Community Church Sermons

The Sixth Sunday in Lent, Palm Sunday, Year C – April 8, 2001

"From Visible Happiness to Unseen Joy”

Luke 19:28-44

Today’s Gospel reading is one of those passages that begins with laughter and ends in tears. To the shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus enters the Holy City of Jerusalem amidst great expectations that he will now drive out the Romans, and establish the reign of God. But even before the joyful parade ends, Luke portrays Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. And, of course, we know now that before the week is out, the disciples will also be left in tears.

This is the paradox of Palm Sunday. From laughter to tears we journey in the space of an hour-long worship service.

Tom Long reports that a number of sociologists have been measuring the level of well-being among the citizens of various nations. When asked to rate their own happiness level, the Irish turn out to be just about the happiest people in the western world. Yes, the Republic of Ireland tops the happiness list, followed closely by the people of Northern Ireland. Go figure that. The Irish then are followed by Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and – at number six – the United States. The most unhappy westerners are the Spanish, the Germans, the Japanese, and – at the bottom – the reportedly miserable Italians.

Although these researchers are reluctant to specify which factors contribute to happiness, one issue seems to be whether or not the nation has lost a war within the memory-span of those living. Thus we find the defeated Germans, Japanese and Italians at the bottom feeling bad.

On the other side of the coin, affluence seems to contribute to overall life satisfaction, although money alone doesn’t produce happiness. For instance, although the Irish earn only about a third of the per capita income of the United States, they manage to be a good deal happier than Americans. And the Irish are positively delirious when compared to the Germans who are also about three times wealthier.

And beyond affluence, some have theorized that the more religious a people, the happier they are. But as we walk our final steps in the Lenten journey toward the cross, and witness the transformation of Palm Sunday’s laughter to Good Friday’s tears, we need to question that assertion. Does faith really produce happiness?

To listen to the TV preachers, it would almost seem so. Believe in Jesus and all your problems will disappear!

But listen to others, and you get a different slant. Karl Marx once argued that the first requisite for the true happiness of people is the abolition of religion. Though it may surprise you, I have to grant Marx his point. How much easier it would be without the stuffy old church and crabby old preachers around – especially at times like Lent, reminding us of sin, death, suffering and injustice. H.L. Mencken once described my Puritan forebears as people tormented by the thought that somewhere out there, someone might be having a good time! And by all means, they needed to be stopped!

What do you think? Does faith produce happiness?

“Christianity is a thing of unspeakable joy,” writes C.S. Lewis. “But it begins not in joy, but in wretchedness. And it does no good to try to get to the joy by bypassing the (sorrow).”

In today’s reading from Luke, the people want to get to the joy of the Kingdom of God without the painful sorrow of the cross. But while they look at the sunny side of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and shout, “Hosanna!” Jesus stares into something they seem to be unable to see. And Jesus weeps.

What is it that he alone perceives that day as he rides into Jerusalem? What is the sight unseen by the others that captures his attention?

It is the brokenness of the people along the way. The widows who’ve lost their husbands and now live in loneliness and poverty. The orphans in the streets, living without parental care, begging for food. The oppressed ones who have been down for so long that they think the only way to a future is through armed revolution or crime. The wealthy ones who’ve capitulated and bought into the inevitability of the unjust Roman economic system. Jesus sees along the side of the road those crowded out of life’s marketplace. Poor people. Hungry people. People who are ostracized and excluded. The religiously unfit are there. So too are the disabled – the paralyzed, the hearing and visually impaired. There are people possessed by the demons of life. There are children there along the side of the road, living in a world of violence and confusion. Moms and dads are there too, afraid for the future of their kids.

And Jesus, Luke tells us – seeing this throng of people who otherwise would be unseen – weeps. Jesus will have none of this put on a happy face kind of religion! No – so long as there are human tears in the world – he must take them upon himself. And so, my friends, must we.

W. H. Auden once wrote a cute poem called “Homage to Clio” in which he expresses sheer contempt for the happiness of a rooster he hears crowing every morning. Auden writes, “(Hearing) a cock pronouncing himself, himself. Though all his sons had been castrated and eaten, I was glad I could be unhappy.”

You see, it’s a good thing to be able to be sad. You ask, how can that be? Well, the rooster manages to be so gleeful in the morning because his brain is the size of a pea, and the tragedy of the loss of his own offspring never even occurs him! And there are people like that, you know! Gleefully going about the ruins of many of our cities, and the wreckage of many of our families as though everything in the world is wonderful. Happily going about their business even while you are sitting in the ICU waiting room – a loved one’s life hanging in the balance, even while a lost soul of a derelict collapses in a cold doorway somewhere, even while a child brings a gun to school and fires at his classmates, even while a woman is battered by her lover, and even while a whole race of people is discriminated against because of the color of their skin.

Oh, if faith could make us happy in the face of the world as it is, we would be less than human.

So as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, we are invited to wipe away our superficial smiles, and instead to open wide our eyes to the broken humanity that Jesus loves. And we are asked to join Jesus in giving our lives for them.

For this is the way to the “unspeakable joy” that C.S Lewis describes.

Two of our church families have recently walked the long and arduous path of caring for loved ones journeying toward the end of their days. When you talk with them, you sense the depth of the loss they have experienced. There are no happy faces there. But as they share with you the meaning of being with their loved ones as a source of faith and love in the final days, weeks and months of their living, you begin to detect in them a quiet and unspeakable joy.

It is the same joy many of you report when you return from serving supper to the hungry people at the Knox Area Rescue Ministry. There is nothing happy about the circumstances that grip the lives of the human beings there. But there is a joy in serving them. It is the same joy written on the faces of those beginning our new ministries in Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon. The same joy radiating from the face of the nurse I know who once responded to the constant crying of an AIDS baby by taking the infant in her arms against all the rules of the time, and rocking the child to sleep.

The Palm Sunday crowds are looking at what seems to be the obvious. Jesus is coming to wipe out the Romans, and chase all the bad things away. But Jesus rides on, perceiving what few others dare to see – a world of broken people who need the presence of God in their lives. And so he rides on to take upon himself their wounds.

Paul says that Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, for the sake of the joy that was set before him.

This is the ultimate test of faith: trusting that God will bring you joy as you open your eyes to this often unseen and overlooked world of God’s children, and as you pour out your life in redemptive love.

So I invite you this morning to step out of the happy crowd waving palm branches by the side of the road as Jesus comes by. Don’t be just an observer! Instead, join Jesus on the roadway itself, and journey with him to the cross. Open your eyes to see what he sees. Weep with him for those who are broken. March on to the cross – and, with him, lay down your life for others – trusting God to raise you and the world to joy!