Sermon for Friends Congregational Church

“The Consequences of Rejection”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon

Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008

Psalm 118; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Matthew 26:14-29

Have you ever thrown something away that you figured out later you really needed?  You throw away something and then a couple of days later you go, “Oh no!  That widget is exactly what I needed to make this otherwise worthless contraption work!”  So, you start asking, “Did I throw out the trash that had that widget in it?”

When Stacy, Mac and I moved to Bryan, I just knew that we would lose something in the process.  But I was pleasantly surprised, because we didn’t lose anything at all…at least not in the move.

Stacy has a clock collection, and one of the clocks was a gift from my parents.  It was a white-faced, round clock with black hash marks all around it instead of numbers, but it had no hands; no big hand, minute hand, second hand…nothing.  But it did have this red ball-shaped magnet that would sit on the face of the clock, and another magnet underneath the face of the clock would guide that round red magnet around the clock minute by minute as the means of telling the time.  The ball-shaped magnet was the hands of the clock.

Well, when you take a tiny red ball and place it in any other context, especially when you have a, then, 5-month-old child, it looks like just another toy that could be a choking hazard.  So, when we unpacked the boxes at our new home in Bryan, and we found the little red ball wrapped in newspaper all by itself, we thought it was junk.  There was no use for this little red ball, so we threw it away.

And weeks later when we finally got around to Stacy’s clock collection, we realized what we had done.  Without the little red ball-shaped magnet, the clock that it used to be a part of was useless.  It was just a white plate with hash marks all around it: a strange symbol that we had so much time, but nothing to do with it.

“The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

This is what today is all about: Rejection.  Today is about the tragedy of rejection and its consequences on our human condition and our relationship with our God.

I’m not saying that it’s a tragedy that we ruined a clock because we rejected a red ball.  But this metaphor is so concrete for what rejection means in the story of God.  “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”  What we reject today might be the very thing that can steer us toward salvation.

So the story goes that in ancient times when King Solomon’s Temple was built there was found a stone that appeared to serve no purpose, so it was thrown out; rejected.  And later when the Temple was near completion, it was discovered that the chief cornerstone of the Temple was missing, and the rejected stone fit this most important place perfectly.

This is what the Psalmist is getting at in today’s Scripture reading, too.  The Israelites are standing at the gates of the House of the Lord, and they demand that their procession be granted entrance.  The Israelites were a people once a rejected by their cultural peers, and now they are revealed to be God’s chosen people who exclaim the very essence of salvation for all the world to hear.

And Jesus of Nazareth, rejected as a blasphemer, a radical, a criminal, a miscreant; Jesus is later heralded by the resurrection to be the chief cornerstone of human salvation.

As many of us know, today is Palm Sunday, but it is also Passion Sunday.  Today is a day about waving palm branches and shouting, “Hosanna,” but it’s also a day about the betrayal of Jesus.  We often like to sidestep the Passion part of Palm Sunday in our Christian tradition of worship, because it’s really not very pleasant.

But what does the history of God, of God’s people and of God’s son teach us about the consequences of rejecting part of the story?

Take a look at your palm branch for a second.  We waved our palm branches high and proud just a few minutes ago, but what does that mean?  What’s the symbolism?  At the time of Jesus’ entry at the gates of Jerusalem, waving a palm branch was the symbol of Roman victory.  Bearing a palm indicated victory and triumph over your foes.  So, in this case, the people of Jerusalem under oppressive Roman rule, see Jesus coming into town as a sign of victory: “Here is our mighty Messiah who will take care of everything for us.  Let’s wave our palm branches as a sign of our great victory.”

Well, let’s now ask what do these palm branches mean for us on this day that is also Passion Sunday?  What do these palm branches symbolize when it comes to the betrayal of Jesus?

I had a kind of Palm Sunday moment Thursday evening.  I saw a parade marching into town.  My little brother Mikey’s band was playing a show at Austin’s SXSW music festival, so I drove over there Thursday afternoon to support him.  The parking was a nightmare.  I had to park in a parking garage 15 blocks or so away from where Mikey was playing.

And the path I walked for those 15 blocks was mostly down Sixth Street in downtown Austin.  They had the street barricaded off from traffic so people were walking up and down the middle of the street.

Now, I grew up in Austin.  I’m used to it.  But when SXSW comes to town, it’s a whole new ball game.  I walked down that barricaded street and I experienced culture shock.  It was only 6:30 in the evening.  The sun was shining bright after our recent spring forward time change, and it was so crowded that I felt like, walking down the street, I was playing a game of Frogger.

There were posters, fliers, postcards and other promotional trinkets littering the street.  The air smelled like cigarette smoke, B.O., and urine, and there was enough reading material on everyone’s t-shirts to hold my attention for hours.

Granted, the environment in Jerusalem was worlds different from this scene when Jesus waltzed into the city gate.  But the people had the same sense of anxiousness and frenzy, the same cultural milieu I was watching unfold in that moment.  Everyone was waiting for something, and they already had a clear picture in their minds of what that something would be.

Well, this cultural juxtaposition was just too much for me, so I did what any good pastor would do to take his mind off things for a moment: I stopped at a Bratwurst stand.  And as I’m standing in line for my Bratwurst, what do I notice but a procession marching down the street.  This is just too weird.

They’re holding up signs that say, “Stop Executions Now!,” and they have a leader walking alongside them with a megaphone spouting off chants that the group would then repeat in unison.  I was just about to brush this off and order my Bratwurst when the guy behind me said, “Ah, they’re just talking about some nonsense.”  He was obviously talking to me, so I just turned my head and raised my eyebrows to acknowledge his statement.  The guy went on to yell at the protest marchers, “Shut up!,” and then he turned back to me with a smirk and said, “Welcome to Austin, right?”

That’s when it hit me: all of this was an illusion.  It was just an image, this whole thing.  The illusion was that everyone was having a good time.  The image was that the music festival was an escape.  The belligerent guy behind me was a perfect example of this.  He was so confident in this illusion that anything contradictory to it was just a bunch of nonsense.  It didn’t fit.  It was worthy of his attention.  And any of this nonsense would have to be rejected.

Litter isn’t fun.  Stench isn’t fun.  And a procession of protestors marching into town isn’t fun.  It’s just a bunch of nonsense.  Imagine how the people of Jerusalem might have felt when Jesus strode into town on a donkey.  They were ready for their Messiah, their great warrior, to come offer them salvation in the form of toppling the Roman empire by force, and Jesus represented that illusion to them.  He was the image of their salvation.

So, garments littered the streets.  Crowds flocked to see what was happening.  Palm branches filled the air.  But if Jesus had stopped to address the crowd, if he had opened his mouth and talked about what he was really all about and what the kingdom of God really required of the people, the crowd might have changed their tune and sounded like that guy at the Bratwurst stand, “Shut up!  What a bunch of nonsense.  Welcome to Jerusalem, right?”

Our palms might at first glance represent that same sense of triumph, that same victory over our foes that the people of Jerusalem were so excited about.  But they realistically represent the vanity of human foolishness.  Then as of now, our palm branches symbolize the illusion of what passes for victory in this world.  And they represent the consequences of rejection.

So think again about the history of God and God’s people and God’s son.  Think about what that history teaches us about the consequences of rejection, and think about how far we’ve come.  Are we any better off?

We reject people based on their country of origin, the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

We reject progress and the people who dare to dream it and speak it aloud, because it doesn’t fit into our comfortable sense of normalcy.

We reject ideas that don’t resonate with where we come from.

We reject truth that brings to light the atrocities of this world, because those things have no place in our daily lives.

And even on Palm Sunday, we might reject the Passion that is also a part of this day, because the betrayal and subsequent crucifixion of this Jesus that we herald with loud cries of ‘Hosanna’ is supposed to be our perfect hero!  Anything other than that is just nonsense.  So we reject it.

But what are the stars in the sky without the darkness that surrounds them?

What is success without the painstaking challenges that precede it?

What is the beauty of new life that brings us to tears when we hold an infant child without the truth in the back of our minds that we are all mortal and death is a part of life?

What is Easter without Good Friday?

What is the triumph of Jesus over the sin of the world without the betrayal of this Messiah by the very sinners he loved?

“The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

I know it’s tempting to sidestep the Passion.  It’s not sexy to having anything to do with the betrayal of Jesus, and it’s not fun to change our happy cries of ‘Hosanna,’ into belligerent shouts of, ‘crucify him.’  But this is part of the story—part of our story—that we can’t afford to reject.  Because without that chief cornerstone of the story, the resurrection is deflated and pointless, and suddenly our Christianity itself becomes an illusion, an image, a nice philosophical discussion about how we view right and wrong.  The Gospel becomes just a code of ethics and not a revelation of truth.

Here’s the thing: We think that God’s love is so perfect, so beautiful that we assume we can understand it.  And by our understanding, God’s beautiful, perfect love has no room for unsightly injustice, no room for ferocious atrocities, no room for the ambiguities of the human condition.  God’s love has no room for all that nonsense.

But, sisters and brothers, listen: God’s love is made evident to us in the empathetic offering of Jesus the Christ who strode into Jerusalem on a donkey, was betrayed by his friends and handed over to the authorities, was crucified as a public sign that nonsense will not be tolerated in our town, was buried in a tomb and who was resurrected on the third day as God’s ultimate victory and triumph over sin and death: the real nonsense of the human condition.

So, God’s love is not about getting rid of those things we feel don’t fit.  God’s love is about being equipped to embrace them empathetically; to weep as Jesus wept and to experience broken dreams and the brokenness of the human condition as Jesus experienced it.  How else can we receive revelation and motivation to change God’s world one act of love at a time?

As Peter Gomes says, “Jesus did not die in order to spare us the indignities of the wounded creation.  He died that we might see those wounds as our own.”

So, when someone is executed in Texas, our conscience dies, too.

When a child does not have access to clean drinking water in Africa, our souls thirst, too.

When a working family is denied healthcare to address simple symptoms of diarrhea and dehydration in their children, our ethics are sick, too.

And when someone is rejected because of who they are or where they come from or what they look like, part of us is rejected, too.

In some form or fashion and in our own particular way that is unique to us individually and us alone, we have all been rejected.  In some way, everyone in this room knows what it feels like to be rejected.  But I want to tell you that God loves you.  God embraces you.  The Lord finds you beautiful and without blemish.  And God has a purpose for your life.  God has as plan for you.

We can realize that purpose and start making that plan happen when we snuff out the vanity of our human foolishness and recognize the rejected.  It’s when we recognize the rejected parts of this world that our lives begin to work for God.  And until we work to bring those rejected elements of our culture to light, God’s plan for us is halted.  It can’t go anywhere.  Until we work toward reconciliation, our lives are undone.

Until we listen to the rejected voices of God’s world, then our lives are like a clock with no hands: just a symbol that we have all this time and nothing to do with it.  I wonder what is more tragic, that or the Passion of Jesus Christ.

As we march into this, our Holy Week, let’s ask ourselves, “How can we be about jumpstarting God’s plan right where we are?  How can my life be an agent for Easter?”

“The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”  May our lives be evidence of that truth.  Amen.