There was a man and his wife who were driving along on the way to church. They were late, and the man was fussing at his wife for taking too long getting the kids ready. Surely she could be more organized. As you might expect, he was also driving too fast. Sure enough, a police car pulls them over. The police officer walks up to the window and asks for the the man’s license. As innocently as possible, he asks “What’s wrong officer?”
“You were speeding”
“I didn’t realize. I must have missed the sign.”
His wife chimes in “Don’t lie to the nice young man. I’ve been asking you to slow down for the last mile.”
He gives his wife a dirty look just as the officer adds “And your left blinker isn’t working.”
“Really, that must have just happened.”
“Just happened a month ago,” says his wife.
This lack of loyalty infuriates the minister who begins to unleash a blistering torrent of invectives in her direction.
The officer asks the wife, “Does he always speak to you this way?”
Just then she is struck with an idea, so with a glimmer in her eye she answers, “No, only when he’s been drinking.”
This man made a real donkey of himself -- I can’t use the other word in the pulpit. Usually we don’t think of donkeys in a positive light. They are stubborn, and hard to control. They are not known for their speed or their intelligence. They do have some positive traits. They are strong, and persistent, and hard working. If the ground is treacherous or the loads are heavy, you are better off with a donkey than a horse.
We all know the story of Palm Sunday. It is the beginning of Passover week and Jesus is coming into Jerusalem. After three years of ministry, his reputation is well known. He is the healer – the miracle worker – the teacher – the prophet. He is feared by the authorities, but loved by the common people. Those common people have come to believe that he might even be the promised Messiah.
There is a problem here. The popular conception of the Davidic Messiah was that he would be a great conqueror and political ruler. Among the common people who were making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover, that was a good thing. They were tired of Roman occupation and wanted someone who would lead them in a victorious revolt. They resented King Herod who had been imposed upon them. While he was a descendent of Abraham, he was not a descendent of David, the royal line. He wasn’t even a descendent of Jacob, the father of all Israel. It was said that this Jesus was a true descendent of the royal line. The people responded to Jesus in a way that indicated that they accepted him as Messiah. Laying palm fronds and cloaks in his path was an indication that this was a coronation parade. The shouts of “Hosanna” showed that he was accepted as Messiah – one chosen by God.
The Roman rulers would have reacted much differently. They would have seen Jesus as one of many would-be Messiahs who had attempted to lead revolts against Rome. They would have been watching for the first hint of violence. They would have been concerned about the possibility of riots in a city full of religious fervor because of the festival.
The Jewish leaders would have had similar fears. They were no friends of the Romans, but they had made their accommodation. They knew that any uprising was doomed to fail to achieve freedom. Instead, it would only cause more repression and cost hundreds of lives. They feared Jesus, not for what Jesus would do, but out of a concern for how the people would act and how the Romans would respond.
Jesus also understood. He knew that the people had no understanding of the nature of his mission. He also understood that he was heading to the cross.
Jesus does something odd, though it turns out that it was prophesized. Instead of entering town like a concurring hero, he entered town as a humble servant. Instead of coming into town driving a chariot or rider a charger, he came on the back of a donkey.
I want you to think today about that that donkey. First, I am certain that Warren would want me to point out that this was a donkey, not an elephant, but the choice wasn’t intended to be a political endorsement. This was a special donkey. This donkey was planned. This donkey was prepared. This donkey had a purpose.
I mentioned earlier that this donkey was prophesied. I couldn’t avoid talking about it, because it is in the text. The passage quoted here if from Zechariah around 520 BC. It talks about a future day when a new kind of king will come to Zion – a king who brings peace instead of war.
The problem is that many people today have great difficulty with the whole concept of prophecy. The issue has to do with the conflict between free will and predestination. If God, speaking through a prophet, says that something is going to happen, does that cause it to happen or were all the people involved making free decisions and God just knew how it would come out? A few hundred years ago, the emphasis was on determination. Isaac Newton had crossed the line from physics into philosophy. He was so impressed with the power of mathematics and the beauty of the physical laws that he asserted that if we could know the exact location, mass, and momentum of every object in the Universe and if we could somehow do the math, we would be able to predict with absolute certainty everything that would ever happen. Of course, human beings could never do that, but God, as conceived by the deists could. For them, God had set the universe in motion, rigged up all the rules just so, and now it was progressing exactly as it was intended.
Free will has reasserted itself in the last century. Not only does the notion of freewill conform to our own perceptions about individual choice, the philosophy behind physics has changed as well. Einstein showed the flaw in Newton’s thought. Heisenberg gave us his famous uncertain principle. We have a whole branch of mathematics based on chaos theory and strange attractors. The thought today says that Newton’s idea about knowing everything is not simply impossible because of the enormity of the task, it is impossible because it is impossible to determine with certainty both the location and velocity of any one subatomic particle. Everything in physics today is about probabilities. There are no certainties.
So if the future is unknowable, what is prophecy? Does God intervene to make prophetic statements true? If so, what just happened to freewill?
These questions have been discussed for hundreds of years, so I doubt that I can make a definitive statement that puts the issue to rest. I can tell you how I think about these things. Since Einstein, we have understood that time is just another dimension like height and length and depth. Time is anything but constant. For example, it has been proven that as speed increases, time slows down, although you have to be moving near the speed of light before there is a measurable effect. I think that God is somehow outside of time, just like God is outside of place. Most of us don’t conceive of God as being in a particular spot – instead we understand God is somehow in every place at once. In an analogous fashion, we shouldn’t think of God occupying any particular time. He is in all times at once. We experience ourselves moving through time and we choose all of our actions freely. God experiences all of time and knows the consequences of all our past and future acts.
What is really significant in this passage is not that God knew that there would be a donkey, but that God cared about this detail to set the stage so that it would be understood. We still have enough deist thinking in us that we often see God as distant and unconcerned about the details. We figure that He doesn’t have the time or the interest to “micromanage” our world. When we think that way, we are simply projecting our own limitations on God. We assume that God must not care about every individual because caring about 6 billion people is far beyond our capacity. Scripture teaches us differently. We are told that God not only cares about each one of us, He actually knows the number of hairs on our head. I know in my case, that number is getting easier to count, even considering the need to add in the hairs that seem to be popping up in unexpected places -- like my ears. God knows who you are and what you are like. He knows your strengths and weaknesses better than you know them yourself. And with this perfect knowledge comes a deep concern and compassion.
The donkey was prepared. First, it had been set aside. It was preserved as a holy gift to God. It was ready and waiting for when it would be needed.
I don’t think that most of us feel particularly prepared to be used by God. I have quoted an adage on other occasions – “God does not call the equipped, but equips the called.” This passage seems to question that. If we are like the donkey, the things that happened to us yesterday and the things that will happen to us today are preparing us for the task that God has in mind for us. The problem is that we don’t understand the challenges that we will be facing so we don’t understand what sort of preparation we need. We look at the enormity of the task and imagine all the myriad of possible situations that we could face and so we assume that we need to be much more prepared than we are. Even on those occasions when we do understand the task, we almost always underestimate our resilience. We forget that we are not on our own. If we are responding to God’s call and doing the work that God has put before us, we are not limited to our own inherent strength. We have God’s support and guidance – we have God’s sustaining hand helping us to move beyond who we were and to become the people that God intended us to be.
The donkey had a purpose. There was a reason for the donkey to be and a job for us to do.
What am I here? What is my purpose? Do I even have a purpose? These are profound questions.
Some deny that we have any purpose. I don’t read just Christian writers, but try to include a variety of perspectives. My favorite atheist thinker is the late Bertrand Russell. I think I like him because his background is in mathematics and he carries that discipline into his philosophy. You might recall a book that he wrote called “Why I am Not a Christian.” It isn’t for the feint of heart, but if you are ready to wrestle with what you believe and why, that book will help you come to grips with the issues. Bertrand Russell is an inherently tragic figure. It is not just that he died as a non-believer, but he was intellectually honest enough to recognize that life outside of faith was pointless, and yet he persisted in his unbelief. Here is a quote from him. “Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.” He followed the height of human reasoning and concluded that life means nothing. How sad.
Sigmund Freud reached a similar conclusion. Though his background was Jewish, Freud was an atheist. He considered faith, especially Christianity to be a delusion. Even so, he described it as a benign delusion that generally does more good than harm and helps people to cope with the difficulties they face in this world. He makes faith sound like a delusion that he wishes he could have.
Even people like Russell and Freud understand the importance at a very fundamental level of living a life with purpose. Something has to be the one central principle around which life is organized. Without faith, what is that principal?
I hate the movie “City Slickers.” How many of you have seen it? Billy Crystal, who plays the lead, is pretty funny. It is about 3 city guys who are stuck in a rut. Their lives have no meaning. They go off to a dude ranch to participate in a cattle drive as a way to get away in order to find themselves. The cattle boss, name Curley, is played by Jack Palance. Early in the movie, Curley tells Billy’s character the following. “I’ll tell you the secret to life. This one thing. Just this one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean [expletive deleted].” Billy asks what that one thing is and Curly says, “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
I was certain that the whole point of the movie was going to be that one thing that made life make sense. I waited and waited to find out what that one thing was. Even when Curly died, I was sure that the movie would answer Billy’s question.
Sure enough, at the end of the movie, Billy’s character turns to one of his friends and says “I know what he meant.” He goes on to relate his conversation with Curly word for word and he repeats, “I know what he meant.” When his friend asks what he meant, Billy repeats “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
The friend says “I’m gonna deck you.” I could agree more. How could they raise a question like that and never answer it? What a tease. I hate that movie.
Rick Warren has had a book that has been on the best seller list for a couple of years now. While it is a Christian Book, I’m not talking about a book that is a best seller among Christians. It is a best seller period. I’m sure that you have heard of it. It’s called “The Purpose Driven Life.” I read it a couple of years ago and have been rereading parts of it recently. Warren’s basic point is that life only makes sense when you have purpose and life can’t have purpose apart from God. I have seen the book on sale for as little a $7.00, but I’ll give you a summary for free.
Actually Rick Warren talks about five different purposes to life. It seems like the one thing might not be one thing, but they are all related to each other. In fact, they represent a single purpose that matures in every person.
Warren refers to the basic purpose of life as “worship”, but he isn’t talking about attending a church service. He means a broader sense – I would use the word “relationship.” Each one of us was created so that we could have a relationship with God. In fact, we have an inherent need to be in that kind of relationship. A continuing sense of relationship with God, a constant attitude of worship, is necessary to put everything else in our lives into perspective. It is the only way for us to get our priorities straight.
The second purpose is fellowship. Because we are created as relationship beings, because we are created in the image of God, the same needs that drive us toward a divine relationship also cause us to need a relationship with others. Still, the order is important. It is our relationship with God that prepares us and teaches us about healthy relationships. It is only in the context of our worship that our fellowship makes sense.
The third purpose is discipleship. This is recognition that relationships are never stagnant. Instead, healthy relationships imply growth and change. Our relationship with God and our fellowship with others implies that we will not stand still. Since our relationship with God is our central relationship, it only makes sense that our greatest need for growth is in the area of our spirituality. We need to read and to pray and to study.
The fourth purpose of life is ministry. As we grow in our understanding of God and others, we become increasingly aware of the importance of meeting the needs of others. God’s relationship with us is not self-centered and our relationships with others must not be either. Each of us has be created with unique abilities, gifts, passions, experiences, and personalities. That means that each of us is uniquely suited to particular areas of services. There are acts of service that you can perform more effectively than anyone else and part of your purpose depends on find places where you can make that unique sort of contribution. You will never be the person God created you to be until you are working to meet the needs of others.
Rick Warren’s final purpose in life is evangelism. Again, he is using the term in a broader sense than might first come to mind. When he says “evangelist” he is not talking about some guy who preaches on TV. He is talking about an inherent need for us to share our faith. If each one of us was created to be in relationship with God and we as individuals can not find fulfillment outside of that relationship, does that not imply that each person we meet would also be better off living in a divine relationship as well. If we care about people, we can’t do anything less than help them as they seek to find meaning in their lives. That doesn’t mean that we need to be obnoxious or pushy. In fact, the kind of evangelism that Rick Warren is talking about is an evangelism that is centered around the needs of others. We don’t do this for ourselves, though we should want to share our faith. We don’t do this for God, though God desires the relationship. We do it for them – for those on the outside. That sort of evangelism encourages and supports. Occasionally it asks hard questions, but only to help others to surface issues that hold them back from being happy and fulfilled. They make the choices. They dictate the timing. We support them and love them and encourage them to find what they need.
This Sunday is an important Sunday in the life of our congregation. We have set it aside for a special emphasis on making a decision to become a part of this congregation. This is a place where we seek to find purpose. This is a place where we strive to build an attitude of worship. This is a place where we grow in relationships with others. This is a place where we work to deepen our relationship with God. This is a place where we seek ways to serve. And this is a place where we freely and respectfully share our faith.
We are a congregation that is growing stronger with each passing week. We have a mission and a purpose. We invite you know to join with us. Just as that donkey carried Jesus into Jerusalem, we are committed to carrying the message of God’s grace into our community. If you share our purpose we invite you now to come forward and unite with us.
