In a bit of delicious irony, I turned to Wikipedia to read about the origin of the term “crowdsource.” Wikipedia is, of course, one of the largest and most visible crowdsourced projects on the Internet. Its articles are written, contributed, critiqued and edited by a huge number of volunteers, with their work being harnessed and harmonized by Wikipedia’s algorithms and staff.
My own blog here itself was meant, although I wasn’t thinking of the term, to be a kind of crowdsourcing of sermon preparation. It hasn’t panned out, but I had hoped for readers’ comments and questions regarding my initial thoughts about a text to aid and hone the final work I did in preparing to preach. The reality is that comments (other than a load of immediately trashed spam from blog bots) are rare and only come from one or two people. But I digress.
I’m having a little fun this Palm Sunday by viewing Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as a bit of dominical crowdsourcing, with Jesus pulling together resources contributed by a crowd of volunteers in order to create an acted parable and time of worship focused on who He is and what He has come to do. It appears in all four Gospels, but this year we will hear about Palm Sunday from John 12:12-19.
Surprisingly, John is the only Gospel which specifically mentions palm branches, providing the popular name for the day in the church calendar. Matthew and Mark simply mention branches being laid in the road, while all three synoptics say that faithful disciples laid their cloaks in the road for Jesus to ride over. Thus some the trappings of the procession were crowdsourced both by Jesus’ immediate circle of followers and by the crowd which joined them that day.
Likewise, only told in Matthew, Mark and Luke, the donkey(s) upon which Jesus rode, was(were) procured by disciples following Jesus’ directions to have it(them) volunteered by the owner.
The praise itself, including that iconic word for the day, “Hosanna!” is also a voluntary product of the crowd. It appears that Jesus in no way directed or arranged for what was said about Him, yet the ancient, perhaps not even wholly understood, cry of “Save us!” and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord–the king of Israel!” are accurate and prophetic depictions of the One one who was riding into Jerusalem.
Which all, I will muse, suggests the possibility that Jesus still desires to “crowdsource” our worship of Him. Scripture offers us no complete liturgy, even for a Jewish service of worship. Instead we receive tantalizing glimpses of great moments of praise offered to God and to His Son. Some of them, at least, incorporate parts that utilize what people have at hand to offer, be it palm branches, words from Scripture, musical instrumentation, or bodily expression like standing or bowing before the Lord.
Our own congregation has discovered that even our recorded on-line worship services are enhanced when crowdsourced in some way, by including more faces and voices than simply the pastor and the song leaders. So we seek a variety of Scripture readers, offerings of devotional thoughts, reports from missionaries, and brief words of praise or thanksgiving on special occasions. All of it comes together a bit like Wikipedia or some piece of open-source software, and like the first Palm Sunday: beautiful but functional, highly participatory yet unified in aim, glorious in being so good while incorporating both the great and the less-than-perfect in the whole.
So I’d suggest that our Lord invented crowdsourcing long before we thought of it, and that it is actually His own plan for the creation of His kingdom on this earth. As we are saying also about the diversity of that kingdom, it’s a grand mosaic, with each of us in the crowd bringing and offering a piece to fit into the holy design.