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Stuck in the Stuckey's

Stuck in the Stuckey’s

April 9, 2006 [Palm Sunday]

Text: Mark 11:1-11  

      Know who he is?

      This is probably one of the most famous faces in Hollywood history.

      In the 1990 movie Home Alone, the 8 year old boy wakes up to find himself alone. His family has accidentally left him behind as they travel to Europe over the holidays.

      At first he’s elated. He can eat whatever he wants, watch whatever he wants, and stay up as late as he wants.

      But then he starts feeling bad. He wonders what happened to his family. He feels guilty that he might have done something to make them disappear. He also wonders if he is so bad that they didn’t love him any more.

      By the end, of course, everything works out: the bad guys are defeated, the family is reunited, and the kid grows up.

      It’s a great feel-good movie, especially worth watching around Christmas time. I would NOT recommend watching, though, Home Alone 2—where the kid is so obnoxious I was rooting for the bad guys. Nor Home Alone 3—where he battles North Korean terrorists. Nor Home Alone 4—which was so bad one reviewer said, “To see what I think about this movie, look up ‘terrible’ in the thesaurus!”

      No, let’s just remember the little boy in the first movie.

      And let’s just sympathize with him a little bit. One of the deepest fears of a child is to be left behind—the parent is gone, and the child is alone, on their own, without protection.

      Now, this was just a movie. But think of what a child feels when the child is really abandoned.

      Know who he is?

      He’s Philip Gulley, a nationally recognized writer and pastor.

      He was once left behind, and he describes that experience this way:

My family drove off and forgot me once…We were on vacation--5 kids, Mom, and Dad--and stopped to eat at a Stuckey's. I was in the bathroom when they climbed back in the car and headed out. They went 20 miles before discovering they were short a kid. Took a quick vote and decided to come back for me. It was almost a tie, but at the last minute Mom changed her mind.

[ Front Porch Tales, pp. 58-9]

      Get that picture in your mind’s eye.

      Leave the bathroom at a Stuckey’s, and you look for a brother, sister, mom, dad. You don’t see them. Your heart starts beating faster. You look outside, for the station wagon. It’s gone. Your heart now skips a beat. You panic. You feel hot tears welling up in your eyes. You look around, and all you see are strangers—in a strange store—by a strange highway—near a strange place.

      You look around through those blurry eyes, and you ask one thing:

      WHY? [on slide, superimposed over pics?]

      WHY have I been abandoned?

      Chasing that question is a tsunami of feelings.

      Fear.

      Guilt.

      Anger.

      Betrayal.

      Hurt.

      Those feelings just keep tumbling over and over in your heart. You can’t shake them. There’s no feel-good solution. You’re “stuck in the Stuckey’s” and there’s no way out.

      I wonder if Jesus knew what it was like to be “stuck in the Stuckey’s”?

      He’s riding into Jerusalem today, surrounded by people. People are oohing and aahing over him. He feels their love and admiration.

      But slowly, and inevitably, they all fall away. On Thursday night of this week, he’ll take his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane. He’ll pray for strength to face the cross. And you hear his heart break when he asks Peter, James, and John to pray with him—but they fall asleep.

      He’s abandoned that night. And the next day he will die on the cross, between two criminal-strangers. As he dies, he will wonder why his Father drove off and left him.

      Gulley says that “the saddest line in the Bible is when Christ asks God why he forsook him.”

      The cross is Jesus, standing on the curb at Stuckey’s, seeing his father drive away, not looking back.

      The cross is Jesus, looking at the taillights disappearing, calling out, “Why? WHY???”

      [God’s feeling]

      But the father keeps on driving away, driving away…

      He hasn’t forgotten his son.

      He’s leaving his son there, intentionally.

      And you can only imagine tears streaming down his face, his throat gagging. All His instincts scream at Him to go back—turn the car around—pick up the son, hug him, say He’s sorry.

      But the car just keeps accelerating down the highway.

      Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian pastor, tells of a farmer who was taking a calf to the slaughterhouse. The calf was frightened. So, he got someone else to drive the truck while he stayed in back with the animal. “By the time they got where they were going he was in tears—the calf had licked his arm the whole way.” [Home by Another Way, p. 86]

      The farmer couldn’t take it, as that calf was led away, to go to his death.

      And the Father can’t take it…but does. The car just keeps accelerating down the highway. And through tears the Father glances in the rear-view mirror. He sees the Son just standing there alone. He blinks the tears away, and sees his Son dying there alone, with the question, “Why????” on his lips.

      Why? Why did this heart-breaking scene take place?

      Well, fact is, we’re all stuck in Stuckey’s.

      The difference is, most of the time we don’t want to be found. We don’t want to go back to the car.

      We want to be left alone. We want God to ride off and forget us, and let us have the run of the store.

      Look at all the stuff that can be ours.

      I especially like the pecan logs. Hmmm. Sweet. It’s easy to lose yourself in here.

      Look at all the stuff that can be ours…[possessions…relationships… hobbies… careers…]. All good. All worthy. All sweet. And we can lose ourselves in here. You can make all those things and all those people little gods. You can become possessive. And greedy. And jealous. And uptight. And neurotic. And self-centered.

      Funny thing—these sweet things, if that’s all you eat in your life, will ultimately leave you empty. Maybe a stomach ache will tip you off: you need to change your diet.

      If the stuff you find in Stuckey’s is all you base your life on, then you’ll live and die disappointed. Everything ends up dust or rust, remember? Some children are born with holes in their hearts. But each of us is born with a hole in the soul, a hole that can’t be filled by any of these things we stuff into it. There’s an emptiness that disappears only when God appears.

      WHY does God leave the Son at Stuckey’s?

      WHY does the Son stay there, abandoned, instead of running after the van?

      BECAUSE the Father wants us back. The whole scene, that begins today with Palm Sunday, is painted for you. It shows just how far God goes to reach out to you, to get your attention, to fill that hole in your soul.

      Look at the scene unfolding this week. You’ll hear God saying THREE THINGS to you. Each of those things is an invitation to come closer to Him, to restore the relationship, to give you life.

      The first thing God says this week:

      DON’T BE AFRAID!

      There comes a time when we have to realize that there are consequences for staying in Stuckey’s when it’s time to leave.

      WE deserve the cross. We have abandoned God by turning from Him. He’s waited for us to get in the car with him, but we’ve refused. We’ve preferred pecan logs. We tell him to go on without us.

      We ought to pay for being such rotten kids.

      But God looks past our rottenness.

      “Enough!” God says. “Enough of the oughts. Enough of the “eye for an eye” type of thinking. Enough of what you ‘deserve.’ I want you back. My Son has paid the price for you. My Son has taken your punishment. There is no willow switch for you. There’s no woodshed. There is only a Father who wants and waits for you to get back in the car. Don’t fear me. Come back to me.”

      You who enter Holy Week feeling guilty: DON’T BE AFRAID, says the Father.

      As the Holy Week scene unfolds, you’ll hear something else:

      I KNOW WHAT YOU FEEL!

      God feels the very raw feelings of human existence. When the Son cries out from the cross—“My God, why have you forsaken me?”—he cries out for all of us. That’s what we say, right? You’ve said it in the hospital hall and funeral chapel; you’ve said it in the living room and class room; you’ve said it with people you thought were your friends, and you’ve said it with people you know were your enemies.

      And now the Son of God says it. Now God feels exactly what we feel. Now there is no separation between a just, holy God—unstained by the messiness of human life. There is, rather, a blood-smeared God—a Son crying out, confused, by what’s happened.

      And now NOTHING can separate us from God.

      Will isolation or loneliness? Pain or despair or depression? Suffering or grief? Abandonment or betrayal?

      Will any of these things separate us from God?

      NO!

      For our Creator has felt all these things personally.

      God feels the pain of losing a child. God feels the pain of being given up, of feeling abandoned.

      You who enter Holy Week feeling crushed: I KNOW WHAT YOU FEEL, says the Son.

      And we hear God saying one other thing:

      I WILL RETURN!

      And what a return it is. Talk about the “return of the King”!

      Just as our God is a feeling God, so is our God a powerful God.

      The God Who laced the tiny atom with awesome power…The God Who flung galaxies and nebulae across the infinite universe: That God focused all that power into transforming a dark Friday afternoon into a bright Sunday morning.

      The theologian Stanley Hauerwas put it best:

We killed him who would work our redemption. That is the worst thing that humankind could possibly do. But the good news is that the God we crucified refused to hold this terrible sin against us. Raising Jesus from the grave, God rejects our rejection. Instead, God offers us the opportunity to become part of a new kingdom--of a new time…God has made it possible for us to freely respond to this love, [and] we become new creatures. [Homiletics, 9/19/99]

      That’s where this drama will ultimately lead: it leads to us having the opportunity to become “new creatures.”

      You who enter Holy Week wanting new life, wanting to live in a new way, beyond suffering, fear, and death: I WILL RETURN, says your Creator.

[back down front]

[conclusion]

      Such are the things we will hear this Holy Week.

      But the week’s just begun.

      It begins today.

      Palm Sunday.

      We wave palms with the crowd. [wave] We think, like them, that Jesus will provide a sugary fix. He’s the key to the candy store. He’ll let us have all the pecan logs we want.

      Like the crowd, we don’t know the full impact of what’s going to happen in less than a week. If we did, we’d place the palm branches under the cross. [do it]

      The thunder…the lightning…the earthquake on Good Friday reflects the breaking of God’s heart as He gives up the Son for us…

      But then, on Easter morning, we can pick up the palms again. Because God will do something beyond belief, beyond understanding. Our loneliness will be crushed. Our death will die. Our sin will be forgiven. New life, with our Father, awaits. Our hearts will beat faster. Our faces will smile again.

      As Phillip Gulley said, in concluding his story:

The empty tomb tells us [Jesus] was remembered. And so are we all, which is what I'm going to tell my son, just as soon as I remember where I left him… 
 

Mark 11:1-11

When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples 2 and said to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it.  3 If anyone says to you, 'Why are you doing this?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.'"  4 They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, 5 some of the bystanders said to them, "What are you doing, untying the colt?" 6 They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. 7 Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. 9 Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,

"Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

10 Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

11 Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

NRSV