I Wanna Be a Rock Star

This is the text of the message given in the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, April 1, 2012.  The scripture is Mark 11:1-11.

            Have you ever thought about what it’d be like to be treated like a rock star?  Even if it was only for one day, that’d be great, don’t you think?  Everywhere you go, there are huge crowds waiting to see you, and they all love you.  Everyone in the crowd is thrilled to see you, excited just to be in your presence, even if you don’t even acknowledge them. 

You get out of your car, and the crowd magically parts to make way for you.  They roll out the red carpet ahead of you, making your entrance as smooth as they can.  You send someone for something, and all they have to do is let people know who wants it and boom, it’s yours, no questions asked.  To just have one day like that, one time where we got that special, red-carpet treatment; that’d be something we’d never forget the rest of our lives.

            In our Bible reading for today, Jesus had a day like that.  But you know what?  I’ll bet he did not think it was all that special.

            We don’t know that, of course.  We’re not told what was going through Jesus’ mind on that first Palm Sunday, when he road into Jerusalem on a colt.  I somehow don’t think he was that thrilled about it.  Not just because he was humble, either, although of course he was.

            The reason I don’t think Jesus was that thrilled is because Jesus knew that his big day was just that.  It was one day.  It was not something that was going to last.  Jesus knew that the crowd did not really love him, at least not in any lasting sense. 

That’s not because they were hypocrites, exactly.  Some of them were, probably, but a lot of the people were sincere at the time.  They really thought they loved Jesus.  The really thought they were going to follow Jesus forever.

            The love of the crowd was sincere, but it was all on the surface.  It was the love people have for someone who’s a big star.  It’s like saying we love Tom Hanks or Taylor Swift or Tim Tebow.  In fact, it’s sort of like when Whitney Houston died.  Lots of people were really sad, and that feeling was sincere.  Maybe some of you felt it, I don’t know.  For those who did, that feeling was not phony or fake.  It’s probably similar to the feeling I had when Harmon Killebrew died last summer.  The feeling is real.  We really do feel a kind of love for people like that.

Here’s the thing about that kind of love, though.  It’s real, it is a kind of love, but it’s not a love that has depth.  It’s not the same as the kind of love we have for a wife or a husband, or a parent or a child, or a brother or a sister, or even a close friend.  We may have feelings for celebrities, but we don’t know them.  We may be sad about their deaths, but their death does not really impact our lives in any lasting way.  Our lives continue to go pretty much the same way they did before.  We feel sad for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but then we move on.

Jesus knew that was the kind of love the crowds felt for him.  The crowds did not have any deep love for him.  The crowds did not know him.  He knew that his death in a few days would not make any lasting impact on their lives.  Some of them might be sad for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but then they’d move on.  That knowledge probably took away any joy he might have felt by being treated like a rock star.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever get that one day of being treated like a rock star.  Probably you never will, either.  Most people don’t.

Even so, as we go through our lives, it can be really tempting for us to play to the crowd.  In our lives, the crowd won’t be thousands of adoring fans.  In our lives, playing to the crowd can mean trying to impress our friends.  Playing to the crowd can mean trying to get noticed by the boss.  Playing to the crowd can mean doing things that help us get accepted by the in group at school.

It’s understandable why we do that.  The need for acceptance is a very strong human emotion.  We all want to have friends.  We all want to have people think highly of us.  We all want to get ahead.  Playing to the crowd, whoever the crowd is in our lives, is a way to do that.  It’s understandable why it’s so tempting to do it.

The thing is that playing to the crowd means doing things we would not normally do.  It means going against our better judgment, doing things we know better than to do, just to impress people.  Ultimately, playing to the crowd means not being ourselves.  When we spend too much time trying to be someone we’re not, we can forget how to be who we are, and we’re not the people God created us to be any more.

In our last sermon series, we talked about how each one of us has been selected by God to do something.  The thing about that is that God never selects us to be somebody we’re not.  When God selected me to be a pastor, God did not tell me to completely change who I am.  I still love sports, and I still love music, and I still love to laugh and tell bad jokes.  God did not select me and then tell me to be somebody else.  Instead, God selected me to be the best me I can be.

God does that same thing for each one of us.  God created each one of us with different interests and different abilities.  God created each one of us with certain things we love to do and certain things we don’t like to do.  God wants us to use those things we love to do to serve God.  God does not want us to be someone we’re not.  God just wants us to be the best at being who God created us to be.

Did you notice, as we heard the story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem, that we’re not given any indication of how Jesus reacted to the crowd?  In fact, we don’t know if Jesus reacted at all.  We don’t know if Jesus even acknowledged the people along the road who were cheering and waving palm branches, and laying their coats in front of him and generally treating him like a rock star.

What we do know is that those people did not have any effect on him.  Jesus never played to the crowd.  Jesus never did anything because he wanted to impress somebody.  He never did anything because he wanted people to like him.  Jesus never did anything because he wanted to get ahead. 

It was probably tempting, sometimes.  I mean, think of the power Jesus had.  We’re talking about someone who could do miracles.  We’re talking about someone who could bring people back from the dead.  It must have been tempting for him to put on a show for the people.  That was one of the things Satan tried to get him to do when he was tempting Jesus.  Satan said, “Jump off the top of the temple and have the angels save you.”  Think about how impressed everyone would’ve been, to see that.

Jesus never did it.  Even when Jesus worked miracles, he never did it in a showy way.  When he cured a blind man, he did not use a flash of light or a puff of smoke.  He rubbed mud on the man’s eyes and told him to go somewhere else and wash it off.  When Jesus cured ten lepers, he did not use a magic spell or wave a wand.  He told them to go somewhere else and show themselves to the priests, and on the way there, they were healed.

Jesus never played to the crowd.  He never tried to impress anybody.  The reason for that, I think, is that Jesus always knew who he was.  He knew who he was, and he knew he had to be who he was if he was going to do what God had selected him to do.  If he tried to impress people, if he tried to play to the crowd, if he tried to be someone he was not, he’d never be able to get it done.  The only way he could do what God had selected him to do was to be who he was supposed to be.

That’s true for us, too.  We need to know who we are, because that’s who God created us to be.  God created us to be who we are because that’s the only way we can do what God has selected us to do.  If we try to impress people, if we try to become part of the in group, if we try to get ahead by being someone we’re not, we’re eventually going to forget who we are.  If we forget who we are, we’ll never be who God created us to be, and we’ll never do what God selected us to do.

God does not want us to be someone we’re not.  God just wants you to be the best you that you can be.  When we do that, we don’t need to be treated like rock stars.  We’ll have something better.  We’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that we are who God created us to be.