Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

March 25, 2018

John 12:12-16

 The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!”

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written:

“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.

Glory

Some of the speeches from the youth yesterday, at the March for Our Lives: In one, Emma Gonzales stands and after a fiery opening, naming those who have been killed, she stands in silence without an explanation.  Let me say, it is a difficult thing to hold a large group in silence because you start to feel their discomfort.  In the church, even when we announce and say, “A moment of silence” in the bulletin, about as long as y’all can stand it is 30 seconds.  After that you begin to start feeling people adjust in their seats; the air starts to get uncomfortable.  So Emma stands there on the stage for a count not of seconds but minutes. At one point the crowd gets so uncomfortable it starts to cheer because the crowd is trying to fill the air with something concrete.  And she just stands there, unmoving, unhurried, crying. She just stands there and cries until a timer goes off:  6 minutes and 20 seconds, to commemorate the time it took to end 17 lives in an attack and to change others forever.  Looking back on it, her speech has been called one of the most powerful moments from the events yesterday.  But in the moment, even watching it on video, it is really uncomfortable because crowds are ready to cheer.  They are ready to leap up and say that someone is great and find the answer they had been looking for and be jubilant together.

Crowds can be ready, also, to rise in anger.  They are ready to find their villains or, at their very worst, to cast aside the weak.  But crowds do not do well with silence and seriousness and pain, to stand in a moment and neither let them lift you up as your hero or look away from suffering.  What you get is an uneasy crowd who wants to look away.  And trust me; it is only in hindsight that you are able to say, “Wasn’t that powerful?  Wasn’t it glorious?”  Now that we know what to look for, what a tremendous thing was done.

In many ways, the speeches of the young people yesterday, especially those who were lifted up, the brutal and disproportionate losses of people of color, I felt within myself this similar impulse as my soul is tempted to either put them on a pedestal as an exceptional presence or to jump straight to creating the villains and blaming those terrible other people, without sitting in the truth of their pain and accepting the responsibility in that was my own.  These children do not need any more comparisons to Jesus.  I pray for them, for they have found themselves tasked in leadership as grieving children where our leaders have dared not stand.  Such a place of vulnerable leadership is a place of spiritual peril and so I pray for them.  I receive as a gift the silence they hold that cries glory such that even the silence of the stones would cry out: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”

We are here today at the final phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, the ending chorus, the last refrain.  This final passage is called “The Doxology” and likely a later addition:  Doxa which means glory and logos which means word: a word of glory for