...Song In Progress

Brad Sullivan

Palm Sunday, Year A

Sunday, April 13, 2014

St. Mark’s, Bay City, TX

Matthew 21:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16

Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14- 27:66

Episcopal priest and author, Chuck Meyer, summarized scripture as “God’s search for humankind and humankind’s rejection of that attempt to communicate, to heal, to love, to reconcile, to reconnect.” (Dying Church, Living God)  Realizing that God’s search for us also bears fruit, there is a lot of rejection of God on our part.  He said it must have been frightening for Jesus, knowing, based our history for rejecting God, that people would ultimately reject him. 

People wanted Jesus to do it all for them, but Jesus constantly turned the responsibility back onto them.  You heal them; you feed them, Jesus said. 

Ultimately, he became a threat to the political establishment and to the religious establishment.  He was unsettling, revolutionary, radical in his belief…He saw the universe from a totally different perspective, one that confronted the culture’s prejudices and the religious establishment’s smug certainty about the nature of God…He demanded justice, equality, and above all, love.  So because the culture and the religious establishment felt threatened by him, it was inevitable that Jesus would die. (Dying Church, Living God)

People rejected God, yet again in rejecting Jesus, and yet, killing Jesus didn’t put a stop to God’s reaching out to us through Jesus.  Instead, “the power of God exploded out from him and imploded into everything and everyone, permanently and indelibly.”  (Dying Church, Living God)  God took our rejection of him and used it to be with us even more fully. 

That is the full story of scripture, our rejection of God and God using our rejection to unite with us ever more fully.  It’s a story that keeps on happening over and over throughout scripture and ever since scripture.  Looking particularly at humanity’s propensity for stopping people through whom God is speaking, only to have God’s message explode out more fully through the person’s death, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was killed because God was speaking through him and being a threat to established society, and when he was killed, his message and God’s work exploded out of him and imploded into our society. 

There are countless other stories like this of God speaking through people, those people being silenced, and God’s message breaking out even more strongly.  There are countless stories in the church’s life and in individuals’ lives of God’s presence and power alive and active in their lives.  Sometimes God works through people, bringing healing, reconciliation, and love.  Sometimes God works in ways we don’t know or understand, bringing healing, reconciliation, and love.

A friend of mine has a daughter and when she was two, she wasn't talking much, so they were sitting around one day talking gibberish to each other.  The grandmother was there too, and years before, she had prayed for and received a prayer language.  The language is unknown, and she doesn't know what she is saying.  It is like stories in scripture where God's Spirit speaks through people in languages they don't understand.  My friend prays this language in private, the words praying to God those things on her heart, things of which she may not even be aware, the "sighs too deep for words."

So, the two year old daughter and her mother were speaking gibberish to each other, and the grandmother, not being overly adept at gibberish, begins speaking to her granddaughter in the prayer language.  When they were all finished, the granddaughter looks at her grandmother and clearly says, "yes."  No one knows what was said, but the granddaughter understood what her grandmother was praying.

My point is this:  the stories of scripture are still being written.  The story of God reaching out to us, of us often rejecting God, and of God using our rejection to reach out to us even further is a story which God continues to write in each successive generation, in all of our lives.  We’ve all got stories of God’s healing, reconciliation, and love in our lives; we’ve all got stories of people bringing healing, reconciliation, and love in our lives. 

These stories are our scripture.  We’ll go little “s” on this scripture.  The stories of the Bible are still the Holy Scriptures of the church, Holy Scripture for all of us, and the stories of God continuing to heal and reconcile and love in our lives are also our stories, our scriptures.  We need to tell our stories, share with each other the scripture that is still being written. 

God’s power and presence has imploded into us.  In God, we live and move and have our being.  Nowhere we can go will remove us from his presence, nothing we can do will separate us from God’s love.  As often as we personally or humanity may try, nothing will stop God writing his story in our lives.  Not killing Jesus, not killing countless prophets since Jesus, not running from God’s message, not stuffing cotton in our ears, nothing will stop God writing his story of healing, reconciliation, and love.  God’s healing, reconciliation, and love is our story, our song, a song still in progress.  Amen.