Lent VI - "Palm Sunday: a second look" sermon preview

After beginning our journey through Lent with Ash Wednesday back on Feb. 18th, we have now journeyed six Sundays (5.5 weeks) to our final Sunday of Lent leading up to Easter.  Thus it is also Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week.  In our reading of Psalm 118:1-2; 19-29, we have a sense of celebration, perhaps even pomp and circumstance.  This is likely what the Jews were expecting and looking for in their coming messiah, and to some degree this is what Palm Sunday was and is.

But when we read Mark 11:1-11 and take a second look at Palm Sunday, the Jesus that we encounter entering Jerusalem; is not entirely the one that the people were expecting.  Mark does quote from Psalm 118.  That dynamic is present and yet, Jesus did not come in on a mighty stead.  Jesus rode in on a donkey.  The Jesus we receive is not always the Jesus that we expect.

Here's what the leader magazine had to say...

Sermon seeds

Primary text: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-20

The problem: We love to celebrate—to gather together with loved ones, eat delicious food, maybe even exchange gifts. Yet when the party ends, the people are gone, and the cleanup is left to the host, the celebration dies away. We know that celebration is limited, and at the end of a party it is time to get back to real life. Or is it the case that real joy isn’t only about the isolated and extraordinary: birthdays, holidays, accomplishments? Can we learn to look for and celebrate God in the strange? The odd? The ordinary? The trash?  

The grace: This psalm wastes no time in jumping into the festivities. The psalmist isn’t responding to a specific event, glorying in an accomplishment or mile marker. Instead the writer is celebrating something beyond himself, finding joy not in human accomplishment (builders choosing—or failing to choose—a particular stone) but in who God is. This is an occasion to mark the extraordinary ordinary-ness of God’s continual presence. God is here, let us celebrate! God does not let us down, so let us celebrate! God offers love, so let us celebrate! It is a celebration of the odd. God works in mysterious ways, so let us celebrate! A king rides into town on a donkey, so let us celebrate! God pays attention to the poor, so let us celebrate! Jesus is rejected—and still we celebrate because this rejection doesn’t have the last word. God sees the world in ways we cannot, uncovering as treasure what we thought was trash. God provides us with a second look at what God is doing in the world. 

Here is an additional resource...

 http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20150323JJ.shtml