Palm Sunday - You're Invited

Today is probably the most emotional rollercoaster of the church year, our church year.

We start off with the funnest thing for the kids, and then we move into the

darkest hour of our story.

And I just want to make sure that you know this morning that you're invited.

If you've gone to your mailbox this week, you probably got some stuff from Trinity

if we have your contact info. And if you looked in your inbox,

you probably got some emails. That's

what happens when you're rector's of communications bachelor's degree.

And you showed up here today, and, you know, boy, do you look great.

So you must have some sense that you're invited.

But I just wanted to be sure that by the end of our time today,

you know that you're invited to Holy Week.

In exactly seven days, we'll have the brightest service of the Christian year,

where we remember, again, the Son of God coming back from the dead.

And on Friday, we'll have our Good Friday service The same story we just read

Where from noon to three in the afternoon Darkness hung over the land as Jesus

hung on the cross And we'll do seven sermons,

seven words A drop-in, drop-out Over the course of three hours An invitation to come here.

And to consider again and to be involved with and to be struck by the somberness

and the death and the difficulty of what it means for Jesus to have given himself over to death.

On Thursday evening, we'll have our Maundy Thursday service.

And if you're like my students at Christ School, you are confused why it's called Monday Thursday.

So just as a quick aside, this is for free, included with tuition.

The Latin word for command is a commandment is mandatum.

And so in the Latin translation of the Bible, Novum mandatum wo bestow,

I give you a new commandment to love one another.

Maundy Thursday is the night when we come here to remember the new commandment

Jesus gave us on his last night on earth. And we go through the sacred and awkward,

if you like, ritual of having your feet washed, of washing somebody else's feet.

And then on Wednesday and Tuesday and Monday, we'll have Eucharists here to

remember the way Jesus preached in the temple. the conversations that he had

in those first three days of the last week of his life.

And here we are today to remember, to reenact, to re-embody the moment when

Jesus marched, entered into Jerusalem on a donkey.

If you were looking at Jerusalem from above,

let's say 100,000 feet up in the air, and you were looking down on this day

when a 33-year-old Jewish rabbi from a small-ish town on the northwest side

of the Sea of Galilee rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, what would you see?

Well, Jesus is coming from this town, the name of which is impossible to pronounce

in English, Bethphage in Greek.

He comes over the Eastern Hill and over the Mount of Olives,

where he'll also spend part of his last night.

And Matthew tells us that normal people.

Like field workers, people who had probably something else they should have been doing that day.

Hundreds of them, thousands of them, come pouring east out of Jerusalem to greet Jesus.

They're doing this. This is a pretty standard cultural practice in the ancient

Near East and is still to a certain extent a practice today where if a foreign

dignitary, a respected figure, a beloved figure is coming to your city,

your village, your town,

you'd run out to meet them on the desert road and guide them into your city.

And into the 20th century, people would still go 10 miles out from Near Eastern

cities to go greet a foreign dignitary or something.

They are going out to meet what Matthew tells us they think is the prophet from

Nazareth and to ferry him back into their city.

And all the while, they are shouting what we say every Sunday,

Hosanna in the highest Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord Why do we do that?

We do that because we believe today as then Jesus is trying to come home to us.

He's trying to enter into Trinity and to our lives and to Asheville.

He's trying to bring the kingdom of God to the orders of creation.

And so every week a little bit is Palm Sunday in our Eucharist.

We say, Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. We walk with Jesus over the hill into Jerusalem.

And Matthew does this kind of mix and match thing in the little prophecy that he says this fulfills.

The first chunk of that indented bit in your bulletin comes from the book of

Isaiah, chapter 62, verse 11, which says, The Lord has made proclamation to

Isaiah 62:11

the ends of the earth, say to daughter Zion, see your Savior comes.

See your reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him.

And the other verse he steals from is Zechariah 9.9. I know you read it earlier

this week, but just to remind you, it says,

Rejoice greatly, daughter Zion, shout, daughter Jerusalem, see,

your king comes to you, righteous and victorious and lowly, riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Matthew sees in Jesus the fulfillment of this long-awaited hope that God would

come to Jerusalem himself in his own human form, that he would bring salvation,

that he would show up with the strength of God, but curiously in lowliness and

of the humility of someone riding on a donkey.

If you looked above Jerusalem, a thousand feet down, you would see from the

east this one man coming in in this throng of peasant people as they cut palms

from the trees around them and they laid their clothes on the ground to smooth out his way.

And he's only on a donkey. a second-hand low model,

It's possible—now, this isn't like a dead historical fact, but it's good historical

speculation to think that you would have seen another procession,

maybe even at the same time.

You know, Jesus is going into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover,

which is the holiest day of the Jewish year.

And Jerusalem—well, lots of people wanted to do that in their day and age.

So Jewish people would come in from the surrounding area of Jerusalem.

They might come as far as Greece or Cyprus. They would come in from all parts

of their scattered world, and Jerusalem would swell to three,

four, maybe five times its size in the ancient Passover season.

And so they come into Jerusalem the day after the Sabbath before Passover.

And in the decades leading up to Jesus, as you can imagine, under Roman oppression

and Roman rule, this became a time of some.

Dissatisfactory energy, you might say. There are records of attempted,

mostly crushed, Jewish rebellion around the Passover season.

So it became the practice of the Roman governor of Judea to come in just to

remind everybody who was in charge and to keep anyone from getting any funny

ideas. So Pontius Pilate,

would have come to Jerusalem perhaps a week before the Passover starts.

He would have ridden in from the west, from his palace in Caesarea Philippi on the coast.

He would have come in with a hundred, if not a thousand Roman soldiers.

He would have come in dressed for battle and on a white horse with his slaves

and his animals and his servants trailing behind him.

It would have been a sign of who was really in charge, what was and what was

not going to happen this week.

And so there's a chance, maybe, that if you looked at Jerusalem from 1,000 feet

above, on Palm Sunday, in the 33rd year of Jesus' life, you would see from the

east the prophet from Nazareth riding in on a donkey,

and a show of military strength coming in from the west as a sign that a showdown was about to go on.

Now, if you go read chapters 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 of Matthew, if you read that

last week of Jesus' life, which I very seriously encourage you to do this week.

You notice that Jesus is constantly in trouble.

He is constantly in fights with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the people

who run the temple to a certain extent with his own disciples and all of it.

Under the pressurized watch of the Roman guards in the temple, around the city.

You can feel it as you read the last week of his life that he is building up to something.

And, well, we just read what he's building up to. He is building up to the moment

of his own brutal and tortured death.

When all of the things that still ravage our world, mob mentality,

sin and evil, a broken justice system, corrupt religious bodies.

The irresponsibility of the state, the irresponsibility of national leaders,

all of the stuff that still breaks the world today, it crashes down on the body

of Jesus as he hangs for three hours on the cross.

That week builds up to that moment from the two processions facing down until

the day Jesus finally breathes his last.

We walk with him through Holy Week. I want you to know that you're invited this

week to Holy Week, but I'm a little nervous that I haven't explained myself well.

Because you might think, it might feel like I've just given you more homework

for a week of work you've already got to do. Now you have to read stuff and think about stuff.

And if you don't, then you might miss out and you might lose stuff.

But it's worth remembering that our entrance into Holy Week,

our participation in Holy Week, is not something we do.

It's a reminder of what God has already done for us.

I think I was maybe part of the last generation that had home videos on VHS,

which means every so often when I've got the energy and I can find somebody

who I can borrow their VHS set from, I might go watch these videos of my early

days, and I'm sure you've done this too.

There's footage of my parents dating, badly filmed footage taken by my uncle

of their wedding. there's footage of my first couple years running around the yard and.

And you know that feeling. You know that feeling when you're brought home again

to some piece of your own history, when you remember almost what it was like

to live in that house or to have that friend.

Maybe you've got a piece of your mom's clothing, even though she's long gone.

Maybe you've got something that smells like somebody.

Maybe you have something that sounds like somebody.

And when you encounter it, when you spend a little time with it,

it's just an unavoidable reminder that this is who we are.

This is where we've come from. That was our house and that was our little face.

Holy Week is the story of how the God who made the world in love and when the

world had broken itself, called a people for himself and Abraham,

made an agreement to try to fix it.

How it never seemed to go exactly right. And so God thought he would go down and fix it himself.

And Jesus, the God human, lives among us, teaches among us, prays among us, walks among us.

Heals us, casts out all those things that then as now break human life until

he gave his own body for the campaign of saving the world, only to resurrect

and ascend and send the Spirit so we can do it too.

The invitation to Holy Week is not to be Jesus. You don't have to get crucified.

But it is a moment to remember that his entry into Jerusalem,

his death on the cross, they have made a whole new life,

possible for us you are invited this week to live in ancient Jerusalem to be

part of all this good stuff going at Trinity you are invited if you want to eternal life in God Amen.

The homily was offered by Deacon Peter Hartwig in the presence of the congregation.

Musical contributions were performed by Dr. Kevin Seal.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Production was guided by Karen Marie Frederiksen.