Jesus' Secret
Ancient Testimony ~ Matthew 21: 1-11
March 16, 2008
Palm Sunday
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

I had planned a long time ago to talk about Jesus’ secret today.  I had it down to one sentence: Jesus’ secret was his ability to govern himself.  Authority is always the ability to control ourselves, not to control others―and Jesus’ authority gave him the leadership necessary to change the world.  By leadership I mean the “art of getting others to want to do something you believe should be done.”¹  Jesus, an ordinary carpenter without a MBA, put himself in charge of himself―and thus was able to transform others.  In this nugget for Palm Sunday, I had no idea that I would get so much help from Albany. 

If self-governance is Jesus’ secret, what do we do with a governor who can’t govern himself?  There is a way in which Eliot Spitzer’s personal tragedy is comic.  It is so absurd that it is comic.  Some of my best friends keep laughing about it.  I have become a humorless toad―and every time these people laugh, I turn into an angry, schoolmarm-ish nun: “There is nothing funny about a woman being humiliated in public by a man, not to mention what just happened to the sex lives of three teenage girls.”  I hope you can hear the sound of my finger wagging.  When I start on this rant, I am not in control of myself.  I join the governor in missing the goal of self-governance.  I spin a web of fury.  I sound very Capital “R” Right about everything.  I am able, in this cage of righteousness, to avoid looking at the real Jerusalem of this situation, the real absurdity of American sex, for men and women, straight and not (or gay and not, depending on how right you want to be yourself).  My web protects me from suffering.  It also shields me from the art of self-control.  I really don’t want to wag my finger.  Nor do I want to be sitting at my desk and hear absurdity interrupt the regular programming.  I join Spitzer in a trap; he has his, I have mine.  Mine is anger, especially when girls and women are hurt.  His is pride, especially that of the Alpha Male, the “I am above ordinary justice” trap.  I really can’t stare for too long at the Jerusalem of broken sexuality or powerful arrogance, of men who can’t take the heat so find stupid ways out of their responsibility, of leaders who can’t lead and people who, for an increasing number of good reasons, don’t trust leaders.  Again, I go on.  Pretty much everything that could be said about Spitzer has been said.  I just want to add my one metaphor: he reminds me ever so much of my son, handing me a pair of jeans that he said has to be washed by the evening.  Could I manage? Yes, said I, the universal female, who cleans up all messes men make: Mars, mess; Venus, detergent.  Are we having fun yet?  Anyway, my personal sense of the governor who can’t govern is that he knew he had made a mess―of political relationships, driver’s licenses, and more―so he figured out how to get caught.  Of course, the data suggests that he was hiding a used condom in his pocket for years.  When we reach for answers to absurdity, they are often contradictory.  Absurdity is defined by the way it doesn’t proffer explanations.

Permit me to return to Jesus’ secret. We may untangle from our hand-knit web of self-protection by following his lead. 

It is just too early for Easter, not to mention Palm Sunday.  I am not ready.  The earth is still cold.  The sky is still dark.  The song of the dove is definitely not being heard in the land.  Instead, we hear the sound of cranes crashing, back-to-back Saturday funerals for members of our congregation, and rioting Buddhist monks (you don’t hear that clause much) having their Tibetan bodies crushed to the ground.  Easter is as far away as Tiananmen Square, as distant as self-governance, for many of us.

No doubt the disciples felt the same way.  I had never noticed before―after all these years of waving palms―that Jesus makes an absurd request of his disciples.  He doesn’t ask them to just steal one car (a donkey, after all, is a car) but actually insists that they get two cars.  “Go get me a donkey and the colt that is tied to it.”  They surely must have said, “How about tomorrow?”  Another part of Jesus’ secret was that he wasn’t a fan of delay.

Our un-readiness for early Easters brings to mind nothing less than King’s famous brief sentence.  “Tomorrow,” he said, “is today.”  The genius of King was this challenge to un-readiness.  Everybody is always saying, “Tomorrow.”  The people need their freedom today.  So do we―but unready, we don’t pick up our palms and get on our donkey.  Many have articulated the tension of Palm Sunday here: we refuse to get off our ass and onto our donkey.  We spiritually straddle, leaving the palms on the ground.

When I say that Jesus’ secret to success is his self-governance, I am saying that he knew what he wanted and where he was going.  He had a personal mission and a vision statement that he had taken off the wall of his office and planted in his heart.  Some of you know that I am taking a course on leadership at the New School.  No jokes, I haven’t graduated yet!  That’s where I got that definition of leadership as the “art of getting others to want to do something you believe should be done.”  Anyway, the Dean, Mark Lipton, taught the class on Thursday.  He started making fun of organizations that had vision statements―and then told us that the research on some had changed his mind.  He had a few good jokes about how hard it is for a professor to change his mind and even put up a few power points of bad jokes about vision statements.  Then he showed that companies and not-for-profits who knew what they were doing were far more successful than those who did not.  His mind was changed by fairly consistent data that clarity is important.  Clarity is obviously the prelude to self-governance or corporate governance. You can’t govern a self who doesn’t know itself.

I fear most of us live in the land of fuzz.  We might book a car or a donkey if we had somewhere to go, if we had a picture of a future that was so compelling that we could not not go there.  Jesus headed to the heart of Jerusalem.  He was going there to save it.  He was going there to love it.  He was going there to engage it.  The clarity in Jesus came from his organizational chart.  He saw himself as accountable to God, the one he called father, and no one else.  That accountability directed him.  What do you want me to do, Father?  I want you to feed my sheep, love my people, engage them, act interested, make them safe.  Save them. 

Save is an interesting word.  It comes from Shalom, which means peace, security, safety. Hosanna is also an interesting word; it means “O Save.”  “O,” we might translate, “give us peace.”  “O,” we might translate, “give us security and safety.  Save us from dark thoughts in the middle of the night.  Save us from monkey mind about which client we should prioritize.  Save us from fuzz and not knowing what to do next.”

My professor says that the difference between a vision statement and a mission statement is that one is about your DNA, your particular, unique reason for existence.  Your raison d’etre.  Why are you here?  Jesus answered that he was here to save the world.  That is too big an agenda for me, even in my schoolmarm-ish mode.  But I and you can still borrow from the process.  Why are you here, anyway? 

I was relieved that my professor did not think a vision statement had to be just one sentence.  He said it had to be what it had to be.  He said the best ones were about four pages, which pleased me to no end.  The brevity people turn complex human reality into sound bites. That is not self-governance; that is discount dreams, large people put wearing clothes too small for them.  Instead, a vision statement is about your particularity.  It is the content of self governance: toward what will we bend and train ourselves?  Why us?  Why not them? 

Jesus answered the question about his own DNA as saving the world.  Once he knew what he had to do, nobody could stop him, not even his close friends. Inconvenience or lack of transportation didn’t bother him.  He had a ferocity about keeping on keeping on, which is what happens to people who know what they have to do.

Another version of a vision statement is to say I know what I have to do.  Note that it is not a mission statement, which is how I’m going to do what I have to do, with whom I am going to do it, etc.  The vision statement is the why and the what; the mission statement is the how. 

We live in a world that is all about how and little about what or why. Jesus’ secret was his attention to the what and the why.  What: Secure the world.  Why? Because it doesn’t have to be scared.  What: Bring peace to the world.  Why? War is not necessary.  What: Life after Death.  Why? Because grave robbers are better than grave diggers and love survives death.

Let me spell the last one out in the context of Holy Week.  We always have a choice about whether to dig our own graves or whether to rob death and its ways from its sting.

Spitzer excels at digging his own grave, as do many of us.  We dig with the shovels of fuzz, the shovels of self-righteousness, the shovels of fear.  Very few of us excel at ridding these shovels of their power.  When we say that what we have to do is to love each other, engage each other, march in each other’s parades, when we say that, we rob the grave of its victory.

What is most galling about people who won’t self-govern or declare themselves a unique servant of a unique vision is the way it hurts the gene pool. Instead of being ourselves, we become something we think other people want us to be. We clone.
Listen to Verlyn Klinkenborg talk about cloning: 

An agricultural system that favors cloned animals has no room for farmers who farm in different ways. Cloning, you will hear advocates say, is just another way of making cows. But every other way—even using embryo transplants and artificial insemination—allows nature to shuffle the genetic deck. A clone does not… This striving for uniformity is the driving and destructive force of modern agriculture… It is another way of shifting genetic ownership from farmers to corporations.²

The same movement occurs when we delay defining and governing ourselves.  Remember tomorrow: I’ll gladly define myself tomorrow, which is just about as true as I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow.  Tomorrow is today. We become clones―and the ones who benefit are not us.  Nor is it the moral and spiritual gene pool.  We dig our own graves when we refuse to be ourselves, define ourselves, govern ourselves and bend ourselves toward who we want to be, why we want to be it, and what we want to be.  The “How” just falls out, once we are defined.  You get the donkeys you need when you know where you have to go.

When I talk about self-governance as the way Jesus matters, I think of the way Thoreau talked about living deliberately.  I think about mission and vision statements being pulled out of the diary or off the wall and into our hearts.  I think of people doing what they have to do.  And I think of what a great threat that kind of power is to the people who want to break our spirit.  I think of the struggle that Jean Montrevil is in right now, with a bracelet around his ankle and a stepped-up reporting to ICE as an even larger shackle.  I think of a man the size of Jean having a curfew so that my government can check up on him, as though he were a danger to society.  Jean is a blessing, not a danger to society.  The only power he has to fight this absurdity is the power of his spirit.  That power―the power of the directed spirit, the one that knows who it is and that it matters―has no real enemies.  It always wins.  It robs graves instead of digging them.³

Today we can just return to the world of leaders who are imposters because they can’t govern themselves, where cranes fall from the sky and hurt people, where banks fail, and monks get fed up―the world where many high-minded vision statements are still on the wall.  We can think that we are not yet ready for Easter and that as soon as we do get ready, we will get ourselves together.  One speaker expressed this dangerous reluctance well when he said at yesterday’s memorial service, “I got the invite to my high school reunion and realized I had six months to get myself together.”  We can let our high school friends prod us into self-definition―and as soon as that is over, we can go back to our couch, our finger wagging, our fuzz, our lack of engagement with Jerusalem or its people. 

Or we can order a couple of un-cloned, custom-designed donkeys, get off our asses, and join the parade.  The parade is a great populist conspiracy to save Jerusalem from itself.  There is a role in that grave robbing conspiracy for you.  And you, and only you, know what it is. 

¹ Mark Lipton, Guiding Growth: How Vision Keeps Companies on Course (Harvard Business School Press, 2003)

²Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Closing the Barn Door After the Cows Have Gotten Out,” New York Times (January 23, 2008)

³Thanks to Craig MacCreary for the grave robbing/digging metaphor! Check out www.maccreary.org.