The Rev. Canon John Bedingfield's sermon for Palm Sunday, 2021

On Palm Sunday, we almost always talk about the amazing turn of events that led Jesus to the cross.  There was the triumphal entry into Jerusalem — which we remember by processing from outside into the church with palm branches.  And then, almost in an instant, we turn from saying “Hosanna in the highest,” to “Crucify him,” as we read the Passion narrative.  It is an incredible contrast to go from parades and adulation to crucifixion in a matter of minutes.  But we do this to recollect what it must have been like for Jesus and His disciples, who experienced all of these things in just a matter of a few days.  But what got Jesus to that point?  What were the circumstances that caused all of this to happen?

First, there was the city itself.  Historians believe that there were usually about 40,000 people living in Jerusalem at that time.  But during the Passover festival, when the faithful Jews from around the area made their pilgrimage to the Temple, the population of the city could swell to over 200,000.  Think about that for a minute.  That would be like St. Joseph going from just under 1,000 people, to 5,000.  A 500% population increase will always put a strain on the resources of a city.  And resources being stretched thin will always create tension amongst city residents. 

Then there was the Roman army.  Rome usually stationed a cohort of soldiers in Jerusalem to keep the peace.  A cohort was somewhere between 360 and 480 soldiers.  So imagine being an ordinary Roman soldier stationed in Jerusalem.  Not only were the language and customs of the local people strange and foreign to you, but there were only 480 of you to keep the peace among 600,000 people, most of whom hated your guts.  There had to be more than a little tension among the soldiers.  When you add to that, the fact that there were members of the Zealot political party running around trying to start riots so that the Romans would respond and the people could be led to rise up against them; the city was pretty much a tender box.

And the third part of this trinity of circumstances was the Temple authorities: the Pharisees, the Priests and the Scribes.  Mark tells us that these folks had been watching Jesus pretty closely from the time He began His ministry, three years earlier.  And He scared them.  These men were the ultimate religious leaders of that day.  As such, they had a great deal of power over the Jewish people.  With power came wealth (or vice versa) and they had that as well.  The Temple authorities saw Jesus as a charismatic rebel, capable of gathering huge crowds and then winning them over to His way of thinking.  To those men, nothing was more dangerous than what Jesus represented — a world in which they were no longer necessary, much less exerting power.  They desperately wanted Jesus dead, but Roman law had taken away their power to execute Him.  For that, they needed the Romans.  So they made a sort of unholy alliance with their sworn enemies, and called it something done for the good of all Jewish people.

And so it was that Jesus road into Jerusalem to crowds of adoring people proclaiming Him the blessed one who comes in the name of the Lord, only thereafter to run into a power structure that was ready to remove Him from the scene because His very presence frightened them.  But how did all of that translate into the crowds themselves turning against Jesus?

One simple answer is that the crowd that met Him when He came into town may not have been the same people who, a few days later, called for His execution.  With 200,000 people in town, gathering a crowd would not have been difficult, and those who followed Jesus might well have gone into hiding when they heard of His arrest, leaving those who sided with the Temple authorities to stand outside the Governor’s palace and give voice to their desires.  But there is a more disturbing possibility.

I think that the way Mark tells this story, shows that the author believed the two groups of people — those who yelled “Hosanna” and those who yelled “crucify him,” — to have been the same people.  And that has implications for us all.  

You see, whenever we profess to be followers of Jesus and then fail to do as He would do, we are, in a very real sense, showing that we too are members of both crowds.  When we say that we love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength and yet do not feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend to the sick and visit the shut-ins, we too are showing our tendency to live in both camps.  And when we say that we support the ministries and good work done through our churches but do nothing to provide real support for them, we are likewise showing ourselves be on both sides of the fence.

Today we are faced with a slowing ending pandemic, an economy that is great for some and horrible for others; racial divisions that are even worse than our abysmal state of affairs; and political strife, the likes of which I have never — in almost 65 years on this planet — seen.  In other words, there is a lot going on in our country that could define, divide, and destroy us.  We should be looking up instead of down, looking up to Jesus for lessons on how to live, rather than looking down at this fallen world.

Jesus told us exactly how to live.  He said to love God and love our neighbors — all of our neighbors — just as we love ourselves.  But we, the “crowds” of humans in every city and town, just cannot seem to do it.  Love God.  Love neighbor.  It sounds so easy, doesn’t it?  But just get on social media, or watch television and you’ll see how bad we are about actually doing it.  One minute we can hail a person or group as the “2nd coming” and the next we can verbally crucify them.

It is absolutely true that whenever we say one thing about our religious identity and then do something else, we are modern-day representatives of the crowds in the Passion story.  But fortunately, that is not the end of the story.  Because, as the faithful Centurion who stood at the foot of the cross said, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”  And for God’s Son, there can even be forgiveness of our unfaithfulness.  

In the name of the God who was crucified for faithless people, Amen.

[Palm Sunday Sermon 032821, Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16, Philippians 2:5-11, Mark 14:1-15:47]

Services at Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter 2021

The Rev. Canon John Bedingfield will lead Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph, in services for:

Palm Sunday, March 28 at 10am

Good Friday, April 2, at noon

Easter, April 4, at 10am

Please join us and invite others!

Peace be with you!

The Rev. Canon John Bedingfield's sermon for March 7, 2021, Christ Episcopal Church, Saint Joseph

When I was a kid, I received a Bible that had belonged to my father’s uncle, John Davis Bedingfield, who died 12 days after I was born, and whose name I carry.  It was a leather-bound, King James Version, with our name embossed on the cover.  In between the Old Testament and the New Testament, it has a bunch of prints of paintings, the origins of which are unknown to me.  Along with such pictures as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Noah loading animals on the Ark, there was a picture that really stuck out to me.  

The picture I remember so vividly was of Christ Cleansing the Temple.  In it, there are birds flying around; men who are ducking or recoiling;Temple authorities who are talking about what is going on; men who are chasing their coins across the floor; and in the midst of it all, Jesus, with whip-like cords held above his head, as he prepares to swing them — again — at the merchants in the Court of the Gentiles, in the outer part of the Temple.  What struck about the picture, at least as a child, was Jesus’ face.

Like most children, I was pretty familiar with the story of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, you know, carrying a lamb on his shoulders, to make sure that this lost creature got back to its mother.  In pictures of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is kind, caring, serene, and exuding absolute love.  Laying aside the fact that most of the artistic renderings of Jesus are blond haired, blue-eyed, white guys — which is most certainly not how Jesus looked — the pictures that I had seen of Him, up to that time, were always of a smiling man, who cared for everyone around Him.  But this Jesus, the one in the cleansing the Temple picture, this was an angry guy, and it made quite an impression on me.

From all that I have learned in the intervening fifty-plus years, Jesus was indeed very angry when he cleansed the Temple.  He made a whip out of cords, and was using that whip.  No one fashions a homemade whip in order to have a calm conversation with those who disagree with him.  Yeah, Jesus was teed off that day.

When we think about this story, we should keep in mind that Jesus was a faithful, observant Jew.  He read, taught and preached in synagogues.  He fasted on fast days and feasted on feast days.  He made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to the Temple, when the Jewish calendar said to.  That is important because, although some have taught it this way, this story is not about Christianity being more pleasing to God, than Judaism.  In Jesus’ day, there was no such religion as Christianity.  No, this story is not about Judaism.  It is about Temple worship and the way it had slowly disintegrated into a corrupt and misguided system in need not only of reform, but of dissolution.

Jesus came onto the scene, “as one with authority.”  He preached and taught with an authenticity and a truth that the religious leaders of His day lacked.  The Pharisees, the Scribes, the Sanhedrin, had all come into being to guard the Jewish faith from those who might either try to pervert it, or otherwise change its worship into something God never intended.  Unfortunately, over the centuries, these faithful men gave way to those who were more interested in gaining, consolidating and keeping power than they were in insuring that the worship of the One True God was pure.  

And so, instead of having a humble place where faithful Jews exchanged Roman currency for Temple coins — which was necessary to pay your Temple tax — what Jesus found in the outer realms of the Temple was a bunch of people who were little more than ancient loan sharks, constantly cheating those who came to them, just to increase their profit margin.  And instead of having a convenient place where people who traveled long distances to make an offering at the Temple could buy whatever animal was needed for their sacrificial worship, Jesus found overpriced livestock whose owners hid the animals’ blemishes and treated pilgrims as a constituency to be gouged, cheated, and otherwise taken advantage of.  In other words, Jesus found that the evils of the commerce-based world outside had infiltrated the Temple in very deep and pervasive ways.

By his actions that day, Jesus held a mirror up to the merchants, the bankers, and the Temple authorities.  He showed them how far they had strayed from what Temple worship was supposed to be.  And that truthful and critical look at “the Church” of the day, was something that was desperately needed, even if it meant that Jesus was hated by those whom He exposed.

That is the thing about Jesus.  He is always ready, willing, and able to hold a mirror in front of our faces and to show us exactly where we have wandered off the path that God laid out for us.  And that is true whether we are talking about us as individuals, or us as the Church.  Jesus is the corrective to whatever is harming us.

If there is one thing that I have preached more than anything else in my career, it is that Jesus calls us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  That seems so deceptively simple that one wonders, “How can we need a corrective when the rule is so easy to understand?”  And yet, somehow we do.

In America today, the economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor is even greater than it was before the Great Depression.  That means that the very wealthy have gotten much richer, as the number of people who are truly poor has continued to increase at an alarming rate.  According to a recent survey, conducted by the Federal Reserve, between 42% and 48% of American have no money in savings, and between 50 and 60% of people have only the minimum to keep a savings account open.  That means that many people — over half of our population — are theoretically one paycheck away from homelessness.  One big car repair, hospitalization (with a large deductible to meet), layoff, or other economic change, could push any of those households into a debt spiral that could quickly put their home and transportation in grave jeopardy.

And an amazing thing about how all of the working poor people in this country live, is that while they struggle to just stay alive — hoping someday to reach what they call “even” — their creditors lobby Congress and get bills passed that allow them to charge ever-increasing interest on the debts of people who will be paying that interest until they die, or beyond, without ever touching the principle.  And most of the working poor in this country have, from time to time, had one of those unexpected car repairs or other catastrophic expenses, that has caused them to get a “payday loan.”

Did you know that anyone, no matter how bad their credit rating might be, can borrow between $100 and $1,000 from a payday loan store.  And the interest that they pay on these short-term loans (usually two weeks is the term of the loan) is 30% or more.  So, if I have to take my child to the emergency room and need to borrow $1,000, I would either give the payday lender access to my bank account, or sign a post-dated check for $1,300.  I then would have two weeks to come up with the money, at which time, the lender would cash my check or draft my account; or the loan would kick over into a long-term note, with equally high interest, and the $300 that I owed in interest, would now be tacked on to the principle.  So I would now owe $1,300 with an annual percentage rate of 400.  And if the loan were to kick over that way, my car and household furnishings would become collateral.

The way things are in America today, makes what Jesus discovered in the Temple seem tame by comparison.  Perhaps it is time for us to start seriously loving our neighbors as ourselves, and to stop demonizing the poor in this country.  If we stop using rhetoric like “welfare queens” and start thinking of the 50%+ of our brothers and sisters who are struggling, as beloved children of God; then we might become part of a system that works to close the wealth gap.  And we might cleanse our own Temple to protect those who literally cannot protect themselves.

In the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

[Lent 3B Sermon 030721, Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22]