Palm Sunday Sermon "Unintended Consequences"

Christ United Presbyterian Church
April 13, 2014     Palm Sunday

Luke 19:29-42

Sermon:       “Unintended Consequences”

I’m one of those people who had a college major that often makes people smile at you and say: “Really.  What are you going to do with that?”  I was a sociology major! 

The only thing that bugged me more than “What are you going to do with that?” was the opposite extreme:  “Oh, you’re going to be a social worker!”

Sociology is not a prep course for social work.  Sociology studies the interaction between groups of people and the organizations and institutions that are shaped by the people and that in turn reshape the people.  Religion is one of those institutions.

There’s a concept in sociology that was given life by the sociologist Robert Merton.  The concept is “unintended consequences.”  These can be positive consequences, negative consequences, or absolutely perverse consequences.  Merton was especially interested in consequences that derived from “conduct,” that is actions that were the result of choices not just happenstance.

Merton said that there were 5 possible causes for “unintended consequences”:

Ignorance; 

Error; 

Immediate interest;

Self-defeating prophecy; 

Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values.)

If I haven’t put you to sleep yet, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with Palm Sunday.  Unintended consequences can sometimes be seen most clearly in juxtaposition.  In our Gospel lesson in a matter of 4 verses we read: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”  and “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.’”  The people praise him and proclaim that he is king, and he goes off and cries because they haven’t got a clue.

I could make a strong argument that the entire history of the relationship between the Lord and humanity is a story of unintended consequences.  It’s the story of humanity’s ignorance, error, perceived self-interest, self-defeating prophecies, and most of all the maintenance of a set self-serving values through which we chose – perhaps still choose – to blind ourselves to God’s love for us because we can’t clearly see how God’s love will lead us where we really want to go.

And none of it is the result of happenstance.  It’s all the result of choices we have made – and continue to make.

Exodus 20:20 may be one of those moments that has had disastrous unintended consequences.  It follows the Ten Commandments:  “Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.’”

God didn’t give Moses the Ten Commandments so that out of fear we might be motivated not to sin.  God gave the Moses the Ten Commandments so that people would live together in peace and harmony and know that their God was with them always.  Is it really so hard to understand? 

Worship God and only God.  Worship the God who created all that exists and who has brought you into freedom and promises to be with you always.  Worship only God.  Don’t think that you can construct some other god to serve your own purposes.  Worship only God and serve God’s purposes for you, and you will have a good life.  Don’t abuse God’s name for your own purposes and don’t misrepresent God to others.  And remember to keep just one day as a sacred day every week to remember the God who created the universe, who created you and who wants you to take a day on which you do nothing else but rest and reflect on God’s power and love.  That’s how you should worship God

Now here’s how to live in peace with one another.  Honor your parents.  Don’t kill one another.  Don’t be led astray from your wife or husband and don’t ever undermine someone else’s family.  Don’t steal from one another.  Don’t lie about one another.  Be content with everything that you have, everything that I have given you.  If someone else appears to have more than you, it doesn’t mean that I have favored them more than you.  If someone else has less than you, it doesn’t mean that I have favored you more than them.  I have loved you all equally, so don’t be jealous of anything that someone else may have.  And remember, I love all of you, and for you to hate or mistreat anyone that I love is for you to demean my love.

This is how you should worship me, and this is how you should live with one another.  This is all that you need.

But across centuries, across millennia, God’s people took God’s words and perversely decided that there was something else there. They took the words of God’s love and turned them into words of judgment to be used against one another.  They took the words of God’s love meant to shape our hearts and hardened our hearts instead.  We take God’s very direct words and all-embracing love and through the actions of our free wills arrive at unintended consequences.  We arrive at a place in which we use God’s words of love to measure each other’s performance to make ourselves feel good.  We arrive at something that makes us God’s special and spoiled people rather than God’s chosen people, something that sets us apart for privilege rather than for service to our God.

On that day as he approached Jerusalem for his final week, Jesus was mistakenly hailed by the crowds as the king they longed for rather than the king who would restore the world that God intended for them when God gave Moses the commandments. They sought a restoration of the worldly privileges that once had abounded, and Jesus sought to bring them back to service and humility, to once again become the messengers of God’s desire for all of humanity to live lives of justice and righteousness, mercy and charity, all the while worshipping only the one God who had created us all.

And so for the second time in two weeks – the only times in all the Gospel stories – we read that Jesus wept.  He wept because God’s own chosen people still didn’t see; still didn’t get it.  They had made their choices and perversely came down the road of unintended consequences to a place that God had never intended for them.  They were at a place of their own choosing, and they didn’t see the truth of God in the man who stood there in front of them.

God’s intention for us has always been that we worship with joy and gratitude the one God who created and abides with us all. God’s intention for us is that we live with one another in loving peace, setting judgments aside, and secure only in the knowledge that God will be with us as we seek to carry out God’s intentions for us.   God’s intention for us is that we recognize that to abuse the creation that he loves – people, places, environments, resources – is to deny the significance of God’s love.

Two thousand years after Jesus wept over the people, we are still faced with the same choice, the same alternative consequences.  In the week ahead we celebrate that God loved us so much that Jesus died – God subjected himself to human agony – so that we could see how serious God is about the consequences he intends for us.  In the week ahead we celebrate that God showed us that bodily suffering and even death is not enough to keep us from living out the consequences that God has always wanted for us. 

^3:16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.¹⁷“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  ….  ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

“The people loved darkness….”  The people chose darkness.  The people choose darkness.

It’s our choice.  God intended us for life together in God’s own image.  The consequences of the life God wants for us is so “…everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  The choice remains ours’ to make.  Do we choose the life God intended for us, serving God and loving one another, living with the joyful consequences that God has provided, or do we choose the darkness and lives that God never intended for us? 

In 2 Corinthians 3 Paul tells us that whenever the words of Moses are read we respond as if there were a veil over our eyes.  We still don’t clearly understand.  But when we turn to Christ, the veil is lifted “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…. [2 Corinthians 3:18]”

It’s our choice.

Amen.