April 8, 2001
Palm Sunday

One Thousand Nine Hundred Seventy Two Years of Testimony, and Counting

"But if these disciples were silent, the very stones themselves would shout out." That is what Jesus told the Pharisees when they said, “Tell your followers to be quiet. They are going to cause trouble. The Roman soldiers are going to come in and we won’t be happy then.” Jesus said, “There is nothing that can stop what is beginning now. Everything is in motion.” When I read that earlier in the week, I thought about the years that have gone by since that day of entry into Jerusalem. Give or take, we have the title of the sermon today. One thousand nine hundred seventy two years of testimony and counting. From time to time there are movements that are started by evangelical Christians about winning the whole world for Christ. Gathering the troops. Inspiring them. Sending them out to the corners of the globe to convert people to Christianity. Now I believe very strongly in the importance of us living out our faith. I think each one of us should be an example of what it means for us to be a follower of Jesus. We should reach out to others with love and concern. We should try to meet the needs of the people that we meet each day. But this idea of going out and convincing people that we have the truth that they are missing is one that has always been troubling for me. In much the same way, I’m troubled by a particular description of creation. God created the planet and put plants, animals, and humans upon it. Then humans transgressed. They ate the apple from the tree of good and evil, and found themselves separated by that sin from God. The sin was so great that, at some point, a price had to be paid. That price was Jesus giving his life. Dying on the cross for our sins so that we could be reunited with God. Our task as Christians is to spread that story of God’s love and God’s redemption so that everyone might be gathered into that forgiveness.

When people talk about winning the whole world for Christ, the years that have gone by lead me to reflect upon the whole plot line. Why would God bring a world into being, then set a process in motion where only people who have the right words, who know the password, who heard the invitation to forgiveness would receive God’s love and everyone else would be separated from God. What I want to say is, if God is all powerful and in control of everything, then why have we been stumbling along for nineteen hundred years trying to turn the whole world back to God?

The issue must be much more complicated. It must have a different goal than trying to convert everyone to Christianity. When Jesus says that things are in motion, he can’t be talking about the kind of success that we like to point to. We know that congregations in the United Church of Christ are seldom “mega” churches. Most of our churches are about this size. A community of people who come together. Who know each other. Support each other. Challenge each other to grow and to live faithful lives. Ministers in the United Church of Christ like to quote the words, “We are called to be faithful, not to be successful.” This suggests that the things we do as a church should not be measured by capitalistic-worldly measures of what it means for us to have done a good job. I think that the idea that we are going to win the whole world to Christ is a capitalistic idea. Imperialism, “We are going to take our way of life, our beliefs, our political system and we are going to spread it out to everyone. Then we will know that we have been successful. Jesus was talking about what has been set in motion he was talking about something entirely different. Not success. Not the numbers game. Not programming and big churches. He was talking about relationship, unity, God’s love. Knowing that we belong. His response to the Pharisees has always intrigued me. “You could tell everyone to be silent. But that wouldn’t stop it. If the humans had no words to speak, even the stones themselves would shout out.” Many of you know the power of stones in your own lives. How many of you have brought stones back from a vacation, a trip?. Stones in your yard? Stones on the bookshelf, in the kitchen on the windowsill. Stones that remind you of different places. Connections to things that are meaningful to you. How many of you had rock collections when you were a kid? We all studied different kinds of rocks. The very rocks themselves tell the story of our planet. Rocks that came together in the heat of volcanic action. Rocks that were formed as sediment was laid down, layer upon layer at the bottom of an inland sea. Rocks tell the story of what has come before us.

I have another image of stones. In the first congregation I served, there was a church graveyard back beyond the white frame building. There were times when I had difficulty focusing on a scripture passage that was scheduled for the coming Sunday. Times where I was worn out from the daily tasks of ministry. I would walk out into the graveyard and read the names on those stones. I would read the names of those who had come before me. Who had lived in that place. Who had come up the Missouri River valley from St Louis to settle in western Iowa. The names of Boehm and Heuwinkle, Frankie and Young were there on those gravestones. There were the names of former ministers who had served that church who had returned to that place to be buried. It reminded me of something that has always been important to me in my ministry. Ministry did not begin at St. Paul’s when I arrived. Ministry would continue on long after I left that church.

There are other stories that rocks and stones can tell to us. When I was a young boy, I remember spending hours upon hours in our gravel driveway, looking at the pieces of limestone and finding fossils of all kinds. Small patterns of leaves. Shells from some ancient ocean bed. Doing Paleontology right there in the driveway with all the gravel that had been poured down.

You know something of the way that fossils can be formed through your experience with Mt. St Helens blowing, now more that 20 years ago. Ash settled everywhere. A fine ash. There are stories that we read about when we were in school about Pompeii, Italy. When that volcano blew, ash came down and settled over everything. People and pets, homes. When Pompeii was excavated many years later, unfinished meals were still there on the table. Forms of bodies, frozen now in stone, where they were when the volcano blew.

I haven’t had the opportunity to visit Pompeii, but I visited another site in Nebraska. The Pompeii on the Prairie. Ten million years ago there were animals gathered around the savannah area in the central part of our country. Not the kind of animals that we know now. Not moose and bear and wolf. But Rhinoceros, Zebra and Tapir. Then in southern Idaho a volcano blew. In a short time, ash fell to a depth of ten or fifteen feet and more, suffocating and burying those animals as they gathered around the watering hole. In 1971 there was a storm. The water washed out a gully on a farm. The head of a baby Rhinoceros appeared. An area of north-central Nebraska that is well known for the paleontological treasures that are hidden under the surface there. The area is now a state park known as Ashfall. A state park where you can go and see archeologists digging even as you watch. You can see the skeletons of the Rhinoceros. A mother and a baby tucked close in. Complete skeletons there in stone, telling of a time many, many, many years ago, when the volcano blew and the ash fell from the sky. The area where Ashfall is located is right at the edge of the Sandhills of western Nebraska. Rolling prairie and very few trees, mostly in the gullies along the waterways. That place has a sacred feel to it. A feel that extends way beyond our days here and now. We are able to glimpse something from the ancient past, and realize our connection to it.

Stones do shout out, speak stories. Not only the stories of the things that they have observed, as if you were writing an essay in an English class about, “What would this pulpit have to say if it were able to have voice.” The stones speak in another way. With the evidence of times gone by, they show how we are connected to the past. How we are part of all of history. They shout out to us of the same kind of connection and unity that Jesus pointed to when he spoke to the Pharisees and said, “You cannot stop this now.” We are talking about God’s love poured out for the whole world and there is no way that you can bring an end to the testifying to that love.

A friend of mine, from Plymouth Congregational I Des Moines, Iowa, some years ago preached about Jesus, a lonely rider, coming into Jerusalem. David explored the expectations that people had, that this Jesus was going to be a political leader, the one to spark the revolution that would drive out the Romans. He talked about what he believed to be the real thing that had been set in motion. He says, “But even if our voices are silent. Even if everything is neat and tidy and apparently under control, even if we refuse to acknowledge it, our hearts cry out like these very stones. For God has done and is doing something we cannot ignore. And in the sad face of that lonely rider on Palm Sunday we read the truth about who and what we are. Jesus calls us to die to our illusion about ourselves. We are not God. The universe does not revolve around us. We will not live forever. We do not do the good we wish we did. We do not have everybody else fooled as thoroughly as we have ourselves. But in dying to our illusions we are freed to know and to live the truth. We are beloved children of God. Not made to rule the world, but to join its symphony of praise to the one who has made us all. We are called to be as fully human as a stone is fully a stone. We are called to know a love from which nothing, not even death can separate us.”

As we celebrate Jesus entry into Jerusalem, we are not looking for worldly success. We are not celebrating the first step toward winning the whole planet for Jesus. Instead we are celebrating God’s love for each and everyone of us. We are celebrating the presence of the Spirit that allows us to share that love with the world around us. It is for this that we give great thanks to God. Amen.

With Thanks to The Reverend Dr. David Ruhe
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
Des Moines, Iowa