Exuberance, Part 2

Ken Whitt         April 1, 2007

(A single note on a harmonica is played.)

I know some of you are hoping beyond hope that that’s the beginning of a great piece of music that I’m about to play on the harmonica. You are hoping, I am sure, that I have an awesome here-to-fore hidden talent.

(Plays the same note)

That is about as good as it gets.

I could probably come up with that same note again and possibly I could add a second.

(Plays the same note and another one.)

Ah, two in a row. But I don’t know how to play a harmonica. But I can play a slide whistle as well as anyone.

(Plays a wolf call.)

If you’re going to be exuberant you have to have a way of being exuberant, a way of expressing exuberance, like a slide whistle, like my orange hat. Haven’t some of you dressed up in the springtime in colors different than the colors you wore in the winter? Somebody out there is going to wear exuberant clothing on Easter Sunday. Maybe you will even be decked out in a brilliant Easter bonnet. Some of us will go shopping this week and spend a few dollars just to be exuberant. I won’t be spending a lot on pink, now that my six year old friend Wyatt has informed me during the children’s story that pink is only for girls.

If you’re going to express exuberance you’ve got to come up with a method. Like shouting. “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Maybe you could join a choir in order to be exuberant. You have to have some kind of way of taking something on the inside and getting it out of you into the world.

There’s a problem though. Exuberance is risky. When you put yourself out there, when you express yourself, there are risks to be taken in such expression. For example, at about age 6, my son Micah learned the basic rules of my favorite board game, Parcheesi. Parcheesi is extremely simple and very complex at the same time. If you want to be really good at Parcheesi you have to learn strategy and you have to be mean, but not too mean. Well, at age 6, Micah was already a math wiz and he wasn’t interested in strategy, and he wasn’t interested in winning. He just loved playing because when he threw the dice and he got a seven, he got to count his little piece seven moves forward, and that’s why we played, so that Micah could count as he moved his pieces around the board. And, of course as he was counting the pieces around the board, I was playing with strategy, having absolutely no intent of letting my son do anything but lose.

I was a winner in Parcheesi, and I played with all the strategy I could muster, and Micah didn’t care. My other children cared, but Micah didn’t care. He just liked to count.

Okay, he gets to the age of 10 and things change. Gradually he’s been picking up strategy and the desire to win. One day he was really lucky, threw a couple of doubles in a row, and he moved his final piece into home, and he beat me in Parcheesi, and his immediate response was, “I won, I won, I won, I won, I won!”. And he went running in circles, just like you can run in circles in my house here. He went running around in circles screaming, “I won, I won, I won, I won, I won!”. And he was so excited and he was exuberant. But something in that moment changed. Winning became important. And he came back in to the living room and said, “Lets play again”. And I whipped him. And I shouted, “I won, I won, I won, I won, I won!”. And Micah got really angry because now winning mattered to him, and he did not like his dad winning and he did not like me being the one who had earned the right to scream the cry of victory.

And so, his exuberance and excitement over winning took on a risky dimension because if you can win and be exuberant, you can also loose and be the opposite of exuberant. Help me, what’s the opposite of exuberant? Teachers? How about crushed. How about flattened?

Well, that’s how it played for the crowd that gathered on the road from Bethany and Bethphage, heading towards Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. That’s how it played to the crowd. They were exuberant, shouting, “Hosanna, save us, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”, and they were waving palm branches and they threw their coats on the road. Jesus entered the city at the front of a small procession of disciples, and the crowd celebrated.

It’s interesting what that crowd was like. One of the things we know about the crowd is that they had been witnesses to the miracles of Jesus. The crowd was made up of believers, people who were excited about Jesus. They were friends in the deepest sense of the word. They were believers and they shouted and they praised God and their exuberance was genuine, but there was a risk to this exuberance and we will come back to that in a moment.

How many of you know that there were two parades on Palm Sunday? Curtis knows! Because he came to Sunday school today. There is value in adult education. Two parades. Jesus came in from the East, from Bethany, a couple miles outside of Jerusalem, and they brought him a donkey, and he sat on this donkey and the disciples probably walked along beside him. The roads were lined with people shouting, “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” They waved palm branches and recognized Jesus as the Messiah foretold by the prophet Zechariah in Chapter 9. He was the one who would come in and get rid of all of the guns, well the bows and arrows. And he would get rid of all the chariots and all the warhorses. He would cast them aside and he would come in as the prince of peace beginning his reign on a donkey.

Another parade started in Caesarea out by the sea, the Mediterranean, and this parade skirted the edge of Samaria and then came across from west to East and entered Jerusalem. And at the head of that parade was Pontius Pilot, the Roman Governor, and behind him came the Calvary and the Roman legion, the power of the Roman Empire. Empire entering from the west, the kingdom of God entering from the east, and they were on a collision course that would lead eventually to the execution of Jesus.

And, our crowd that gathered on Palm Sunday, again they were true believers, they had seen the miracles, they did not doubt Jesus, and they would not doubt Jesus, but they would doubt themselves and they would doubt the movement of events as the King of the Jews coming on a donkey to bring peace confronted empire and empire had more power especially when it was joined by… Who joined up with empire to get rid of Jesus? Who joined forces with empire to kill Jesus? Yes, the religious establishment, the leaders of the Sanhedrin.

Religious establishment joining forces with empire to destroy the Prince of Peace. And what happened to the crowd? On Sunday they were exuberant, on Monday they may still have been exuberant, but as Tuesday and Wednesday came along, it was like they were a big balloon and it started to deflate. And the power of empire and the power of religious establishment began to suck the life out of the crowd and by the time Good Friday comes around everyone from the crowd is fully deflated and even the apostle Peter and all the other disciples ran away and hid in fear, in fear of the Jews, in fear of the Romans and their power.

The crowd, they did not stop loving Jesus, and they didn’t stop believing him, but they did run and hide. Exuberance has its risky side. Because when you declare yourself on the side of God, what happens when events move so the power of empire and the power of religion begins to take over, and the power of God to usher in the kingdom seems to be in doubt, and death seems to hold sway over life, and fear seems to have more control than hope and hate seems to dominate love for a time and your balloon is deflated.

That’s the way life is.

Our belief gets deflated for a time. For a time. For a time. I have a friend named Ken who’s a pastor, retired. He was one of my mentors back in New York, and his family—he had five children—and our family—we had five children—were friends. My dad and Ken pastored together. He and I led Christian camps together for many summers and Ken was a very good friend. Over the past couple of years I visited with him a couple times. I stopped by their home in Norwich, New York last summer. Last November Ken was one of the pastors that led my Mom’s funeral service.

About ten weeks ago I heard that Ken was really struggling over his wife, Nina’s, illness. Nina was sick with a heart infection, something wrong with a valve, and she was really on the edge of dying and as time went on it was clear that there was nothing that the hospital over in Binghamton, New York was going to do. So they started talking about the Cleveland Clinic, and they ended up at the Cleveland Clinic. It took them a couple of weeks to get her ready, but she went through the surgery. She barely survived. The next day I drove up to Cleveland to spend the day with Ken and I was in the waiting room and he found me there and we walked into the intensive care unit and he went over to the left side of the bed and I went over to the right side of the bed, and I’m looking at his wife, Nina, and she looked terrible. She was hooked up to every imaginable tube. I’ve seen that before. But she looked much worse than I expected. She was bloated, and I couldn’t even recognize anything about her to be the person I know and love. She looked terrible.

And Ken walked up on the left side of the bed and he started crying and he cried out, “She looks beautiful, she’s so much better than she was. The operation worked.” You know, if he could have shouted in his exuberance--his tears were his exuberance in this case—we would have been thrown out of the ICU. He was so excited. She looked so good and she had survived this surgery, and he was so happy and after a few minutes we went out into the waiting room, and he started telling me stories about his love for his wife. He was exuberant in his joy. I occurred to methat one of the reasons he was so exuberant…

You know, it says somewhere that those who have been forgiven much, love much. And those who have been forgiven even more love even more. He’d done something some years back—at least everyone in a position to know said he had done something--that needed a lot of forgiving. A good part of his exuberance was that he had this woman to love at all. His exuberance just poured out of him and it was so good to see him feeling hopeful again.

On the other hand, I called yesterday and things are really bad. She has a terrible blood clot in one arm, she can’t move it. It’s terribly painful. She’s hallucinating all the time. Ah, they just don’t know if she’s going to make it. Over the last week, when it was supposed to get a little bit better every day, it just either stayed the same, or got a little bit worse, and, his exuberance has turned to exhaustion again. Maybe exhaustion is the opposite word to exuberance. He’s just exhausted and this story doesn’t have an ending yet.

Well, it has an ending. The ending is life, but we don’t know what form that life will take. Whether it’s life here or life in eternity. It has an ending but we don’t know how it will play and we don’t know how Ken will handle the continued suffering or the healing or the death and the loss, whatever it is. When you love someone, and you’ve been forgiven by someone and you care about someone that much, it brings a lot of risk to your life. A lot of pain is possible from that.

So, all of us have a choice. We’re here for Palm Sunday and you heard the parade and you saw the celebration of the kids running around, and we sang the hymns and we heard the choir and we’ve heard from the Bible. I’ve been preaching. We’re about to have communion. You’re part of the excitement and the celebration and the exuberance of being the disciples of Jesus and it just doesn’t get any better than that. To be one whom Jesus loves, to be one who Jesus has forgiven. We have so much reason to be exuberant.

But the other side of that is that before we know the end of the story on Sunday, this coming Sunday, Easter, we have to travel through Thursday night and betrayal, and abandonment, and suffering, and Friday, crucifixion and death and all kinds of fearful pain.

But if you don’t travel through them, you never learn what’s on the other side, and you never learn why it matters. This week, this Thursday, this is a new idea to me. I thought of it this week, I hope its right, or at least close. This week, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday into Easter is a rehearsal for the rest of your life.

If you think you’re going to go through the rest of your life with every day being Easter, all joy, exuberance, excitement, love, life, and goodness, without the suffering of Thursday and Friday, you really are living in denial. You are going to lose something, some time down the road. You will lose something. It will be the betrayal of Thursday and the death of Good Friday. But if you live and worship throughout this Holy Week, it will be a rehearsal for the circle of life. Every year Holy Week is a rehearsal for the circle of life. It starts to sink into your heart and your soul that on the other side of death is life. No matter what, no matter how the next frightening events of your life turn out. You don’t know the exact end of the story at any turn in your life, you don’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but it always turns toward life.

I guarantee you that you will not skip over the difficult days of your life so don’t skip Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. The days of darkness will come and you will be in them up to your neck, and they will threaten to destroy you. But if you have been living the Holy Week story, the movement from Palm Sunday through Good Friday to Easter, then when that bad news comes, you will know, with a certainty that passes all rational understanding, that no matter what is going on, you belong to God.

And there will be a moment when one of you will come to me in the next five years or ten years and you will be in the midst of that pain, and my job will be completely different if you have been serious about the journey from Palm Sunday to Easter. Because all I will have to do is remind you of what you already know, that Jesus loves you, that God is victorious, and nothing can defeat you. But if you don’t know that, if you’ve skipped over Maundy Thursday and Good Friday year after year, my job will be really different because I’ll have to somehow try to get you to understand something that you don’t already know.

This week is a rehearsal. What can I say about a rehearsal? Charlie, what do you say about a rehearsal? You say, show up, on time, be there, and practice, and work at it. And then when the time comes you’ll be ready to shout “Hossana,” or sing God’s glorious song no matter what is going on in your life.

So be it.

Amen.