{"id":1883,"date":"2005-03-20T12:53:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-20T17:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=1883"},"modified":"2022-03-31T12:56:07","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T16:56:07","slug":"becoming-who-you-are-to-die-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=1883","title":{"rendered":"Becoming Who You Are: To Die For"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Palm Sunday
March 20, 2005
Readings: Isaiah 50: 4-9; Luke 19: 28-44
Rev. Stephen H. Phelps<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Download a PDF of this text<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As this worship service closes today, we will be singing \u201cRide on! Ride on in majesty! In lowly pomp, ride on to die . . .\u201d I have no desire to reset the words of that great hymn, but for our understanding, let us question whether Jesus\u2019 Palm Sunday plan was to \u201cride on to die.\u201d We\u2019ve probably been told sometime or other that Jesus went to Jerusalem in order to die. The idea is that if he hadn\u2019t made that sacrifice, there could be no salvation through him, so in obedience he did ride on to die. But as the officer says when he decides not to give you a ticket for a moving violation: \u201cJust slow down when you come through here again.\u201d Well, we are coming through here again. Let\u2019s slow down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus, fully human, wouldn\u2019t have been fully human, or at least not a fully healthy human, if he had intended to die at week\u2019s end. There\u2019s a word for \u201cintending to die\u201d: suicide. The \u201csui-\u201cin suicide means \u201cself.\u201d The self is at the center in suicide. Jesus\u2019 life is precisely the opposite of suicide: not self at center, seeing no way, no life, no truth; but the Center\u2013God\u2013at self, becoming the way, the life, the truth. Jesus is not looking at what will happen at week\u2019s end. (If you\u2019re curious about that, by the way, come back to the all our services in this coming week.) So the inner music of Jesus on Palm Sunday is not a dirge; the joyful Church got that right. He does not ride on to die. He rides on to become what he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We come to the end of our forty days of Lent with the same theme we met in the wilderness at the first: how we become who we are. In Jesus\u2019 testing by the devil, we saw that temptation helped Jesus to discover and define his divine vocation. He began to become who he was. You too, we said. Now, peasants line the dusty road, amazed at the street theater playing out before them. They know, or at least some of them know, that Jesus\u2019 donkey comes right out of a script in the Bible, in Zechariah 9:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9.9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 10 He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They know that whoever started shouting a fragment of Psalm 118- \u201cHosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD\u201d\u2013was singing exactly the right tune for this play. And some of them are smiling at the fun pun ambling down the street, combining urgent need and perfect answer, for Hosanna! means \u201cSave us\u201d\u2013and the name \u201cJesus\u201d means \u201cGod saves!\u201d Jesus is playing long-awaited King. According to the Bible script, this King is like no other. He is going to make peace among all the nations by destroying all the armaments and military gear at his disposal. Not even David tried that\u2013and no leader of any nation has ever tried it since\u2013but Jesus is playing the part full out as if this is the most important stage in the world. He is not riding on to die. But he does know what he would die for, and for that he is willing to play the joyous, funny, humble, thunderous part called King on the Donkey. They\u2019ve been waiting hundreds of years for someone with the heart for the part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They needed someone who knows himself. No false self is in the way, no pretensions here. This is not a statesman behind whose serious roles one might see a different side of Jesus, up close and personal. No, he is all together. He is completely committed. His vocation and his identity are one. And so he plays his life to the full, as a parable of the Kingdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you know your vocation? Do you know what you are willing to die for? That question has an awfully dramatic sound for ordinary Americans. Most of us never think twice about it until the doctor tells us we have to change, or die. Millions of Americans are apparently willing to die for their bad habits. Now, for you from Liberia or Sierra Leone, things have probably not been so light. Perhaps some of you have faced a moment\u2019s decision on what you are willing to die for, and what you are not willing to die for. But though our experiences differ, we can all walk this road to great advantage. Consider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my last year of high school, my English teacher had her small class of bright, college-bound students to her house for a meal and a class. It was an evening in May. Graduation neared. Possibility shimmered in the night air. I remember the home, on a corner not far from my own. And this, but nothing else: Fred, my teacher\u2019s husband, spoke to us. This probably wasn\u2019t planned. He talked about military service in the Pacific during World War II; about his orders to keep his soldiers from ever talking about certain things\u2013the fear of death, the enemy as a human, moral questions about war and killing. From somewhere in the heart of darkness, Fred finally asked us teenagers\u2013newborns, you might say: \u201cDo you know what you are willing to die for?\u201d No answers came, of course. Sitting there by the grand piano in the living room, he said only a little more: \u201cUntil you find out what you will die for, you have no idea who you are, or what on earth you are here for.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These words felt true to me, though we could do no more than commit them to memory then. But I have been working those words out in the fabric of my life-often by failing-and I call them true words still. We needn\u2019t stumble into confusion over the apparent drama of the words. It is obvious that in societies with relatively stable politics, people rarely sacrifice their body and breath to a cause, so let\u2019s push that part of the equation to the back of the shelf. Instead of \u201cto die for\u201d perhaps we should think \u201claid down for.\u201d Is your life laid down for something? Or is it a career?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider the distinction between vocation and career. \u201cCareer\u201d derives from the word to run in Latin. Careening and careering down the highway of life. Our culture especially prizes this way of running life, seeming to be in command, seeking whatever crumbs of money and recognition the social milieu will offer you. Throughout our Lenten series, we have called these the interests of the false self. In our career, we don\u2019t really run things, however; things run us\u2013most of all, the need of society to remain the same, the same, the same, which need is well fed by our career selves. A career is a sacrifice of a life into the gaping mouth of the old world of pleasures and violence. It\u2019s not necessarily a bad experience. It\u2019s just not what God had in mind in calling you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vocation is the response you make to lay down your life for a word that is coming to you from the future, from possibility\u2013from the kingdom, as Christians sometimes call it. Think of \u201ccareer,\u201dby contrast to vocation, as continually rolling out the carpet of your life, always pushing at the edge, pressed for time, uncertain. Vocation is laying your very self down on a carpet that seems already in place. The work of vocation is on your self, to shape yourself to the mystery of God\u2019s word in your heart. With our careers, the work is done on the external world, to try to make it fit us. To know what you are willing to die for is to know your vocation, not so much \u201cwho you are\u201d as \u201cwhose you are.\u201d Career is dead serious. It is the mind of a literalist applied to the hours and the days, the weeks and the years\u2013If I don\u2019t roll my carpet out exactly in the right way, I will be miserable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vocation is never so anxious about tomorrow. Vocation puts the mind of an artist in play. Time is clay. Vocation has absolute faith that she has no appointment with misery, ever, no matter how this thing plays out. Why, knowing his vocation, a man might mount a donkey, laughing, for the sake of the world. Career looks back, and embroiders an image of identity out of all the things I\u2019ve done and failed to do. The world confirms our picture, and works hard to keep us from adding one new, unusual thread to the fabric. But when we are listening to our vocation, we lay the whole garment of our self down, again and again, to receive a new pattern and weave in new threads. \u201cThe past is over and gone. You are a new creature.\u201d This is what it means to be willing to die: to be willing to go where you are called. That\u2019s how Jesus got on that donkey\u2013he was willing to go where the Eternal was calling. To Jerusalem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is your Jerusalem vocation? To ride humbly into the city of forgiveness? To stand in the temple of your family or your workplace for justice? To play marvelously with time, like an artist, opening doors of hospitality to strangers? To go teach what you know in the temple, and to learn what you do not at temples you\u2019d never attended?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smart, quick answers to these questions never come, or never matter if they do. Vocation arises to awareness from a discipline that consists of three actions, braided in an order that seems given from on high. First, vocation arises from Silence. Then from Word. Then in Action. Silence: in which you lay down your life, seeking nothing. Word, in which you communicate with (\u201cmake yourself one with\u201d) a few others on the way. Action, in which you engage the materials of being with the light given you from on high, and learn. And fall silent, again. And prepare for communication. And act. This is how \u201cthy Kingdom comes on earth\u201d\u2013just as it is in heaven. From the future, God calls out the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus invited the future to break forth upon him each day of his ministry. The gospel portrait shimmers with elegance and power for the report of it. He laid down his life like a parable, like a master artist on the world\u2019s best canvas. Even to the end. And so there is no end. And he is calling you to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a9Stephen H. Phelps, March 2005
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