Lent 2021 - Lament Racial Brokenness

Note: This Sunday is the second of four lament services for Lent, where we’ll gather together and write and pray a lament about a specific aspect of being alive today that is really hard. To get the most out of this, consider reviewing the blog where we introduced The Big Idea for the Easter season and the blog for the Ash Wednesday service to see how we approached the first of our four lament services. For this coming Sunday, we’ve chosen to lament racial brokenness, because all of us have, at some point in the last year, been around when harmful racial brokenness has been on display in our neighborhoods.

According to one U.N. Human Rights attorney, African-Americans meet the United Nations standard for refugee status, and qualify to seek asylum in a different country. {1} {2} I had no idea that was true, until this summer.

As Americans, we might enjoy thinking of ourselves as an exceptional beacon of freedom for the rest of the world to follow, but if we listen to the voices of all the nations we might come to a different conclusion. Now, for clarity, I am not at all suggesting that African-Americans should apply for refugee status with the U.N., but I am suggesting that listening to voices from other nations can help illuminate our blind spots. The story of Palm Sunday is also a story of how the voices of the nations were absent, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

2020 was a crazy year for racial upheaval. Yet as our social media feeds have returned to the status quo, and as we’ve become familiar with the sights and smells of our culture and our relationship to the races and ethnicities around us, I think it’s appropriate for us to pause and lament what has happened. And as we re-enter the story of Palm Sunday, this time from the gospel of Matthew, I’d like to focus our lament on a question that brings our apathy to the status quo back to our attention:

How does Spring Church worship in ways that effortlessly excludes uncommon friends?

Now, before we read the story, I want you to remember God’s covenant with Abraham, that God was going to make Abraham into a great nation, and that nation would be a blessing to all the other nations. All those other nations are described as one big collective group called “The Gentiles.”

Time and again, from Ruth the Moabite to Jesus and the Centurion, we see the people of God mixing it up with the Gentiles in ways where they show how to be a blessing to each other (no doubt we see plenty of other examples, too, but that’s for a different blog post). Fast forward a little bit to the story of Pentecost, we see how all these various nations were worshipping together. Fast forward a lot to Revelation 7, where people with palm branches get it right, and again we see that everyone is there:

“And I saw a huge crowd, too huge to count. Everyone was there—all nations and tribes, all races and languages. And they were standing, dressed in white robes and waving palm branches, standing before the Throne and the Lamb”

Part of the vocation of a Christian is to live into heaven, to live as though we were already in heaven while being honest that we are not yet there. One of the ways people lived into the heavenly reality that God is a God for everyone is in the way they built the The Temple in Jerusalem. In the outer ring of the Temple is The Court of the Gentiles, which is the place where all the nations could worship. The “voice of the nations” that I referenced at the beginning of this blog is certainly on display in all these stories God uses to show us how to live.

As we return to our story of Palm Sunday, let’s remember that this Court of the Gentiles is the holy place in the Temple set aside for the Gentiles to worship at Passover.

So let’s pretend we’re living in the days of Jesus, we’re all one, big, happy Gentile family, and we’re headed to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple at the Passover. Our goal is to make it, as a family, to the Court of the Gentiles. Wherever we come from, travel is long, hard, dangerous, and stressful.

Have you ever been on a family trip that was long, hard, dangerous, and stressful?

Are you thinking happy thoughts right now?

Me neither.

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When we finally get to Jerusalem, we can add “crowded” to the unpleasant list of things going on. Hey, in fairness, we don’t know how people felt: Maybe this was the highlight of the year! Maybe people loved this sort of adventure! But one thing we can know for certain was that is was difficult to make it all the way to the Temple in Jerusalem at Passover.

And we’ll celebrate the Passover by doing, among other things, two very important tasks:

Pay the temple tax.
Sacrifice our animals.

First, we have to pay the temple tax.

The Romans had their own currency, and other countries had their own coins, but to make the required financial contribution to the Temple for every male over 20 years old, we have to use the Tyrian shekel.

Finding a money-changer is a necessary act of worship.

Second, we have to have animals to sacrifice and if an animal has a blemish, we can’t sacrifice it.

What do you think is easier? Making this challenging journey with live animals that cannot get injured, sick, lost, or harmed in any way OR making this challenging journey with money and buying the ceremonially pure animals when we get to Jerusalem? Obviously we choose to travel with money to buy an animal, so when we get to Jerusalem we have to buy animals.

Finding a vendor to sell sacrificial animals is a necessary act of worship. {1}

But when we enter the Court of the Gentiles, we don’t find a holy worship space, set aside for us. The money changers and the vendors selling animals aren’t outside the temple, where they wouldn’t disrupt the worship of Gentiles. What we encounter instead is an active marketplace where the money changers are working and all the sacrificial animals are herded, caged, and being sold. We don’t have a holy worship space anymore. We’re expected to celebrate the Passover in the din and hub of animals and people milling about.

The problem with this story isn’t that there was money changing taking place, or that there were animals being sold.

Those things had to happen as a necessary part of worship. The problem is that the religious leaders were worshipping in a way that effortlessly excluded the people from other races and nations, or as we would say at Spring Church, “uncommon friends.”

Jesus drove the marketplace out of the temple so the nations have a place to worship. And what’s the very next thing he does?

Now that we understand the historical background of this story, let’s return to it, and ask ourselves:

How does Spring Church worship in ways that effortlessly excludes uncommon friends?

The Story of Palm Sunday in Matthew 21:6-17

So the disciples went and did exactly what Jesus told them to do. They brought out the donkey and the colt, and they laid their cloaks upon them, and Jesus hopped on. Nearly everyone who was there spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and threw them along his path. Crowds went ahead and crowds followed, chanting:
“Save us now, Son of David!
It’s our hero, the One who comes in God’s Name!
Save us now, bring us heaven!”
And he entered into Jerusalem, and all the whole city was stirred up, asking, “Who is this?” And the crowd was saying, “This is the prophet Jesus, the one from Nazareth of Galilee.”
And Jesus came into the temple and cast out all the vendors and the customers in the temple. And he kicked over the tables of the money changers and the stalls of the dove merchants. And he quoted, “It is written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a hangout for insurrectionists.’”
Now there was room for the blind and the crippled in the temple, and they came to him and he healed them. When the Chief Priests and the Religious Leaders saw what wonders he did, and saw the children chanting in the temple ‘Save us now, Son of David,” they were furious, and took him to task, “Don’t you hear what these children are saying?!?!”
“Of course. Haven’t you read that ‘From the mouths children and even babies I have prepared a place of praise.’”
So Jesus turned on his heel and left for Bethany, where he spent the night.

As we prepare to write our lament for race together on Sunday, I’d like to focus our attention on how there is no mention of the other nations anywhere in this story of Palm Sunday. All the other nations are mentioned in the covenant with Abraham, people like Ruth and the Centurion get mentioned, the nations are filled with the Spirit at Pentecost, and all the nations worship God in Revelation 7. But they don’t show up here.

Take a moment and add up the number of times you personally read the story of Palm Sunday, and then add the number of times you’ve heard someone preach or teach on the story of Palm Sunday.

Go ahead and take about thirty seconds and add all those numbers together.

If you’ve been a part of the church for awhile, I bet that’s a pretty good sized number. Now, while holding that number in your memory, add up the number of times you’ve noticed, or heard someone preach, the ABSENCE of all the other nations being a part of worship in the Court of the Gentiles in this story. I bet that’s a pretty small number.

Our lament needs to focus on the absence of all the nations, and how we don’t even notice their absence anymore.

The status quo has made us so familiar with the way things are, we aren’t aware of how things could be different. We haven’t practiced living into the heavenly realities of Revelation 7 or in the story of Pentecost, instead we’ve lived out the “haven’t-even-noticed-they’re-not-here” status quo of the Story of Palm Sunday.

I’m so grateful for our multi-church community of practice, Healing Our Broken Humanity, and how it gives a space for us to hear from the voices of the nations when it comes to race and Spring Church. Yet I think it’s time for us a a community to pause and lament that our humanity is indeed broken when the voices of the nations have gone silent, particularly when so many people from so many nations live alongside us in our neighborhoods. Jesus pops the demographic bubbles that separate us from each other and from himself, yet we seem to have a fondness for the bubble.

May the Spirit prepare our hearts as we prepare to lament together on Sunday.

February 28 Worship Service

Footnotes

1 - Accessed again on 23 Feb 2021, here is an article from a human rights lawyer who works with the U.N. on such cases: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/17/if-black-americans-were-to-seek-asylum-they-could-qualify

2 - Accessed again on 23 Feb 2021, here is the statement from the U.N. after George Floyd was murdered. One particularly salient sentence in this statement is “Reparative intervention for historical and contemporary racial injustice is urgent, and required by international human rights law.” https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25927&LangID=E

3 - There’s lots of sources that talk about the historical reality of this scene, but I really love how it’s addressed in the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgound Commentary. This appears on page 128 in the section on Matthew by Michael Wilkins, and on page 32 in the section on John by Andreas J. Kostenberger.