Palm Sunday: A Palm Shaped Imagination; March 29, 2026

speaker-0: Right, our Hebrew Bible reading is from Psalm 118, the first two, and then towards the end, ⁓ give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His steadfast love endures forever. Let Israel say, his steadfast love endures forever. Open to me the gates of righteousness that I might enter through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter through it. I thank you that you have answered me and become my salvation. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Save us, we beseech you, O Lord. O Lord, we beseech you, give us success. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord. The Lord is God and he has given us light. Bind the festal procession with branches up to the horns of the altar. You are my God and I will give thanks to you. You are my God, I will extol you. Oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

speaker-1: Our scripture this morning comes from the Gospel of Matthew, a story you have likely heard before, but may God open it to us in a new way this morning. Listen with me for the word of the Lord. When they, that is all of Jesus's crew, had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. And if anyone says anything to you, just say this. The Lord needs them. You should try this out on your own. and he will send them immediately. This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet. Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey and on a colt, the full of a donkey. The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the ground and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord Hosanna in the highest heaven. And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, who is this? And the crowds were saying, this is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee. Word of the Lord.

speaker-0: Thank you.

speaker-1: Let us pray. ⁓ God, by your work of the Spirit in and around us, shape our minds and our souls that our desires, our hopes, and our imaginations of what is possible with you might be transformed. Now may the words of my mouth. and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. On Friday, we celebrated 11 years since our daughter Lila's successful heart surgery at eight tender weeks old. And by celebrated, I mean she came home from school and I said, Lila, it's been 11 years since your surgery. And she went, and that was it. That was the celebration that we had. But at the time, it was almost impossible to imagine that they could operate on. such a tiny heart. They told us that her heart was really only about the size of the end of my thumb. And the hole that they repaired in the between the top two chambers was of course smaller yet and somehow they were able to get in there and to stitch a piece of Gore-Tex around that hole. So don't be jealous but Lila's heart is waterproof.

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: We knew the surgery was coming. We learned ⁓ during a 20 week ultrasound that it was coming because there we learned that she had a congenital heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. It was, and we knew this because they just kept telling us over and over again. how unlikely it was, it was very unexpected. Colleen was also born with this congenital defect, no one we met at the hospital had ever seen a mother-child combo with this defect. It isn't heritable. We just won a lottery that we didn't buy tickets for. It's safe to say that we were disappointed. Not with the outcome. She did great. Her surgeon was incredible. But the experience did not meet our expectations of what it was going to be like to become parents. Surgery at eight weeks old was not what we had imagined. We learned earlier than most parents, even before she was born, that you cannot protect your children. We pretend that we're capable of doing that, but the truth is that they are always and never in God's hands. I suspect that we were surprised and disappointed because none of our friends had won the same crappy lottery. They all, and God knows that they all were having babies at the same time. This is how it goes. You all get married in waves, and then you have babies in waves, and everybody ⁓ was cruising through their pregnancies and deliveries and were dealing with normal stuff like being walking zombies and learning combinations of new words like diaper genie, that's neat, and realizing that, ⁓ my gosh, There's no turning back now, and I still don't know what the heck I'm doing But not me and Colleen baby We got to do all that stuff with a little extra anxiety Before baby even arrived and most days it was fine truly We've got rather cool heads We've got a very good God and it did not hurt that we lived next to one of the best children's hospitals in the United States when we were in Pittsburgh but on our worst days We'd get a touch, woe is me, about it, right? Why is this happening to us? We felt like the expectations that we had for this season were not being met because as we watched everybody else live, that sort of formed our imaginations for what this was gonna be like. It was supposed to be all bliss and excitement. not bliss and excitement and dread of what might happen. I say that to tell you this. We give a lot of grief to the people who showed up to the protests that Jesus was leading that day in Jerusalem. There they were, waving their palms, crying, Hosanna. But we know, because we have the whole story in front of us, that all of them are gonna turn on him. They'll be crying, crucify him in just a few short days. And even his best friends, the people that are closest to him for years now, they will disappear and swear they don't know him just to save their own hides. And given the benefit of 2,000 years of hindsight and an awful lot of distance, we think to ourselves, how could they? How dare they? But I gotta tell ya, I think that everybody who has ever been disappointed, who expected one thing and got another, should take a beat here. Because you can understand the disappointment that comes with not getting the thing that you thought you ordered. As far as they could understand, Jesus was leading them on

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: and then Rug pulled them. Let me explain to you what I mean. The text says, that just before Passover, Jesus comes into town from the east, from the Mount of Olives, on a donkey, which is exactly the path and exactly the mode of transportation. that Solomon would have taken a thousand years beforehand when his father David named him successor to the throne during a time when the kingship was contested as David's other son Adonijah was trying to steal the kingship. There were alternate visions of who might be king, and Jesus was taking this very well-known Davidic path. The route, the donkey, the coats, the palms, all of them are dripping with historical precedent and laden with expectations about what it means. What is more? Because of the oppression of the Romans during the time when Jesus lived, Jerusalem was constantly simmering and almost anything could set it over to boil. And during Passover, which again, if you've forgotten, was a feast that recalled God's deliverance of the people last time they were being oppressed. During Passover, Jesus wasn't the only one showing up to town. The city was packed with celebrants from out of town who had come in to celebrate Passover. all of this remembering together, right, all of these people had gathered to celebrate a festival of uprising and overthrow, right? And all of this symbol and all of these new faces that the Romans didn't know, all of this might make their present oppressors a little bit nervous. Wouldn't you imagine? Well, it did, in fact, make the Romans nervous. And Pontius Pilate... hand-washing Pontius Pilate, you know who I'm talking about, from about a week from now. His office was in Caesarea Maritima, which was out on the coast. I guess he loved the smell of the ocean while he plotted how to keep the Jews under Rome's boot. the same time as all of these folks would flood Jerusalem for Passover, Pilate would also enter Jerusalem, but there would not be any mistaking him. Pilate would come in with an entourage of soldiers and a parade of military might just in case any of these onlookers might forget who they're dealing with. and consider getting a little froggy over the weekend. The people had seen this year after year. Pilot coming in from the West with a show of strength from Caesarea Maritima and now they see Jesus coming in from the East. Intentionally casting himself as an alternative power to pilot. And because the people believe that they know what he's doing, that he is setting up a clash, they throw him a military parade of his own. Jesus, not on a war horse, we are choiced by Jesus, but we get to throw back to Solomon, right? And they believe they know what he's doing. So they grab their coats and they grab their palms. And as they do, their hands are also full of a thousand years of memories. I don't know if you've kept up with the interior design of Solomon's temple. But the place was decked with palms. Palms were engraved even in the inner sanctuary of Solomon's temple. And so just like a piece of furniture that's always gonna remind you of grandma's house, the palm would always be registered in the minds of the people as a symbol, not only of God's presence, but also of God's power. This was reinforced in the festival of Sukkot, which is a harvest festival that the Jews celebrated every year that celebrated God's provision for them while they were walking through the wilderness after the Exodus. And during that festival, you're never gonna guess what they were commanded to do. Wave palm branches. as a symbol not only of God's deliverance of them from Egypt but also of God's coming reign. Thanks be to God, God is coming in power to save us. 170 years before Jesus rides into Jerusalem on that donkey, Judas Maccabeus led a revolt in Jerusalem to kick out Israel's occupiers of the day, who at the time were the Seleucids, the Greeks. And the Jewish dynasty that would come after that was called the Hasmoneans. And guess what they had minted on their corpse? points. Palm leaves. In the same way that we are printing coins with only arrows in the hands of an eagle these days, so the Jews printed palms on their coins as a way of saying, the occupiers have been ousted, the land is free, thanks be to God, he's done it for us. So every day when you'd walk to work and get your daily cup of coffee and a croissant, calories don't count in this imagination. with coins that remind you of God's liberation that has been led by a single charismatic figure who rallies the troops to violently overthrow an oppressor. Does this sound familiar? The people have been paying attention is my point and they know what is supposed to come next. And so when it doesn't, and when this would-be leader is arrested and killed, of course they take off. They have been steeped in expectation about what liberation looks like. and what power and what strength look like and Jesus all of the sudden in their minds does not fit this mold at all their imaginations have been formed in one direction and Jesus pulls up fast and hard and the other of course they react to this yesterday Millions of people took to the streets in no-kings protests for a lot of different reasons. Some of them were angry and scared about a number of things. Still others were upset with the war in Iran or ICE. And maybe you don't understand why they did that. Or maybe you were out there yourselves. Maybe you are just generally suspicious of demonstrations like that. Or maybe you think, I don't think that protest does anything at all. It's an interesting question. Because at the end of the day, what did Jesus's Palm Sunday protest do? I mean, nothing really happens after this. If you read on in the text, Jesus doesn't even stay in town for drinks afterwards. He walks in, he heals some people, he flips a table, and then he goes back to Bethany. He leaves the city. He goes back to Bethany to spend the night. But here's what it definitely did. And here I think is the power of every protest. It started something. It shouldered open the door of the people's imaginations and it got them to start thinking about what does it mean that this one who has power over wind and wave and disease and demon chooses not to use that power to inflict violence upon the oppressors that everybody to a person would instead deserved it. What does that mean? They begin to learn, even then, what we are still learning today. That the power that matters most sometimes doesn't look like power at all to us. Sometimes it looks like a man on a donkey or two riding toward his own death, weeping over a city that doesn't understand him yet. In a few short days though, that power is going to look like resurrection. And it's going to look like the defeat of death. They just have to hold on for a little bit to begin to have their imaginations reformed so that they can receive this miracle. And hopefully they will begin then, indeed we know they do, they begin to reimagine Jesus as the one that Zechariah described. Not just riding in on a donkey, but riding in on a donkey to break the weapons of war. not to incite violence, but to bring peace to all the land. These same people are going to be a part of the community that produces the book of Revelation, which includes a vision of an uncountable multitude made up of every tribe and every nation and every language standing before God and before Jesus, who is the lamb of God with palm branches in their hands, crying out, save us ⁓ God but salvation belongs to the Lord because they are celebrating a day when God has indeed healed every broken heart physically and metaphorically. Palm Sunday prayers become praise because the saving will someday come but it won't come through force. That's the imagination that Palm Sunday is trying to build in us. Not simple optimism, not wishful thinking, but the costly, actual, resurrection-proven conviction that nonviolent, undying love is the most powerful force in the universe. that God with us in every way is undefeated. That Christ's presence in our suffering, his refusal to return hatred with hatred, his willingness to go all the way through death rather than around it, that alone... is the power that no military parade, no crucifixion, no pilot, no emperor, no empire has ever been able to answer. So let us wave our palms in love's great protest, for God's love will never disappoint. Thanks be to God.