"ANSWERED QUESTIONS"

Matthew 21:1-11; Philippians 2:1-11

What a week it's been across our country

and around our world.

A mother who throws her children off the bridge into traffic

and then jumps after them.

A governor elected to office

on a platform to round up those who traffic in vice

is brought down for practicing the very vice he sought to end.

A seemingly-happy married couple

who chose to solve temporary problems

with the permanent solution of suicide.

Presidential primary politics 

which are more interested in making dividing lines

out of race and gender

than they are in uniting the country and moving forward.

War drags on, and rumors of war continue.

Leaders jockey for position,

natural disasters dot the landscape,

and the poor we always have with us -

while financial institutions with corrupt business practices

are the first to get a bailout.

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay

would say that all of these events boil down to one thing.

 "It's not true that life is one (*) thing after another;' she said,  

"it is one (*) thing over and over."

Untold thousands of years of the human race,

and it seems that we have hardly gotten past go.

Elizabeth Gilbert would say that it's two things over and over.

She's the author

of a book that's on the New York Times bestseller list

called Eat Pray Love.

Quite a book.

On one level,

it's about her travels acrossItaly, India and Indonesia

in order to write a magazine article.

But on another level,

it's a trip to find herself

and to answer some of those age-old questions

that have haunted men and women for centuries.

On one leg of the trip,

she recalls a woman she met one time

who was almost a hundred years old.

The woman said to her,

"There are only two questions that human beings have fought over,

all through history.

How much do you love me?

And, Who's in charge?"

Everything else is somehow manageable,

Gilbert says.

"But these two questions of love and control

undo us all, trip us up,

and cause us grief and suffering."

How much do you love me?

Who's in charge?

Whether it's parents and their children,

or spouses or potential spouses,

or favorite siblings or closest friends,

these two questions lurk at some level

behind every misunderstanding

in every relationship.

And these two questions tend to get intertwined

and tangled up with each other,

which makes them hard to isolate out

and even harder to answer.

Gilbert turns everywhere

looking for the answers to those two questions.

She practices Yoga in an Indian ashram.

She spends time with a holy man in Bali.

She even thinks that limitless pasta in Italy might do the trick.

If you want to enjoy an armchair tour of the world

along with your quest for truth,

this is your book.

But if you want the answer to those two questions,

you don't have to leave Fannin County

as long as you have your Bible in front of you.

Our scripture readings this morning

tell us who is in charge,

and who it is that loves us.

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At first,

it seems that our reading from Matthew this morning

answers the question of "who is in charge."

The Son of David is in charge here.

People clear the streets,

they find him a donkey in lieu of something grander

to ride in the parade,

they lay down their cloaks

to make a makeshift carpet for him,

they wave palm branches to celebrate.

This isn't exactly the most fitting tribute

to honor the Son of David,

but it gets the message across.

Matthew tells us

that when Jesus finally makes his way into Jerusalem,

the whole city is in turmoil.

It would be nice if Matthew's gospel ended right there,

with Jesus being in charge

and all the people recognizing it

and giving Jesus the honor that he is due.

But almost immediately

it moves into a struggle of control,

becoming almost a literal riot

over who really is in charge here.

Hardly seventy-two hours go by

before the disciples fall asleep on Jesus

in the garden of Gethsemane,

before the people are crying for Barabbas to live and Jesus to die,

before Pilate is washing his hands of the entire episode,

before Peter denies three times that he ever knew Jesus.

How could Jesus lose control that quickly?  

As we mentioned earlier,

the questions of love and control

can get really intertwined and messy

at the blink of an eye.

Maybe instead of being a story of who's in charge,

the story of Palm Sunday -

which leads Jesus from exaltation to crucifixion

in the space of four or five days -

maybe at its heart

this is the story

of whether and how much we are really loved.

If we stop and realize for just a moment

that Jesus had alternatives,

that he could have chosen to do things differently

at any point along the way,

then there's no need for us to even pose the question

of the depth of Jesus' love for us.

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Put this reading up against Paul's letter to the Philippians,

and the questions of love and control

get turned on their heads.

Paul tells us this morning

that even to ask who's in charge is a moot point.

We can check that one off the list.

"Who's in charge" is a nonissue

because God's got that one covered.

Paul also says

that if we have to ask whether and how much Jesus loves us,

we're asking the wrong question.

That's not even a question that Paul would entertain.

The question for us, he says,

is whether and how much we love Jesus.

The question of control is covered;

all that is left for us to do is to love.

And that's not a mushy kind of love

that only wishes the other person well

without having to get too deeply involved with them,

or hopes benignly that nothing bad happens.

It's love which extends all the way up to our creator,

and all the way across to our neighbors -

all of them.

If that is the kind of love we practice, Paul says,

we will have within ourselves the same mind as Christ,

the same love as Christ,

the same willingness to go down the hard path

for the sake of others,

the willingness to confess

as often as we will

that the same Jesus who rode into Jerusalem

is indeed the Christ in charge,

the Holy One of Israel

whom alone we worship and serve.

Shane Claiborne knows about that kind of love.

He's one of those young people

who's not waiting his turn

to influence the church some day up the road.

He's making a difference right now,

preaching and writing

and keynoting at conferences on church growth

and hanging out at places like Church Under the Bridge.

He's written a book that Carol Amlin will be glad to loan you

called The Irresistible Revolution.

And that's where he has this to say:

"[Our world is in desperate need of] lovers,

people who are building deep, genuine relationships

with fellow strugglers along the way,

and who actually know the faces of the people

behind the issues they are concerned about?

a community of people

who have fallen desperately in love with God

and with suffering people

and who allow those relationships

to disturb and transform them."

The last time I checked with scripture,

that's pretty much the mind of Christ.

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Friends, the good news of the gospel -

the good news of this day -

is that while there may be two age-old questions,

they both have the same answer.

The One in charge really does love us.

And the One who really loves us

calls us with his own life to love others:

not just from a distance,

but from alongside,

just as we have been loved and accompanied by him.

That's the message of Holy Week in a nutshell.

And in order for us to practice and strengthen that love,

I want to challenge you to do something.

Avail yourself of the offerings of this holy week.

It is very easy to glide from the celebrations of Palm Sunday

right over to the celebrations of Easter Sunday

without missing a beat.

It is also very easy

to let ourselves become so distracted by the headlines of the day

or the little intrigues of our own lives

that we don't have to think about the implications of Holy Week.

But in order to get there himself,

Jesus had to go through the valley of the shadow of death.

My challenge to you

is to accompany him this week :

accompany him to those places which are not so happy,

and to learn to answer those two questions

at a much deeper level.  

Gather around the Seder table Thursday evening.

Commemorate the first celebration of the Lord's Supper

and the last meal he shared with his disciples.

Gather on Friday at noon

to remember the crucifixion.

Pray for an hour at the prayer vigil,

and come to terms with how much Jesus does indeed love us.

Discover how much you love him.

And then crawl out of bed at sunrise next Sunday

to hear the good news for yourself.

Let yourself live and walk the rhythms of this holy week

in order to be of the same mind

and to share the same love.

The God who is in charge,

in the words of C.S. Lewis,

"isn't safe but he's good."

Take the occasion of these next seven days

to put yourself into the hands of the Holy One,

the One in charge who loves us more than life,

and be led through a resurrection experience you'll never forget.

Amen.

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Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat Pray Love was published in paperback by Penguin Books of New York in 2006; the story of her elderly friend can be found on page 157.

Shane Claiborne's book The Irresistible Revolution was published by Zondervan, Grand Rapids MI, in 2006.  His wonderful statement about "the army of lovers" is on pp 295-6.

C.S. Lewis makes this statement about Aslan, referring of course to God, in his book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperCollins, 1950), pp 79-80.