The Stones Would Shout Out

(This is a sermon I preached for my preaching practicum, inspired by the gospel passage for Palm Sunday, Luke 19:28-40, which directly follows.)

After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the 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. If anyone asks you, 'Why are you untying it?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it.'"

So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?" They said, "The Lord needs it." Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now 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 that 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." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."

We all have stories. 

Some of us have our standard stories, the ones we tell when we’re first meeting people or the ones we tell over drinks or the ones we tell when we want to share our hard-won wisdom with others. But we all, each of us, have stories about our life that we hold dear, stories that, when we share them, explain to others who we are and why we do what we do. Stories are a vital part of our human lives, of the way that we live in community together, and we spend hours each day telling them and hearing them. We all have stories and stories matter. 

As a nanny for a two-and-a-half-year-old, I read a lot of stories. I read stories about cats in hats, about rainbow fish, about hippopotamuses and armadillos. I’ve read Where the Wild Things Are so many times, I can recite it from memory. “The night Max wore his wolf suit and mischief of one kind” [mime turning a page] “and another…” and on and on it goes. Charles and I read stories from everywhere and we read lot. We also read the Jesus Storybook Bible, or the “Yeesus book,” as he calls it (he’s not very good with j’s yet). He loves the rainbow story (Noah’s ark) and the storm story (Jesus calming the storm) and we always somehow end up reading the Abraham story, because it’s got the most stars in it. Charles and I both love stars. 

But there’s one story that I wasn’t prepared to tell him. See, there’s a little Catholic church just down the road from where Charles lives and we go there at least once a week to play on the playground. We can spend an hour on the swings, with a couple of breaks here and there for the slides. At the end of playtime, Charles wants to go to the church. He was baptized there, so I figure we’re allowed in, and once we’re inside, he does everything you think a two-year-old would do in a church: wanders up and down the pews, hands me missals to read, and plays hide-and-seek in the confession booths. 

It’s all good fun. Once, though, he ran up to the chancel area and I, as a nanny and a protestant, had to decide whether I was going to stop him before he made it up to the altar or risk the lightning bolt, or at least the anger of the priest, if he pulled off the altar cloth and went running down the aisles with it, pretending it’s a cape. I chose to chase him up there and walk with him as he explored and we ended up sitting together on the “comfy pillows” (kneeling pads) in front of the cross back up behind the altar. 

Well, actually, it isn’t a cross up on the wall. It’s a crucifix. Charles and I looked up at the crucified Jesus and I… had no idea what to say. How do you tell this story to a two-year-old? What do you say? I decided to let Charles guide the conversation.

“Yeesus has a boo-boo,” Charles said.
“Yes, he does,” I said. “He’s got a couple.”

“Kiss it, make it better?”

“That would be a nice thing to do, but he’s too high up for us to do that right now.”

“He’s sad.”
“Yes, he’s sad right now. His boo-boos hurt. And people were mean to him.”
“He will get better?”
“Yeah, he gets better! We talk about that on Easter!”
“He will get better.”
“Yes, he will.”

Then Charles noticed the sacristy and we were off again, but I’ve come back time and again to this moment in front of the cross. Why did I have such a difficult time telling that story? I can explain the effects of gravitational tidal forces outside the event horizon of a black hole to a third grader. Why couldn’t I explain Good Friday to a toddler?

The answer, of course, is that conversations about hatred, death, and loss are hard, especially with children. We want to save them from the evil and suffering in this world if we can, and Good Friday is a story of evil and suffering, even if it’s bookended by celebration on Palm Sunday and resurrection on Easter morning. We let the children wave palm branches in the air as we sang our hymns this morning, and we’ll dress them up in their Easter best and let them go hunting for eggs next Sunday, but we’ll leave them home with babysitters if we come to church on Friday. Let them be innocent for a while. Shield them from all the pain that’s in the world.

But I struggle with that. This story, the story of Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter Sunday, this is our story, our story as Christians. Pain is a fundamental part of our story. Tragedy is a fundamental part of our story. We have spent centuries trying to explain why, trying to tell this tragic story in some way that makes sense. And even though we struggle, it’s still our story. We need to be able to tell it. And Charles is a baptized Christian. It’s his story too, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

Each of the Gospel writers sat down to tell this story, the Passion story, and found that the events leading up to Golgotha needed some background, some context. Mark’s gospel is breathless in its run up to the Passion, going non-stop from Jesus’ baptism through his ministry and teaching all the way up until the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where time starts to stand still and events are described in detail you don’t find anywhere else in the Gospel. Mark needs you to know this story.

Matthew takes Mark’s gospel and adapts it for Jewish Christians, putting a different lens on the Passion story so that his audience would hear it more clearly and better understand the “why” of it all. Luke does the same, but for Gentile Christians, like us.

John’s gospel, which we read from last week, is an explanation from front to back about why Jesus died and rose again. It has its turning point in chapter 12 and then goes on for another nine chapters, all of which have to do with Passion Week and the teachings Jesus shared as he said goodbye to his disciples. For all of our gospel writers, the passion is the center of why they write. Their wrestling with the reality of the crucifixion gives us four different but beautiful retellings of the events that led Jesus to Golgotha. 

Every three years, we go through this cycle of telling the different passion stories, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Matthew, Mark, Luke, hearing each of these different voices try to make sense of what happened to Jesus. Every Holy Week, we hear John’s side of things. We have spent all of Lent preparing ourselves for this week, to encounter again the story that leads us through Good Friday to Easter Sunday but today, all that preparation leads us only to a question. 

Why? 

Why did Jesus die? 

Was it all a part of God’s plan? John certainly seems to think so. 

Was it because of the leaders in Jerusalem? All the gospels point some blame that way too, with sometimes tragic consequences. We have a history of antisemitism in the church, and much of it sprouts from how John’s gospel treats “the Jews,” as if Jesus himself isn’t Jewish. 

Was it the crowd’s fault? The gospels surely don’t think they’re innocent in all of this. 

Is it our fault? Well… that’s what I learned when I was a kid. 

And maybe that’s the reason I struggled to tell the Passion Story to Charles. I learned as a kid that Jesus’ death was all my fault and I spent years carrying that shame around. But in the years since, I’ve learned so many other ways to tell this story. I’ve learned to always pair Good Friday with Easter Sunday, to believe as we Christians believe that with every death, there’s a resurrection, because of this Resurrection. I’ve learned to pay attention to the backstory, to study how Jesus lived his life and find new life for myself in his teachings. I’ve learned so much about the world Jesus lived in and the world I live in and how much humanity has always struggled with goodness, every single one of us, in many different ways. I’ve learned that we’ve always longed for community and have built up communities and will act out when it seems like someone is threatening our community, or our way of doing things, and Jesus was certainly doing a new thing. 

I’ve learned to tell this story as a story of God’s great love for us, that out of goodness and compassion, the Word of God came to Earth, incarnated in a human body, and lived a human life and died a human death and even though pain and death are parts of our story that we cannot walk away from, we also know that a light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it, even if it feels that way sometimes. 

When I tell the Passion Story, that’s the story that I want to tell. I want to tell the story where God loves us so deeply that God couldn’t stay away from us, even though God knew it would probably hurt. I want to tell the story where even though we hurt God, God loves us with an extravagant love and showed us that there is nothing we can do that will separate us from God. I want to tell the story where hurt and pain matters, and is real, and is powerful, but never gets the final word. I want to tell the story that ends in love. 

We all have our stories and our stories matter. We all have our own way of telling this Christian story of ours. Maybe my Passion Story is not your Passion Story. Maybe you’re not sure how to tell it. That’s okay. It’s not an easy story to tell. But as we listen to Luke’s Passion later in this service, and as we go throughout this Holy Week, I want you to think about the story, about what matters, and about how you would tell it. Because, as Christians, the passion story is our story. It is our story of life and death, the story that leads to Resurrection. If we don’t tell it, who will?