When the Lord Comes

Amos 5:18; Matthew 21:1-11

Robert M Watkins

April 1, 2007

 

Amos stands out like an April Fool on Palm Sunday. He is so out of step with the tone of joy and laughter and celebration. He barks doom and destruction while the rest of the world dances all around him.

 

This week, Amos would be a scary looking man come into town from somewhere deep in the country, standing at the corner of Berkman and Washington, not holding a buy-sell sign for Masters badges, but with a cardboard placard pinned to a stick that proclaimed the end of the world to all the golf patrons as they entered Augusta National. He would be shouting as loud as he could holler, too. How long would it take for a Richmond County deputy to sidle up and ask him to move along?

 

He would be just as out of place in First Century Jerusalem on a day when the whole city turned out for an impromptu parade. Rabbi Jesus was coming to town for Passover. He had won over thousands of people as he went about Palestine, preaching comfort and hope and healing to the masses, people who had long been forgotten by the people in power. He had captured the imagination of the faithful with words of wisdom and truth. He made things simple and he brought all the structures and strictures down to earth so anyone could understand them. Now he was coming to the city central to the faith and to the whole nation. This was a great day. Things were going to change. Everyone could feel it. God seemed to be on the brink of a new thing. The revolution was at hand. God was coming. And there would be Amos, fretting and pacing, grumbling and mumbling about how no one saw what was really happening, no one saw the signs, no one was thinking clearly. God was coming and it was going to be a day not of light, but of darkness. The world was shifting and woe unto all under whom it moved. I could see Peter ushering him aside with a strong arm.

 

It is probably just as well Amos lived over seven centuries before Jesus was born, and nearly 3000 years before the Masters got started. He would never have lasted in either place.

 

Or is that untrue?

 

We love celebrations. We love Christmas because it has become a month long time of happiness and wonder. We love Easter because of its celebration of renewal and hope, the blossoming of creation, and the promise that it is our own time to flower. We would be right there with the crowds on that first Palm Sunday, singing and dancing alongside the road as Jesus went by. Similarly, Masters Week is unlike any other week in our fair city, one that clogs the streets and the restaurants, but as our own Chuck Baldwin pointed out, anyone who says they don’t like it hasn’t paid attention to what it does for Augusta. It makes the whole city alive and confirms what a lot of us already know—this is a great place to live. We celebrate and let down for a week.

 

But this week it is also Holy Week. Just as the golf tournament begins in earnest on Thursday, so, too, does the faith journey of the week. Thursday night we remember another Thursday, long, long ago, when Jesus Christ rewrote the relationship between God and ourselves. As the golfers march toward the cut on Friday, the day when many of them will realize this is not their year and some will find promises unfulfilled, a time of athletic judgment and pain, we, too, will gather in the presence of darkness—golf will fall beside the way as we consider Christ dying at the hands of those who celebrated him, for nothing more and nothing less than confronting human evil and demanding something different. Sunday a new champion will be crowned, but only after an ultimate victory, one that turns all others to straw, will be proclaimed—Christ lives again. Like Amos, Holy Week cries out that there is something other than mindless celebration at hand.

 

Amos stands there and stares us down. “Do you not see?” he asks. Whoever wins the Green Jacket has done only that; God is doing something else altogether. God is winning our lives.

 

Amos goes further—“Do you not understand?” We love Palm Sunday—the beauty of the palms, the festive music, the bright colors and words—but do we not see? Jesus will only be the Christ as he descends into darkness, as he stands up to utter rejection, as he dies the death of a common criminal. God is at work, but do we see the full reality of that work?

 

We like celebrations because they distract us. For a moment, they take us away from the problems we face each day. For a little while, they divert us from the cares, fears, and troubles we have. The Masters does that. It takes us away for a week from the problems we have within our community. It gives us a chance to talk about something else. But underneath nothing has changed.

 

Palm Sunday is different. It opens a week unlike any other. It opens a week that will include a tragic death. But it opens a week in which change really will happen. It opens a week when the power of all that troubles us is vanquished and taken away in the blink of an eye. It opens a week that will end with Resurrection.

 

To get there we have to walk into the darkness, though. We have to gather at this table set before us this morning and taste and see what it is the Lord has prepared for us. We have to hear words intoned, hard words, about flesh and blood as a new covenant marked by sacrifice, and we have to accept them. But then there shall be joy, joy that never ends, light that never fades—then there will indeed be cause for celebration.

 

But we have to attune our ears and focus our eyes to grasp it.

 

Amen.

 

3/25/07 Lawnmower Theology