This is a lightly edited transcript of a sermon I preached on Palm Sunday, 2026.

Before the sermon began, we removed the cross paraments, covered the crosses on the windows with paper, and pulled a large cloth up in front of the huge metal cross in the front of the sanctuary.

My first spring at Fairplain Presbyterian Church, a guy walked in one of the weekdays. Well, he came to the door and I went over and I let him in. He was clearly not in his right mind. He had a thick envelope full of money and he threw it down on a table and was like, “Here, this is for the church, this is for God.”

And I just went, “I don’t know what is happening right now.”

And I was trying to be pastoral and like a less anxious presence and listen to get a sense for what on earth is going on with this guy. He’s clearly not right in the head.

This happens in the courtyard room. I didn’t know what was going on. So then he walks up to the sanctuary and just walks in and he walks back out the back and comes back down into the courtyard and he yells at me,

“What have you done to my cross?”

And I went, I don’t think we’ve done anything to it. As far as I know, it’s still up there. What is going on with this guy?

I never really figured it out. He also threw a chair at one point, but he didn’t seem dangerous. I called my friend, Pastor Laurie Hartzell, and I was like, “Is there mental health 911? What are we going to do with this guy?” And she’s like, “No, there isn’t. You have to call the police.”

I called the police. They came, they talked to him. He left, it was fine. He did take the envelope of money, which was probably good. I would’ve felt weird about taking it from him. I don’t know, maybe he was on drugs.

But that thing that he shouted, “What have you done to my cross?!” That is the theme of the sermon this morning.

You may have seen, we’ve gone around and we’ve, covered up all the crosses.

And we’ve done that because I talked to the chair of the worship committee and she said that taking them down would probably not be taken well. She said that COM, the Presbyterian’s Commission on Ministry, probably wouldn’t save me if I took down all of the crosses.

But why did we cover up all the crosses?

And to answer that, we’re going to go back to Palm Sunday.

In Mark Allen Powell’s commentary on Matthew, he argued that what Jesus is doing on Palm Sunday is not the traditional understanding, which is that Jesus is stopping people who are ripping other people off. You’ve probably heard this, right? That they’re ripping people off in the temple. They’re cheating them.

But Mark Allen Powell has a different read on that. He says that Jesus is basically essentially saying that the temple is closed for business. He’s shutting down the temple.

And where we get this interpretation from, there’s three pieces of this.

One, Jesus isn’t just driving out those who are selling in the temple. He also drives out those who are buying in the temple. You ever noticed that before? I didn’t. It’s not just those who are selling, it’s those who are buying in the temple.

Two, Isaiah 56. “The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord to minister to Him, to love the name of the Lord, to be His servants, all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it, who hold fast to My covenant.”

And if you’ve been here the last, oh, six weeks or so, you’ve heard Isaiah 58 repeatedly. This feels like that, right? Well, this is only a chapter before. “These I will bring to my holy mountain, make them joyful. Their burnt sacrifices or burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” That part sounds familiar, right? “My house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Jesus quotes that.

And third, he also cites Jeremiah 7:9-11. He doesn’t say the whole thing, but we’ll get to this. “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house which is called by my name and say, ‘We are safe, only to go on doing these abominations. Has this house which is called by my name become a den of robbers in your sight? I too am watching, says the Lord, a den of robbers.”

What’s a den of robbers?

Is a den of robbers where a bunch of robbers go to rob each other or to rob other people? Maybe not, Powell says. A den of robbers is where robbers go to be safe. Is where the robbers go to hang out and to bring their stolen loot and to, you know, just somewhere to be safe.

So Jesus says, my house will be called a house of prayer, but you’re making it a den of robbers, a place where the robbers go to spend and feel safe and enjoy their ill-gotten gains. You’re making it a den of robbers.

So what Jesus is doing, if I’m reading Powell, and if Powell’s reading scripture correctly, is he is shutting down temple worship.

He’s saying, you have been out there doing the works of injustice, and now you are going to come here and offer sacrifices as though that’s going to get you in good with God. Get out of here.

He throws out not just those who are selling, but those who are buying because the temple is closed for business.

So if we were gonna do that today, what would we have to do? Because we don’t do sacrifices in modern Christianity, do we? We just have the one sacrifice and that sacrifice is Jesus on the cross.

And that is why we have covered up all of the crosses. Because if we’re going to re-run Palm Sunday, we got to cover up all the crosses.

Because if we’re doing injustice, and then coming to church, we cover up the crosses.

The problem, though, is that if we cover over the cross, that’s a huge theological problem, because many of us have been told a version of the story that goes like this:

Humans are separated from God by this enormous chasm dropping down into eternal damnation and only the cross connects us from God. Only the cross stands between us and God.

So if we cover over the cross, now we have a giant hellfire-sized problem.

So the only way to do the Palm Sunday thing that Jesus does in Matthew specifically is to go back and re-examine this picture because though I have seen a million different versions of this picture and I created this one, it’s not in the Bible.

It’s in a lot of tracts, but it’s not in the Bible.

So if we take away the cross, there’s nothing left than this gigantic chasm between us and God. Feels like a problem.

But some of us have read or heard Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” that says God holds you over the pit of hell like a odious spider. Those are Jonathan Edwards’ words.

But is that true? I don’t think so. I don’t think that this picture represents the theological reality. I don’t think there’s this chasm of hellfire between us and God that is bridged by the cross.

What we have, though, is the incarnation. The incarnation is where God bridges the gap. God comes over to our side.

The incarnation is what happens at Christmas. God becomes one of us. And yes, there’s still glowing around the God picture in this picture because how else are you going to know it’s God?

And I think that the gap is itself a fiction, that God has always been on our side of that chasm that we thought that we made with our sin.

God has always been on our side of that chasm that we thought that we made with our sin.

In fact, God is on the cross.

God is on the cross.

But if we receive the cross as this thing that saves us from accountability for injustice, I think we’ve received it wrong.

And there’s a lot of Christian traditions that seem to be acting that way, that use the cross as a means to avoid accountability, as the means to say, “Oh, well, Well, this person is a Christian now, so we should promote them and keep them in leadership” of a church or a country or whatever.

“Because they’re a Christian now, so they don’t need to face accountability for what they’ve done. They don’t need to face any accountability. Well, if God is going to save them from that consequence, then maybe they don’t need to have any consequences. Maybe they should just be able to stay in leadership forever.”

But that’s not how we’re supposed to receive the cross, I don’t think.

And speaking of which, we don’t even receive the cross, do we?

We don’t receive the cross.

What we receive is communion. We receive the bread and cup.

And that’s the thing about sacrifice: Sacrifice is what you do.

You kill an animal and offer it up for the gods.

You kill your animal, you break its body and pour out its blood for the gods.

But when Jesus hands the bread and the cup to his disciples, what does he say?

He says, this is my body, broken for you. This is my blood shed for you.

God joins us in the incarnation at Christmas.

God joins us.

God becomes one of us.

And on Good Friday, Christ’s body is broken for us. His blood is shed for us.

Not because God needed a sacrifice so that God’s righteous wrath could be poured out on Jesus. That’s not what scripture teaches. It’s what a lot of us probably have heard in church. I certainly heard it lots of times.

His blood is poured out for us. Turns out we were the ones who needed it.

So now that we’re not as worried about this giant chasm and maybe we can feel a little safer about covering over some crosses. (We’re going to take this cloth covering the cross down after today, I promise. We’ll go back to normal.)

Because if Jesus came today, I think that this is the way that he would demonstrate it, to say that worship and sacrifice are not a substitute for justice.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with worship. I think worship is great. I love worship. I’m a pastor. My job depends on y’all coming to participate in worship.

But worship, I believe the message, at least Matthew’s version of Palm Sunday, is that worship is not a substitute for justice, that the cross is not a substitute for us doing right.

And that, I think, is what Jesus is doing when he shuts the temple down for business.

And that’s the theatric that I was trying to emulate by covering over the crosses.

Let’s pray.

God, thank you for the message of Palm Sunday, for the theater of Palm Sunday, for Jesus shutting down the temple for business and showing us that you care about justice. Teach us to care even more about justice and to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with you. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.