Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Palm/Passion Sunday, April 13, 2003, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Psalm 31:9-16; Mark 14:26-15:39

And the soldiers began saluting him, "Hail, King of the Jews!"

                      -Mark 15:18

     I don't know if you recognize the name of a Southern Baptist fellow from Georgia, Clarence Jordan. It's pronounced JER-dan even though it's spelled with an O, for reasons having to do with Georgia. Don't ask me why, I'm from New Jersey and we have our own linguistic issues.

     Clarence died in 1969, but he was a major player in American religion for a while there. He wrote The Cotton Patch Gospels, which is the Gospel translated into colloquial Southern American English. It was funny, but it also had an edge to it, it was a call to radical discipleship, and a challenge to the way most Christians lived then and live now.

     In 1942 God told Clarence to start living the way Jesus wanted him to, so he and his wife and another couple moved to a farm in Americus, Georgia, and called it Koinonia, which is the Greek New Testament word for "communion." or "community." They started trying to do something about rural southern poverty. They practiced racial equality and integration in the Deep South in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. They were pacifists in the middle of the Second World War. They lived communally when the Cold War against Communism was gearing up, and they chose to live a very simple life during history's greatest expansion of consumer materialism. They got firebombed, shot at, vandalized, cross-burned, persecuted, prosecuted, threatened, excommunicated, boycotted and nearly driven out of Georgia.

     One of the things they needed a lot of was legal help, so Clarence went to his brother Robert, who was a lawyer, and asked him to represent Koinonia Farm. Robert said, "Clarence, you know I can't do that. You know I'm going into politics. If I represented you, I'd lose everything. It's different for you."

     Clarence said, "Why's it different for me? You and I were baptized and joined the church on the same Sunday when we were boys." (These guys are Baptists. They weren't babies when they got baptized.) "The preacher asked us both the same question, 'Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?' I said, 'Yes.' What did you say, Robert?"

     Robert said, "Clarence, I follow Jesus up to a point." Clarence said, "Would that point by any chance be the cross?" And Robert said, "That's right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I am not going to get crucified."

     Robert later got elected a State Senator, and eventually he became a Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Georgia. Clarence just went on being Clarence Jordan.

     I have to tell you, my sympathies are with brother Robert. I don't want to get crucified. And Clarence - even if he did have a sense of humor, he must have been a royal pain to have for a brother. He makes me think of that old saying: "A martyr is someone who has to live with a saint."

     People who genuinely, seriously undertake to follow Jesus and live by the Gospel are so few and far between that they stick out like sore thumbs, they get on everybody's nerves, and they bring awful consequences down on themselves. That's what brother Robert was saying, and he was absolutely right.

     Every year the Passion story reveals some new thing to me that I never noticed before. This year that new revelation is in the mocking of Jesus - the insults that compounded the injury. Listen to the verbs: They mocked him, they taunted him, they flogged him, they blindfolded him, they struck him, they spat on him, they derided him, they stripped him naked, they dressed him up in royal purple and crowned him with thorns - a little mock coronation -, they knelt down before him, they saluted him, and above all, over and over, they called him "the King of the Jews." They made a huge joke of that. And all this before they actually crucified. him.

     Mockery accomplishes two things: One, it adds to the punishment of the person identified as the wrongdoer; and two, it makes the identified wrongdoer less of a threat. Anytime we can make fun of something or somebody that frightens us, it takes away some of their power over us.

     The point wasn't just to get rid of a troublemaker. It was just as much to discredit and neutralize what he stood for, because if what he stood for is honorable and righteous and good and the God's own truth, and worthy of our loyalty, then we're all candidates for crucifixion. That is every Christian's dilemma, not just Clarence's and Robert's, and God knows it is every preacher's dilemma.

     I want you to understand that just because I stand up here and preach Christ crucified, that doesn't mean the Cross is my idea. It goes against my grain just as much as it goes against anyone else's grain to forgive my enemies and love them and pray for them. I actually feel contempt and loathing for my enemies, and I can demonize and blame and dehumanize and skewer them just as skillfully and enthusiastically as anybody in this room, and don't make me prove it. I'm not willing to put my own life on the line and say, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

     It's not my idea to bear witness to a way of life that the world at large has never tried - a way of life that gets laughed off the stage in any real situation of conflict and evil. The Cross bugs me every time I confront the realities of the human race - greed, poverty, tyranny, exclusion, violence, war, abuse of power, disregard for human life, hypocrisy, self-righteousness - you name it, the Cross bugs me about it. If I had my druthers, I'd worship a god who smites evildoers on demand. I have a hit list all ready. How did I ever wind up being hired and paid to preach the Cross?

     We don't choose the Gospel. It chooses us. How else do you explain the fact that it's still around two thousand years after Christ died on the Cross, still bugging us, still bothering us, still making demands on us? Anybody who hears the Gospel and jumps happily on its bandwagon saying, "Wow! That's for me!" is either deranged or the victim of a serious misunderstanding.

     As Christ was mocked, so all of his followers are and will be mocked, no matter how lukewarm and ambivalent followers they may be. It's part of the deal. They are derided as sentimental, naive, delusional, terminally idealistic, and sometimes even as liberal! As if political ideology had anything to do with it! As if Christians had no idea what it costs to follow Christ and no appreciation of the reality of evil in the world! As if Christ himself had had no idea what he was getting himself and us into! But he did, and God help us, whether we admit it or not, so do we.

     Amen