Will you pray for me? Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

If you want to get bitten by a strange dog, you should corner it and come at it fast with your teeth bared.

If you want to see a small woman lift up a big car, you should drop it on her child.

If you want to see a zebra run fast, you should put a lion next to it.

If you want to provoke a nation to war, you should fly an airplane into one of its buildings.

And if you want to get crucified, you should ride into first-century Jerusalem on a donkey while the peasants hail you as a new king.

It’s not very complicated, the relationship between these causes and effects. It’s actually quite simple, and quite predictable, and it works exactly the same way for lizards, as it does for humans, as it does for nations. Threaten me or mine enough, make me feel unsafe enough, and I will freak out. Threaten a system enough—a family or a church or a religious hierarchy or a nation—and it will come down on you—hard.

It’s actually biological, built into the brain, an evolutionary adaptation for survival. The theory, vastly oversimplified for my purposes, goes like this: the brain can be divided very generally into three basic parts. The largest and newest part, evolutionarily speaking, is the neocortex. It is responsible for all the so-called higher brain functions: language, abstract thought, imagination, most memories, consciousness of self, and culture. It’s the seat of learning and adaptability. It controls the things that make us both most human and most like God, the things that make us lovers, poets, creators, imaginers, visionaries, peacemakers, people able to forgive and to reconcile.

The next oldest part they call the limbic brain. Among other things, it’s the place from which emotions arise, and is the place where especially powerful or formative memories are stored.

Finally, there is the very oldest part, evolutionarily speaking: the reptilian brain. They call it that because we share its parts with the main parts of a reptile’s brain. It is ancient, in evolutionary terms. It deals with the sorts of essential body functions we don’t even notice, like breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. It’s also responsible for very basic, very powerful, and very old responses to the world around you, responses like xenophobia, fear of that which is strange and therefore possibly threatening, and (the important one for today) the fight-or-flight response to perceived danger.

Under stressful, strange, or dangerous conditions, the reptilian brain can, seeking to save your life, take near-total control of the brain very quickly and almost without warning. Suddenly, all you ever learned, all the art you ever appreciated, all the gentleness of soul or nobility of mind you have cultivated, can be gone in a second, and you can become an animal in the rawest sense, simply seeking to survive and reacting, with tooth and claw and adrenaline, to the stimuli around you. It sounds terrible in a way. Actually, it’s a very good way to survive, at least when the danger is physical: think of the mother lifting the car off her trapped child or the zebra on the savannah.

But it is a primitive thing, about fear and threat, stimulus and response, violence and quick reactions. It is uncomplicated, unsubtle, fast, brutal—and it should be, for it is about life and death.

The place where this wonderful and powerful adaptation breaks down, however, is in situations that create fear or anxiety but are in fact not life-threatening. We’ve all watched a coworker or family member lose control when he or she felt threatened or cornered; maybe some of us have even done it ourselves. And systems—like families, organizations, or nations—can experience and react to threats in similarly un-nuanced ways. Any effective leader can tell you that when implementing substantive change in an organization, at least half the task is keeping people from reverting to the reptile brain, for when people revert to that place, their only options are fight or flight, and while that works well when the danger is physical, it is deadly for organizations and those who try to change them.

Jesus knew this very well indeed; he warned his disciples over and over that his work would lead to his death. You see, Jesus was angry, and he believed that God was angry, too. He had watched the gap between rich and poor in his nation widen and widen, he had watched as Roman occupiers killed, and abused, and taxed the Jewish poor beyond all endurance, he had watched as the Jewish religious and political elites had befriended the occupiers at the cost of the masses, he had heard about and seen the corruption of the pure worship of the Temple by this alliance. And so, all full of righteous anger and the love of God, Jesus and his followers decided to take on the system. They planned a series of demonstrations, of enacted parables, of offensive and over-the-top street theater, designed to express their anger and dismay, and to present what they thought God thought about the situation.

So Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, just as Solomon had ridden in on a donkey for his coronation centuries before, just as an ancient prophet had predicted the Messiah would arrive. And he and his followers had the people hail him as a new king of Israel—a king that was not Herod and was not the Emperor. It was his intent to offend, maybe even enrage, the leaders and the powerful ones who looked on as his peasant parade went by. It was his intent to shock them with the audacity of his claim to religious and secular leadership. He knew it would probably lead to his death. And while death was not his goal or his intent, he knew enough about human nature to know what happens when you do the kinds of things he did. But he did them anyway, did them for the sake of the people and the Kingdom of God, because trusted that in the end, God would not let death have the last word.

The plan worked. The story says that Jesus and his followers’ angry demonstration had the whole city in “turmoil”. But the Greek word that the author of Matthew used for what Jesus did to the city isn’t “turmoil”. The Greek word is εςειςθη. The root for that word is the root that also give us the English words seismic, seismograph, seismologist. It means “earthquake”.

Matthew says that when Jesus entered Jerusalem, he hit the city like an earthquake, shaking the whole place right down to the foundations of palace and Temple. He hit it like an earthquake, for suddenly, the poor and dispossessed seemed very powerful. He hit it like an earthquake, for suddenly, they did not cringe or flee or respond to their oppression with violence, but with peace and laughter. He hit it like an earthquake, for suddenly, they were crowning their own king, one very different from those in power. He hit it like an earthquake, for suddenly, they looked very much like a people whose God was standing in their midst and was taking their side. Scary stuff for the powerful. Scary enough, says Matthew, that it made them quake.

Now friends, I’ve never been in an earthquake, but I imagine that it’s pretty scary. And I imagine that if I ever find myself in an earthquake, whatever my reaction is, it will not be one that proceeds from my complex, creative, highly-evolved neocortex. I’m pretty sure that it will come instead from my reptilian brain and that it will be fast, and powerful, and very, very basic. Stimulus/response. Fear for my life/swift action to preserve it. Not unlike the reaction of the chief priests and the scribes and the Romans when Jesus’ earthquake hit their city: it was less than a week from the time Jesus entered the city as King David’s son to the time they hung him on a cross with the title “King of the Jews” posted over him. It’s not very complicated, the relationship between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. It’s simple, and it’s predictable, and it works exactly the same way for lizards, as it does for humans, as it does for nations.

Another example: some of you have been in touch with Nancy and me about the recent, mostly negative, media attention given to The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Trinity is a predominantly black congregation, with membership in the thousands, and with dozens of ministries designed to educate, challenge, support, and bring to deeper Christian faithfulness its members and its community, especially the youth. From its location in the impoverished Southside, it is involved in numerous community organizing and social justice ministries. It gives millions of dollars a year to the wider church for mission and ministry. It is one of the most potent and well-respected churches in the city.

Jeremiah Wright is a thoughtful, colorful, loud, proud, prophetic preacher. He has spoken from this pulpit. He sometimes yells a bit. He challenges a lot. He intentionally makes his hearers uncomfortable to try to jolt them into a new ways of seeing the world. He does not flinch from calling his congregation or his country to account for its sins. He looks at the political landscape and tries to describe it as God sees it. He is full of righteous anger and the love of God. His primary goal is not to make you happy; his primary goal is to tell you about God.

Wright has been preaching this way for a long time now, against a host of sins: racism, sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation and oppression, and the horrors of war, among others. His preaching and work have earned him an excellent reputation among colleagues and allies, but frankly, not many beyond the church have taken much notice at all. But it just so happens that one of his parishioners has been much in the spotlight in recent months. Senator Barack Obama has been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years. So now people are listening to Wright in a new way. Lately, he has seemed much more worth listening to—and not everyone likes what they hear.

Jesus spent the first years of his ministry preaching and challenging oppression and economic exploitation in the countryside, among the poor and underprivileged there. But he didn’t really shake things up, didn’t really get into trouble with the authorities until he approached Jerusalem with his angry challenges. The words, the actions, the witness that were grace and truth and living water to the poor and the oppressed of the countryside were anathema to the elite of the nation, were like an earthquake in the halls of power. And only then, when the powerful were listening, did the trouble start.

Likewise, now that a parishioner of Wright’s is on the national political stage, his words and his actions have become more widely heard, and more urgently challenging. In short, he has become a threat. And so those in power or in favor of the status quo are responding, I suspect, predictably. I cannot help but wonder whether the recent news reports do not come from a slightly reptilian place.

I have to ask: What does it mean, that out of a 40-year preaching career, only the same two or three snippets of sermons—not even whole sermons, just snippets—are endlessly broadcast, quoted, and commented upon? What does it mean that a man and a ministry that has reached thousands in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago, one whose work and message has clearly been good news to people who needed some, is being cast as hateful, violent, unchristian? How are we to reconcile a living, thriving Christian church with dozens of Christian ministries serving the community with these media portrayals of the man who has lead that church for years? And, perhaps most potentially telling: why have almost the only people we’ve heard commenting on this been the media and political elites—most of them white? Why has almost no one stopped to ask the members of Trinity—the ones for whom most of the things Wright said were actually intended—what the man and his preaching is like? Could this just possibly be a system protecting itself in basic, uncomplicated, and old ways?

And if it is, might it not actually be a very good sign, because might it not mean that the Word of God has once again managed to set the powers that be to quaking?

The route from Palm Sunday to Good Friday is not hard to understand. It is about stimulus and response, action and reaction, threat and fight-or-flight. It is about what the powerful do when faithful people challenge them. It is about the reptilian brain.

The life and calling of the Christian, on the other hand, are about something else altogether. They are about the most human part of us, the part of us made most closely in God’s image, the part of us that loves, and creates, and imagines, and envisions, the part of us that is angry at injustice, that has a long memory and can reconcile and forgive, and that by the grace of God manages to do it in a hostile and scary world. Jesus knew that what he was doing would almost certainly lead to his death. The Scriptures tell us that before it was over, he would quake, and weep, and be sore afraid, and beg God to put a stop to it all. But Jesus, Jesus had faith in the God that makes all things new, had trust in the God who created Heaven and earth, had hope in the better things God has in store for those who set the tyrants of the earth to quaking before the glory of God. So, not for Jesus the old way, not for him the old stimulus/response, not for him threat/attack.

Jesus was about the new way, the gentle and the brave way, the truly human way, the Godly way. And so when they threatened him and made him very afraid, he said to his followers, “Put away your sword”, and he said to his enemies, “I forgive you”, and he said to his God, “I am yours.”

As we journey through this Holy Week together, we will hear story after story of retreats to the basic, the animal, the fearful, the reptilian that is still in us all. We will remind ourselves of the great evil that can proceed from this good evolutionary adaptation when it is allowed to go unchecked by grace. It will not be easy. It will feel too familiar. We will be reminded how mightily difficult it can be to stay human, to be like unto God, in a world full of threats both real and perceived. But in the end, we will also be reminded of the good, good news that we are not finally reptilian, we are not finally trapped in our evolutionary heritage, that there is one powerful beyond all measure nearby whispering, “Do not fear, put away your sword, I forgive you, you are mine.”

If you want to get bitten by a strange dog, you should corner it and come at it fast with your teeth bared.

If you want to see a zebra run fast, you should put a lion next to it.

But if you’re a God who wants your people to respond to the earthquakes in their lives as humans holy, evolved, and new, you should show them a peasant king and an empty tomb.

Stimulus/response. So may it be. Amen.