscles, but damage to family and psyche and society.  It’s the price of winning—eye always on the prize.

Today, on palm Sunday, the theology of glory leads us to wave palm branches, and then jump straight to Easter Sunday….eye on the prize, God wins.

True as far as it goes.  But it doesn’t work for me.  The week between PS and ES is real.  Between parade and party lies passion, suffering.  I need a deeper theology….what Luther called the theology of the cross.

Theology of the cross is more concerned with what looks like failure, not winning, with what seems to be disaster, and the absence of God in our desperate and despairing times.  

The people at the palm parade were looking for a winner, because they were desperate and despairing, but they had a clear winner theology and a certain idea of what the winner would look like and do—heal their hurt, trample the occupying forces and give them their independence back.

And what does Jesus do?  Shows up on a donkey.  Already the glory theology is being challenged. Sure, some may have remembered the old prophecy about their savior coming on a donkey, as Matthew later projects, but these weren’t the learned and elite; they were busy greeting Pilate arriving in another parade of glory, with horses, and soldiers and power and glory.

The people at this parade come, like us, with needs, some physical or mental, some social—Hosanna, save us!  Help! 

The forces of death still seem to be prominent in OUR empire today.  Like them, we see sorrow, and humiliation, and disgrace and injustice all over the place.  And it’s real.  As real today as it was for those parade go-ers and Jesus 2000 years ago.  We too seek to transcend that, sometimes by holding fast to Easter, even as a secular holiday, sometimes with practices like meditation and yoga, hoping against hope that winning will win.  We cling more tightly to our theology of winning, that something we can do, or something bigger and more powerful than us, will make it all better. 

But these coming 7 days tell us otherwise.  They call us back to a deeper spiritual reality.  And offer us a just-as-real, but deeper hope.

That reality is that new life, new hope, always involves sacrifice, not the no-pain-no-gain kind, that is self-centered, but sacrifice that is self-giving, other-centered.   The kind of sacrifice we’ve seen historically in the 60s human rights deaths, or in the struggle to be rid of apartheid in SA, or peacemakers in foreign lands.  The eye on the prize here isn’t all about me and my winning. Sometimes the self-giving comes in acts of com-passion (quote from Spiritual Literacy)

Nothing new and meaningful comes without self-giving, and it’s no cheap hope that’s offered here-to that crowd nor to us today.  You see, what’s on offer following the com-passion Jesus way means dying…

Dying to the self that pretends

Dying to the certainty that I can go it alone, or that its all about me

Dying to control

Dying to who we think we are

And living….

Living into the true self that knows it is part of something much bigger

Living into the uncertainty of trusting others

Living into giving up control to God’s way

Living into a new identity of compassion, instead of winning.

Not easy.  Sometimes painful, often arduous, and certainly countercultural.  No wonder few follow.

But it’s FULL, abundant, often joyful life, because we go through suffering knowing that death doesn’t have the last word.  Life does.

Here in Jesus we find the answer to our need….not the answer we think we need.

Here in God’s way we find real hope amid real pain.

So what’s your theology?   The theology of glory, of winning.   The all-American dream theology.

Or the theology of the cross, of self-giving, of compassion.

Really?

The question in our last hymn is a real one.  We live in a world of hurt and injustice.  A world Jesus came to touch and heal through compassion, not winning.   Will we answer as he calls us?