Since late January I’ve been preaching weekly as a long-term supply priest at Trinity+St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. It’s been mostly from the aisle with no notes, but you can watch/listen here. For Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter, at least, I’ve returned to manuscripts …
A sermon for Palm Sunday, Year C:
Luke 19:28-40; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56
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Scene: Jesus sends his disciples to fetch a donkey he knows will be tied up near near the entrance of the city. Although he does not seek the kind of glory he knows the crowds will shower upon him, he is mindful of how the stories of scripture shape his community’s imagination. He expects they will miss the prophet’s point about the necessary humility of anyone who would claim to be the Messiah. He honors their expectations anyway.
Scene: A pair of teachers with long beards and fine robes sidle up beside our Lord’s humble beast of burden. One of the men is pointing straight in Jesus’s face, barely keeping his anger in check; the other keeps looking anxiously over his shoulder, watching the teenagers who have no cloaks pulling down frond after frond and running ahead to toss them in the road. The teachers tell Jesus to get his people under control. He tells them “you don’t know the half of it,”: all creation is longing for the promised redemption.
Scene: Jesus and his friends share a meal, balancing his desire to enjoy a final night with them and the need to prepare them for all that is to follow. “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Already he is giving them all that he has and all that he is. They get into an argument about who is the greatest. He sighs, smiles, begins again.
Scene: Simon Peter sees clearly enough the severity of the situation unfolding before them, and he boldly declares his commitment to the cause. His loving teacher knows the disciple doesn’t see within himself quite so cleary. Still, he trusts his friend to do what is right when he comes to himself, and he offers a preemptive word of encouragement and de facto forgiveness.
Scene: Jesus raises his voice for the first time all evening when he realizes his disciples have taken all that sword talk too literally. He reflexively heals the bystander his friends have maimed—and as he does so, he realizes it’s the last time power will go forth from him in quite this way.
Scenes: Though his hands are now bound, still in his final hours Jesus witnesses with his words. While he refuses to claim the kingship the rulers and their handlers have in mind as they interrogate and mock him, he is regal in his compassion to the last: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me”; “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Scenes: A good and righteous Jewish man who shares a name with another who proved similarly trustworthy, Joseph of Arimathea receives and lays to rest the body. The women who were Jesus’ companions, and who were not so easily scared off as his male disciples, bear their own witness to the body and make their preparations according to the custom of their people. And then like Joseph, like Jesus himself, “On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.”
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The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ: According to Luke, it was remarkable, but not exceptional. He had listened in Galilee, so he listens in Jerusalem. He had taught in Galilee, so he teaches in Jerusalem. He had eaten and encouraged and healed and prayed and loved and forgiven and even occasionally rested, and so he continues to eat and encourage and heal and pray and love and forgive and even—when the time comes—offer up his spirit in a kind of ultimate Sabbath rest.
Jesus died exactly how he lived. He used his every human and divine faculty to express and embody and enact the love of God, a love that knows no beginning and no end.
Our various responses to this wondrous love will necessarily be partial, imperfect, halting. And yet respond we must, with the practices Jesus taught us, with listening, teaching, shared meals, words of encouragement, healing touch, and all the rest. Whatever we can do to show God’s love to our neighbor. Whatever we can do to emulate God’s forgiveness. Whatever we can do to overcome alienation from ourselves, from our families, from our neighborhoods, from our fellow citizens of the world, from the very earth itself.
Whenever you hear the Gospel, any gospel, any story of our Lord, remember that Jesus lived and died for us to show us the Way of Love, which is our help and our salvation. Don’t feel as if you need master that Way; it has already been mastered.
But when you hear the Gospel, any gospel, listen for that still, small voice of Christ whispering those words of challenge, encouragement, and power: go and do likewise.
Jesus probably won’t ask you to die for him. He will most certainly ask you to live for him.
Photo by Raquel Pedrotti on Unsplash