This is a text of a Palm Sunday sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church. It is based on Matthew 27:11-54.
If you ever find yourself wondering how seemingly rational, intelligent, good-hearted people could be convinced to make a 180-degree turn to embrace falsehoods and far-fetched conspiracies, and rally behind people whose values run contrary to everything you thought they stood for, we see today that this phenomenon is not new.
During Lent we have been focusing on the importance of connection. But today I want to focus on misconnection, of how people can be pulled collectively into a vortex of propaganda, of “fake news” promulgated to protect power, privilege and ego.
And just as misconnection is not new, neither is the question: How do we get people who have been misconnected through fear, misinformation, distrust, and hatred be reconnected in love, truth, grace, healing and redemption?
Earlier in Matthew, Jesus Christ is cheered in a parade in which people are chanting “Hosanna to the Son of David!” and laying on the road before him a sort of red carpet of branches and even the cloaks off their backs.
Meanwhile the scribes and Pharisees—the religious authorities and guardians of the status quo—have mounted a whisper campaign of “alternative facts” on PNN—the Pharisee News Network— that sets up the face-to-face between the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus.
Pilate knows he is being used by the religious authorities to carry out an unjust execution of Jesus on trumped-up charges. Jesus, for his part, is not playing along, refusing to give an answer to any of the charges.
But Pilate feels compelled to continue participating in this sham. He presides over a festival customarily held before Passover in which a prisoner is selected by the masses to be given clemency. Matthew presents the choices as two people with coincidentally the same first name. There’s Jesus Barabbas, described by Matthew as a “notorious prisoner,” who the gospel writers Mark and Luke explain was imprisoned for murder during a Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation, and Jesus Christ, who the people have been told disrespects the Mosaic Law and the people sworn to uphold it?
The crowd unanimously—no dissent at all—shouts for the release of Jesus Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Pilate chooses to wash his hands of any responsibility for what was to follow.
And thus Jesus willingly allows himself to be marched down the road that would inexorably lead to the cross. He endured the mocking, the unimaginable pain of having the nails pounded into his hands and his feet and then placed on a cross—even deciding to reject the mix of alcohol and painkiller that was offered him that would have eased his suffering. Most of all, he endured the soul-crushing sense of being abandoned by his heavenly Father that causes him to cry out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”
He bore the pain of it all. And then he died.
But then the extraordinary happens. The curtain of the temple that separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place—intended to keep ordinary believers from being in the center of God’s presence—was torn in two. There was an earthquake that split rocks as the earth shook. And the scripture says, “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised” and began appearing to people in Jerusalem.
At that point, the people who kept watch over Jesus who had been believing and acting on everything they heard on PNN—the Pharisee News Network—were confronted with a reality they could no longer deny. As their own internal worldview was shaken to the core, they said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”
For them, it took an earthquake to shatter the narrative that the religious authorities had promulgated against Jesus. But this was no ordinary earthquake. We don’t have a report of people’s homes collapsing or masses of people being buried under rubble. This earthquake was designed to disrupt, not destroy. It accomplished the purpose of declaring that with the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus we are all welcomed into membership in the very household of God. And it unleased ministers released from the penalty of death who could testify to God’s grace, forgiveness, and unconditional love.
Today we live in a society in which modern-day scribes and Pharisees in religious and secular realms make a big show of religiosity, of saying they stand for life, of saying they are protecting children and defending the interests of people who “play by the rules” when in fact they are just like the Pharisees who Jesus called out for standing in judgment of others while neglecting the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faith, of making others twice as much a child of Hell as they were.
They say they are for Jesus Christ, but their agenda is Jesus Barabbas.
What else can you say about leaders who say we cannot ban assault weapons but we can ban gender-affirming health care for transgender people or ban drag queens from reading fairy tales at public libraries? What else can you say about people who use even our sacred pulpits to promote Q-Anon conspiracies but will not allow our schools to teach the truth about the atrocities that we have committed against Black, Brown and Indigenous people?
There are too many other examples. They all lead to this question: How do we change this misconnection and bring about true connection?
Let me give you the short answer. It starts with the earthquake. And the earthquake is us.
We have to be the ones who communicate and live out the word of Christ in a way that shakes things up, that shatters the prevailing narratives that are designed to divide us and hold us in allegiance to that which runs counter to what Jesus told us were the greatest commandments: loving God, loving each other, loving ourselves.
We have to be the ones that God uses to tear down the curtains that are designed to keep certain folks marginalized and perceived as “less than” in the sight of God merely because of who they are.
We are the strategic disruptors, not aiming for mass destruction but working for mass liberation, preaching and teaching the truth that sets us spiritually free and then working to make that freedom incarnate in the world.
And those bodies that came out of the tombs and went through the city as a manifestation of Jesus’s divine power? Well, didn’t Jesus Christ bring you out of death into life? And do we not in our Baptismal Covenant say that each of us will “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ”?
We have a mandate to get up and stay woke, to declare that the broadcasts on PNN that keep us misconnected are lies, and to share the good news of real connection to the living God through Jesus Christ and true connection with our fellow human beings.
Now, I know some of us are here today precisely because we feel bombarded by all that is going on in our lives and in the world. We want a refuge. To those of you who feel traumatized or tired, Jesus says:
Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
(Matthew 11:28-29)
Just know that you are resting for a reason. God has a purpose for your life—and for this church. Your rest, recovery, and the restoration of your hope and joy helps prepare you to be the disruptor God needs, to tear curtains and break stones that are keeping people from seeing and being the transformation that God is continuing to usher into this world through Jesus Christ.
Changing a cultural mindset and a social structure that is built on individualism, on dividing people between “us” and “other,” and on competing for wealth and power in a game designed so only a few can win is neither easy nor simple. But, recalling the words of an old hymn—“at the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light”—it started with an earthquake.
As people of God, may we be that earthquake.