Weekly Sermon

Sinkholes : March 24, 2002

The Reverend Anne Benefield

Matthew 21:1-17

When Jesus and the disciples neared Jerusalem and reached Bethphage, the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples with the instructions: "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tethered there, her colt with her. Untie her and bring them to me. If anyone asks what you are doing, say, 'The Lord needs them.' And he will send them with you. This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, "Tell Zion's daughter, 'Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a pack animal.'" The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and Jesus mounted. A large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. Crowds went ahead and crowds followed, all of them calling out: "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!" When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, "Who is this?" The crowds were saying, "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee." Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer'; but you are making it a den of robbers." The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the son of David," The priests and the scribes became angry and said to Jesus, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes, have you never read, 'Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself?" Jesus left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there. Prayer: Open our hearts, Dear Lord, that we might prepare the way for Christ to enter and cleanse what is unpleasing to you. Amen. I was thinking about sinkholes the other day. I'm not sure why they came to mind, but there they were. Among other things, I was thinking that maybe they should be called "stinkholes." I figure they probably stink as well as sink. There was a sinkhole in Winterpark, FL, into which 12 Porsches disappeared. That is the point: a sinkhole makes no distinctions. Good and bad things alike fall into sinkholes. Palm Sunday is a day when good things get mixed up with bad things. There is all the excitement and energy of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. The city swelled, the crowds, the smells, the sounds, the rejoicing, dancing and singing. For many, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover was the high point of a lifetime. There was another time when the city was filled with joyous throngs of people who cut down palm branches and covered the road for the triumphant entry of a victor. That was in 165 BCE when, after defeating the Syrians, Judas Maccabaeus entered the city and cleansed the temple, which had been desecrated. His entry is celebrated as Hanukkah, the Festival of the Lights. When Judas Maccabaeus came to the temple, he found only enough consecrated oil for one day, but miraculously, the oil lasted for eight days until enough holy oil could be properly sanctified. When Jesus came into Jerusalem, he took all the energy and excitement that surround him and went into the temple. Like Judas Maccabaeus, he found it desecrated. Jesus became angry. An angry Jesus is a different picture than we expect. There are times when we have heard irritation in Jesus' voice. Sometimes he sounded impatient or disappointed, but this is the only time when he was furious. He was angry because the house of the Lord, the house of prayer where a person should be able to feel the presence of God, had become a holy mess. It's kind of like a sinkhole. Do you know what causes a sinkhole? In a prolonged drought underground, streams dry up, and without the water to support the ground above, everything collapses. There is an analogy to be drawn here. Just as there are sinkholes in Florida, the temple that Jesus found was on the brink of caving in. The danger extends to us, today. Our souls, the place where we should have a bedrock of faith, can collapse if the living waters aren't flowing through us-supporting us. A powerful message of Palm Sunday is Jesus' call to clean out the mess inside us. We need to clean up our attitudes. It may sound trite, but our attitude has a tremendous impact on everything else. It is easy to look around our homes, our jobs, and our church to see all that is wrong. It's easy to find fault, but with an attitude of hope we can see God working all around us. In Treasury of Joy and Enthusiasm, Norman Vincent Peale told this story about Thomas Edison. "On the night of December 9, 1914, the great Edison industries of West Orange were virtually destroyed by fire. Thomas Edison lost 2 million dollars that night and much of his life's work went up in flames. He was insured for only $238,000, because the buildings had been made of concrete, at that time thought to be fireproof. "Thomas Edison's son was twenty-four; Thomas was sixty-seven. The young man ran about frantically, trying to find his father. Finally he came upon him, standing near the fire, his face ruddy in the glow, his white hair blown by the December winds. "'My heart arched for him,' Charles Edison told [Dr. Peale]. 'He was sixty-seven-no longer a young man-and everything was going up in flames. He spotted me, "Charles," he shouted, "where's your mother?" "I don't know, Dad," I said. "Find her," he bade me. "Bring her here. She will never see anything like this again as long as she lives." "The next morning, walking about the charred embers of all his hopes and dreams, Thomas Edison said, 'There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew." What a positive attitude Thomas Edison had. He achieved great things at least partly because he refused to be drawn into the sinkhole of a negative attitude. Three weeks after the fire, his company shipped the first phonograph! [Normal Vincent Peale, Treasury of Joy and Enthusiasm, (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1981), p.71-72]. After he cleansed the temple, the Lord healed the blind and lame. He can bring healing to us, too, but we need to clean out the negative attitudes that keep us from being open to his presence. We also need to clean up our relationships. We tend to be pretty oblivious to the people we have been given to love. I like the way Annie LaMott puts it in Bird by Bird. She says, "If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with the door." [Anne LaMott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), p. 178]. In this country, we don't value our relationships nearly enough. According to a study conducted in 1991, money appears much more important to us than our relationships. Among Americans in exchange for ten million dollars: 25% would abandon their family. 25% would abandon their church. 16% would give up their American citizenship. 16% would leave their spouse. 13% would put their children up for adoption. [James Patterson and Peter Kim, The Day America Told the Truth (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991), quoted in Discipleship Journal, September-October, 1991, 16] When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus answered to love God with all your heart, and strength and mind. He didn't stop there. He went on to say you must love your neighbor as yourself. We can't separate loving God from loving each other. If we want Jesus to come into our lives, we have to clean up our relationships with each other. The third area we need to clean up is our actions. What would it mean if instead of finding fault with everything, we pitched in to help? The smallest act of kindness can make all the difference. My dad was a hotel man. I guess that is why one of his favorite stories was a hotel story. It is about "an encounter one stormy night, many years ago, when an elderly man and his wife entered the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. The couple had no baggage. "'All the big places are filled up,' said the man. 'Can you possibly give us a room here?' "The clerk replied that there were three conventions in town, and no accommodations anywhere. "'Every guest room is taken,' he explained, 'But still I simply can't send a nice couple like you out into the rain at one o'clock in the morning. Would you perhaps be willing to sleep in my room?…' "The next morning, as he paid his bill, the elderly man said to the clerk: 'You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best hotel in the United States. Maybe someday I'll build one for you!' "The clerk laughed. And he laughed again when, after two years had passed, he received a letter containing a round-trip ticket to New York and a request that he call upon his guest of that rainy night. In the metropolis the old man led the young clerk to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street and pointed to a vast new building there, a palace of reddish stone, with turrets and watchtowers, like a castle from fairyland cleaving the New York sky. 'That,' he declared, 'is the hotel I have just built for you to manage.' "As if hit by lightning, the young man, George C. Boldt, stood fixed to the ground. His benefactor was William Waldorf Astor-and the hotel the most famous of its day, the original Waldorf-Astoria. [Normal Vincent Peale, Treasury of Courage and Confidence, (Anderson, Indiana: Warner Press, 1970), p.155-156] To each of us, the Lord comes. He may be dressed in a raincoat, completely unrecognizable, but he comes. Into Jerusalem he came on a donkey, a sign that he came in peace. He entered Jerusalem and cleansed the temple so that those who came could experience the presence of God. What does Christ call you to cleanse in order to make a sacred place for God, a place for prayer, healing, and praise?