30.03.2026
Saint Francis
Rev. Gregory Stevens, Guest preacher
"Ordinary Radicals"
Palm Sunday March 29, 2026
“The Power of Christ compels you! The Power of Christ compels you! In the name of all things holy I cast the demons out of you!”
When I was a kid, the movie, “The Exorcist” absolutely terrified me. The spinning head, the pea soup, the guttural voice. And that line, "The power of Christ compels you", was supposed to be the thing that made everything safe, but in the movie, it only made things more terrifying.
So years later, when I found myself standing in the San Francisco chambers of the California Public Utilities Commission, wearing my pastoral collar, holding my fingers in a cross shape, and shouting those same words, I had to laugh at the absurdity. Here I was, a pastor, reenacting a scene from a horror movie in a government hearing room.
But this was no exorcism in the traditional sense. This was street theater, the kind that tells the truth so clearly people cannot look away, the kind that interrupts business as usual.
We walked into that chamber knowing that outside, the lights were going out across our city. Not because we lack the knowledge or resources to keep them on, but because PG&E, the investor-owned utility granted a monopoly over our grid, has let the infrastructure decay. Lines left aging. Repairs deferred. All while the company kept raising rates and paying out dividends. Over a hundred people died in wildfires caused by neglected equipment. Families sat in the dark during heat waves watching their food spoil.
We were there to demand something different: democratic public power, a utility owned by the people, accountable to communities, not shareholders. Electricity is a public good, not a market for financial extraction.
For months, we had brought frontline stories to the CPUC elders struggling to breathe in sweltering apartments, families wondering how long a medical device battery would last. And every time, we were met with technical explanations, deflections, the quiet message that this was all somehow inevitable. The commissioners sat through hearing after hearing, their eyes glazed, already knowing what they would do. We were losing. Not because we were wrong, but because we were boring. So, I decided to tell the truth in a way that could be felt in the body. I put on my collar, walked to the podium, and performed an exorcism.
The power of Christ compels you!
I cast out the demon of rate hikes without reinvestment. The demon of corporate greed that extracts value while letting infrastructure crumble. The demon of a rigged system where the regulators end up working for the same corporations they’re supposed to keep in check. The demon of complacency that whispers, “This is just the way things are.”
It was theater, pure, unapologetic street theater. And something shifted. The Board woke up. They laughed, they looked confused, they were genuinely unsettled. After hours of rehearsed testimonies and mind-numbing statistics, suddenly there was a pastor in a collar casting out demons on the record. They could not look away. It changed the energy in the room more than any spreadsheet ever could.
Now, did my exorcism single-handedly defeat PG&E? No. The fight continues. But for one moment, the numb routine of bureaucracy was broken by a holy fool who refused to pretend that rate hikes were good policy. PG&E’s policies acted as spiritual and material violence on us working families trying to keep the lights on, and they needed to be named and cast out.
Now, this kind of street theater has a long history. In the late 70s, groups like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took to the streets and to the bedsides of dying AIDS patients, dressed in holy habits and face paint, parodying sacred religious imagery while offering real acts of compassionate care. They raised tons of money for those abandoned during the AIDS crisis, confronted shame with joy, and turned spectacle into deep solidarity. Their work did not ask for permission. It operated on the belief that sometimes the most important performances happen in the public square, loud and impossible to look away from.
And here is the thing. Jesus was doing this centuries before anyone gave it a fancy name.
On this Palm Passion Sunday, Jesus’ triumphal entry is no usual royal parade. It’s more of a holy spectacle. It’s a piece of street theater designed to mock the powers that be and envision a different way of being in the world.
On the other side of the city at that very moment, Pontius Pilate was entering the city from the west, arriving at the head of a column of Roman cavalry.
Picture it…Horses. Armor. Spears. Banners declaring “Caesar is Lord.” The whole machinery of the empire reminded the occupied people exactly who was in charge.
And then there was Jesus, entering from the east on a borrowed, beat up donkey, surrounded by peasants waving branches torn from the roadside, shouting “Hosanna” a word that means “save us” directed at a man who, by all appearances, looked like he couldn’t save anyone at all. It was a direct visual counterpoint. It was a first century political satire. It was a living, breathing protest against the lie that violence and domination are the only ways to rule.
This too, was not Jesus' only performance.
When he cleansed the temple, overturned tables, that was an act of street theater. When he healed on the Sabbath, putting a man with a withered hand in the center of the room and making everyone watch, that was street theater. When he ate with tax collectors and sinners, sharing a table with the very people the religious elite had cast out, that was street theater. Every meal was a performance. Every shared loaf was a declaration that God's table is bigger than anyone's rules.
The very concept of God’s incarnation into a lowly working-class peasant to save the entire cosmos is the ultimate act of street theater.
That’s what the crowd understood when they shouted “Hosanna.” We’ve cleaned that word up too much. We put it in hymns, print it on banners, say it like it’s polite church language. But Hosanna is not a neat little “hooray.” It’s a shout from the gut, and in this story, the answer shows up in a strange, almost ridiculous way.
Hosanna means “save us!.” It’s what people cry when they’re fed up and out of options. It’s the sound of folks living under occupation, watching their kids go hungry while the rich sit comfortably. It’s what you say when the whole system has told you, you don’t count.
And here’s the twist, the thing the crowd somehow gets before anyone else does: the help doesn’t come looking powerful. It comes looking foolish. It comes in a kind of holy mischief, a subversive, almost laughable act that pokes at the whole system. Hosanna is not just desperation. It’s recognition. It’s people seeing, maybe for the first time, that the way out might not look like strength as the world defines it. It might look like flipping the script, making a mockery of power, finding hope in something the empire can’t even take seriously.
It’s the kind of joy that bubbles up not because everything is fixed, but because you finally see a crack in the wall. And somehow, that crack comes dressed in drag.
And as the crowd shouted Hosanna, the city was thrown into utter turmoil. Verse 10 says, "When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, 'Who is this?'"
The city was shaken. Not by swords. Not by chariots. Not by a well-funded insurgency. But by a man on a donkey and a crowd full of people who refused to stop shouting and waving their palm branches.
Much like Jesus, we are called to be ordinary radicals. Ordinary because we do not have it all figured out and we don’t much believe anyone who says they do have it all figured out. And we’re radical because we’re holding onto a very sacred and irresistible hope. A hope that refuses to play by the rules of power. A hope that trusts the way of the donkey over the warhorse. A hope that dares to believe, as Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl reminded us, love is stronger than hate. And a hope that knows sometimes the most prophetic thing you can do is make the powers that be laugh just long enough to unsettle them while you cast out their demons.
As people of deep faith, we are called to a disruptive kindness, a bold compassion, a reckless generosity. To be so full of Love that when the world looks at us, at our messy lives and our weird hope and our insistence on feeding the hungry, they are thrown into turmoil. As Jesus told his disciples, "They will know us by our love.”
So, reclaim the word *Hosanna*. Let it be the rhythm of your feet as you walk out those doors. When you look at the news and feel anxiety creep in: *Hosanna*. When you see a neighbor struggling and do not know what to do: *Hosanna*. When you feel like giving up because the road is long and the empire keeps winning: *Hosanna*.
Because this is the weird and subversive way of the Divine. God hears our cries and then arrives on a donkey, not a war horse, to walk with and alongside us. God does not confront the empire with violence but begins to undo it through vulnerability and creative foolery. God lifts up the voices of the powerless and lets them cry out, sometimes with a borrowed cloak and a holy, almost ridiculous sense of theater.
So here is what I want you to know before you leave this place. You are not here to sit in comfortable seats and admire a story about something that happened two thousand years ago.
You are the story. You are the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence that God is sending into the world. You get to throw down your cloaks, your resources, your time, right in the middle of the road so that something holy can pass through. You get to be the disruptive kindness that makes people stop and ask, “Who is this?”
And when they ask, you get to tell them. Tell them it is the one who comes in the name of love. Tell them it is the one who rides with the left out and the over looked. Tell them it is the one who still needs your voice, your hands, your willingness to make a scene for the sake of healing justice.
So go ahead. Make a scene. Be ridiculous. Shout for help like you mean it. Cast out a demon or two. And trust that the one who heard the first *Hosanna* is still listening and still riding right alongside you.
Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest.
Amen
