Palm Sunday, Cycle A

Text: Luke 19:28-40

“A Fool on an Ass”.  That’s what they called him.  The power-elite and the cynical, as he rode into town being hailed as a king by his band of followers.  Yes.  Cutting the branches down and laying them before him, and throwing your garments down for him to walk upon, both of these are things you would do for royalty and the adulation did not go unnoticed by those whose charge it was to keep the peace.  They knew, too, that by allowing this to happen, he was daring the dog to bark — they knew, too, what the stakes were.  That’s why they called him a fool on an ass.

Do you find the title of this sermon to be offensive?  Our staff did.  Wondered if I had lost my mind posting this title.  However, to people of a certain age, (which means mine and above!) the title calls to mind a film called “Parable” released in 1964.  It depicted a circus train coming into town with all sorts of colorful wagons and clowns and music.  At the end of the train, riding on a homely white donkey, was a single clown, with a pitiful white face.  He rode with dignity, and, yet, with a solitary sadness.  The film went on to show him interacting with the other circus figures as he comforted his fellow performers and disrupted their lives; the movie had no dialogue or subtitles, but it did not need any; we all knew the story.

At the end, the white-clad clown was shown hanging from acrobatic rings, in the middle of the circus tent, as he was pelted with rubber balls and other objects and the blood drained from his body.  A fool on an ass came into town with the rest of the clowns and because of his pains with them was strung up and cut down.  The movie was controversial in 1964.  Some said that it dishonored the Lord.  Some moviehouses refused to show it, and though it was a legitimate effort to portray the Passion-story, some churches railed against it.  A fool on an ass.

The yearly recitation of the Christ-tale comes to us at a time in our nation’s history which is rich in bitter irony.  Jesus came into Jerusalem, if we are to trust the Gospel accounts, as a solitary rider, a prince of peace.  Yet, folk of our generation, by which I mean, this time, folk both younger and older than I, remember watching television on the 19th of March, five years ago, as the planes began to soar over Baghdad and the lights of the city blinked out.  The greatest military power the world has ever known invaded the city of Baghdad and the tiny country of Iraq, and overthrew its grandstanding president. Soon thereafter, his statues and likenesses were pulled down in the full bore of TV cameras as a signal to the world that those who had come into town with guns and bombs had won.   At a cost now amounting to over a million Iraqi deaths and uncountable wounded, the United States took over and caused an interim puppet government to be installed. Over four thousand U.S. servicemen and women have died and there are an estimated one hundred thousand Coalition troops who have been wounded, either physically or psychologically.  To say that the maneuver hasn’t worked yet in five years would be a great understatement.  The causus belli, the notion that there were weapons of mass destruction abrew in Iraq has long-ago been discredited.  According to the Center for Public Integrity, George Bush and his administration made a total of 935 false statements during the leadup to the war in Iraq between 2001 and 2003.  The Secretary-General of the United Nations, a voice that used to be respected in this country, stated that the war is not in conformity with the U.N. charter. “From our point of view,” stated Kofi Anan,  “from the charter point of view, it is illegal.”  Probably no war in the history of the world has faced such simultaneous criticism from so many quarters of the globe.  Millions of people in many, many countries, have taken to the streets to protest this thing which the government of the United States has almost unilaterally done and continues to do.

From this pulpit I declared, six years ago in the leadup to this war, that if we should go to war in Iraq it would be the greatest moral evil of our time.  I do not feel any sense of gloating that history has vindicated my point of view, nor should anyone else; I feel but sadness and dread. I recall that six years ago there  was  the amazing coincidence that the lectionary readings provided us with reading after reading from the greatest of the prophets, Jeremiah, on a matter that was, in substance, not different from ours, then, and now.  That is, Jeremiah was trying desperately to warn the king and the government of his day against a military entanglement that would mean the end of the nation.  And today, five years later, I feel only Jeremiah’s broken heart and anguish every single week as I go through the list of dead for that week in preparation for posting them for your bulletin:

“Oh, my heart, my heart, I writhe in pain,
Oh, the walls of my heart, (they tear like a tent)
I cannot keep silent
For I hear the sound of the trumpet
The alarm of war
Disaster overtakes disaster
The whole land is laid waste
How long must I see the standard?
And hear the sound of the trumpet?
God says, “For my people are foolish and they do not know me.
They are stupid children, they have no understanding
They are skilled in doing evil
but do not know how to do good.”

[Jeremiah 4: 19-20a, 21, 22]

Whatever those of you who have to listen to me from week to week may say, think or feel about my railing against the war back then, I’ll say to you that I simply did not want my heart to break (as if preaching to you, and thus unloading my fears would keep it from breaking).  Nor, did I want the nation’s heart to break, but it has.  What was begun with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his brother Robert and then Martin Luther King, carried through by Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra, and, yes, Monica Lewinsky, has come to its apotheosis, now, in this illegal, immoral, and dreadful catastrophe, and that is the almost utter distrust of the people who a mere two centuries ago declared a nation of the people, for the people and by the people, no longer their government to do good.

Reference was made in yesterday’s Winter Soldier testimony, to a Picasso painting depicting the destruction of a village in the Spanish Revolution.  The barren landscape of the painting, it was said, depicted a destroyed village as a way of deploring the destruction of war.  It was further said that this painting hangs in the United Nations building in New York City but that it was covered up! during Colin Powell’s now utterly discredited testimony urging the world to make war on Iraq because it’s message didn’t go along with the Secretary’s!  It was said, however, that in one corner of the painting is a single, solitary flower.  And that flower represents hope.  It was said that Iraq Veterans Against the War, who sponsor the Winter Soldier event, are that hope.  Having watched some of the testimony of the soldiers who have been there yesterday with some other members of this congregation, I can only agree, wrenching though it is. We who follow the lonely figure his lowly beast are also flowers of hope.  We who hear the words of hope in the story, sprout up as hope, as it were, in the world.   We take that hope out of this place and spread it around, that the world may open up and come to full-flower.  We who follow the lonely figure of the Lord without cynicism, without despair, and with hope, love, and faith, we have a power greater than we know.