March 20, 2016
Luke 19:29-40
“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.” These are the Palm Sunday words from Luke. They sound familiar, but they are slightly different than the words you will find in the other three gospels. They all say, “Blessed is the ONE who comes in the name of the Lord.” Honestly, it would have helped my case a bit if Luke had kept to everybody else’s language. What I want to know is: what’s to keep that crowd from coming in the name of the Lord as well? What’s to keep us from coming in the name of the Lord?
Maybe Luke helps us avoid that question by specifying “king.” After all, we all can’t be kings. Or, on the other hand, maybe he helps us rethink what it means to be a king, what it means to lead.
I found myself on a Phi Theta Kappa website the other day, which is an honors society dedicated to encouraging scholars and building servant leaders. I like the mission, but honestly, I had never heard of them before. I ended up on the website because I googled “culture of competition.”
Most of the sites I saw focused on free markets, finance, commerce, productivity in the workplace, etc. Competition was the key ingredient for success in all these arenas, which I could discern after approximately five minutes of clicking around. “Competition is what makes us great,” one site said.
I disagree with that.
I think it has its place. The Lending Tree commercials that I hear on the radio all the time come to mind. “When banks compete, you win!” And, I suppose they are right. The competition brings down the cost of loans. A bit of competition in the workplace can be a good thing too. Maybe it pushes us to be effective, protects us from complacency. As the little league season gets ready to start, it occurs to me that competition can be good there too. It teaches us how to win and how to lose. It teaches us that both are okay.
But, if I were to answer my own question – what’s to keep us from coming in the name of the Lord? – one of the answers that comes quickly to mind is competition. Though the Phi Theta Kappa people aren’t against competition, they present a nuanced and balance view. They quote Desmond Tutu’s 2011 address at the World Economic Forum saying, “We worship at the temple of cutthroat competition. We have become quite obsessional about competition. In our culture we set high score by success. The most horrible thing is to fail. The pressure is so great.” The author continues, “For Archbishop Tutu, something is off when stomach ulcers become status symbols related to how hard we work. We often ask, ‘Is it profitable?’ he suggested, when we should be asking, ‘Is it right?’”[1]
It is not good for us when our assumption is that the answer to those two questions is necessarily the same.
My primary concern with a culture of competition has to do with its effect on how we see ourselves and how we see others. I don’t think we’ll come in the name of the Lord if competition is our primary driver. I think, rather, we’ll come in the name of ourselves. We’ll come in the name of our own interests above and regardless of the interests of others. We’ll see others ultimately as means to our ends or as obstacles to them. And, we’ll see ourselves – our worth as people – in terms of achievement, and in comparison to others. To be your best self is not to be better than everyone else, yet that is what it comes to so often in a culture of competition, and it turns us into people who scrape and scrap to defend ourselves, to justify ourselves, to insist upon having value in this world.
I’m convinced that this is where road rage comes from. We can’t tolerate the implication of worthlessness, of invisibility. When someone mindlessly cuts us off it’s an assault to our being; it is an indifference to our existence. “You can’t do that to me; I matter!”
My 6th grade girlfriend, Rachel, Facebooked me the other day. She shared an article that she thought her other spiritually inclined friends and I might consider and comment on. The theme was “spiritual bypassing,” which is a term that most Christians will never hear, though perhaps the “spiritual but not religious” folks will more readily know. The point, if I grasped it all, was that even our spiritual practices can get in the way. Even our religions, whatever they be, can falsely prop us up and cause us to focus on the self as both the agent and the goal of faith. “Let us convince ourselves that we are at peace,” we might say. “Let us hold true to the rules so that we might say that we are good.” “Let us know the right things, orthodoxy, right from wrong, so that we can feel correct.” Meanwhile, there’s other stuff happening within us – uncertainties, uncharitable thoughts and acts, fears and falsehoods and whatever else – that to face, we fear, might crush us. Oddly, we find ourselves either in competition with ourselves or with God. The fight to justify ourselves is equally pervasive and pernicious. At the same time, we’re so accustomed to a culture of competing for worth that we don’t even know it much of the time.
I’m reminded of a poem by a 14th century Persian Mystic named Hafiz. The punch line comes first, and it’s proof that the battle we may find ourselves in isn’t a new one. He writes,
You don’t have to act crazy anymore –
We all know you were good at that.
Now retire, my dear,
From all that hard work you do
Of bringing pain to your sweet eyes and heart.
Look in a clear mountain mirror –
See the Beaugiful Ancient Warrior
And the Divine elements
You always carry inside
That infused this Universe with sacred life
So long ago
And join you Eternally
With all Existence – with God!
I think that’s what this Palm Sunday – this triumphal entrance into Jersualem – is all about. It is about a different way coming into town, coming into the spiritual center of things, coming into our hearts and minds. We don’t have to act crazy anymore. We can stop the frantic pursuit of self-satisfaction, self-justification, and self-defence.
What we have is a God who comes, a God who enters our lives regardless of our worth, our achievement, our standing in comparison with others. We have a God who comes to us out of love and nothing else. We have a God who comes to free us from our endless striving, a God who is poured out for us and within us for no warranted reason at all.
What this means to me is that we can stop trying so hard for what we cannot achieve, and we can start responding instead to what has been graciously given. We can receive the love that is so freely given, and we can freely give it too. We too can come in the name of the Lord, and not worry so much about our own names. When we do, anyway, we find ourselves with a new name, one that bears his and knows a peace that passes understanding.
[1] http://connorsstate.edu/ptk/files/2011/09/2012_honors_program_guide1.pdf