Today is Palm Sunday. Unfortunately, we did not make it to church services. Instead, youngest daughter got to wait two hours to be examined in a clinic and informed she has both bronchitis and sinusitis. Not fun.
But the Rev. Donald Sensing has posted his Palm Sunday sermon and that's food for thought, as always. Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt.
We should pause today as we wave palm branches, to remember that our faith is often fickle, too. We also tend to impute to Jesus a reputation he doesn't deserve and motives he doesn't have. It's all too easy to decide Jesus will affirm our fallen desires and fulfill our fallen wishes. Our praise can be both sincere and erroneous unless we remember that once we've stopped clapping our duty is to take up a cross and follow him as he carries his.Posted by Alan at March 20, 2005 07:36 PMJesus will no more turn aside for our misgiven acclaim than for that of a Jerusalem crowd two millennia ago. Nothing so trivial as public adulation can lead him away from his mission. For that we should be humbled, for Jesus does not need our praise and is not swayed by it anyway. And we should be thankful that he's not, for where would that put us? A King Jesus, twenty centuries ago, would do us no good today.
Passion week is the central part of the Jesus story. It begins with joy but proceeds to fear, despair and grieving. This week is a time of life and death, a time of love and hate, joy and sorrow, honor and betrayal, affirmation and denial. Every human emotion plays out: happiness, disappointment, joy, fear, despondency, disbelief, love, anger, bitterness. We retell this story because it rings so true with what we live and know today.