After Jesus said this, he continued on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.
29 As Jesus came to Bethphage and Bethany on the Mount of Olives, he gave two disciples a task. 30 He said, “Go into the village over there. When you enter it, you will find tied up there a colt that no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If someone asks, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say, ‘Its master needs it.’” 32 Those who had been sent found it exactly as he had said.
33 As they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?”
34 They replied, “Its master needs it.” 35 They brought it to Jesus, threw their clothes on the colt, and lifted Jesus onto it. 36 As Jesus rode along, they spread their clothes on the road.
37 As Jesus approached the road leading down from the Mount of Olives, the whole throng of his disciples began rejoicing. They praised God with a loud voice because of all the mighty things they had seen. 38 They said,
“Blessings on the king who comes in the name of the Lord.
Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heavens.”
39 Some of the Pharisees from the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, scold your disciples! Tell them to stop!”
40 He answered, “I tell you, if they were silent, the stones would shout.” (Common English Bible)
“From Haran to the Negev: When God Foretells Transition,” Week Six
Bill Conner endured what no parent should have to endure: receiving the news that one of their children had died, as his daughter Abbey did, drowning in a pool in January 2017. She was only twenty years old.
Abbey had registered as an organ donor when she obtained her drivers’ license, and her organs had saved the lives of four different people after her death. Bill, her father, asked if he could reach out to the people who had received her organs. Only one, the person who had received Abbey’s heart, a 21-year-old man named Loumoth Jack Jr., responded.
Jack had suffered a heart attack, and was given only days to live if a donated heart was not available. Fortunately for him, though, one was—Abbey. And when Abbey’s father reached out to him after the transplant, he responded. The two struck up a correspondence and, when Bill began biking across the country to raise awareness for organ donation, the two arranged to meet, and CBS News was there to describe the scene:
When Conner met Jack Sunday afternoon he felt like he already knew him. The pair walked toward one another with their arms outstretched.
Knowing he’s alive because of Abbey, Abbey is alive inside of him—it’s her heart having him stand up straight,” Conner said. I was happy for him and his family, and at the same time, I got to reunite with my daughter.”
After sharing a minute-long hug, Jack pulled out a stethoscope so Conner could hear his daughter’s heartbeat for the first time since she died in January.
Listening carefully, surrounded by Jack’s friends and family, Conner heard the thumping. Both men began to tear up.
“She saved me and I can’t repay her. I wish I could but I can’t,” Jack told CBS affiliate WAFB in Baton Rouge. “All I can do is send my love to her family.”
The family made a recording of Jack’s heart so Conner could listen to it as he rides.
This is such a profound Palm Sunday story for me—Jesus goes to Jerusalem to eventually die, yes, but in so doing, He is also resurrected and, in turn, so are we. New life is begotten in this journey, just as new life was witnessed by Bill Conner on his, life that he took with him in Abbey’s heartbeat.
This is both a Lenten sermon series and my last sermon series for you here in Longview. With my last few weeks as your pastor, I want to speak to you in spirit and in truth about the nature of our transition into new roles in one another’s lives, and what my own hopes are for this mighty family of Jesus followers when I am no longer here.
To do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving, and new starts throughout Scripture. We began this series with one of the oldest and greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran, from which this sermon series takes part of its name.
Haran is located in what is now southern Turkey (and is now called Harran, with the extra ‘r’), and its name comes from ancient Akkadian to mean “road” or “crossroads,” which is an appropriate name for both a waystation for a traveling couple and this series as we approach a crossroads in the life of our congregation. So, this series derives its name from it and from the ending of that passage from Genesis 12, which says that Abram and his household continued on toward the Negev.
From Abraham, we talked about the story of Moses at the burning bush. The voice of God has just told Moses that God has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and is sending Moses to right this historic wrong, but there is still more: Moses needs to know who it is that is sending him to undertake this monumental task. God simply replies, “Say to the Israelites, “I AM” has sent you.”
Then, God sent another Biblical hero—the prophet Elijah, whose defining trait is the passion with which he opposes the worship of the false deities in the Old Testament such as Ba’al. It so determines Elijah’s sense of faith and public ministry that his name, Elijah, means, roughly, “My Lord is my God.” (From the Hebrew words “Elohim,” for “Lord,” and “Yah,” for “God.”)
Two weeks ago, we arrived at the calling of the prophet Isaiah by God in a very famous passage from Isaiah’s book, in chapter six. Isaiah sees God high and lifted up, surrounded by angels and with just the hems of God’s robes—never mind the rest of God—filling the temple. It is an image of grandeur and divine majesty, one that takes place in a difficult time: Jerusalem has just lost its king.
Last week, we heard from another of the Hebrew Bible’s major prophets—Jeremiah. For Jeremiah, the primary external threat was not Assyria, as it was for Isaiah, but Babylon, and the looming exile that Israelites would experience at the hands of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II.
And today, to conclude this series on Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week, we just listened to the traditional Palm Sunday text, this time from the Gospel of Luke.
Palm Sunday is a holiday that, like Pentecost after it, can sometimes get a bit overshadowed by Easter, and honestly, when I first got here, I really only had one Palm Sunday sermon in my hip pocket (that Palm Sunday was a public satirizing of the victory parade procession of soldiers on warhorses that conquering empires—including Rome—would throw for themselves in the cities of vanquished foes), meaning I had to get creative with my preaching each subsequent year.
But this year—my last year—here, I find myself somewhere a bit different. I’m looking for life in new places. And I’m finding it here as well. Jesus goes into Holy Week, and up to Jerusalem, knowing what is about to happen. We, too, enter Holy Week knowing what will happen in two weeks as I transition out of being your pastor.
This eventuality—of knowing that what comes next is the cross—does not paralyze Jesus, though. Nor should it paralyze us. If we are to be Christ-like in this Holy Week, then we must walk into our future as surely as Jesus walks into His.
That does not mean that going up to Jerusalem was easy for Jesus. It probably wasn’t, especially if His reluctance in the Garden of Gethsemane is any indication. We should probably give up any expectation of this Holy Week being easy for us, either—and that’s okay. Normal, even.
Because if anything, Holy Week has only gotten easier. Perhaps it needs to be a bit tougher for us.
After all, we already know how this story ends. In the moment, I am sure a number of Jesus’s followers were not quite so sure, if their skepticism to His earlier prophecies in the Gospels of His death were any indication.
The first rhetorical salvo is loosed in this Palm Sunday story, with some of the temple authorities telling Jesus to instruct His followers to stop their Hosannas, which He pointedly declines to do. It sets up a week of such rhetorical barbs lobbed to and fro by the temple authorities and Jesus.
But it also foreshadows the eventual execution of Jesus by the Roman state. Right now, the authorities want Jesus’s followers silenced. But it will be Pilate who ultimately has Jesus silenced.
Such silence, we know, is not the ending to this story. It is a temporary silence, lasting no more than forty or so hours.
But those forty hours will be excruciating for Jesus’s followers. May we sit with them in that pain and loss, if only so that we might better understand our own.
That is something that Loumouth Jack was able to do for Bill Conner, when the father came to this young man needing to hear his daughter’s heart after he lost her.
Maybe, just maybe, we can hear our own hearts beat in echo and rhythm around the high Gothic walls of our beloved sanctuary, as we too go up to Jerusalem alongside our Lord.
And as you then go forth once more from this sanctuary, may that heartbeat God placed in you propel you anew into the next day of the Holy Week story, the next day of this church’s story, and the next day of God’s story for you.
For while we may not always know how such a story ends, we know who its author is. And let that knowledge of God’s authorship of us be enough for today.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
March 25, 2018