The Park Road Pulpit

  Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church 

      Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors

The Face of the Future

Isaiah 50.7-11; Luke 9.51-62

Russ Dean, March 24, 2002 (Palm Sunday)

Just before the turn of the 20^th century, the commissioner of the United States Office of Patents, Charles H. Duell, made the recommendation that his office be closed permanently. In 1899 he commented, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

In 1872, Pierre Pachet, a Professor of Physiology deemed “Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs… [a] ridiculous fiction.”

A Western Union internal memo, dated 1876 states matter-of-factly, “The ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

In 1927, H.M. Warner, of Warner Brothers fame asked (with a bit of profanity included), “Who… wants to hear actors talk?”

And in 1981, none other than Bill Gates, now the world’s wealthiest man, who has made his fortune pushing the computer industry to the brink of the impossible and then beyond claimed, “640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anybody.”[1]

            So much for The Face of the Future according to these geniuses! If only we had a trustworthy crystal ball, we would be millionaires many times over.

Or maybe we would just be miserable.

            The professor asked each member of the class to write her or his own obituary. “How do you want to be remembered?” he asked. “Please write a complete obituary, including hypothetical jobs, achievements, future family members (spouse, children, etc…), and… put a date on the page, please,” he added. Later, the professor commented on the issue of the dating of the obituaries. Most members of the class had chosen a date that was ridiculously advanced into the future (several hundred years), or one that was already past history. Most people, it seems, didn’t want to date their own death even for a classroom exercise in visioning and priority-setting. Was this some form of superstition at work, or an indication that at the heart of being human is a reluctance to live beyond the day, a resistance to mark our own end, to know our own future?

            What would your life be like, if you knew the future? If this were a choice you could choose, would you take it?

            Today is Palm Sunday. The day of celebrating the “triumphal entry” of Christ into Jerusalem. It is a day of celebration around the world. For in this day, many Christians see the foreshadowing of the “ultimate triumph” of Easter.[2] It is a day of looking forward. But we will do the celebration, and our lives of faith, a great injustice if we make it a day of overlooking as well. If we choose to celebrate, today, a victory…  if we choose to celebrate, next week, a victory… and miss the all-important journey between the two. It is the journey of our lives.

            Luke’s Gospel hinges at the point of our text for today. In the first part of his story, Luke records the most extensive birth narrative of the gospels, and then has Jesus ministering in Galilee. The final chapters of his gospel detail the events of that final week in Jesus’ life, known as the Passion. Between these two bookends, the lengthiest section in his gospel is a journey. A journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. A journey that begins with the decisive words, “he set his face toward Jerusalem” (9.51). The journey of Jesus, recorded here by Luke, is not to be understood as a geographical journey. If we follow the journey from start to finish there is a confusion of itinerary that makes it clear to most interpreters that Luke had something more important in mind than simply charting the events of a pilgrimage from one geographic region to another. This journey was about his resolve. About his commitment. The journey is a key to understanding his life.

            So as he “set his face toward” Jerusalem, what did he know about what lay ahead? And what does this mean for us this Palm Sunday?

            Many of you have noticed that in my preaching, I often offer you at least a bit of carefully-constructed heresy to chew on. This is intended, of course, and always suggested somewhat playfully, as a means of stimulating our minds, of pressing us all to a richer understanding of our faith. This is always intended for a practical purpose. What good is any theology if it does not drive us to more life? Better life? To hear-and-now life? To God-with-us life? I believe this is what Jesus intended by his living and his dying, so for the sake of making this Holy Week of your living more filled with the presence of the  living God of Jesus, I ask you: What did he know?

I should say before I tell you what I think he knew that, obviously, I don’t know what he knew. And neither does anyone else. What exactly was in his mind is not a part of the record. It is, though, an inevitable item of speculation for those of us who have dedicated our lives to following his way, to all who have said, with the Apostle Paul, “Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” What I believe is simply one person’s speculation. But it matters in how I live. So I hope you will speculate with me.

Many pastors and interpreters would have you believe that his destination was an earthen tomb, warmed to body temperature by the spark of recent resurrection. And that he could see that destination, even as he turned southward from Galilee. Resurrection. He was marching to a known outcome of victory. But I’m just un-orthodox enough to suggest that perhaps this is not so. Maybe resurrection was not what Jesus saw when he set his face toward the Holy City.

            I think we read the story too simply. In our hind-sight reading, we make it too neat. Too tidy. We smooth over the rough edges and wear down the real-life tensions until his journey becomes only some kind of interesting color-commentary, travel trivia along the way, not the real, existential anguish of one who was “like us in every way.”[3] Read in this way, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem becomes incidental. A necessary but actually meaningless change of scenery. A marking of time serving only to set the stage for the final act, which was resurrection. Read in this way, Easter morning becomes a show, and the gut-wrenching resolve which led Jesus to “set his face toward Jerusalem,” to “take up his [own] cross” ultimately holds no meaning for us.

            But alienation, betrayal, denial, rejection and death are not incidental to his story. They are not incidental to our story. So, they are not incidental to God’s story either. It is precisely on that journey that we should find the most meaning. For it is on the journey to our own Jerusalem. It is on the journey as we face our own defeat. It is on the journey in which we dare to carry our own cross that we meet the living God of Jesus.

            As I see it, his victory was not in resurrection… his victory was in the stone-faced resolve that led one solitary man to turn his face toward certain death, and to do so because he loved.

            What did he see when he “set his face to Jerusalem?” I don’t believe that he saw resurrection. I will not overlook his life of love or his death of anguish by making God’s always-surprising Grace an expected consequence of living a predetermined existence.

            Like Isaiah’s suffering servant, who in the face of real persecution, “set his face like a flint,” I believe Jesus of Nazareth saw what you and I see, if we are willing to look at life one day at a time in this real world. In resolute determination I believe Jesus saw every day as today: The day the Lord hath made. Today is the only day that matters.

This is the impractical. The spiritual. The mystical. The miraculous. Since “tomorrow never comes,” every today is filled, literally, with all of the possibilities of God.

            I believe that as he “set his face toward Jerusalem” he saw all that was impractical for that day. But he also saw the practical. He saw reality, laced with the very potential of God, but he saw that reality also wrapped in human particularity and short-coming. For the first century Israelite named, Jesus, this meant that he saw an imperial power cloaked in the garb of Rome, heavy-handing common folks, like you and me, with uncommon brutality. He saw the face of evil, and it looked human. He saw young children dying of malnutrition. And old children dying of every thirst imaginable.

And he saw God’s people, God’s so-called “chosen people” – doing the choosing, now, for themselves. Choosing might over right. Choosing power over principle. Choosing investment over integrity. Choosing religion over relationship.

            Life is always lived in the great gulf between the impractical (the possibilities of God) and the practical (the very real suffering and insecurity of human life). Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem teaches us how to live in this great gulf.

            In her poem, “Redemption,” Leslie Goerner writes:

. . . What did Lot’s wife hope to see

when on that moving day her eyes slid back

to the town where she had raised a family,

exchanged the recipes of substitution…

Perhaps she turned to douse with tears

the fire of a hearth where friendship dawdled

near the shame she’d entertained:

in her heart, still burning,

embers of a tolerance

for sin we too have hosted –

her final heedless turning hardened

into destination.

            In the certain face of uncertain future, some refuse to look ahead at all. Their “final heedless turning,” their refusal to face Jerusalem, “harden[s] into destination.”  “First let me bury my father…” then I will follow. “Let me go back and say goodbye to my family…” then I will follow. But today is the Face of the Future. Jesus said there is no looking back.

            On the other hand, in the certain face of uncertain future, some look only to a glorified future. They want to skip on to resurrection, the real thing. But the journey is the real thing. And if we miss the living God on the journey, it may be the only thing. Life is not an incidental ticket to an Easter morning spectacular. And Jesus’ death is not called his passion without reason.

The poet, Rilke wrote,

The future enters into us,

in order to transform itself in us,

long before it happens.

Today is the Face of the Future. Jesus said there is no looking forward, either.

            As I believe Jesus was, you are truly free today, on this Palm Sunday, to seek a crown – or to choose your cross – but you are not free to claim his celebration without setting your face with his, to the Holy / unholy Jerusalem. Setting his face to the future meant choosing, daily, to live, to love, to die for the sake of another.

            The Face of the Future is your face, today.

Who knows, if we are willing to abandon ourselves to that kind of daily living and daily dying that Jesus practiced, perhaps resurrection awaits us all!

May it be so. Amen!