Courage
Courage
Matthew 21:1-11
Courage… Next Sunday, I will enter my 26th year of being the pastor of the Union Church, my 36th year of being a pastor. Of all the memories that I have filed in that time, the thickest file is labeled simply, “Courage.”
It was Lavergne Wesselhoeft who faced 17 different major surgeries in her life when I knew her, including one that lasted nearly nine hours. At the end of that surgery, when I was allowed into recovery to see her, she was still intubated but took my hand and smiled. I whispered to her in words that I could only say to her, “Lavergne, you are one tough lady!” If you can laugh and be on a ventilator, she was.
Courage was what I saw in Lavergne’s daughter, Mary, who cared for both of her parents through their final days and then, when she missed them so much, revamped her nursing career to become a hospice nurse. She became one of the best hospice nurses around, a person with the courage to stare down mortality every day. Then, when her diagnosis came down, it was her turn to face her own mortality.
Courage is what Barb Mortimer showed every day that I knew her because for all of those 27 years she was either an active cancer patient or was a former cancer patient who had a hunch that “cancer free” wasn’t going to necessarily hold. For those of us who went to chemo treatments with her, it was like being in the Palm Sunday parade. Mortality may have been there but so was joy and laughter and all of the other things that make a single moment, fully lived, so layered. And the bravest person in the room was Barb, not putting on same “happy face” but being fully present and responding with compassion to every other patient and doctor and nurse and custodian that she met.
Barb used to talk quite a bit with me about what she wanted in her memorial service some day: white cake with white frosting at the reception; no balloons; lots of joy and laughter. I used to tease her and say, “You know, Barb, I’m mortal, too. I could get hit by a bus out front of the hospital when we leave today. So…here’s what I want you to say at my service…” She’d humor me and act like she was making mental notes. Ever the Viking, she especially liked the idea of putting my body on a ship and setting it on fire on Lake Michigan. We both agreed, though, that Kathy O., our village president, was probably going to draw the line on that one!
You probably get where I’m going here. To be a pastor is to deal with mortality all the time. When I found a body on one of my hikes in Open Lands a few years ago, I was glad it was me and not some kid. There was no trauma involved for me because not only have I seen bodies, I have often spent hours sitting with them because they were the bodies of people whom I have loved who died just an hour or two before.
Of course, this isn’t just true of pastors. It’s true of doctors and nurses and EMT’s and funeral home directors. There is just a cross section of folks for whom mortality is an undeniable reality. The other group of people for whom this is true is the folks who love the first group. I’ve often apologized to my kids that they had to grow up in a world where tragedy was a daily feature. However, I have to say that the reality of loss in this life probably makes not just my kids but everyone in these groups better people. When you are with someone who is staring mortality in the face, either you feel compassion for them or something is wrong with you.
Really, though, what’s most moving is not the fact of mortality but the courage of ordinary people. I used to think it took courage to take the last shot of the basketball game. I used to think it took courage to run an ultramarathon. I used to think it took courage to take a public stand on some issue or to speak the truth to those in power when you, yourself, have none. I was right…you have to be brave to do those things. However, the bravest people around are the folks who stare their own death in the face and say, “I choose to fully live!” (Pat Bruce would be the most recent such person in my life!)
Of course, there is a special group of equally brave people, the people who carry the loss of those whom they have loved. In particular, I think of parents who have lost children. It doesn’t matter how old the parents or the children are, this is a terrible loss. I have seen people be brave enough to stare that loss down and live every day of the rest of their lives with the broken heart that they were left with and still find ways to be a loving, not bitter, person. People who live with loss—they are heroes, too.
Such losses are so hard that, for the most part, we do our best to totally deny the possibility on a daily basis. Under normal conditions, we do everything we can to put mortality and grief as far away from ourselves as possible. We tell ourselves that we’ve taken such good care of ourselves and such good care of those we love that bad things can’t come our way. We make the first aid kits for the work trip include everything right down to snake bite kits and we try really hard to not think about the dangers of just driving that many people to one place, much less having them work with all those power tools. Every now and then, we get the call back on the mammogram or the PSA goes a little high, but we convince ourselves that such things are just “blips” in an otherwise safe world. Honestly, as a pastor and a clinician and a human being, most of the time, I say, “Good for us all for having defenses!”
However, we now live in a time when denial isn’t really working for us all that well. We also are being challenged to break through whatever denial is left. We have to social distance. We need to wipe everything down and wash our hands until they crack. Now, we are being told, if we are out in public we should probably be wearing our own homemade masks. Both the dangers and the fears are real. All of which brings us to Palm Sunday.
One of my favorite story tellers is a guy named Mike Birbiglia. If you’re bored and have Netflix then look him up. He does comedy specials that are amazing! Anyway, he has a little thing he does when he is in the midst of telling one of his amazing stories where the audience suddenly gets where the story is going and start laughing before he gets there. He steps out of the story and says to the audience, “I know…I’m in the future, too!” It is such a brilliant line. It makes me laugh every time.
We know what’s on the other side of Palm Sunday…because we’re in the future, too. What we know is that what is unfolding is not going to end well. In the next week, Jesus is going to kick over the money tables at the Temple. He’s going to be betrayed and denied and abandoned by just about everyone who has ever loved him. He’s going to be arrested and tortured and tormented and crucified and die. We know this. We know that Jesus is facing his own death. I don’t think the crowd knows this. However, according to the Gospels, Jesus has tried to tell his disciples this a number of times.
Now, I don’t think you have to believe in a Jesus who has magical powers to foretell the future to believe this. For me, this is just Jesus being astute. He recognizes that the authorities—political and religious—have nothing but contempt for him. He loves his disciples…but like all of us who love someone…he loves them so much that he sees their frailties and breaking points, too. And, I have to say, that the disciples, themselves, had to have a sense that anyone who loved them that much would know them that well, too. Jesus didn’t have to read the tea leaves to know that going to Jerusalem was an existential threat. He just had to own what he already knew.
Then, he had to go anyway. He had to overcome his own human instincts—the ones that are there inside of each of us. This is the voice that is inside everyone of our own heads that recognizes a dire threat and screams, “Run!” This is also the voice in the firefighter or the doctor or nurse or maybe even an occasional pastor that screams a second later, “Not that way…Run away from the danger!” Self-preservation is such an ingrained response. It takes a lot of courage to not give into the fear.
Jesus sends his disciples to pick up a donkey and her colt. Mathew’s big take away on this is that this fulfills a prophecy. That leaves me a little cold. My take away is that this courageous next step that Jesus is about to take is thought out and thoroughly planned which makes it even more impressive. It’s one thing to be rushed to the E.R. having a heart attack. It’s another thing to be preparing for a major surgery that is coming in six weeks. The longer you have to plan, the more chance you have to run.
Now, the threats to Jesus are very real. The Roman guards are armed to the teeth. They ride war horses and carry huge spears. There’s an old saying about not bringing a knife to a gun fight. (Do you remember when Indiana Jones is confronted by the guy with the sword, who waves it around so skillfully? Indiana Jones pulls out a gun and shoots him!) Jesus not only doesn’t bring a knife to a gun fight, he comes completely unarmed. And though Matthew doesn’t make the point, I think it is probably fair that he hasn’t brought his toughest friends with him, either. There’s nothing like a bunch of faithful women, former lepers, and a tax collector or two to make the Roman guards knees wobble, right? (I’m telling you, though—never, ever underestimate the faithful women—not then and not now, either!)
The crowd does some amazing things. They shed their cloaks which I have said to you for years now is them rejecting all the social class and status of their society. Why? Simply put—because the quickest way to tell how rich someone was wasn’t, as in our day, to look at their house or their car. Rather, it was to look at how fancy and colorful their robe was. The fancier the cloak, the more high class the person. Literally, when the crowd sheds their cloaks, they are saying, “We’re done with that!” The other thing the crowd does is cut branches and lay them down. Think of this as a symbolic way of disarming themselves. The guards waved sharp spears. The crowd for a moment waves sharp branches. Then, they lay them down and the donkey and the colt trample them. We should honor the crowd for getting two of Jesus’ central teachings right: everyone is equal in God’s sight and violence only begets more violence.
What the crowd and the authorities can’t see is who this man Jesus is. The authorities and the crowd think this Jesus might be the Messiah, the one who was going to start a revolution and try to be the new king. Jesus had no interest in the world’s power. Inside Jerusalem, the word on the street was that this was some guy named Jesus from Nazareth who was just another prophet. They could not see that he was so much more.
We know, because we are in the future, too, that this has been Emmanuel, God-with-us, since the day he was born. We know that his project all along has been to show us how to live. What he knows about us is that when we get scared, if we are consumed by that fear, we will quit walking the path that he has laid before us. Our calling is to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. What he knows is that real suffering and the real fear of death can make us run from that path. So, what he’s about show is that things can get hard in just about every way imaginable, even to the point of dying, but nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing can stop us from being loving people.
“Hosanna!” Save us! Save us from the things which make us less than brave. Give us the courage that we need to actually inspire courage in the people around us. Show us how to be brave enough in the living of these days, to stare down the virus and choose to love anyway. Courage, my friends. Courage.