“The Road Less Travelled”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Text: Luke 19:28-40
[audio:http://temc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/20110417_Sermon.mp3|titles=2011-04-17 - The Road Less Travelled]
Words are powerful things. And I don't think there's anything I've seen that supports that idea more than when I recently watched the movie The Kings Speech, which many of you will have seen. It was a touching movie at so many levels. But there was one particular moment that I think was the central moment, when the two great protagonists, King George and Lionel, who was the speech therapist, had a heart-to-heart conversation. The speech therapist was becoming frustrated with the king and he asked him this question, “Why should I waste my time trying to help you?”
And the king glared and spoke with a loud voice, “Because,” he says, “I have a voice.”
And Lionel said, “Yes you do. Yes you do.” It was a powerful moment where the king could put his words together. And although the king was never really eloquent in his life, never an orator, never particularly articulate, he'd found his voice and his words became important.
I've often thought that words are important probably more because of who speaks them, than by the nature of them. By that I mean that in the king's case, it was the fact that he was the monarch that made his radio broadcast so powerful and so winsome. It was who he was. And think about it for a moment. If you have committed some misdemeanour against a friend and the friend says to you, “I forgive you,” that's a nice word. But if your enemy, with whom you've been at war, says to you, “I forgive you,” it is far more important. Same words, but the who really matters.
Throughout the gospels, we have heard some wonderful words by Jesus. We've heard him give great speeches, sermons on the mount. We've heard him give advice, have kind words to a woman as well. We've had powerful words that have raised the dead. We've had parable words with deep teaching. We've had personal statements and prayers, all marvellous. But those words, they're powerful because of who said them. When you look at the words of Jesus and you go back, you can try and peel away the text as much as you want to try and find some great oratory or some great power, but it is the who, that makes the words so powerful.
But it's not just words that speak; it is also actions that are highly symbolic. I've never agreed with the adage that says, “Actions are more powerful than words,” or “Actions speak louder than words.” I've never agreed with that. Sometimes powerful words can produce great actions. Sometimes great speeches can bring about magnificent changes. Think of Winston Churchill speaking before the Empire and the British people and the Allies in the face of terrible, terrible oppression by the Nazis. His words led to great actions, or, Martin Luther King Jr. standing in Washington before the memorial with his great “I Have a Dream” speech. Great words, but they led to great actions.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the power of oratory in the words, actions and symbols do speak. And when Jesus came into Jerusalem on a donkey, when he entered that great city that day, he was powerful and he was speaking, but with his actions. The great New Testament scholar Bishop N.T. Wright said the following and he is so right, that, “This is not so much a matter of teaching, as of symbolic action. Jesus as we have seen often enough, was as capable of any his contemporaries of deliberately performing actions which had rich symbolic value. Within his own time and culture, his riding on a donkey over the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley, and up to the temple, spoke more powerfully than words could have done of a royal claim,” he writes. This was a powerful moment! Palm Sunday was a powerful moment. It was Jesus speaking to Jerusalem, but not with words, with symbols. In the minds of many of the people who gathered there, they would recognize that symbolism. They would hear the echoes of Zechariah the great prophet, about the coming of the Messiah. They would think back in their imagination as a people to the crowning of Solomon and the coronation of Jehu. They would remember these great things and so they said, “Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest.” They knew. They understood. The Messiah was here. The Lord of Life had appeared. This was his day.
Now some have suggested that it was all a little contrived. Just last week, I saw a fascinating thing outside a little store in Nova Scotia. As I was driving by, there was set up all these lights and cameras and there were sheets and there were reflective panels and standing in front of all these lights was a local politician who was trying to get elected. And behind on the stage, there must have been maybe a dozen or more people. And I just slowed down and I watched this. I nearly hit the car in front of me and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And he was talking away and gesticulating as politicians do (and preachers) and he was waving his arms, and then every now and again they would lift the placard with the name of the person and the party on it. It was really quite fascinating. And I thought, you know, it's very true, you read in all the political books and all the political science books, and I'm a junkie for this stuff, how in fact politicians manipulate situations and they create sort of an aura using the media to make something look more than it is. It was fascinating. When that actually came on local television that evening and they were covering the politician, you'd have sworn there were hundreds of people there. Because all they focused on were these 12 getting really carried away, but they looked at the 12 from about 15 different angles and unless you'd have seen your own Auntie Margaret there, you wouldn't have known that they were not in fact different people from different angles. It was completely phoney, but it was effective.
Jesus isn't a phoney. This isn't a setup. He's being symbolic. He's using the donkey. He's coming across from the Mount of Olives. He's entering Jerusalem. This was his red carpet. This was his great moment, his great entrance. But the difference is, he had no idea how the audience would respond, none. Unlike politicians who have everything carefully scripted and applauding every statement, Jesus had no idea. He only knew he had to be faithful to the symbolism that he wanted to give. And the symbolism was this: That the Lord of Life, the Messiah, the King of Kings was coming into Jerusalem humbly as a servant of his people, coming as a Messiah to represent humanity, to come to what he knew would be an ultimate rejection.
So what did Jesus have then, for us this Palm Sunday? Well clearly, he had had to make a choice between the pressures of the crown and the purposes of God. One of my professors once said that the canvas on which the gospels were actually written was the messianic expectations that underlining it all, there was this “what would the Messiah really be like?” What would the King of Kings really be like? When he comes, what will he do? And there was much pressure on Jesus. Some were saying, “Don't go. Just stop right here. You know it's going to end badly, don't go any further.”
Others were saying, “Go on, ride on, take the kingdom, liberate the people, set everybody free. You're the King, keep on going.” The authorities intimidated him, threatened him. The lowest form of intimidation is a threat. That's what they did, trying to stop him in his tracks, letting him know that they would suffer if they didn't do what he wanted them to do. And then of course there was the crowd. Ambivalent, praising him one day, shouting crucify him the other, fickle to the end.
But Jesus, he did not change. To use Robert Frost's great line in his poem, “He took the road less travelled by.” He took the route that perhaps was the most ignominious of them all. But he did it for us. And when the powers and the pressures wanted to manipulate him and move him and get him to do the things of the world, Jesus did the things of God.
And is that not true for us also? Those of us who gather and wave palms, you have sung “How Great Thou Art” who will take the sacrament in a few minutes time, are we not also challenged to make those same choices? To do the things that are things of God, not just what the world sets as its agenda. To do the things that are in keeping with the kingdom, not those things that are in keeping with popularity. I think the Church needs to think long and hard and individual Christians in their daily walk, if I was there on Palm Sunday, we need to ask ourselves, would we be receiving Jesus for who he really was, a holy, righteous, pure, gracious, loving, kind, self-sacrificing Lord? Or do we want a Messiah who's just going to bend with the winds of change? Who will take the road that everybody else walks on as opposed to the road less travelled?
But there's one last temptation for Jesus in all of this. And that was between his personal integrity and his public popularity. I've never understood why those who follow Jesus sometimes want to be popular and want to be liked and respected. I never understood it, because Jesus didn't. Jesus had what in psychology they call “congruence.” He did not need the praise of others to give him self esteem. He had self esteem because he followed God. And a lot of people want affirmation and they want self esteem and they want people to tell them they're good and they're right. And they want to be Mr. and Mrs. Popular. But in the end, is that what really makes us who we are? Is that what gives us integrity? Is that what gives us our soul? No. The one who gives us that is God. And if we do the things of God and follow the path of God, we've no need for the accolades of those who are often much more insecure.
As I was on the plane out to Nova Scotia, I was really looking forward to sitting back for a minute and watching a television show on the plane. But unfortunately, none of the televisions were working on the plane that day. I won't tell you which airline it was in fear of embarrassing them, O Canada, but I will tell you I was mighty peeved off. I didn't have a paper or a magazine and if you've read any of the magazines that are there on the plane already, trust me, they'll put you to sleep in a minute. And so, I thought what am I going to do? I've two and a half hours. And then I realized that in my case, I'd taken with me for the purposes of my message, a biography of some of the great Christians. It didn't sound particularly exciting but I thought I'll find somebody. And I opened up and there was a brief biography of none other than George Whitefield.
George Whitefield was an 18th century English preacher, who ended up preaching in the United States, famous at Harvard, famous in Pennsylvania, famous in Georgia, one of the great preachers of all time. And yet he was a man with many problems. But his great preaching began in a most inauspicious place, the place where he found his voice. It was in Bristol and it was during the time when many of the miners in Bristol, in Kingswood, were a rough and a motley crew. Violent, ignorant, many of them were illiterate. They were horrible people. And one of the things that Whitefield wanted to do was to preach, but unfortunately there was an act at the time in England, the Conventicle Act that says you could not speak in public, you could not preach, except at, get this, a public execution.
So George Whitefield thought, well I'll go to a public execution then. And it was an execution of a murderer and it had been of one of the miners. And the miners wanted to watch this man die. They were violent, they were vile, they were horrible. But this man took his own life before the execution. And so the miners were deprived of their vengeance, so they finally dug up the corpse and danced around it in praise of the death of this man. Not a nice bunch.
George Whitefield though had great empathy for these poor and violent people. He wanted to reach out to them and he started to preach to them. And he was stunned that in preaching to them they changed. And in their hearts they were moved. And when Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,” they identified with him. And when Jesus said, “The Lord of heaven and earth came into Jerusalem,” when Whitefield told them of this story of Jesus coming in, they identified with him. And they accepted what Whitefield said and he said there was nothing more beautiful than to watch their dark soot-coal faces have streams of white run along their cheeks from their tears when they realized Jesus had spoken to them.
Whitefield had found his voice. God has spoken to them in a symbolic gesture of standing with them. They were changed. Why? Because the Lord whom Whitefield worshipped spoke in a similar way. He came into Jerusalem on a donkey as the Messiah on the road less travelled. Will you walk with him? Amen.