Love Leans In - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

It is good to be with you on this Palm Sunday.

If you are a guest, welcome.

If this is your first time here, my name is Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here.

And seriously, come see Vicki afterwards.

She would love to give you a gift.

And I want to sort of

 Give us just a quick recap of where we've been through this season of Lent.

It's also all for me to do that since I was away last week.

On spring break, went to Phoenix, Arizona, watched some spring training baseball with the family.

It was 108 on Tuesday.

Cool front.

Cool front.

 Pastor Anthony said.

Not in March, apparently.

Set records for March temperatures.

But it was lovely being in the desert.

In all of Lent, we've been sort of asking a very simple question.

What does love, or specifically divine love, actually look like?

What does it look like?

Not the...

 idea of love or even a broad definition of love, the thing itself.

What does divine love look like?

What is the shape of it?

What does that love do when it shows up in the world?

 So week after week after week through this season of Lent, we followed Jesus through stories that keep redefining the edges of love.

Each week the picture has gotten a little more clear and unfortunately I think a little more demanding of us.

And I've noticed something about this divine love revealed through Christ.

This divine love

 At its essence is movement.

 This divine love closes the gap.

It doesn't admire or care from a safe distance.

It is a love that moves towards us.

Now, as United Methodists, we believe that this love, this divine love, grace, this grace is moving towards us, and it is a sign that God is always initiating, always pursuing, always revealing, always moving towards us.

 We call that pervenient grace, and it is a part of our theology, and I believe it is unique to a Wesleyan way of thinking.

It is unique to think that God, before we're even aware of it, is moving towards us.

We don't have to earn that movement.

We don't have to do the right thing for God to move towards us.

 But really, it can also be boiled down, I think, into two simple things.

And it's really the reason we're all here, hopefully.

The reason we claim Christ as Lord.

Essentially, there are two simple things to being a faithful Christian.

Acknowledging two simple things.

And one is the reality that we cannot save ourselves.

We can't do it.

 And once we realize that, we seek to model our life after the one who can.

We can't save ourselves.

 Jesus is the only one that can save us, all of creation.

And because we believe that, then we seek to live like Christ.

And yet loving, truly loving like Christ is way more difficult than reading scripture or waving palms or showing up to church because we are pretty good at loving things from a distance.

 Cities, people, communities, causes.

We think about them.

We pray for them.

We mean well towards them.

We'll change our profile picture on Facebook to signify how much we love a place or a person or a cause.

And, well, it can feel rather performative at times.

Because something...

 Somewhere between the caring and the actual closing of the gap, something in us hesitates because loving from a distance is safer.

You can hold the feeling without bearing the cost.

You can care deeply and still feel rather protected from what that caring might actually require of you or the pain that loving something or someone will or can afflict upon you.

 And so on this Palm Sunday, and like every Palm Sunday, we watch this love manifest itself in Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

We watch or listen to the parade, the cloaks spread across the road we read about, the crowd at full volume, the whole electric energy of the city about to receive its king.

 And on Palm Sunday, we tend to stay right there in the parade.

It's a good parade, and there's plenty to glean from it, no doubt.

But if we follow Christ just a little farther, if we follow Christ just a little farther down the road, we find something that doesn't really belong at a parade at all.

And so I invite you to rise and embody your spirit as we read the Gospel of Luke.

 The 19th chapter, verses 28 through 44.

After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead going to Jerusalem.

And when he had come near Bethphage and Bethany at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two disciples saying, go into the village ahead of you.

 And as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden.

Untie it and bring it here.

And if anyone asks you, why are you untying it?

Just say this, the Lord needs it.

Now, I can't recommend any of us do that, but...

 So those who were sent departed and found it as he told them.

And as they were untying the colt, its owners rightfully asked them, why are you untying the colt?

And they said, well, the Lord needs it.

And then they brought it to Jesus.

And after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus upon it.

As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.

 Now as he was approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power they had seen, saying, "'Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord.

Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven.'"

 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, teacher, order your disciples to stop.

And he answered them, I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.

As he came near and saw the city.

 Jesus wept over it, saying, if you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes, indeed the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will crush you to the ground, and you and your children within you, and they will not leave.

 within you, one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.

For the Word of God in Scripture, for the Word of God among us, and for the Word of God that's within us.

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer.

 And on this day of palms and procession, open our eyes to what we might otherwise miss.

Give us the courage to follow love all the way down the road.

Amen.

 Now, like I said on Palm Sunday, the instinct is to stay right there with the parade.

And I understand that because there is real powerful theology in the parade.

And while I've mentioned in a sermon from this pulpit before that I do not love parades, there is real power in this story, this palm procession.

There's real power in the description that the author of Luke gives us, the cloaks on the road.

 The crowd at full volume, the disciples celebrating all the deeds of power they had witnessed.

There is something electric and important happening in these verses, no doubt.

But for today, I want us to follow the story, follow Jesus just a little farther down the road, past the celebration, past the noise, because just beyond the parade, we find Jesus on the side of a hill.

 And Jesus is weeping.

And it's not sort of a shy cry.

It's not hiding grief, trying to look strong.

The Greek here, ekklesin, means deep, heaving, wailing type of grief.

 It's audible.

It's loud.

It's the type of crying that when you encounter out in the real world, when you see it in someone, your first instinct is to just go the other way because it's so uncomfortable.

And what...

 Jesus says in the middle of all of this is rather haunting.

If you, even you, Jesus says, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace, Jesus is not angry here in the text.

Jesus is not satisfied with his own prophecy.

Jesus is mourning.

He is grieving the gap between what Jerusalem was meant to be and what it has become.

Between what could have been

 and what is.

And this is not the first time a prophet has wept over Jerusalem before naming its destruction.

Jeremiah did it.

The book of Lamentations did it.

Jesus is standing in a long line of voices who love the city enough to grieve what it could not see coming.

And what he describes in verse, what Jesus describes in verses 43 and 44 is not abstract.

 It is the Roman siege of 70 CE, 40 years from that moment of Jesus' sort of crying and weeping, 40 years from that moment where the city of Jerusalem was destroyed.

Luke's community, the author of Luke understood that the community in which he was writing had either witnessed or lived in the shadow of that siege.

 So the violence that Jesus talks about in these verses is not a threat, it is a lament.

This is what happens to a city that cannot recognize the things that make for peace.

And if we're paying attention, we know that the temptation to confuse the will of God with the will of the empire did not end with Jerusalem.

 It is alive in every nation, including our own, that wraps its flag around a cross and calls it faithfulness.

It is alive in the drums that are beating towards war with Iran and every attempt to baptize that march, that movement towards war with the language of divine purpose.

But this, this text, this one line revealing Jesus's

 Grief is what has stood out to me all week as I've wrestled with the text because what I've begun to realize is we don't see Jesus weeping at the cross.

We don't see Jesus weeping when he's arrested or when he's betrayed, when he's imprisoned.

We see Jesus weeping here before the celebration is even over, which means that the grief is

 Love or traveling together as Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem.

You don't weep or grieve over something you do not love.

The depth of the tears in this text is a measure of how much Jesus is leaning in with his love.

 If we back up all the way to Luke chapter 9, we learn that this is not a sudden arrival.

Jesus doesn't accidentally stumble upon Jerusalem.

Luke chapter 9 tells us that Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem.

It's a phrase of intention.

It's a phrase of resolve.

It's a phrase that brings us along on this journey.

Jesus knew where he was headed.

He knew what he must do.

And he knew

 Ultimately, what the likely outcome was.

And he encourages his disciples to keep walking alongside him as they make this move towards Jerusalem.

So when he finally reaches the top of the Mount of Olives, it makes it sound like it's a 14er in Colorado.

It's not.

It's sort of just like a little hill outside of Jerusalem.

I've been there.

It's impressive, but not for its size.

 He sort of looks out.

You can kind of see Jerusalem below in a little valley, but you stand on top of the Mount of Olives and you look out and Jesus sees Jerusalem from this vantage point and he sees the city sprawling out below him.

He is not a stranger then arriving in an unfamiliar place.

It's a place that he knows.

This is someone who loves deeply.

 and knows what this is going to cost and yet shows up anyway, eyes wide open.

Jesus is sort of all the way in here.

And it feels a bit familiar.

I was in graduate school, proud alum of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

I know you know that institution well, prestigious.

When one of my mentors pulled me aside, Dr. Tink Tinker, Native American scholar and theologian,

 one of the most important voices I might add in post-colonial theology.

And as I encountered his work, it deeply formed my own perspective.

And he said something to me towards the end of my time at ILF that I've never forgotten.

He told me that if my work as a minister, as an ordained clergy person was going to flourish, if I was going to feel satisfied and whole, if the theology I was learning was ever going to mean anything

 I had to go home to do the work.

Post-colonial theology, he said, demands proximity.

 The work has an address.

The ministries that we are called to as individuals and a community, they happen in real tangible places with a physical mailing address.

They're not abstract.

You cannot love a place from a distance and expect that love to bear fruit.

So I got in the car with my new wife and we came back to Dallas.

 I want to be honest with you about what it means to love the city because I do love the city of Dallas.

I love the grittiness that lives below all the shine and pomp and circumstance and the sort of flair in which Dallas operates.

I love the entrepreneurial spirit that shows up not just in the gleaming corporate towers, but in the visionaries who take corner stores and turn them into something extraordinary

 I love the way that the community burrows itself down into neighborhoods.

 because being hyper-local and protecting a neighborhood's identity is so important to us not getting swallowed up by the concrete jungle that we call home.

I love the diversity of this city, not only in the music that is displayed on Buckner Road late in the evenings, I also love when you can hear the diversity of cultures

 and experience those cultures in restaurants.

You can taste it in the food.

I love the way that you can experience so many different perspectives and the beautiful ways that the city celebrates itself.

But I think we also need to love the city enough to name the truth about the city.

 The way we treat our unhoused neighbors is a moral failure.

The line between wealth and poverty in Dallas is not a gap, it's a chasm.

Our schools remain segregated in ways that should trouble everyone in this sanctuary.

 And there are people who do the essential work of the city, who cook the food, build the buildings, care for the children, who cannot even afford to live in this city.

They drive in from somewhere they could afford and do the work we depend on and overlook, and then they drive back out to their homes.

That is not a city living into its potential.

That is a city that has learned to love from a distance the very people who hold it together.

 I love what Dallas can become.

I'm not yet fully in love with who we are, though.

And I've chosen to stay not because I can save this city, but maybe in learning to love more like Jesus, it can give me the opportunity to be saved.

Because it is still too easy for me to love from a distance.

And if I'm really honest with you all, even this pulpit, this one right here, can become a place to love

 to love from a distance, to talk about brokenness without ever having to touch it.

 The challenge of this text is that Jesus moves towards the city he loves knowing that it will likely reject that love.

And if we are going to model that kind of divine love, if we're going to try and live our lives like Christ, the real personal transformation, the real repentance comes not from our pursuit of personal piety above all else, but the challenge that our personal piety demands of us

 that our faith moved towards the pain in our communities and works for the transformation of our city.

There is no holiness, absolutely no holiness without social holiness.

And we know that tension.

We feel it in our bodies.

The problem is not that we don't love.

Most of us in this room love deeply.

We do.

 We love our families.

We love this church.

We love this city in our own way.

The problem is the distance we keep while we do it.

We have become skilled at caring without closing the gap.

We donate without showing up.

We pray without proximity.

We feel genuine compassion for the unhoused neighbor.

And then we drive right on past.

 We are troubled by the segregated schools, and then we go home to our neighborhoods where we send our kids to segregated schools.

We believe the working poor deserve better, and then we order the food from the working poor, and we don't ask the person who brought it how they're doing.

If you're like me, you'll just complain about your order, but it's wrong.

We're not bad people, but we are distant people

 We're distant.

And the gospel keeps asking us the same uncomfortable question, how close are you willing to get?

Because here's the good news of Palm Sunday, God refused to love from a distance.

That is what the incarnation is.

It is God closing the gap.

It is God deciding that loving humanity from a safe,

 Distance was not enough, and so God gets on the road.

God takes on flesh and bone and dust and limitation.

God learns what it feels like to be tired and hungry and misunderstood and betrayed.

God then moves towards us, all the way towards us, not to observe our brokenness from a safe distance, a comfortable height, but to enter into it.

 to enter into our brokenness, to weep over it, to bear the cost of it.

And this is what makes the tears on the side of the hill in this text so important.

Jesus doesn't weep because he is surprised by Jerusalem.

Jesus weeps because he loves Jerusalem.

 He has known since Luke chapter 9 where this road leads.

He has set his face towards the city with full knowledge of what it will cost him.

And he finally sees it spread out below him.

The love does not retreat.

It does not protect itself.

It spills out in grief.

 and yet it keeps moving forward.

That is what love leaning in actually looks like.

It looks like someone who sees clearly and yet still knows the cost, who has no illusions about the outcome, and who gets on the road anyway.

Not because the city deserves it.

Jerusalem doesn't deserve it.

The city of Dallas doesn't deserve it.

 Not because the reception will be warm.

That's not why Jesus moves towards the city.

Jesus moves simply because he loves Jerusalem and that love is real.

The kind of love revealed in Jesus Christ does not wait for a guarantee before it shows up.

 This is the love that has been pursuing us this entire season of Lent.

The love that made room for the broken woman in the room that wanted to ignore her.

Remember that story?

The love that stopped on the dangerous road to tend to

 the man who was in the ditch, the love that ran down the driveway, the love that got on its knees with a towel and basin and washed feet.

It has always been moving towards us before we deserved it, before we asked for it, before we were even ready for it, God's love has been moving towards us.

And now on this Palm Sunday, that love reaches the top of the Mount of Olives and sees us spread out below in all of our beauty, in all of our brokenness.

And

 Not because that love is giving up, but because it loves us too much to look away.

Keeps riding straight into the city, straight into the mess, straight into the week that will cost it everything.

That is the invitation of this day.

Not to wave palms and stay at the parade, but to ask ourselves the honest question, where is our Jerusalem?

 Who is our Jerusalem?

There is no holiness without social holiness.

John Wesley knew it.

Dr. Tinker knew it.

And Jesus, weeping on the side of a hill with his city spread out before him, knew it too.

Love does not do simple observation from a safe distance.

Love leans in.

 even when it knows the cost, especially when it knows the cost.

May we have the courage to get on the road with Christ.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.