For Thine Is Kingdom, The Power, And the Glory Forever
March 24, 2002
Palm Sunday
Year A
Title: For Thine Is The Kingdom, The Power And The Glory Forever
Theme: The God who is, the God who is in relationship with us, is
greater than the God we think we want—thus it makes our quest for
Faith a journey worth going on.
When we began this season of Lent about 5 weeks ago with our look at
the Jesus’ Prayer, or the Lord’s Prayer, as most know it, I never though I
would start off a sermon talking about being disappointed. You know,
we, your sisters and brothers in Oklahoma City have been going on this
journey with you during the season of Lent, and so when I came to the
end of the season, and to the conclusion of Jesus’ Prayer, and was
scheduled to preach on “For Thine Is The Power, And The Glory
Forever,” I was actually pretty shocked to find that I couldn’t find the
actual verse in my Bible. You see, in the most ancient manuscripts the
church has of its New Testament, scholars can’t find that last line of
Jesus’ Prayer, that line that most of us grew up with and sometimes
recited every Sunday in church. We’re pretty sure that somewhere down
the line, someone, maybe some monk or Christian scribe just didn’t think
that Jesus ended his prayer all that well, and somehow he decided he
might need some help, and so he, and it was probably a “he,” he added
“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, Amen.” I
must admit that I was pretty shocked—I hadn’t really thought about it, nor
had I actually preached on Jesus’ Prayer, so it was a complete surprise
to me as well. And after I got over my surprise, I found myself, well,
disappointed, and even a little bit saddened that what I had come to
expect wasn’t there anymore. The prayer ends with “and do not bring us
to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one” and then Jesus goes
on to talk about the hard stuff of forgiving other people. To be perfectly
honest, I like the old ending, the one that we’re pretty sure Jesus didn’t
give us—I mean, who wants to really end a prayer on temptation—its not
exactly an “up” topic, so I can see how the that monk hundreds and
hundreds of years ago was tempted to help Jesus along by ending his
prayer with something a little more grand and powerful, a little more
punch—“for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever.
Amen!” Now, that is how a prayer should end, that’s the finale we would
expect!
But, you know, that’s not actually what Jesus taught us—he didn’t ask us
to end the prayer with that last line that I love so much, and I suspect a
few of you do as well. But, you know, I’m not the only one to be
disappointed in Christ—Jesus was disappointing people all the time, he
was always failing people’s expectations. Sometimes it was his disciples
expectations and their expectations of what the Messiah should be, what
a Savior of the Jewish people should be like, and sometimes it was the
crowds that came to see him and to be healed by him, and to simply be
in his presence. I’ve always thought that Palm Sunday was an odd
moment for us Christians to celebrate, though I must admit that I love the
beauty and wonder of this celebration—the palms, the hosannas, the
sense of pageantry in this place as we celebrate Jesus’ entry into
Jerusalem. Its odd because we know, we know, that those crowds who
spilled out into the streets of Jerusalem 2000 years ago, who waved
those palms and shouted “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the
one who comes in the name of the Lord!” that these same people, would
soon become an angry mob, days from then, and this mob would be
shouting something else, something less welcoming. Their voices, their
mouths would scream words of murder, words of hate, “Crucify him!
Crucify him!” they would come to yell in the coming days. How quickly
the crowds turned on him, and they turned, I think, because they were
disappointed in Jesus—he failed them as a Messiah. Messiah’s don’t get
locked up by the Romans and they don’t like a pathetic mess, standing
before them, bloodied from the crown of thorns placed on his head, the
world making fun of this would-be Messiah. God’s savior for the people
of Israel, for the world, is not supposed to look like this, and he shouldn’t
be standing before them, with his life in their hands, with his life in the
hands of pagan Romans. This Messiah, this Savior, had been like all the
rest of the would-be Messiahs that had come and gone in the last few
years and they were in no mood to be disappointed again.
And so, oddly enough, we imitate the people of Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, the people who have come to welcome Jesus into the city of
Jerusalem, full of mixed motives and high expectations for what God will
be doing in the coming days. But another reason why we gather to
mimic the crowds of Jerusalem even now is because we too have
sometimes been disappointed in the God we have welcomed into the
walls of our hearts and, though, we may not scream the words “crucify
him,” we do often walk away from the God of our expectations. We have
this idea of God that we have been given by others, that God is
supposed to be like this and like that…and then when God fails to live up
to our expectations, we are incredibly disappointed and we walk away a
little broken-hearted. The people of Jerusalem, good people who
wanted the best for their lives, their children’s lives, for their nation, had
this expectation of God’s Messiah that was simply not going to be met by
this Messiah, this Jesus, and so when it was clear that this Messiah was
not going to fail them, they turned away in disappointment because
Jesus did not end up reflecting the God they wanted. But I understand
where they are coming from: who hasn’t been disappointed in living the
life of faith, in our relationship with God? Who hasn’t walked away, a
little broken-hearted, at times in their lives? “I wanted this, I expected
this, and God failed me,” we say to ourselves, as we struggle, like the
people of Jerusalem, with the God of our expectations. In this funny clip
from the show Futurama, Bender, the robot, is lost in space, and he
stumbles upon God, a God who is not all what he had expected…
Futurama clip here
I love the last line, where God says “If you do things right, then people
won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” This is not the God Bender
was expecting to meet, a God of the soft touch. Now, I must admit that I
don’t think God would be really giving advice on how to burn down a bar
for the insurance money and how to make it look like an electrical
problem, but this little clip does point out the truth that more often than
not, the God who we expect disappoints us. Bender was surprised that
God didn’t know where Earth was—certainly that is something God
should know, right? We want one kind of God and yet we so often get
another kind of God—just ask the people of Jerusalem about how that
truth was lived out some two thousand years ago. We sit and struggle
with the dilemma of having a God we want rather than the God who is,
the God of our wishes, our desires, rather than the God who really is,
truly the God of our dreams, the God whom we are REALLY in
relationship with.
But you know, the good news is that the God we expect, the God whom
we’ve decided needs to be this way or that way, who needs to do this or
that for us, is nothing in comparison to the God who really is, the God
who does exist and who does care for us and who wants the best for us.
This is an unexpected God, a God who startles us, who stuns us, who
challenges us, who won’t let us have a relationship with an expectation, a
relationship with a God we want, but who will ask us to have a
relationship with the God who really is, who exists. The God who exists,
who asks for relationship with us, the God who is, who actually exists, is
greater than the God of our disappointments. This is an unexpected
God, a God who comes into this world to immerse all of the divine into
the experience of what it means to be human, something we see in the
Christ some two thousand years ago. This is a God who doesn’t end
doing what we expect—the God that the people of Jerusalem expected,
the God the people of Jerusalem wanted. This was not a God who would
achieve the freedom of the people by violence and war. This is a God
who constantly does the unexpected, the God we witness in Jesus as he
enters into Jerusalem. Here comes this Jesus, triumphant and a winner,
and the first thing he does is to go and make a lot of very important
people very mad—he goes into the temple and drives out all the
moneychangers and the folks who made their living through the religious
establishment—he challenges the status quo, the expectations of the
people, of the religious leaders, the expectations of everyone he ever
came into contact with. And why should we expect anything less for us,
we who encounter God in this world? God comes to us in such
unexpected ways, and the way that God may come to us will surely
surprise and startle us…
Dogma clip—
God really is something, something totally unexpected, something we can’
t put into a box, and someone that will constantly surprise us. And
maybe God is not Alanis Morisette, but I do think God does handstands,
and that God has a sense of humor—you’ve only got to look around the
world to see that God does a lot of laughing at and with us humans! And
this is also the God who does all the politically stupid things, like hanging
out with the poor and outcasts, and calling into question even those
things that seem to be all about God, like the temple. I think anytime we
actually explore our relationship with God, like we are doing during this
Faithquest, this time we’ve set aside to go deeper into our faith and find
out what it really means to be a Christian, anytime we do some
exploration of our faith, we’re going to be disappointed. We’re going to
be disappointed because we had a certain idea about who God was and
then when we actually had to do some hard spiritual work, we find that
the God of our expectations was not the God who actually is, the God
who actually exists. But the good news, the very good news is that the
God we get, the God who is, is greater than the God we want, the God of
our expectations. The God who has disappointed us has never existed,
but the God who is more than our expectations does exist—and what a
surprising, astonishing God this is! The people lined the roads of the
busy Jerusalem streets to catch a glimpse of the Messiah God has sent
into the world and they tore palm leaves, much like we have in our hands
right now, and they greeted this new glimpse of God they were going to
see in this Jesus by waving those palm leaves and shouting “Hosanna!”
The glimpse they got may have disappointed them, but I hope it doesn’t
disappoint us—no, I don’t think it will, especially if we are not held captive
by our expectations. If there is anything to learn from this God who
meets us in Jesus of Nazareth it is this: The God who is, the God we
meet on the dusty roads of Jerusalem, the God who meets us here, even
now, this God is more incredible, more wondrous, more startling than we
could have ever imagined. And that is surely a reason to celebrate, to
laugh and to sing, and a reason to immerse ourselves in the God who
really is, the God of our dreams. Amen and amen.
