One of the things that bugs me about books and movies where the heroes live happily ever after is that you never get to see them living happily ever after. After the big adventure where someone almost dies but doesn’t or the couple risks everything to be together or the kid finally confronts the bully, at the end they always just ride off into the sunset. It’s like this in the Christian gospels too. You get the resurrection – the juiciest moment, the dénouement of the whole thing, and then the story’s over. In some versions Jesus talks to his disciples and gives some parting instructions but then he basically goes up into the sky and sits happily at the right hand of God ever after.

 

But I always want to see what happens next. Whether it’s a novel or a movie or the Bible, I want to get to enjoy the new lives of the characters. I want to watch the couple having long, relaxed candlelit dinners together. I want to see the kid growing up all confident and happy. I want to see Jesus doing whatever he does at the right hand of the Father and I want to see the women who discovered his empty tomb never doubting their faith for even a second for the rest of their lives.

 

But you never see that. Because, for one thing, that would actually be boring. Without dramatic tension, without some problem that needs to be resolved, there’s no plot. It would be like a football thrown out into outer space with no friction that would just keep going in one direction at one speed forever. Boring. More importantly, you never get to see the happily ever after because it would be unrealistic. There’s no such thing as “happily ever after” in the sense of being unrelentingly happy forever.

 

We have moments of great happiness, great joy. We have breakthroughs and personal triumphs; we climb physical and emotional mountains. We have spiritual awakenings. Maybe we have a baby. Maybe we do marry the person we love. Maybe we do finally confront the bully, whoever that is in our lives. Maybe those women did see an empty tomb and an angel. Who knows? But after the euphoria, after the glory, and the heady, tingly rush of meeting our fate passes, we come back to ourselves. And we find that we still have to get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and feed ourselves and brush our teeth. We still have to have relationships with other human beings who can, I’m told, be fickle. And we are still basically ourselves with all our own fears and insecurities and patterns and limitations. We carry most of that with us into the next chapter.

 

Because in real life, unlike in books and movies, there usually is a next chapter. After the euphoric moment, there is something else. And that something else is where things actually get interesting. Because whatever is next tests the transformation we’ve undergone. People who go on meditation retreats for weeks or months or even years often report having major spiritual breakthroughs, feeling a profound liberation from everything that had been causing them pain. But when they return from the retreat to the “real world,” they can report feeling all the old stuff come rushing back in – the anxiety, the anger, the worry. It is said that it can take as long to integrate what you’ve learned as the time you were away. So if you go for five years, it can take another five years to see that spiritual work bear fruit in your life.

 

It may seem like I’m being a downer on Easter and saying that we can’t change. But that’s not my intention. Of course we change. We always change. It may not be a once-and-for-all happily-ever-after change, but we do change. If we are lucky, we can shift our perspective and elevate our consciousness a bit in a way that carries over into the next week or the next year. But I am saying that transformation doesn’t happen all at once. I’m trying to take some pressure off of the idea of these big, spectacular moments where, boy, you better never be the same again or you’re a loser.

Jesus was a relatively young rabbi when he rode into Jerusalem to such acclaim – the tradition says he was 33 years old. Old enough and special enough to have accomplished quite a bit – healing, teaching, working miracles, starting a movement. But not old enough apparently to be craving the peace and simplicity that many of us crave as we age. In fact, he was hungry. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem showed a bit of the aggressive risk-taking that we associate with testosterone-fueled young men. He had persuaded ordinary people – also mostly young men – to leave their families and follow him and he told them, “if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” He went in expecting a fight and he predicted that he would not make it out alive.

 

Jesus had grown up simple, as a peasant, in a dusty little agrarian village where life was simple. He was used to teaching sitting under a tree or on a little hill, using metaphors of seeds and plants and birds and flowers. He was idealistic and pious. Now Jesus entered the big city – the complex social and political territory of Jerusalem with dueling Roman gods and the Hebrew God, Jewish priests colluding with their occupiers, cross cultural currents buffeting everyone, money gumming up the gears of religion, wealth alongside poverty. He voluntarily, intentionally inserted himself into the middle of this complexity. As of this day that we commemorate as Palm Sunday, Jesus was not in Kansas anymore.

 

The Leonard Bernstein song we heard at the beginning of today’s service says, “Sing God a simple song. Make it up as you go along. Sing like you like to sing. God loves all simple things, for God is the simplest of all.” This clear, almost Zen-like image of spirituality feels lightyears away from that embattled city of Jerusalem. But it’s a vibe that resonates for me and maybe for you as well. It’s one where our connection to the holy is childlike and effortless. Nothing fancy. No rituals, no elaborate prayers. Just sing like you like to sing. Express how you naturally express and whatever comes out, it will be embraced by the universe. It’s the impulse behind the prayer, “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, God.” May my simple song be enough. It’s what we all deep down crave: may I be enough.

 

Jesus also embodied this spirituality of simplicity. He had been teaching it all along. He taught his followers to stop stressing about everything so much and making everything so complicated and just have faith. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or about your body, what you will wear. …Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”

 

He also taught his followers to pray spontaneously and directly from the heart. When he spoke the prayer now known as the “Lord’s Prayer,” he wasn’t saying that we should use those exact words. He was giving an example of praying in his own words, talking directly to God. He prayed with familiarity. Sing like you like to sing. Pray like you like to pray. God loves all simple things, for God is the simplest of all.

 

So Jesus at the moment of entering Jerusalem embodied a paradox: a guru of simplicity hailed as a king in the layered, baroque complexity of a high stress city. The country Jesus meets the city Jesus. That very paradox was his secret sauce. He didn’t retreat from the social and political world and stay in his pastoral comfort zone. He rode his donkey straight into the messy complexity. But he also didn’t leave his spiritual simplicity behind. He carried it with him, inside him, as the bedrock of his connection to God.

The Purim story recounted in the Book of Esther contains a speech by the villain Haman that may be the most chilling, infamous speech in the Hebrew Bible. Haman is the right hand man of the Persian King Ahasveros and wants to rid Persia of their Jewish refugees. His speech to the king has echoed down through the ages because some version of this speech has been spoken by every anti-Semite that ever lived. He says to the king, “There is a certain people dispersed and scattered among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom, who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different from those of other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws. It is not in the king’s interest to tolerate them.”

 

In the case of the Purim story, it's not true that the Jewish people don't follow the laws of the king. In fact, it's the Jew Mordechai who alerts the authorities about the plot against the king's life and saves the king. But Haman is right when he says that “their customs are not like those of other people.” They keep themselves a little bit separate, and proudly so. Haman's accusation has deep resonance. It’s the timeless accusation that Jews living outside of Israel in the diaspora have dual loyalty. They are not full citizens of the country in which they live but are secretly working on behalf of their foreign civilization.

 

This concept of “dual loyalty” has been in the news recently. This exact insinuation touched a nerve when Representatives Illan Omar and Rashida Tlaib suggested that Jews in positions of power were putting Israeli interests over American interests. They were raising fair points about a real problem. But their statements had painful echoes because over the generations, the charge of dual loyalty has been used to justify the murder of Jews from the Spanish Inquisition to the Russian pogroms to the holocaust.

 

And today we know that it’s not just Jews who are accused of dual loyalty. Muslims around the world are so accused. Catholics have been so accused. Immigrants of all religions are targets of hatred because of exactly this. The Purim story is an archetypal story of the way that minorities can be mistrusted and othered by the dominant culture. Some version of Haman’s speech has been uttered by every tyrant, every white nationalist, by every shooter who walks into a mosque or a black church and commits an atrocity against people at prayer. The Haman figure in whatever specific form says, “These people are not real Americans. These people are not real New Zealanders. These people are not like us. They look different, they smell different, their customs are different. They refuse to assimilate. They don’t speak the language. They’re bringing drugs across our border and sending the money back home. They’re going to destroy us if we don’t keep them out. They’re going to destroy us if we don’t destroy them first.” The suffering caused by this ancient trope to this day is immeasurable.

 

So in the Purim story we can all agree to deplore Haman's speech with all its historical echoes. We can agree that it unjustly calls for violence against Jews for nefarious intent that they simply don’t have. And we can point out that the Jews are good citizens and they’re not harming the Persian empire in any way. That’s all true. But we can't honestly say that they don’t have dual loyalty. They do. That's the whole point of the story. It's precisely the dual loyalty of the heroes that makes them heroes. We celebrate Vashti, Mordechai, and Esther because each one faces a conflict between their loyalties - they wrestle with it, agonize over it, and even knowing they may pay a price, they choose loyalty to an ideal over loyalty to the secular state.

 

Queen Vashti’s conflict of loyalties comes when she finds herself in the crosshairs of patriarchy itself. Her husband, King Ahashveros, has thrown a lavish, boozy party where, the text says, “the rule for the drinking was, ‘No restrictions!