Palm Sunday Photos

Holy Week began today with our Palm Sunday worship. The incense couldn't quite keep the gnats at bay, but we braved the bugs to start our worship outdoors. Retired Bishop Henry Louttit and his wife Jan joined us for worship. The sermon is online with other recent sermons at Our sermon page. Worship continues this week with services each night at 7 p.m. with the sole exception being the Easter Vigil which starts Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Come journey with us through Holy Week.

Into your hands...

Christ,
we have seen
how much you love us.

You set your face toward Jerusalem,
gave your body to the whips,
your face to the slaps.

And with your last breath
taught us how
to live.

“Into your hands, Father, I commend my spirit.”

Help us be truly present
at your
cross
all
our lives.

The poem above is from The Center for Liturgy at Saint Louis University.

Debra Dean Murphy writes of Palm Sunday in a blog post Palms and Passion: The Work of Holy Week:

That we call these long, dense narratives “liturgies” reminds us that when we read and hear them we are not innocent bystanders–we are implicated in the stories; we have “work” to do in them (“liturgy” = leitourgia = “work of the people”). We are the crowd along the streets of Jerusalem shouting, “Hosanna! Hosanna!” and we are the same mob on Good Friday screaming, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” As Fleming Rutledge has noted, “the liturgy of Palm Sunday is set up to show you how you can say one thing one minute and its opposite the next. This is the nature of the sinful human being.”

In looking at the cruxifixion, Rutledge also says this: “What we see and hear in Jesus’ death is not just his solidarity with the victims of this world. It is that, but it is not only that. What we see and hear in the Cry of Dereliction is Jesus’ identification in his Cross not only with the innocent victims of this world but also with their torturers . . . What Jesus assumes on the Cross is not only the suffering of innocents but also the wickedness of those who inflict suffering.”

And when Jesus says, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34), “he makes himself one, not only with my pain but with my sin–because I myself, and you yourselves, and all of us ourselves, are sometimes victims of others and sometimes torturers of others and sometimes both, and when we recognize this we are, as Jesus says to the scribe, ‘not far from the kingdom.’”

To know this deeply is to do the “work” of Holy Week.

The full text of her post is online here: Palms and Passion: The Work of Holy Week.

What language does God speak?

Tomorrow's Gospel Reading is Luke's account of the Passion. We hear Jesus proclaim from the cross, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." In preaching on this passage previously, I wrote a story in which a Tanzanian man sets out on a pilgrimage to discover God's own language:

In the summer of 1998, I journeyed to Tanzania to take part in a cross-cultural internship sponsored by the Seminary. I worked in western Tanzania in an Anglican Church led by a Tanzanian priest. While there, I was asked several times, “What is your mother tongue?” You see in East Africa, everyone speaks Swahili, and many people speak English. But these are not the languages of home. Among their own tribe, their own family, most East Africans speak their tribal language. This language is their mother tongue. Whenever I explained that English was my mother tongue, people always felt sorry for me. They knew that I was a much poorer person for not having a mother tongue, a special language spoken only among my own people.

This concern about a mother tongue is reflected in a story told in East Africa of a man from the Dodomo district of Tanzania named Msafiri. Msafiri followed the traditional African religion of his people, the Wagogo. He believed in one God, the creator who is the source of all good things. Msafiri approached God by praying to his ancestors who he believed still watched over their people.

An Anglican evangelist came to his small village and began teaching the people about Christianity. Msafiri listened to the evangelist as he told about God sending his son Jesus to live among us. The stories of Jesus life, his death and resurrection touched Msafiri and he converted to Christianity. He studied with the evangelist and was baptized, taking the name Simon, for Simon of Cyrene, the African saint who had carried Jesus’ cross to Calvary.

Simon Msafiri went to church faithfully, always attending the Wednesday fellowship meetings and Sunday services. Gathered with the other Christians under the grass roof of the mud-walled church they had built together, he learned the stories from the Bible.

Simon Msafiri prayed to God in Kigogo, the language of his own people instead of the Swahili that he used in town with others. This was Simon’s mother tongue and was part of Simon’s ties to his extended family. Simon knew that God understood him when he spoke Kigogo, but he decided that God, too, must have a mother tongue—a language that was God’s own language from before time. Simon wanted to learn to pray to God in God’s own mother tongue. One day he asked the evangelist, “What is God’s mother tongue?” The evangelist thought for a moment and then said that God doesn’t have a mother tongue—all languages are the same to God.

Simon listened and thanked the evangelist. But as he went home, he began to wonder about the evangelist’s answer. Everyone Simon knew had a mother tongue they learned as a child and used among their own people. If the people Simon knew had a mother tongue, then God must as well. He decided to ask some of the elders of the village to get the answer to his question. One man said that God, as the great ancestor, must speak the language of their ancestors, Kigogo. Another said that surely God’s mother tongue is Swahili. These answers didn’t sound right to Simon and he decided to set out on a great safari, a journey to find his answer.

The full text of the sermon is online here: What language does God speak?

Palm Sunday Photos

Palm Sunday in photos and video

171 of us gathered this morning to begin the journey of Holy Week with our Palm Sunday services. Thanks go to Kenn Hodge for the photos and video of the morning.

The Passion

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, which will begin outdoors with a reading of the Palm Gospel, continue with a procession inside and then later a reading of Jesus' Passion (which means suffering) from Matthew's Gospel.

As I have preached on this Gospel reading before saying,

While, there never is an audience in a worship service, that distinction is made clear on Palm Sunday. It may seem that there is no distinction between a congregation and an audience, but there is a vast difference. An audience gathers to watch a performance. A congregation is a group gathered for worship. Some of us have roles as readers, acolytes and even as preacher, but all of us are active participants.

On Palm Sunday, we kick the congre-gations’ partici-pation up a notch. We began this service outside with a reading from Matthew about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We proclaimed “Hosanna in the highest.” Then we took up palm branches and sang and processed our way into church. You played the role of the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. That was the easy part. But Palm Sunday is also known as Passion Sunday, for on this day we recount the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. And the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem also took part in the betrayal, which followed that Friday.

Each week at King of Peace, as the congregation, you take part in the worship. This happens in your hearts, and also in the words of the liturgy. Easy words usually. Words like, “Our Father who art in heaven” and “Thanks be to God.” Today, the liturgy puts some very different words in your mouth:

“Let him be crucified.”
“Let him be crucified.”
And the most daunting of all,
“His blood be on us and on our children.”

Harsh words. Painful words. Words that seem to tempt God to take us seriously in a way we don’t want God to act.

On that Friday we now call Good, Jesus’ betrayal was complete. He had been deserted by his disciples and rejected by the Jewish leadership, as well as the crowd that had welcomed him so enthusiastically with palm branches and cloaks spread on the road. Mocked, beaten and finally crucified by the Roman officials, the man we call the King of Peace was put to death as a threat to the peace of Jerusalem. In starkest contrast to his welcome into the city gates, Jesus was taken outside of the city to be killed. Like all criminals, they did not want his death to desecrate the city. Jesus’ cross stood by the road leading into town as a warning to any other trouble makers not to follow in his footsteps.

Darkness covered the whole land from noon to three. Then Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ betrayal was complete and we join in that betrayal each Palm Sunday taking on the words of the crowd as our own words.

The sermon went on to explain the grace in the bleak story of the passion. The full text of the sermon is online here: From Passion to Table.

Palm Crosses
If you want to be able to tie palm fronds into Palm Crosses, clear directions are online with photos at kingofpeace.org/palmcrosses and zipped as an RTF file with photos at kingofpeace.org/palmcrosses/palmcrosses.zip.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Palm Sunday

April Fool's Day

Doubtless, many preachers will make the obvious connection between Palm Sunday and April Fool's Day. It's a connection the Apostle Paul first made in writing,

I know very well how foolish the message of the cross sounds to those who are on the road to destruction. But we who are being saved recognize this message as the very power of God. As the Scriptures say, "I will destroy human wisdom and discard their most brilliant ideas." So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world's brilliant debaters? God has made them all look foolish and has shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save all who believe. God's way seems foolish to the Jews because they want a sign from heaven to prove it is true. And it is foolish to the Greeks because they believe only what agrees with their own wisdom. So when we preach that Christ was crucified, the Jews are offended, and the Gentiles say it's all nonsense. But to those called by God to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the mighty power of God and the wonderful wisdom of God. This "foolish" plan of God is far wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God's weakness is far stronger than the greatest of human strength. Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world's eyes, or powerful, or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God deliberately chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose those who are powerless to shame those who are powerful. (I Corinthians 1:18-27 in the New Living Translation)

and

Stop fooling yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world's standards, you will have to become a fool so you can become wise by God's standards. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. (I Corinthians 3:18-19 NLT)

At St. Thomas' Church Upper Ferntree Gully on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, they got an early start on this by making "Fools for Christ" their theme for Lent. You can read the Rev. Susanne Chambers' Palm Sunday sermon for St. Thomas online here: Fool for Christ.

In the archives is the sermon Holy Foolishness.

What would our lives look life if we were unafraid to be fools for Christ? What would happen if you decided it was better to please God than to be concerned about what other people think of you?

Note:
For those interested in tying palm branches into crosses, King of Peace offers a clear set of illustrated directions here: How to Tie Palm Crosses.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Who is to blame?

This weekend, we have the longest Gospel reading of the year in which we read the story of Jesus' passion (or suffering) from the Gospel of Luke. Paul Nuechterlein a Lutheran pastor in Wisconsin preached a sermon about who to blame for Jesus' death in which he said in part,

How did the "Hosanna!"'s of Sunday turn to the "Crucify Him!"'s of Friday? Five days is all, and the crowd turned from shouting "Hosanna!" to shouting "Crucify him!" How does that happen?

Typically, one finds explanations that focus on Jesus and on people's mistaken views about Jesus. One often hears the line of argument, for instance, that Zealots were hoping for a Messiah to lead them into victorious battle over their enemies and simply mistook Jesus to be that kind of Messiah, turning on him by Good Friday. One often sees that kind of portrayal in today's movie versions.

Or the focus is put on the Jewish leaders and their ability to somehow turn the crowd. In the made-for-TV movie of three years ago, one that I like a lot overall, it takes the most modern approach of blaming Pilate and the Romans. Jesus died by a Roman form of execution. They were the overlords in charge of the politics. So this movie portrays Pilate as manipulating everything behind the scenes. Sensitive to the terrible deeds of Christians killing Jews through the ages, we don't want to blame the Jews, so we blame the Romans.

I'd like to submit to you this morning that blaming anyone—Jews, Romans, the Jewish Sanhedrin, Pilate—that blaming anyone is completely beside the point of this whole story. In fact, when we try to blame anyone, we are exactly missing the point. For the Christian Gospel isn't about this group or that group needing forgiveness. It's not about this person or that person needing forgiveness. It's about all of us needing forgiveness...

The full text of the sermon is online here: Brief Reflections on the Passion

In the archives are the religion column Who killed Jesus? and the sermon What Language does God speak?