Radical Love Always Confronts Power

a Palm Sunday sermon

Happy Palm Sunday all! This morning I am preaching the following sermon at Camas Friends Church in Camas, WA, as part of my weekend in the Pacific Northwest. I wanted share with you all too—and given that it’s a sermon, give you the option to listen to it, if you’d prefer.

The below audio is not me preaching it at Camas Friends, but one of my practice runs in preparation. If you’d rather read it, the transcript is below, too.

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image from https://betaviv.org/sukkot/

Good morning everyone, it’s a real treat to be here this morning. When I was initially talking with Matt about the dates that I was going to be in town, we had locked it in before I realized “Oh no that’s Palm Sunday.” I thought surely that Matt would cancel, but I’m grateful he didn’t. So it’s an honor to get to talk on this significant day, and to get to connect the themes of Jesus’ triumphal entry to the work that I’m passionate about, which is ending homelessness.

I always hoped to get to preach on Sundays like this; I thought I was going to be a pastor, and went to both undergrad and Seminary to study theology and ministry. Instead, I’ve spent the last ten years working in direct services for people experiencing homelessness, and the last 5 writing and talking to primarily churches about how to engage this issue. So it’s with all of that context this morning that I’m just thrilled to be with you today and sharing this message.

Palm Sunday marks Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Jesus had spent a few years teaching and preaching, healing and feeding people, casting out demons, and building a following primarily among the underclass of society. The poor, the sick, the disabled, the widows and widowed and orphans–outsiders and social rejects were Jesus’ primary demographic. His message was Good News for all, but for those who preferred the false promises of wealth and status and privilege, his words didn’t sound too Good. But for those who knew the truth about how wealth extorts, how status demeans, and how privilege patronizes, those who had received the blunt end of these powers, Jesus' message wasn’t just good news–it was salvation. It was a world made new.

And Jesus’ message and following and spectacular acts got him into trouble. He was run out of town and threatened and confronted multiple times because his actions were a danger to the way things were–and a lot of people had a lot of personal and financial stake in things staying the way they were. But none of it compares to what Jesus faced coming into Jerusalem. And he knew it. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, he knew he was crossing a line he couldn’t uncross.

We’ll return to this shortly, because I want to talk a bit about the how of Jesus entering Jerusalem. What is so memorable about this story are the details, the idiosyncratic elements that make it interesting, but also differentiate it from what might have been expected.

While we normally associate the events of Jerusalem, like the Last Supper, the Passion and Resurrection, with Passover, the Triumphal Entry has symbolic meaning pointing to another festival, the Feast of Tabernacles; in Hebrew, Sukkot. Sukkot remembers the time that God’s people spent wandering in the desert for forty years after the Exodus and before entering the land of promise. In this festival, palms are among the materials used to assemble makeshift dwellings, like the ones that ancestors built, rebuilt, and relocated throughout the period of transition.

My friend Aaron Horner, who is a pastor and homelessness advocate in the Bay Area, preached on this about six months ago, and in preparation he spoke to a local Rabbi about the significance of this event. The Rabbi spoke of Sukkot as a joyous celebration, because even while it remembers a time of wandering and transition, it was also a time of formation and dependence on God. He said, “We wandered for decades impermanent in place, but permanent as a people."

This reflection caused Aaron, and of course myself, to think of our unhoused neighbors and how they experience the impermanence of housing, and yet still find ways to make home on the fringes of our neighborhoods and society.

There’s a phrase I’ve grown accustomed to using when people ask me about those who sleep outside, especially in the winter. In Minneapolis where I live, the winters are brutal, and yet unsheltered homelessness remains high even during the coldest months. People ask me “how do they stay alive out there?” and I usually begin my response by saying, “Well, people have always lived outside.”

When I say that, I don’t mean to suggest that it’s ok or should be at all tolerable that unhoused people are forced to endure such conditions. Rather, it’s meant to remind us that even in a place like Minnesota, indigenous peoples survived for centuries without our modern development, infrastructure, without gas and electricity creating heat. In fact, for the vast majority of human existence, we’ve all lived like that. And historically and in our own lives have in some way experienced a level of impermanence and transition when it comes to where we live. And amidst all of that, we’ve always found a way to make home.

The difference today, of course, is that we do have the ability and all the resources so that everyone could live inside, but we don’t allow everyone equal access to those resources. We’ve created a world designed exclusively for people who sleep inside, then we’ve cast hundreds of thousands of people out of it. We have commodified permanence, barred entry to it, and we then punish those who find themselves on the outside looking in.

Even still, unhoused people–and all peoples who have experienced marginalization–-fight for joy, community, freedom, permanence, home. I’ve worked with and borne witness to encampments that develop communities of support and mutual aid even as they strive for housing and fight for their right to exist in public space. I’ve known the absolute ingenuity of how people who are so often accused of being lazy and useless create makeshift plumbing and electricity, not just for themselves but for their friends and neighbors. It’s beautiful and tragic all at once.

This is the significance of the Palm Branches of Sukkot, and I find it especially meaningful that these are what ushered Jesus in to Jerusalem. Those who know the pains of Empire’s marginalization welcome Jesus into the heart of the Empire by waving the symbols of permanence-within-exile. What a demonstration of resilience, and power.

And what a fascinating contrast to how Jesus rides in… on a donkey. Rev. David Lee said it well: “Jesus doesn’t come in power that would sweep us away in random judgment, but he comes weak and lowly and humble and approachable.” To be sure, the power that the authorities feared in Jesus had as much to do with those waving the branches as it did the lowly man on the donkey. Jesus’ ability to rally the marginalized, instill them with a sense of worth and a hunger for a better world, was dangerous. Jesus rides in humbly, and in peace—but it’s also decidedly antagonistic, confrontational, and disruptive.

The triumphal entry is the signature moment of Jesus’ ministry where his vision for the world encroaches on Empire and threatens to topple everything. It’s a risky moment where radical love marches on power.

Radical love always confronts power, eventually, if it follows the way of Jesus. We may start out innocently enough, providing a helping hand to our neighbors, cooking a meal for a hungry child, or donating money to a good cause. But when we allow love to take root in us, we find ourselves drawn to not only helping those who are crushed, but wondering “Why are so many people being crushed, and what would it take to stop it?” The liberation theologian Dom Helder Camara famously said, “When I feed the hungry they call me a saint. When I ask ‘Why are so many people hungry?’ they call me a socialist.”

This is no more true than in homelessness work. If you’ve heard the term NIMBY (which stands for “Not in My BackYard”), then you’ve seen this play out. It’s the idea that “Of course we should help homeless people, just don’t do it here.” People will donate to a shelter or program, and maybe even show up to volunteer, but they don’t want it to encroach on their lives, their daily experience, and certainly not on their property values. But if we’re to get serious about ending homelessness, some things about the way that we’re living will have to change.

We’ll need to invest in affordable housing in every neighborhood, and stand ready to welcome new neighbors. We’ll need to upheave the way that our neighborhoods were designed to intentionally segregate people from one another. We’ll need to confront our own myths and biases that say particular groups of people are lazy, or dangerous, or undesirable. We won’t shelter our way out of this issue, or foodline our way out of it. Triage is important, of course—it’s life-saving—but radical love will always lead us to confront power.

If Jesus had just gone around helping the poor, he wouldn’t be headed for the cross. Instead, he entered Jerusalem—the heart of Empire—humble, peaceful, but resolved.

Love confronts power, in solidarity with those whom power crushes. As the Church, may we love so well that we don’t just triage the damage but we join hands with the hurting and fight to end the brokenness. This past Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who stood up against Hitler and the rise of fascism and paid dearly for it. His work gives us a lot to chew on as we inhabit this current moment, but I will leave us with perhaps his most famous quote: “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” May we be so bold, to love all of our neighbors enough, to find ourselves in holy conflict with power.

Amen.

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