March 28, 2021 “Crowdsource” – John 12:12-19

John 12:12-19
“Crowdsource”
March 28, 2021 – Palm Sunday

I was swept along in a sea of red. Around me, men, women, babies and grandmothers pushed toward their goal, a seat in Memorial Stadium to watch the Cornhuskers play. At that time, 1985 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the stadium held about 74,000. Incredibly, even with capacity now at over 80,000, until last year every seat for every game has been sold out since 1962. Cornhusker fans make a Memorial Stadium crowd larger than any city in Nebraska, except for Omaha and Lincoln. Sorry, but Duck green fever pales when compared to the passionate intensity of Nebraska’s love for the Big Red.

So I was engulfed in the largest gathering of which I’ve ever been part. But I was not really part of it. I’m not a football fan. I understand the game. I know the rules. I can follow the plays. But I don’t get excited; I’m not interested; the outcome doesn’t matter to me. Regardless how long I live in a place, I don’t think of those out on the field as my team. I went along to the game, but I wasn’t part of the crowd.

As we watch the Palm Sunday crowd ascend the road into Jerusalem today, I wonder how many of us may be following the crowd, but without much excitement, without much interest. Are we, and I ask myself this question as much as any of you, here but not really part of it? Do I really belong in that crowd?

For an introvert like me, it’s easy to suppose that crowds do not, in fact, matter much in Christian faith. I pastor a smaller church. I’m more comfortable talking to a little group of people than a big gathering. It seems like attracting crowds often causes trouble.

I used to point out, like any number of other preachers, how fickle crowds can be. The mass of people shouting “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday turned around and shouted “Crucify him!” on Good Friday. But that’s neither accurate to the story nor accurate about crowds in God’s plan for his Kingdom. Our reading from Philippians 2 today says that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” Sounds like a crowd to me.

It was not at all the same group of people who met Jesus as He rode that donkey down into the Kidron Valley and the up into the east side of Jerusalem who then came out on Friday morning to condemn Him and ask for Barabbas to be set free instead of Jesus. The Palm Sunday crowd consisted of Jesus’ disciples, supplemented by other pilgrims coming for Passover who had heard news about Jesus, particularly about how He raised Lazarus from the dead. The Good Friday crowd gathered in front of Pilate was made up of Jewish leaders, priests, Pharisees and others, who brought people with them to support their condemnation of Jesus.

Contrary to my innate distrust of crowds, they are integral to the kingdom of God. And so is what has come to be called “crowdsourcing,” a term introduced in Wired magazine 2005. At that time it was used to denote a business that accomplished some task or created a product by “outsourcing” work to a “crowd” of volunteers on-line. Wikipedia, where I learned all this, though started earlier in 2001, is a pretty good example of crowdsourcing. It’s an on-line encyclopedia created out of over 6 million articles written by volunteers.

There are other historical examples. In the 19^th century, 150 volunteer weather observers were part of the Smithsonian’s Meteorological Project. They used the telegraph to send in data that was posted on a large weather map. And the first installment of the Oxford English Dictionary was generated by 800 volunteers who worked at categorizing words. In fact, bringing the voluntary contributions of multiple people together to create or build some large project goes back to ancient times. In the book of Exodus we read how Moses “crowdsourced” the materials and construction of the Tabernacle.

Here on Palm Sunday, you could say that the celebration which welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem was crowdsourced. The branches for which we name the day and will carry around our church property on Sunday make that clear. John is the only Gospel which specifically mentions palm branches. Matthew and Mark only talk about generic branches from trees being laid in the road, while Matthew, Mark and Luke all say that faithful disciples laid their cloaks in the road for Jesus to ride over. But it was all voluntary crowdsourcing, utilizing handy resources people were ready to offer.

Likewise, Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell how Jesus deliberately sent His disciples to crowdsource the donkey He would ride. He gave them directions for what to say to get the owner to offer the animal voluntarily. And the praise itself, including that iconic word for the day, “Hosanna!” is even more spontaneous and multiply sourced. It appears that Jesus in no way directed or arranged for what was said about Him. The ancient, perhaps not even wholly understood, cry of “Hosanna!” which may have meant “Save us!” and the acclamation “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the king of Israel!” were perfectly appropriate and accurate ways to celebrate Jesus.

Even John, as he explains what Jesus did by connecting it to Old Testament prophecy in verse 15, does a bit of crowdsourcing. On the face of it, the quotation “daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming sitting on a donkey’s colt!” is simply a shortened version of Zechariah 9:9. But the first part, “Do not be afraid,” is not in Zechariah at all. John had to go over to some other prophet, maybe Isaiah 40 verse 9, where there is also an announcement of God coming to His people, to borrow those words about not being afraid and put them together here in our text.

As someone in our worship team said Wednesday, you could even say the Bible itself is crowdsourced, drawing material together across centuries of contributions from many people. It’s one of the primary ways God does things.

A crowd, then, or at least some kind of gathering of God’s people is an essential part of spiritual life and worship in the Bible. In our psalm today, the author talks about joining a procession of people carrying branches into the Temple, clear up to the altar. Individual spiritual life and expressions of worship are important, but in the big moments of the Bible people bring what they have to offer and come together. Just join those studying the book of Revelation and turn to images there of God’s completed work. They show us countless people gathering, joining their lives in Jesus, crowdsourcing the kingdom of God.

You and I know we need each other, but for some reason we keep needing to be reminded of it. Palm Sunday and Christian worship help us remember. Though I don’t really get it, I can see that a football game is better there in the stadium for those who love the sport than it is at home watching TV.

So we acknowledge that part of what’s made this whole COVID-19 isolation so difficult is that God means for us to crowdsource our faith and our worship. Like the palm branch being waved by a joyful woman and the “Hosanna!” being shouted by a happy child and the cloak being taken off by a disciple to lay over the donkey or in the road, every offering is important and even essential to our worship. We were meant to help each other offer praise to Jesus.

Doing my own sermon crowdsourcing a little, I read an account by one of my wife’s Facebook friends of an odd Passover practice. In order to carefully avoid leavened bread during Passover, Jews would normally have to remove all yeast and bread and anything else with leaven in it from their homes. But instead, there arose the practice of “selling” all leavening and bread in Jewish homes to a non-Jew who holds a deed to it until Passover is over. A rabbi often arranges for the sale of everyone’s leaven to one Gentile and then at the end of the festival the rabbi “buys” it all back.

Beth’s friend, a messianic Jew, said that they arranged with a rabbi for all their bread to be bought by someone named Katie. The food remains in their home. But now, during Passover, which started Saturday evening, if anyone in the family ate the leavened bread they would be “stealing” from Katie. It’s a little game which helps everyone remember the proper observance of the holy days.

You might say that Jewish custom is pretty silly. Maybe it’s almost as silly as marching around our church building waving palms like some of us are going to do this Sunday morning. The point is that God has created us in need of each other. His people even need those who are not His people in order to remember and keep their own faith.

Our Covenant denomination has been using slogan “Better Together” for a few years now. It’s another way of saying what Palm Sunday teaches us, that God does what God does in and through a wonderful variety of men, women and children brought together in ways that are often surprising and beautiful. As our denomination has also done, in our conversations about race we’re now framing it as God’s assembly of a beautiful mosaic of people of all races, nations, languages and cultures.

Let the Palm Sunday crowd remind us that Jesus is still crowdsourcing His worship and praise. Do you ever wonder why there is no complete liturgy in the Bible, no “order of service” for Christian worship? There are just tantalizing glimpses of great moments like Palm Sunday or around the Table on Maundy Thursday or on the beach after the Easter. Paul mentions singing hymns and praying and hearing words of prophecy, but he doesn’t tell us or anyone just exactly how to arrange it all. Instead, God leaves us to bring this or bring that which we have to offer, taking music that was just created this year and connecting it with centuries-old tradition, blending it in a great crowdsourced masterpiece.

Tradition, by the way, is one manner in which Christians recognize that our brothers and sisters whom we typically think of as dead and gone are still part of the crowd, still alive in Christ. When we do something in worship the way they always did or say words they always said, we are remembering to bring them along with those of us who are still alive on this earth into the great crowd celebrating Jesus.

Apart for a year now, you may have found that our recorded on-line worship services are enhanced when crowdsourced in some way, by including more faces and voices than simply the pastor and the song leaders. We’ve sought a variety of Scripture readers, offerings of devotional thoughts, reports from missionaries, and brief words of praise or thanksgiving on special occasions. All of it comes together a bit like Wikipedia or some piece of open-source software. Like the first Palm Sunday, it is still beautiful but functional, highly participatory yet unified in aim, glorious in being so good while incorporating both the great and the less-than-perfect in the whole.

Even on-line worship, then, benefits from crowdsourcing. That’s why we’re going to do it more directly, live on Zoom on this Maundy Thursday and Easter. You might wonder what you are contributing if you simply sign and watch. The answer is that you are helping us, even in that way which still feels strange, to be a crowd, a joyful crowd who loves and honors the One who comes to us in the name of the Lord. Offering your own face to that crowd will make it even better.

Which means that as we start to see light at the end of what’s been a long dark tunnel, to make some, still tentative, plans to come back together in person, we want to remember that we stayed apart because we didn’t want to lose anyone in the crowd. Yes, there have been some in our church who haven’t been able or simply couldn’t bring themselves to join us on-line. But because in love we didn’t crowd into our sanctuary and make each other sick, almost all of us will be alive and able to go back in there and join the crowd when it’s safe again. We stayed apart so we’d all be here to come back together.

At the same time, we, like many churches, have learned something new about how God wants to crowdsource the church, crowdsource His kingdom. Like businesses planning to let some employees keep working at home when the pandemic is over, congregations are realizing that we can let some of us keep worshipping from home. There are people who join us on-line who live far away and will seldom if ever come to 3636 West 18^th Avenue for a worship service. But they are part of us, part of the blessed crowd gathered with us to praise our King and Savior.

So when we get back together you’ll see something new in our worship service: a camera livestreaming and recording our songs and prayers and Bible reading together. You will hear something new in my welcome to everyone, a greeting to those joining us from elsewhere, an inclusion of friends far away in the congregation gathered here. I’ve decided to quit talking about going back to “normal,” at least what we thought was normal a year ago. Like God always does with evil and suffering, God has been and will continue to use our pain and sorrow to do new things among us and through us, crowdsourcing His kingdom in new ways.

Verse 16 says, “His disciples did not understand these things at first.” It was only after Jesus was “glorified,” that word we focused on last week, that they understood. Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection were God’s answer to the sufferings of the world. And like the Cross and Resurrection, suffering like the pandemic which comes to us now is often only understood afterward, when we discover at least a little of what God was doing in it all.

Oddly enough the point of it all is provided by yet another bit of odd crowdsourcing by the Gospel writer John. He took what those Pharisees, who five days later were going to help assemble a different crowd to get Jesus crucified, he took what they had to say, pulled it into his message and gave them, of all people, the last word for the moment.

In verse 19, then, we see the Pharisees reflecting on the crowd around Jesus, the crowd there because they had seen Jesus raise a man from the dead or heard about it from those who saw it. Those sullen, jealous religious leaders look at that impromptu, ragtag, uneducated, shouting, singing, palm-waving crowd and see the shape of things to come. So they simply say to each other, to themselves, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the whole world has gone after him.”

They didn’t know it when they said it, but that’s God’s crowdsource plan, to bring the whole world together around Jesus. There’s even a place for Pharisees if they can only see it. There’s a place for anyone and everyone in that crowd. Our new lesson from this past year is that there’s a place in the crowd for people able-bodied and living close enough to walk or drive to a worship service and there’s a place for people less abled or with a different temperament to join in from home. There’s also a place for those who can do neither. We in the crowd must go to them.

I trust God doesn’t want us all to like football or stadium crowds, but I pray that He will help us to appreciate and join the crowd He is crowdsourcing in Jesus. I want to belong to that crowd. I hope you will too.

Amen.