Nashville has been in the news again this week. Tornados have devastated that area, scores of people have died and homes have been destroyed. Thinking about that wonderful, beautiful city took me back to a story I shared with you, when Nashville was in the national spotlight 142 years ago. It was near the end of the Civil War, in 1864, when the Battle of Franklin was raging just a few miles from modern Nashville.

It was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. In the tiny farming community of Franklin was the Carter farm. If you tour the farm today, you can still see bullet holes in the walls and, in the family dining room, the oak floors are stained a dark brown. It was to that room that wounded Union soldiers were brought during the battle. The blood ran so deep that it permanently stained the floor’s planks.

Todd Carter was born on that farm, just 24 years before the battle took place. Raised there all of his life, he joined the Confederate forces and went off to fight, to be captured, to escape, and to rejoin his unit. In a strange twist of events, Todd found himself fighting in the battle in which the Confederate forces were attempting to defeat the Union forces that had overtaken his family farm. There he was, fighting for the farm where he had played as a little boy, swung in trees, hunted squirrels, and milked cows. His family was hiding in the basement and survived the wicked battle. Somehow, they got word that Todd was there and had been mortally wounded. They went out and scoured the battleground until they found him and brought him back to what was known as the birthing room, a separate room in the house where the mother went to give birth to the children. Todd lingered there for two or three days, until he died in the very same room where his mother had given birth to him.

Very many times, that story has made me wonder how it must have been to be born and go full circle in life, only to die in the very same place you took your first breath. How do people do that, end up in the very same place they started, end in the very same place they began. Not necessarily physically, but spiritually. Emotionally. Psychologically. What a tragedy, to be born and, no matter how many miles you travel or how many footprints you leave in this world, only to go full circle back to the very place you were born and die not much more than the person you were at birth, a frightened, and totally dependent child.

I’m not saying that was Todd Carter’s story. I am simply asking the question, wouldn’t it be a tragedy? Apparently, whether we agree with it or not, Tod Carter found a cause worth living and dying for. The question for us, as we come to the last Sunday before Easter, is, have we found a cause truly worth living and dying for?

Jesus lived only 33 years. He never traveled as far away from his physical birthplace in his entire life as many people in this city travel every day, back and forth to work. Now, as we have read in the gospel story from John 12, Jesus has come back full circle to die in a city not very far from where he was born. In fact, oddly enough, no further from Bethlehem to Jerusalem than from Franklin to Nashville, Tennessee.

What do you think? Was Jesus coming back home to die, only having traveled full circle from his place of birth, to end up dead, the same person he was born? Or, is it possible that along the way he had discovered a truly greater purpose for his life?

When did Jesus know who he was? Do you ever wonder about that? When did he come to conscious awareness that he was the son of God? The Bible doesn’t tell us. There’s this huge vacuum of information from his birth to his twelfth year, when we find him in the temple, saying to his parents, "Didn’t you know I was about my father’s business?" It seems that, maybe by the time he was twelve, he was at least becoming aware of his greater purpose in life. Certainly, by the time of his baptism in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, he knew who he was and what he was doing in this world. And, whatever doubt may have remained in Jesus’ mind about his purpose in this life had certainly been burned or starved out of him in the wilderness wanderings for 40 days before he entered his public ministry. By now, when Jesus enters Jerusalem, having traveled from Bethany, where he had been with Lazarus, the man he had raised from the dead, that short little distance that you and I could traverse in a matter of just a few minutes today, by now, riding atop that donkey into Jerusalem, Jesus knew for a fact who he was and why he was here in this world.

Palm branches were laid before him. Palm branches were as common in Jerusalem then as mesquite beans are in West Texas. They made clothing and shelter and gained food from the date palms. The humble palm tree was so common yet so much a part of of the fabric of daily life it had, by Jesus’ time, become a symbol of Jewish nationalism. When they laid the palms before Jesus, the Jewish people were, in essence, saying to the world around them, with this symbol of Jewish nationalism upon which Jesus would tread on the donkey, "This is the king that has come to rescue us." They still didn’t get it. Neither did his disciples. Like most of us, they would only come to understand God’s will and purpose in retrospect.

Though his rating had never been higher, Jesus knew better than to listen to the polls. He’d walked on water, turned water into wine, raised Lazarus from the dead. People were singing his praises, "Hosanna! Hosanna!" He knew better. He knew that those same people crying, "Hosanna!" would be the very same people, within just a matter of hours, who would turn on him and say, "Crucify him!" He was patient with his disciples and their lack of understanding. So, he straddled the donkey.

By now, he knew what Jerusalem meant for him. By now, he was absolutely, 100% committed to what he had to do there. In more ways than one, that donkey represented a lot of symbolic power. If Jesus wanted to paint a picture of humility and servanthood, he couldn’t have chosen a better animal. It’s also true that if he wanted to hightail it out of town at the last minute, having changed his mind, he’d be out of luck, because he would be on the wrong animal. A lot of people could outrun a donkey, if they wanted to chase him and catch him.

All of this, the scripture reports in John 12, was to fulfill what the prophecy of Zechariah had stated hundreds of years before: "Do not be afraid," Zechariah had said, of this Jesus would enter on palms, and what it meant. It was like the prophet was saying, hundreds of years before it even happened, "We don’t always understand what Jesus’ call on our lives means at the time we hear it, but we never have to fear a Jesus whose call on our lives is made to us by the very same person who was willing to walk into the jaws of death on our behalf. Don’t be afraid."

What are you afraid of this morning? We have lots of fears, don’t we? We fear bad health, we fear terrorism, we fear financial hardship, we fear loneliness. I have lots of fears. At my age, it’s hard to sleep without a little help at night. I envy my dog, who seems to be able to sleep anytime, anywhere, with no difficulty. But I discovered two big differences between Beau and myself, among others. One is, every time someone sees my dog, they always say, "Isn’t he cute?!" They never say that about me anymore. The other big difference between my dog and me is that he has no sense of yesterday or tomorrow yet, also, no sense of purpose beyond existing in this moment. We do. Because we have the capacity for purpose, we have the capacity for fear.

Of all the fears I struggle with, having now reached an age almost 20 years older than Jesus ever knew, one of the three greatest fears of my life (and my other two are mine for me to know) is that of traveling full circle in life, leaving lots of footprints but making no real impression for eternity. Spending most of my time running from death, trying to squeeze the last possible drop out of this physical existence, because sometimes, like the disciples, I don’t get it. Do you? That it’s not about how long we live, but why we are alive at all, and whether or not, in this lifetime, we discover that it is about giving ourselves so fully to the purposes of God for our lives that, when it comes time to die, we can surrender as peacefully as Jesus did riding the donkey’s back, because we have already given ourselves to a life of purpose that transcends death. If we don’t discover that purpose, then no matter how long we live, we are like so many cattle headed for purposeless slaughter on the altar of someone else’s debt-ridden, credit-spending, mortgage-enslaving, career-consuming, marriage-to-divorce-to-marriage, crib-to-nursing home idea of what our lives should mean to them, instead of what our lives should mean to God.

This very week, I heard three people, independent of each other and totally unsolicited, tell me of having quit their jobs, because they knew their lives were meant for more than just getting the next paycheck. They did it all, with all the grace and sanity of Jesus riding a donkey. How do people do that?

Speaking of animals, my oldest son, Griffin, who is 20, is working at Chick-Fil-A. Because he is the newest employee, when it came time for a food festival, he drew the short straw and had to wear the Chick-Fil-A cow suit. Among the other difficulties of wearing the cow suit, a little boy about eight years of age came up and kicked him in the shin. Nancy said, "Well, at least he didn’t kick you in the calf." I asked him when the little boy kicked him if he thought about mooving over. I went on to reflect that, "Though I know it was painful, at least it wasn’t udder destruction." Humiliation aside, there did come a time for him to take off the suit others called on him to wear. He knows he’s more than just another cow in the herd, headed for slaughter. He wants to do more than just make the hoof prints of someone else’s costume in this world.

I wonder if, this morning, it’s not time for us to remember the old preacher’s prayer. Someone asked the old preacher as he neared the end of his life, "What do you pray for?" He thought for a moment and said, "I pray for three things. I pray that my body won’t outlive my mind. I pray that I won’t outlive all of my mourners. And, I pray that I won’t drown in shallow waters." Even at the end of his life, the old preacher knew he wanted his life to make an impact that transcended his death.

Shallow waters sometimes serve a purpose. As the drought-ridden shallow waters around us have lately done in Grapevine, they revealed dinosaur tracks made 95 million years ago. We can only guess what the animals looked like. All we know for a fact is that they were here, because they left tracks. There’s evidence. But, for what purpose? We don’t know.

When you’re gone, will anyone be able to know that you did more than just make a footprint in muddy soil? There will be evidence of your birth and death. There is a birth certificate somewhere, in some county courthouse, that said you were born. When you die, there will be a record of your death on a death certificate. For some, both birth and death will be recorded in the same courthouse, as they died where they were born.

By the way, that does set us apart. Every day there are 40,000 children born into this world for whom there will never be a record of birth. But, you and I have birth certificates and almost certainly will someday have death certificate recording the beginning and end of our physical existence. Will anyone know beyond the evidence of our existence why we were here?

As modeled in the life of Jesus, as he moved from his birth to his crucifixion, there is clear evidence of a profound difference between being saved and being truly converted. Frankly, it seems, for too many people, their "salvation" marks a moment in time where they did not much more than affirm faith of their parents. "Conversion" comes only when we get on that donkey with Jesus and follow him all the way to the end of the purpose for which we were saved. If we want to know why we draw breath on this planet, we are going to have to look for the donkey’s footprints where Jesus left them and discover there that, in every part of our lives, every unanswered fear and every unanswered question eventually, somehow or other, is related to that Jesus who rode the donkey all the way to the cross.

By the way, if you want to find the footprints of the donkey, you’ll be wasting your time going to Jerusalem. You won’t find them there, because the donkey’s footprints were not made in soft mud, preserved forever. They were made on cushioned palms. There is no evidence of their existence. If you want to find the footprints of the donkey, you will have to look for them in the lives of people who at one time or another, in one way or another, said something like the old hymn records, "Come into my heart, Lord Jesus. Come in today. Come in to stay. Come into my heart, Lord Jesus." With that invitation, Jesus came walking, leaving footprints in the clay of hearts softened by faith, footprints that are forever leaving the transforming impression of what life can be like when we live and die for the reason God gave us.

With each passing year, my fears are distilling down now to just one. I can’t do anything about terrorism. I can’t really do anything about the economy but live in many ways on the back side of what others choose for me. There is but one fear I can do something about. The fear that I might live and die without ever having known why. I can choose to make the footprints in this world my feet were born to make.

That’s why Zechariah said of Jesus, "Do not be afraid." You can follow a Jesus whose sole purpose for existence was to redeem you for eternity. Jesus knew why he was here. Do you?