“Jesus Saves”

Palm Sunday

March 20, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Matthew 26:14-27

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!   This is how psalm 118 begins.  Psalm 118 is the psalm that is recited and chanted as Jesus rode into Jerusalem as the Messiah on a donkey.  It was one of several psalms that was recited by all pilgrims as they entered Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.  With Jesus it came to have very special meaning.  The apostles saw deeper implications in it.  After all, Jesus was not just another average pilgrim.  Jesus as Son of God enters Jerusalem as the salvation for all the world.

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!  Let us all say it together…..  Now, may the left side say it…..  Let’s have the right side say it….  Choir your turn…..  Let me say it again….

We associate Palm Sunday with happy parades, festive music, and children having a good time.  But, Palm Sunday is also the start of the passion.  It is the beginning of the week wherein events gather and mount.  Things go from good to bad to worse to horrible.  At the end of this service we have a special reading of the scripture where we are told all about what happened next.  Beginning with Palm Sunday through the Passion we witness the very dramatic and powerful saving actions of God through the sacrifice of his only Son.   The poetry of psalm 118 foreshadows this saving action of God.  That is the irony of it having been chanted from the very beginning as Jesus entered the city.

Today in this sermon I would like to show very concretely how God’s saving actions from back then are still working today.   This week in the news we have had a very dramatic illustration of it.  Psalm 118 relates this week to the encounter the murderer Brian Nicols had with his hostage Ashley Smith.  What happened is powerful and moving and true just like what happened to Jesus is powerful moving and true.  Thousands of years later we find these two stories intertwining and playing off each other.  The Jesus of then still saves now.  O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!

As most of you know Brian Nicols is the 33 year old afroamerican who was brought before the court in Atlanta for rape charges.  He grabbed a gun from a sheriffs deputy.  He critically injured her.  He shot and killed the judge and the court reporter.  He then fled.  He carjacked several vehicles.  He killed an immigration and customs enforcement agent.  Then he took Ashley Smith by gun point into her apartment and held her hostage.   

The Psalms are not light weight things.  Psalm 118 has a verse that says these things:  All nations surrounded me;…  They surrounded me, surrounded me on every side;…They surround me like bees; they blazed like a fire of thorns…I was pushed hard, so that I was falling…

Brian Nicols couldn’t have said it better himself.   He was a desperate fugitive.  He had murdered again and again.  There was a man hunt after him.  His face was plastered on national TV.  He was surrounded on every side.  Surely the next firefight would be like thorns blazing. 

What made Brian do it?  It would be easy to write him off as a monster.  Except for the fact that people who knew him said he was a nice guy.  He was a gentle well spoken boy.  He was an athlete in his high school.  A childhood buddy of his, who is now a minister, can’t figure it out.  He is sure that there is some mental illness that took over.  It is so unlike the Brian Nicols he grew up with.  What happened?  What made Brian snap?  No one knows.  Maybe no one will every know for sure.  Whatever it was, it pushed Brian hard.  Now he was falling and falling and falling. 

Brian was falling so hard that the only imaginable trajectory was further disaster and more killing.  It is chilling when he said to Ashley, “You know, somebody could have heard your scream already.  And if they did, the police are on the way and I am going to have to hold you hostage.  And I’m going to have to kill you and probably myself and lots of other people and I don’t want to do that.” 

Psalm 118 has the word “hosanna” in it several times.  They shouted “hosanna” when Jesus came.  “Hosanna” means “save now.”  It is so often used that its literally meaning is sometimes forgotten.  It becomes like “hallelujah” a shout of praise.  Yet, the meaning is always there underneath the shouting.  “Hosanna, save now!”  Can the right say Hosanna, save now!  Can the left say Hosanna save now!  Women say Hosanna, save now!  Men say Hosanna save now!

Brian Nicols didn’t say Hosanna instead he said, “Do you have a shower?”  Maybe he was getting at the same thing.  Maybe he wanted to be cleaned more than just physically.  He wanted the dirt and the blood and the sweat washed off.  He wanted new clothes.  He wanted to change and get rid of the clothes he stole from someone else he murdered.  He wanted to shed his sins.  Save now! 

He tied Ashley up with tape, electric cord and a curtain.  He took her into the bath room and put a towel over her head.  He put the gun on the counter and took a shower.

He then took her back to the bedroom.  She talked to him about her little daughter.  She said that if he killed her that her daughter would not have any parents because her father had died earlier.  He said he would not let her go.

Then she asked him the strangest thing.  She asked him if she could read.  Read?  Read as in school room quiet?  Read after all the violence, the fact that he might kill her?  Read in the midst of terror and random acts of senseless mayhem?  What could she possibly want to read - a murder mystery, fiction, history, biography, the newspaper?  What has reading got to do with being held hostage by gun point?

Brian asked what she wanted to read.  She said her bible and a book called The Purpose Driven Life.  Was this a joke?  What purpose was there to this moment?  What possible God given purpose could Ashley find as a hostage.  More unthinkable, and unimaginable still, what purpose could a shooting spree Brian Nicols possibly have.  Ashley was either a fool or an angel.  Just in case it was the later, Brian chose to listen. 

She read to him from where she had left off, chapter 33.  She read:

     We serve God by serving others.

     The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige, and position.  If you can demand service from others, you’ve arrived.  In our self-serving culture with it me-first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept.

     Jesus, however, measured greatness in terms of service, not status.  God determines your greatness by how many people you serve, not how many people serve you.  This is so contrary to the world’s idea of greatness that we have a hard time understanding it, much less practicing it.

Brian told Ashley to stop.  Of all things he wanted her to reread it again.  So she did.  I am going to reread this again.  As I read it put yourself in Brian’s shoes and imagine what meaning could Brian have found from this passage….  (Reread passage)

Does anyone here have any thoughts about what he could have found meaningful for him, even in such desperate circumstances as his?  (Have the congregation suggest some things.)

The other point I want to make here is this.  If Brian got meaning out of this passage, surely you must get meaning out of this passage.  Surely, you too must find ways of serving God by serving others.  In many sermon illustrations it is easy to listen to the other person’s life and say, “Yes, but he had it easier than me.  He didn’t have abusive parents….or He had an education….  Or Times were easier then…. Or he was younger…. Or he was older…. Or he was afroamerican….  Or , he was white…..”  But, in Brian’s case no one, no one has it worse than him.  If Brian can do it, so can we.

Brian began to trust Ashley.  He unbound her.  They talked into the night.  They talked about people he killed.  They talked about her daughter.  They talked about the fact that her husband had been murdered and she told Brian what it was like to be on the other side.  They talked and talked all through the night.  She made him butter pancakes for breakfast.  Mostly they talked about God and his purpose.  She said to him…

Do you believe in miracles?  Because if you don’t believe in miracles – you are here for a reason.  You’re here in my apartment for some reason.  You got out of that courthouse with police everywhere and you don’t think that’s a miracle?  You  don’t think you’re suppose to be sitting here right in front of me listening to me tell you, you know, your reason here?  You know, your miracle could be that you need to – you need to be caught for this.  You need to go to prison and you need share the word of God with them, with all the prisoners there.

Brian said that they were sisters and brothers in Christ.  He said that Ashley was his angel and God had sent her to him. 

We have all heard of the expression, “Is the cup half full or is it half empty?”    Brian’s cup was not only completely empty but it was filled with the broken shard’s of his own shattered life.  Yet, even that God can do something with.  God can hold that empty broken glass up to the light and make rainbows refract off it in a thousand places.  Only God can turn rainbows out of the broken pieces of the self. 

Psalm 118 says them Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through.  Can we all say that?  Open the gates of righteousness that I may enter through them.  Can the women say that?....  Can the choir say that?...  Can the left say that?... Can the men say that?....

Brian put the guns under the bed.  He said that he wasn’t going to need them anymore.  He let Ashley go and see her daughter at 9:30 in the morning.  When she left he was a transformed man.  He asked her if there was anything he could do while she was gone.  The nice young man that his friend knew from before his fall had reemerged.  Perhaps he wondered if he could hang her curtains.  You know, the ones that he had bound around her waist. 

Psalm 118 continues…I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation.  The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.  This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.  This is the day that the Lord has made let us rejoice and be glad in it.  May we all say it again…  This is the day that the Lord has made may we all rejoice and be glad in it. 

The next line is the one we read explicitly in the Bible when Jesus is riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, Blessed is one who comes in the name of the Lord!  Matthew describes Jesus as humble and gentle that day.  It reinforces what Jesus said about himself, I am gentle and humble in heart.  (Matt 11:29)  The gentle king arrives in his capital with no sword in his hand.  He remained vulnerable to whatever his enemies chose to do with him. 

Brian became a little more like Jesus that day.  He became gentle in his heart.  Like I said, he placed the guns under the bed and said he was done with that now.  He hung her curtains.  He knew that she was going to call the police.  As he waited there for the inevitable, I wonder what went through his mind.  He probably got something to eat.  He probably watched TV.  And, I think his heart probably have filled with a sense of divine purpose.  He saw rainbows around him.  Rainbows scattered on the walls from his life, fractured as it was, yet with the light of God shining through it anyway.  Hosanna to God in the highest.

Riding into Jerusalem that day, at some level Jesus knew he was going to die.  He knew the passion of his life was going to begin.  In a few days those that cheered him would betray him.  Waiting there in Ashley’s apartment, Brian Nicols knew that he was a dead man.  Georgia has the death penalty.  He probably will get it.  Yet, for Brian death now had life in it.  Perhaps he was really alive for the first time ever.  For Brian’s death was saved by Jesus’ death.  Because Jesus died for Brian and for all of us, Brian can now find purpose to his life, however long he has left, wherever it now takes him. 

I imagine that Brian will think about Jesus in his jail cell, on death row.  He will be like the thief on the cross next to Jesus.  Remember the thief who says, …we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.  Then the thief turned to Jesus and asked, just as Brian will turn to Jesus many times and ask, Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.  Jesus’s answer will be the same for Brian as it was back then, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.

Psalm 118 ends as it began like this:  The Lord is God.  He has given us light.  Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar.  You are my God, and I will give thanks to you;  you are my God, I will extol you.  O give thanks to the Lord.  For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.  Can the left say…Oh give thanks to the Lord.  For he is good his steadfast love endures forever!...Can the right say it….  Can the choir say it…  Can we all say it together….Amen!