Palm Sunday – Jesus Christ & Jimmy Wilson
Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on why Jesus is never good enough for us. Check out the choir following the sermon.
He wasn’t like the rest of the kids at Lincoln elementary. He was bigger than the other kids in the 5th grade. He was about five and a half feet tall and was rather heavy, which was very unusual back in the 60s. His name was Jimmy Wilson. And he spent two years in the 5th grade. He was held back because he was slow – that’s what everyone said back in the day. “Jimmy Wilson was slow.”
He had a pleasant face, though it was unusually round. He had a sweet smile, but he had fear in his eyes and for good reason, because since he was slow he was an easy victim for jokes of the simplest kind.
So if you said to him, “Jimmy, your mother’s calling you.” He’d go home and he would do it again and again and again. Boys found out that even though he was large he would not hit back even if he were hit. And so if someone was in the mood to hit someone, well then Jimmy was the target.
For some reason Jimmy and I hung out a lot on the school playground. We sat beside each other on the school bus and if I’m being honest with myself it wasn’t always for the most altruistic reasons. I enjoyed his company partly because he would do what I told him to do. If I said that we were going to play Cowboys and Indians he always let me be the Indian. Or if we were going to play cops and robbers he’d let me be the cop, though he didn’t make a very good bad guy because he was way too sweet and it’s hard to arrest someone who waits for you to catch him and then smiles at you as you apply the plastic hand cuffs.
We hung out for my remaining two years in grade school and the more I hung out with him the more I enjoyed his company because he wasn’t competitive like my other friends. When you were with him he simply enjoyed your company. He was a sweet person, had a sweet disposition and I missed him when his family moved out of town. And while I hardly think of him he still pops into my head from time to time.
I don’t know why he popped into my head as I read the story about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, but something about Jesus riding in on a donkey, a docile animal at best, a symbol of peace made me think of Jimmy Wilson.
And the crowd that stood waving palm branches and shouting Hosanna by weeks end would be spitting and punching Jesus just like they did to Jimmy Wilson because they could.
But it wouldn’t be until I worked in Flemington that I came to see what this all meant. I had just dropped my car off for service and was waiting for the bus when I noticed a group of mentally challenged people approaching me. I could tell they were mentally challenged because of how they walked. It wasn’t stiff and straight the way we tend to walk.
And I remember feeling a bit uneasy as they approached me at the bus stop. And I’m sure it had to do with the fact that when we see people who are challenged in this way we tend to feel pity or fear, which in turn makes us feels guilty, which in turns makes us feel uncomfortable. Mind you Jimmy Wilson didn’t do anything to warrant being picked on. It was simply because he was different than us and that made some uncomfortable with him because it made them uncomfortable with themselves.
And when some one is different from us we tend to think and imagine all kinds of things, especially negative things about them and then we tell ourselves that this is true, even if we have no experience to validate our negative thoughts.
We had to learn that. We were taught that. Think of all the ways we’ve done this: Samaritan against Judean, Jew against Gentile, men verses women? When did this happen? When did we start to notice the distinctions and hold on to them as if they mattered? Because they never have mattered to God.
So I found myself boarding that bus with all of these mentally challenged people feeling a bit ashamed for being uncomfortable and awkward in their presence. They could have cared less. They didn’t even notice me.
Like me they were adults, but unlike me they were having fun, the way children have fun when they’re together. One young man was reaching around the back of the young lady standing next to him and then he’d ever so carefully reach up and pull on her pig tail and then drop his hand and look straight ahead as if it hadn’t been him. She would swat his hand and say stop it, but they were all having fun on this bus.
And then something quite remarkable happened. I was a kid again for a brief moment on the back of a school bus with Jimmy Wilson bumping along toward Lincoln elementary school in Jacksonville, Illinois.
And for a brief moment I forgot about the distinctions and vividly remembered how much fun I had with Jimmy Wilson and my buddies. What sweet relief it was to forget about the distinctions, if even for a moment. I’d like to think that’s what Jesus felt when he came into Jerusalem, that sweet relief, if only for a moment when everyone was like a kid again and all that seeks to separate us was made meaningless.
How sad for us as adults that it doesn’t seem to last. At one time in our lives when we were young, it seemed as if it would never end. We celebrated being together by having fun. But in the end we crucify people like Jesus and Jimmy because they have no real value to us because they don’t fit our expectations and that scares us.
There must be something wrong with Jesus. How could everyone else around me be wrong? It’s got to be this odd ball that’s responsible for my disappointment and my disillusionment and my anger. Yeah he knew what he was doing. So let’s show him. Let’s kill him. I mean if we only get to ask for clemency for one person, let’s ask for it for Barabbas. After all he’s just like us. He hates Rome and least he tried to do something for the cause. So give us Barabbas and crucify the fake!
When all of the profound words have been said over holy week what’s it all about? Am I to identify with the crowd on Palm Sunday who one moment are cheering the arrival of Jesus as the long liberator come to set me free from what ever it is I want to be set free from only to be crying for his death when he fails to live up to my expectation?
During Holy Week this is made very clear. None of us can come before God and say, I would have done differently than those who cheered him one moment only to shout crucify him the next. We may not have driven the nails into him but we abandon God the moment the going gets tough.
We put politics, ideology, economic self interest before God all the time. I never hear Christians ask what would Jesus do? No because that would mean we have to change. It’s a good thing God is willing to change because if we were to get what we deserve none of us whould be standing here today, because God’s answer to our sinfulness is one of forgiveness rather than judgment. Amen
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