Soul Force

Jerusalem Calling

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

April 17, 2011

First Reading: Harvey Cox, Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian’s Journey Through the Jewish Year, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 201, pp. 112-114 passim.

"Why is this night different from all other nights?" asks the youngest child at the table in one of the oldest continuing rituals of any religious tradition. It is the Seder, the festive meal that is the centerpiece of Pesach (Passover), when Jews tell the story of God's liberation of the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt….

Passover is not just a meal but an eight-day celebration…. Because Jesus was in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover when he was arrested and executed, Holy Week and Easter Sunday usually come at the same time….

Passover is a celebration of freedom. At its core is the saga of God's delivery of the Israelites from their captivity in Egypt…. But for many people the story is about the God whose purpose is to liberate all captive and oppressed peoples, which is why the story of Moses and the exodus has played such a prominent part in the faith of black Americans. The purpose of Passover, and especially that of the Seder, is to tell this powerful old story yet again, and to tell it so well that everyone who hears it feels as if he or she were actually there when the original liberation took place…. It tells of the Israelites in Egypt toiling under cruel taskmasters but nonetheless multiplying, of the fearful pharaoh's brutal decision to kill all the male Jewish babies, and of God's summons to Moses from the burning bush to order the pharaoh to “let my people go.” It goes on to rehearse the confrontation between this reluctant prophet and the powerful monarch, who refuses God's command. We then hear about the ten plagues God sends to try to persuade the pharaoh: the hail, the locusts, the boils, and all the rest, culminating in the deaths of all the Egyptian firstborn. But just before the angel of death swoops through the land, God warns the Israelites to smear the blood of a lamb over their doorposts so the angel will pass over them (hence "Passover"). At last the pharaoh relents and the Israelites leave. Then the pharaoh changes his mind and sends his cavalry to recapture the slaves. Again God intervenes, splitting the Red Sea so the Israelites can cross over without getting their feet wet, then causing the mighty waters to rush back and drown the pursuing Egyptian host. It is a captivating yarn, and I admit that, like many people in my age bracket, I can never hear it without the throngs of perspiring men, women, and children and the overloaded camels and donkeys paraded across the screen in Cecil B. De Mille's epic film The Ten Commandments coming to mind.

Second Reading: Psalm 150, a Song of Ascent, Jewish Publication Society, 1917.

This is a Psalm of Ascent; it is thought to have been sung by the priests as they ascended the stairs to the temple.

^JPSPsalm 150:1 Hallelujah. Praise God in His sanctuary; praise Him in the firmament of His power. ² Praise Him for His mighty acts; praise Him according to His abundant greatness. ³ Praise Him with the blast of the horn; praise Him with the psaltery and harp. ⁴ Praise Him with the timbrel and dance; praise Him with stringed instruments and the pipe. ⁵ Praise Him with the loud-sounding cymbals; praise Him with the clanging cymbals. ⁶ Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Hallelujah.

Sermon

Today marks the first day of Holy Week, the most sacred time of the year for Christians. Today is the day we remember the triumphal entry Jesus made to Jerusalem where he came to worship and teach at the temple and to celebrate the Passover Seder with his disciples. That week was the first time Jesus taught in the City of David, the week when he drove the money-changers out of the temple, the week that ended with his tragic, excruciating death and pointed the way to his triumphant return on Easter morning. His entry was marked by crowds celebrating him as messiah with palms and shouts of gladness, welcoming the one who could rescue them from the oppression they suffered from their Roman overlords. It was carefully staged, perhaps deliberately mocking the entry on the other side of town of Pilate in front of his legions, representing the emperor in Rome – who claimed to be a Son of God. Pilate and his legions came to the city to suppress any idea of revolt that might be sparked in this city of city of perhaps forty thousand overwhelmed by several hundred thousand pilgrims joining from all over the known world to celebrate their liberation from another tyrant a millennium before.

Mary Oliver remembers the humble donkey who bore its rider so humbly in her poem “The Poet Thinks about the Donkey:”

On the outskirts of Jerusalem

The donkey waited.

Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,

he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow,
leap with delight!

How doves, released from their cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.

Then he let himself be led away.

Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!

And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.

Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.

I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,

as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.[1]

Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Place of hope for all! Remembered at each Passover Seder with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem!” Storied city that has been the inspiration for so much hope, so many dreams, which symbolizes ultimate perfection in the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible and in so many other places, at so many other times. Jerusalem, which inspired William Blake’s poem of that name, later a hymn, dreaming that the perfection of Jerusalem would come to England, imagining

… Jerusalem builded here,

among the dark satanic mills…. [Pledging]

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England's green & pleasant Land.[2]

Jerusalem, which inspired John Winthrop in 1630 to proclaim Boston “a shining city on a hill,” a place where God’s will might be manifest even as it would be in that imagined Jerusalem, a hope expressed over and over in the history of our nation by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan. Jerusalem, celebrated in the psalms of Ascent sung by pilgrims as they came up to the city, singing:

I was glad when they said to me,

“Let us go to the house of the Lord!”

Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem….

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:

“May they prosper who love you.” [Ps, 122:1-2, 6]

For the Lord has chosen Zion;

God has desired if for God’s habitation [saying]:

“This is my resting place forever;

here I will reside, for I have desired it.” [Ps. 132:13-14]

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,

We were like those who dream.

Then our mouth was filled with laughter,

And our tongue with shouts of joy. [Ps 126:1-2]

[Sung: First chorus of “The Holy City:”

Jerusalem! Jerusalem!

Lift up your gates and sing,

Hosanna in the highest!

Hosanna to your King!]

For all the exaltation of the dream of Jerusalem, the reality is quite different. The Holy City has been the scene of almost unending conflict. As James Carroll puts it in his recent book Jerusalem, Jerusalem, “…only Jerusalem occupies such a transcendent place in the imagination. It is the earthly reflection of heaven—but heaven, it turns out, casts a shadow.[3] Jerusalem has been contested and celebrated for the last four thousand years. It is said that the rock on the temple mount is the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac; or in the Muslim tradition, his oldest son Ishmael. That same rock – once part of the Temple – bears the footprint of Mohammed as he ascended to heaven in his Night Journey. The rock is now enshrined in the sacred Muslim Dome of the Rock. King David wrested Jerusalem from the Jebusites three thousand years ago; the first temple and the city were destroyed by the Babylonians over twenty-five hundred years ago; it was conquered again by the Greeks and then the Romans, and it was under their rule that our story of Palm Sunday occurred. It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. The Muslims conquered it from the Eastern Christians in 638 C.E., just five years after Mohammed’s death. The Crusaders retook it in 1099, Saladin took it back in 1187; after many more conquests the British captured it in 1917, the new state of Israel captured part of the Holy city in 1948 at the founding of the state and the rest in the 1967 war. With each conquest, there was terrible loss of life. Jerusalem the wonderful, Jerusalem the terrible.

Today the city contains so many competing strands of devotion, so many conflicting claims, that it almost seems to defy any possibility of unraveling all of the knots that all of the claims pass through. The temple mount itself is deeply contested; sacred to Christians, it is also cherished by Jews as the site of the first and second temples. Yet the site of the temple is occupied by the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, sacred to Muslims. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the temple mount in 2000 surrounded by hundreds of Israeli riot police – a visit designed to assert Israeli sovereignty over the mount –helped to spark the Second Intifada, the violent Palestinian revolt against Jewish authority. Even that most sacred Christian site, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – where it is said to be the site of the tomb – even that sacred site is deeply contested by its Christian keepers, who include representatives of the Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox. In 2002 a fracas broke out when a Coptic monk moved his chair away from its assigned place; 11 were hospitalized. In 2004 a door to the Franciscan chapel was left open, resulting in fistfights. “On Palm Sunday, in April 2008, a brawl broke out when a Greek monk was ejected from the building by a rival faction. Police were called to the scene but were also attacked by the enraged brawlers. A clash erupted between Armenian and Greek monks on Sunday 9 November 2008, during celebrations for the Feast of the Holy Cross.”[4]

Well might we despair of the possibility of peace in Jerusalem when we consider this long history of strife. But something greater also calls us. It is precisely here in the midst of such strife that there is also the promise of reconciliation, if we can only grasp it. There are so many places of conflict in our lives: conflict with our families, with friends, with neighbors, with bosses and subordinates. Few of them rival the depth and intensity of the strife that has characterized the Holy City into which Jesus rode that donkey two thousand years ago.

In fact, though, it is through conflict that we can grow, that we can expand our own horizons of possibility, sharpen our own beliefs by holding them up against others, practice the teaching of Jesus, who said: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” [Matt 5:44, KJV] If there were no conflict, there would be no growth, no learning. I was counseling a couple who will be married here next October; one of the truths of marriage, I told them, is that we grow to wholeness as each of our incomplete selves learns from the other in conflict and in love. We learn to hear each other’s stories, to share one another’s pain, to learn to be whole – but only from each other, and only through conflict.

The Holy Qur’an, scripture of Islam, puts it this way: “If God had so willed, He would have made all of you one community, but He has not done so that He may test you in what He has given you; so compete in goodness.[5] Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” [John 14:2, KJV] Many mansions which we can visit with respect and open hearts and minds. Many knots which bind us together in love and conflict, many ways to compete in goodness in our own lives and in contributing what each of us can to that vision of wholeness and goodness and peace. The way there is through forgiving others as we wish ourselves to be forgiven. And that forgiveness becomes possible as we listen to the stories of those we imagine to be our enemies, even as we tell our own stories.

We can still heed the call to enter and rejoice in that shining city on a hill which captures our imaginations and requires from us the development of new capacities to love and to listen and to learn. The knots that tie us together in conflict and competition can never to broken, but they can become a place of intimacy rather than a place of despair.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that tragic and ever inspiring city that Jesus entered in triumph two millennia ago. Jerusalem, city of so many hopes and dreams, mired in so many all-too-human conflicts. Jerusalem, which pilgrims entered singing: