SERMON 492

LENT 6 - PASSION SUNDAY – APRIL8, 9, 2006

ISAIAH 50:4-9, PHILIPPIANS 2:5-11, MARK 15:1-47

NOTHING SEEMS TO CHANGE

Beloved in the Lord, grace and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and from the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.

This is Passion Sunday, or Palm Sunday with the liturgy of the palms. It is on this Sunday that we also read the passion story from one of the Gospels, this season coming from the Gospel of Mark. It is a long reading, but the sermon will be mercifully short.

The other lessons are quite remarkable in their content. We hear the prophet Isaiah, writing centuries before Christ, foretell the suffering of Jesus. We hear St. Paul urge us to put on the mind of Jesus, one who gave himself up for us all as the servant of all, putting all his glory aside.

But as we prepare for the reading from the Gospel of Mark we will reflect for a moment on the theme NOTHING SEEMS TO CHANGE.

Jerusalem was the place where our Lord rode triumphantly into the city. It was also the place where he was crucified and raised from the dead. Before enduring that suffering he was subject to mockery and humiliation of all kinds.

NOTHING SEEMS TO CHANGE! Our Lord was not the only one to die there. Jerusalem has always been a place where one nation after another marched in and pillaged and killed without mercy. From the Babylonians to the Egyptians, to the Assyrians, to the Greeks, to the Romans, to the followers of Mohammed, to the crusaders, to the Turks, and now to this present century, nothing seems to have changed.

The radical terrorists have stated that Jerusalem and Palestine do not belong to the Jews and the nation of Israel, and they have sworn to drive them out by one means or another. They do not talk about crucifying them, but they do talk about driving them out forever.

NOTHING SEEMS TO CHANGE! They not only put our Lord to death, they mocked him and challenged him over and over again. They told him that if he were indeed the king of the Jews and the Messiah the least he could do was come down from the cross as a sign of his claims. Those in authority and the rabble that followed them simply refused to believe that Jesus was anything other than an imposter.

Now the claims that Jesus and the disciples made that he was indeed a King, the one chosen by God to redeem the world, the Messiah that the prophets all pointed to, have been mocked over and over again throughout the centuries.

We have been briefly studying some of the elements of Islam in our Sunday morning adult class. For the followers of Mohammed, Jesus was a mighty prophet indeed, but not the one chosen to redeem the world. They simply do not believe that Jesus died on the cross; that he was raised from the dead. Mohammed, in their view is the last and greatest of the prophets. Rather, for Islam, to know God is to follow the prophet and the Koran. Jesus is worthy of honor, but certainly not the glory of the Son of God who gave his life as a ransom for the world!

I was listening to the radio late one night this week and I heard another story that is trying to replace the story of Jesus and his death on the cross as the center of reality. This particular gentleman spoke in terms of star civilizations outside the realm of our solar system. According to him these various star systems have united together in a global organization and one of their objectives is to save planet earth from its disastrous course in both warfare and the eventual destruction of its habitable climate.

According to this gentleman these star civilizations have been attempting to rescue humanity for some time. Some of these aliens have actually come into our midst with the purpose of changing humanity by creating star children. These star children have had their genetic system altered in a way that will enable them to change the course of human history. Many of these so called star children have not yet recognized what has happened to them but some day will come into full realization of the new potential that has been given them. This gentleman stated that his research indicated that about 59 percent of our world’s population has already become star children.

There are indeed some very strange ideas out there in this world. And each new faith or ideology would simply say of Jesus and the faith that surrounds him, that it is not redemptive, that God was not in Jesus redeeming the world from sin and death; that Jesus is essentially an imposter.

NOTHING SEEMS TO CHANGE. They mocked our Lord before they put him to death and denied that he was the one that he claimed to be. Every generation since that have had those among them that continue to deny that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior of the world.

But while nothing seems to change, everything has indeed changed. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. God was in Christ, not only giving us new life and eternal life, God was demonstrating how the world can be changed. As we put on the mind of Christ and become his people declaring his saving works, the lives of many people will indeed be changed. Christ Jesus does change all things. He will change our hearts and our lives if we will let him. He will provide all joy in believing, all grace in our weaknesses and suffering, and hope for this life and the next, and all courage to live in him, die in him and confess his name to the world around us. After all, the cross of Jesus Christ is the power of God for salvation for everyone who will believe.

Let us listen again to the story that can and will change everything.