Make Joy Complete

John 12:12-16; Philippians 2:1-13

April 14, 2019

About 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul wrote this incredible challenge to the young church trying to follow the way of Jesus in Philippi: “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.” For Paul, that was joy in completeness.

Thomas Merton, about a half century or so ago, wrote this challenge to contemporary followers of Jesus in a North American context: “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how to comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identify of any person.”

Between these two answer.

For Jesus, the answer to the first question – what are you living for – was “living fully into will of God as a fully human being.” As Holy Week progresses, you can see a gradual shift in his answer to the second question – what is keeping you from that goal. On Palm Sunday, the noise and adulation of the crowd must have been a distraction. It’s hard to feel fully human when everyone around you is shouting “hosanna in the highest; blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“What’s keeping me from living fully into the will of God as a fully human being?” Jesus could have asked on Palm Sunday. “Well, everybody telling me that I am more than human is kinda distracting, honestly. Everybody calling me ‘lord and savior’ is getting in the way of what I’m trying to do here.”

Holy Week puts three fundamental questions square and center before us.

What are we living for?

What gets in our way?

And, for those of us who, in whole or in part, try to answer the first question with some kind of reference to Jesus, the third question remains: who is Jesus for us?

Which is also to ask, what does it mean, today, to confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?

We could travel down some historical, Christological byways together, and consider the root words from which we draw “lord” and “savior.” We’ve done this together from time to time, and found compelling connections such as that between “lord” and “loaf.” Understood that way, the feudal lord was the one who kept the bread. To be “lord” was, in part, to be responsible for feeding the community. Thus there is a direct line between Jesus saying, “I am the bread of life,” and a faithful response claiming Jesus as lord. Jesus is the one who feeds me, the one who feeds my soul.

Similarly, and, again, familiar to us, we could look at the original political context of the ancient confession and note that confessing Christos Curios – Christ is Lord – was a direct and explicitly political subversion of the Roman pledge of allegiance, “Caesar Curios” – or Caesar is lord.

We could explore those links and roots in depth, and it might be interesting and fruitful to do so, but I’m not going there this morning.

I believe that we live our entire lives as if on a high wire stretched out between palms and passion, kept balanced on this wire by our real hope of resurrection, and by the real experience of rising again when we fall.

Confessing Jesus gives the journey meaning and grounds it in a story of rising, falling, and rising again. That is to say, confessing Jesus grounds our lives in hope, and, as Harvey Milk so famously insisted, you cannot live without hope.

Hope is an orientation of the spirit, and it is a choice that we make … or do not make.

Each of us has countless opportunities to embody such hope every single day. We do not have to do so. We can react to the news of the day or the circumstances of our lives with cynical detachment or with despair, with anger or with fear.

I choose hope.

I rarely look to the world of sports for illustrations for sermons, despite being a life-long fan of most games and participant in many, but the UVA men’s basketball team’s national championship last week is local enough to garner attention beyond hoop heads, and extraordinary enough, as a narrative, to be compelling. Personally, I really enjoyed texting back and forth with our daughter during the championship game. She was with a group of friends in the packed on-campus arena watching the game on the big screen in c’ville as it was being played in Minneapolis.

Her messages to me included:

“This is crazy.”

“I’m so stressed.”

“Oh.”

“My.”

“God.”

All of our conversations are theological.

It was that kind of game. But absent context, it was, really, just another ballgame. The context, in case you missed it, was simple. This same group of young men were supposed to be the best college team in the country this time last year. But in their first game of the tournament last year they got blown out by a team from a school no one outside of Baltimore had ever heard of.

The UVA kids were not only roundly mocked, they actually received death threats and had to have police escorts to and from the hotel where they were staying that weekend.

It would have been so easy to give up and give in, to make excuses, to be angry, to despair.

They chose hope, and they practiced it for an entire year.

It’s an orientation of the spirit that is available to every one of us, even though we live, so clearly, in a Good Friday kind of world. Choosing hope is the only choice available if what you want, in the end, is to come close to the mind of Christ.

Of course, hope is difficult in a world that sees way more of Good Friday than of Easter.

Only in a Good Friday kind of world would college kids receive death threats over the outcome of a basketball game.

Granted, I don’t know a whole lot about death threats, having never made any. I have, however, been on the receiving end of them for public stands and news stories about marriage equality and the rights of GLBTQIA friends. I’ve received unkind missives, random voice mails, and at least one late-night threat message left on the church’s phone.

Those letters and phone calls directed my way never made any more sense to me, coming in response to news about our little community here, than threats against basketball players. I reckon anger and frustration and disappointment drive people to say and do a lot of thoughtless things.

I also know that the angry, frustrated, and disappointed people who pointed thoughtless expression my way included people who said that they followed Jesus, and that they left their messages in Jesus’ name.

In their time in churches they must have missed the passage from Philippians we just read – that part where Paul exhorts the church to “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”

Yeah, I don’t think they heard that part. Or, they chose not to pay it any heed.

Now it’s easy enough for us to dismiss and deride people who make death threats, whether against outspoken pastors or college athletes.

But, if we pay attention at all to the Holy Week story, we’ll see pretty quickly that the shouts of “hosanna in the highest” on Palm Sunday turn to “crucify him” by Friday. Some of the same folks were probably in both crowds.

On Palm Sunday, they were choosing hope in response to the challenging circumstances of their lives, but by the end of the week they were surrendering to fear and anger.

Most of us would not likely answer Thomas Merton’s first question – what are you living for – with, “well, I kinda like living in fear and anger and threatening people.” I believe that most of us would say, “I prefer a Palm Sunday kind of life: singing praise and shouting my support and commitment to the one who feeds me.”

We live on the high wire strung between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, striving to “make joy complete,” on the one hand, and being completely overwhelmed by grief or disappointment or anger on the other.

How do we stay on the wire and not tumble to a very rocky landing?

How do we live into hope in the face of hopelessness?

How do we make joy complete?

In the end, all we really have are our own commitments, made in solidarity with a community trying to follow the way of Jesus. We have our own stories, our own lives stretched between palms and passion, between celebration and suffering, between birth and death, between falling down and rising again, and again, and again.

Sometimes the rising up is just in a game. Sometimes it is in far more serious circumstances. Sometimes the games we play are our ways of practicing for those more serious circumstances.

So, what are you living for? What’s getting in the way?

Through this Holy Week, strive to make joy complete. Amen.