Last week, a mile from where Andy and I sat sipping rum punch and looking at the beauty of the ocean, a professional snorkel cruise guide and her husband got caught in riptide and drowned. Vacationers gathered on the balcony of the Sheraton to watch the helicopter retrieve their bodies from the water.
If a trained person whose life work is to be in the ocean can drown just like that, why should any of us dare risk going in?
This weekend, in an act that is almost unfathomable, on the third floor of the Mall of America a stranger picked up a 5-year-old child and threw him over railing to the marble floor below.
How are we to live a human life?
How can we exist in a world where this kind of senseless, evil thing could happen?
Forget the ocean, the mall is too dangerous. Plane crashes, car accidents…death is a real possibility, for all of us, at any moment. Maybe we are safer if we never leave our own homes, where the risks contract to carbon monoxide or lead poisoning, break-ins, tornadoes, falls, identity theft or grease fires?
It feels these days like fear is lurking around every corner. At every moment there is something to be afraid of. Every choice we make feels weighty and risky. And total destruction at the hands of enemies doesn’t have to mean bodily. It can be done with a a WiFi connection and that poisonous cocktail of good intentions and no mercy.
The earth itself is simultaneously erupting in earthquakes, forest fires, and mid-April thunder snow, hovering perpetually on the brink of catastrophe. Hate is breeding, governments are crumbling, and people are starving, and when they flee to seek a new home, we turn them away as threats to our safety. The stock market is shakey, and politics feel alarming nearly every second.
And on top of sudden illness, we’re vulnerable to random violence, freak accidents and bad decisions. Human beings are just so weak and susceptible to all of it.
So, let’s be real here: Fear is a very sincere and ever-available option to us.
And fear helps us. Fear is not a bad thing; it’s a warning thing. It keeps us alive, (for a little while, at least).
But avoiding death is an abysmal way to live.
With our heads down and our arms raised in self-protection against the risks this life dishes out at every turn, we lock ourselves into a tedious, fear-driven half-life that makes us unable to recognize God in front of us, or our neighbor beside us, or to share deeply in anything truly good – like love, hope or joy.
Instead of being alive, our goal is to be safe.
But safety is a terrible life-goal.
When we have it, it is momentary and fleeting, and it can be taken away in a second by an unlimited variety of things or people, whether accidentally, maliciously, or even with the best of intentions. But mostly, safety is an illusion and we only ever think we have it. So we spend our life pursuing something that we will never attain or keep.
In all our evolved consciousness, we’ve somehow reached a state of masterful delusion that equates the pursuit of peace with the pursuit of safety.
Peace and safety are not the same thing.
In fact, they might even be considered opposites.
Peace is the resonance of the true connection of all things- belonging to God and each other.
Safety is the guarding from risk and harm.
If the point of human life is to be both physically and emotionally safe, you will never have peace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the midst of the horrors of Nazi Germany, wrote:
“There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment. Wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of almighty God. Not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.” (from his speech in Fano, Denmark, quoted in Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life).
There is no such thing as peace that comes with safety.
Jesus knew this.
He knew he was going to die in Jerusalem.
He went anyway.
On Palm Sunday we wave our palm branches and shout “Hosanna!” to welcome in the savior of the world. But I recently learned that some churches have historically also reenacted the rest of what this same crowd shouts a week later, “Crucify Him!”
I get a pit in my throat imagining all of us shouting that together.
It feels unseemly, dark, a little too real, perhaps.
It testifies to the fact that it takes almost nothing for praise to turn to condemnation, for a crowd to become a mob.
God-with-us came into our fear, into our risk, into the randomness and the violence and the isolation and the blame. God came into this unsafe life to bring peace - the resonance of the true connection of all things - belonging to God and each other.
Instead of waving palm branches and shouting Hosanna, when Luke tells the story of this day the people repeat the same thing the angels sang when God first came to be with us, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Glory in the highest heaven!”
The crowd doesn’t know they are saying the same thing that was proclaimed at his birth, but the angels do. The stones do. The very cosmos can hear the literary echo from the time of God’s arrival among us. From the moment he drew his first baby breath, God’s choice to come into this human life meant coming under the sentence of death.
God came to make himself unsafe alongside us.
God brings peace by taking on all that is unsafe.
Peace on earth! The angelic choir proclaims to the shepherds when God arrives. But the script shifts slightly in the mouths of the cheering crowd, Peace in heaven! the people shout at their peasant king. Keep the peace up there. Down here, we’d rather have safety.
Glory to God in the highest heaven! The angels sang.
Order them to stop, teacher!, some religious leaders say urgently to Jesus when the crowd takes up the song. This is the time of their visitation from God! Their experience of peace is right at hand! And the leaders ask him to shush the people because what they are doing feels a little bit dangerous.
Jesus answers, If they didn’t say it the stones themselves would.
Glory to God! This is the truth that cannot not be said. It has been said in a myriad of ways since the beginning of time. There are stones that do speak of God’s glory. I’ve stood in the hushed magnificence of the stunning Chartes cathedral where stacked and intricately carved stones have preached to pilgrims for nearly a thousand years of the glory of God.
The island my family visited last week is still being formed of stone; it bursts molten hot from the earth’s core. When it runs down into the cool ocean water it explodes into brand new sand, forming new land where there was none five months ago. As the Psalmist sang, The earth itself proclaims the glory of the Lord!
Jerusalem was supposed to be a place where the stones spoke of God’s glory, the city on a hill, a shining symbol of peace. The temple of stones within the city was built to be the place where people draw near to God. But Jerusalem has become a symbol of oppression and corruption, stark poverty and opulent wealth on daily display amidst the distraction and commerce of religion. Tomorrow, he will overturn the tables of the moneychangers in the temple. But right now he is weeping for what should have been. ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!
It is right in front of you and you are missing it.
This is not the first time Jesus has cried about Jerusalem. A few weeks ago we saw him weep, when he predicted this very moment:
I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’ (Luke 13:33-35)
And now here they are, just as he said they would be, echoing the Angels’ songs, taking the words out of the mouths of stones.
The Prince of Peace rides among us in a mock military parade, on a borrowed donkey instead of a noble steed, and when he arrives in the city, instead of claiming it in power, he cries over it. He weeps for the people who don’t recognize the things that make for peace. The violence they live by will be the violence they die by, total destruction at the hands of their enemies, not one stone left on another. In their pursuit of safety and security, they do not recognize the time of their visitation by God.
I recently heard it said, “At every moment we have a choice between safety and love.”
Riding a donkey through that crowd that day, to the city of disappointed hopes, Jesus chose love. When he goes to the cross at the end of this week he chooses love.
When he came into this world as a vulnerable baby he chose love.
At every moment he was on this earth, Jesus chose love over safety.
He did this for us.
For our peace. For our true connection to God, each other, and the world.
Death is all around us. We’re flailing to keep our head above water every day, it seems, nearly drowning in the very words looming over us in these banners at this moment– injustice, fear, sin, division, shame and crisis.
Every day we deal in death and the threat of death.
Every day we bow to fear.
Every day we strive to make ourselves, our children, our communities, our nation, our freeways, our computers, our borders, our bank accounts and our futures, safe from any evil.
Every day we exchange costly love for the mirage of security.
But peace and safety can’t co-exist.
The resonance of true relationship is incompatible with protecting oneself from risk and harm.
Jesus knows this. Riding into Jerusalem that day, Jesus is preparing himself to take on the violent act of crucifixion to bring peace.
Evil can’t be beaten by evil. It can only be defeated by an ultimate act of love.
Love is eternal and permanent. It swallows evil.
When everything else, as strong or as scary as it has been for its moment on this earth, disappears, as it will, what remains forever is love.
When death itself is past, love endures.
By surrendering any claim on his life and safety, God submits himself to evil, and in so doing, evil itself is consumed and beaten by love.
You and I cannot extricate ourselves from the crowd or the mob.
We arethe ones who say Hosanna! and also Crucify him!
We are the shepherds receiving the good news of God’s arrival among us, and the soldiers nailing this same God to the cross.
We are the ones who are harmed and the ones who bring harm.
We are caught in sin, and we participate in evil, and no matter what we do or don't do, we will one day die.
In the knowledge of that, we are often weak and worried, predisposed to fear and eager to pursue the illusion of safety.
We are terrified to go after peace, and accept it's risky command to love other people and God. What a dangerous way to live!
But God has come under the sentence of death alongside us to overcome death for us.
God is here alongside us even now.
And we are made from love, for love.
Love is our calling and our purpose and our end.
If we are to recognize the times of our visitations from God, to recognize the moments where love rises up, and peace is tasted, and joy is felt, and hope floods through us, and the real connection of all things is glimpsed and shared in, then this is what it means: That despite the dangers, we “give ourselves completely to God’s commandment.” We lay ourselves, our loved ones, “and the destiny of the nations, in the hands of almighty God,” who comes willingly into our death to bring life.
This earth is an unsafe place.
Living is an unsafe activity.
But we are not alone. And this is not the end.
The way of peace leads to the cross.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Glory to God in the Highest heaven. Peace on earth, and good will to all.
Amen.
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