What Stones Have to Teach Us

A sermon on Luke 19:28-44

[for an audio recording of this sermon click here. Photo of the Lenten Display at Abiding Peace Lutheran Church.]

At the beginning of this Lenten season, I issued an invitation to this community, for each of us to choose a stone from the Lenten display in the Narthex as a companion for these forty days.

This display dates back to long before I came to Abiding Peace, with a symbol and associated scripture to represent each of the unique holy days from Ash Wednesday through to Easter, and a path of small stones connecting them, reminding us of Jesus’s sojourn in the barren wilderness.

It’s a meaningful supplement to our Lenten worship, so when Mary suggested the idea of inviting people to take a stone, I immediately got on board.

After all, we have used hand-held stones before for midweek meditations.

There are plenty of Christian traditions that encourage us to use the sensory solidity of stones as a focus for the remembrance of God’s promises, or as a representation of the burdens we need to lay down.

But to be honest, that’s as deep as my thought process was. “Take a stone? Yes. Let’s do it.” I admit that I did not really put more discernment into the meaning of this practice.

I certainly did not anticipate that it would supply me with my Palm Sunday sermon.

So, imagine my delighted surprise when I sat down with this Sunday’s gospel reading and discovered an unanticipated connection to stones in the reading… two connections in fact, plus a third one that’s sort of implied.

The implied stones come first, in the laying of cloaks on the road… a dirt road that would have had it’s share of stones embedded in it.

The cloaks would have covered these stones, softened them, and while I don’t know if that actually made Jesus’s ride on the donkey’s back any more comfortable, that seems to be the point for people who probably only had one cloak deciding to lay this precious garment down to be trampled and soiled.

The people were welcoming a Savior King, as their song declared, and such a welcome requires signs of tribute and privilege.

They were pinning their hopes for release from oppression on Jesus, and so, he needed to look the part… to be ushered into the city with signs of his status.

The stones are only a small detail in this picture, but they are still significant because of what they reveal about humanity.

They communicate the unspoken assumption that the one who saves us will need to be somehow above the painful and pedestrian realities that mar regular people’s lives.

We don’t want our heroes to stumble on the same rocks that bruise our feet.

So, even if it costs us something, we have any instinct to try to elevate those in whom we put our trust, to want for them a glory that we do not expect to benefit from ourselves.

The next stones are described by Jesus himself.

When the religious gatekeepers hear the crowds loudly praising Jesus as their heaven-sent king – a claim that is both treasonous and, to them, heretical – they are understandably concerned.

They urge Jesus to tell his followers to stop this spectacle that could bring both governmental and divine retribution.

But Jesus answers that “if these (people) were silent, the stones would shout out.”

It’s a detail we do not get in any of the other gospels, and – in full transparency – it jarred me at bit this week.

Because, my mind jumps ahead in the story, to Jesus’ refusal to serve as the military-king that the people want him to be.

I know that the sounds of praise from today’s gospel will transform to shouts of, “Crucify him” by Friday.

So, why is Jesus insisting on them?

Jesus knows he is NOT actually there to be their king, at least not in the way that the crowds think. So, would the stones even be shouting the same thing?

Possibly not… or at least not with the same expectations as those mingled with the voices of the crowds.

But these stones are not significant for what they reveal about humanity. These stones are significant for what they reveal about God.

And God isn’t going to be controlled by human expectations:

Not by the expectations of a crowd trying to fit Jesus into their image of a conquering hero…

And not by the expectations of the religious leaders who are sure that they know what is and is not permissible to do in God’s name.

God has called Jesus here, to this moment;

and Jesus does come in the name of the Lord;

and God will have that known… even if the God who created them in the first place has to give voices to rocks to remind the various misguided people that they are not in control of this story.

The final rocks we encounter on this Palm Sunday are stained with Jesus’ tears.

As he approaches Jerusalem, with the cries of the crowds still ringing in his ears – cries of praise for the peace and glory the people believed he would bring – Jesus grieves that they do not recognize “the things that make for peace.”

Because they want the peace of victory over Rome, not over death itself.

And in his foresight, Jesus predicts the coming destruction of the Holy City.

When the people, impatient for a political release, will back a rebellion against Rome,

and the empire will retaliate with a vengeance,

and the punishment will not leave one stone upon another.

All because the people did not recognize “their visitation from God.”

Their Savior had arrived. They were right about that!

But he wasn’t a military savior.

He did not come to rule a new theocracy that would forcibly wrest power from their oppressors to grant them a temporary political and social victory.

Jesus came to bring a much more profound, much more transformative kind of freedom:

A freedom from the very fear that had their minds and hopes so fixated on one kind of Savior.

A freedom that rejects the entire power-obsessed, status-worshipping worldview that destroys true peace.

A freedom that we can only receive from a God who comes not to rule, but to serve… and to show us a new vision of shalom-wholeness.

It’s a story of which we already know the end, so it’s easy for us to (if you will forgive the word play) cast stones at the people in the story and the ways that they misunderstand what Jesus is there to do.

But if we step back from our narrative knowledge, I wonder if the stones in this story might still have something to teach us:

I wonder if they might reveal to us the ways that we too resist a God who walks the road alongside us because we expect a bit more glory…

and so, we miss the example he sets for us of how to humble ourselves?

I wonder if those stones might remind us that we are not actually in charge of what God wills, or what God does…

and so, we need to stop assuming that God is going to conform to our expectations?

I wonder if these stones might call forth our own tears of compassion for all who are lost, and hurting, even when it is because of their own actions…

And so, we need to follow in Jesus’s footsteps, and take up our own crosses, and suffer whatever comes from fighting for ALL people to be free.

There are a lot of so-called gospels in our world today that have not learned the lessons that these stones have to teach us:

Christian nationalism,

Prosperity gospels,

Any version of faith, really, that keeps God controllable, or conformed to our expectations, and that leaves out our call to the cross.

But if this coming week tells us anything about God’s revelation in Jesus, it is that God does not choose the way of power and privilege… in fact he actively rejects it.

That way is the path that the people were trying to push Jesus down on Palm Sunday, and it is the goal he gets accused of in his trial, but it is NOT what Jesus came for.

Jesus came to bring true peace, and peace is only real when it is for everyone, which means we have some work to do.