Palm Sunday Sermon from Jerusalem 2020

Good morning everyone! Here's the link for the Palm Sunday sermon and prayers from Redeemer Lutheran Church in Jerusalem. I've also copied the sermon below, if you want to read it.

I hope you're all well, staying inside, and washing your hands! Be well.

Please reach out if you have specific prayer requests. Turns out, I have lots of time to pray these days. :-)

Peace,
Pastor Carrie

(photo above: Palm Sunday walk 2017)

PALM SUNDAY SERMON (click here) 

Matthew 21:1-11

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

It’s now been a several weeks since the Redeemer church community was able to gather in person to worship. For Doug, Sara, Victor, and other congregation members living in Bethlehem and Beit Jala, it’s been even longer. And some of our beloved community members have returned to their home countries. This is not easy. It’s not easy for us to stay connected, to stay busy, to stay hopeful in these days of isolation and separation.

But today, I must say it feels especially hard. Palm Sunday in Jerusalem is very special. This is the day we remember the story of how Jesus entered Jerusalem and began a Holy Week journey that led to the cross and, ultimately, to Christ’s resurrection.

In Jerusalem, we don’t do anything halfway, so we usually remember this story together with roughly 15,000 friends, marching from the church at Bethphage on the Mt of Olives all the way down the mountain and into the Old City to the Church of St. Anne, singing and dancing, waving banners and flags, shouting “Hosanna in the highest!”, and generally stopping up East Jerusalem traffic for most of the day.

It’s an amazing experience. I love the feeling of being side by side with so many Christians from around the world, hearing songs of praise in many languages, seeing priests, pastors, sisters and brothers from various denominations and orders marching in their clergy attire, seeing children in the Muslim neighborhoods we march through waving from balconies and street corners—and sometimes marching alongside us, selling us cold water or a palm branch for 5 shekels.

I am really missing this today, and I’m sure you do, too. Wherever you are listening from today, I know you miss the chance to gather as a community and mark the beginning of Holy Week. I know you miss the chance to be side by side with your friends, your church family, honoring your traditions.

This is different, and different is hard.

But I’ve been thinking about how this very peculiar Palm Sunday, occurring in the middle of a crisis, is not all that different from the one Jesus experienced. Because let’s be honest: for Jesus, those Palm Sunday hosannas, welcoming a king to Jerusalem, were not a celebration. They were a sign of crisis. They were a sign that the people really did not yet understand who he was, or what kind of king he was.

Throughout his ministry—from his baptism in the Jordan, traveling through the Galilee and now entering Jerusalem—Jesus not only preached but embodied a new way of being, an alternative to Caesar’s empire. And he did it, not by starting a war or gathering an army, but by teaching, healing, and feeding the poor. He did it by raising Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter to life. He did it by eating with sinners and making friends with scoundrels and outcasts. He did it by telling everyone of God’s love for them, and for the world.

Several times, Jesus warned those who chose to follow him that choosing this alternative way would lead to persecution. He warned them that to follow in this new way, they would need to pick up the cross and carry it with him. He even predicted his own death. But as we know, the disciples weren’t ready to hear it.

So I think that as he entered Jerusalem, surrounded by all those hosannas, Jesus must have felt a range of emotions, and they probably aren’t the happy ones we are missing on this day. What do you think they were? I imagine he felt alone. But maybe also frustrated. Maybe frightened of what was to come. Maybe worried, that even after all his preaching and teaching, healing and raising the dead, the people still didn’t get it. The people were still looking for a king like Caesar, rather than the king of love, the king of mercy, the king of forgiveness, the king of heaven.

As we begin this Holy Week that is so very different from any we’ve experienced before, it is good to remember that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was something entirely different, too. The events of Holy Week, which the church usually marks with time-honored traditions and beloved liturgies, were not “traditional” events at the time – they were acts of dissent. Jesus was a disturber of the peace, a rabble-rouser, a prophet. 

During that week in Jerusalem, Jesus knelt and washed the feet of his own disciples. He spoke truth to power and confronted religious authorities. He spoke mercy to the criminals dying beside him. He forgave his own executioners.

Nothing about that week was regular! Nothing about that week was “the way we always do it.”

But it was holy.

It was holy, because it revealed a God who loves us so much, God sent the Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

It was holy, because it revealed a king—Jesus—who does not rule by fear or by might, but by love, and by emptying himself for our sake.

It was holy, because it was different. 

Which, as a matter of fact, is what the word “holy” means—something that is holy is something that is not like us, it is something “other than”, it is something different—like God, who is unlike us. And like Jesus, who is a completely different kind of king than the world expects.

So here we are, entering Holy Week. And it’s really, really different. The truth is, we are probably looking toward many really, really different weeks to come. Perhaps we can think of them as many holy weeks, many more days in which to contemplate the new way of being community, the new way of loving God and neighbor, the new way of being ourselves, that Jesus brought not only to Jerusalem, but to the world.

Let us pray:

Lord, we mark time with hours, days, months, and years. You mark time in ways we cannot comprehend. Help us to learn to mark time with worship, praise, and prayers, wherever we are, rooting our lives in the living and always reforming tradition of your beloved community. Amen.