Palm Sunday Coming

This Sunday is Palm Sunday. 

I didn't grow up knowing about Palm Sunday. We didn't think holy thoughts about holy days. We were every-Sunday-is-holy folks with a conceit that such a regular focus made us better than the folks who were spiritual on an annual calendar. But now. I guess because I am aging, Sundays come twice a week, and the annual holidays seem to be pretty frequent. So, I am thinking about Palm Sunday. 

Jesus was kind and sweet to the people of simple hopes and nascent faith. They had little, if any, idea what Jesus was going to be about, but they showed up and showered the road with greenery and Jesus with praise. What did Jesus think of all that noise? He could have been cynical, knowing how the week was going to unfold into betrayal, inquisition, torture and crucifixion. He might have been happy knowing that the joys of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem would pale in comparison to the following Sunday's triumphant re-entry to life from the tomb.

I think it is wonderful that Jesus was willing to play the part of the earthly king coming to accept his kingdom. I think it is wonderful that he is as willing now to walk into my own conflicted heart as he was then to enter Jerusalem's contradictory scene of faith and doubt, anger and joy. I want to stand on tip-toe in my own life and watch him enter my life to accept shame for me, die for me and live for me. May each of my days, and I pray yours to, be a Palm Sunday day.

I am thrilled that Jesus enters our gathered worship, invited and praised, willing to be honored by the imperfect, but eager voices of his people. May he always enter. May every Sunday be a Palm Sunday for us in our churches.

"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"

It is not good for man to be alone...

Since I had the time and focus to blog last, I preached a three sermon series on men and women in the public worship assembly. I tried to show from the text that the core teaching was that from the beginning the image of God was projected best into the world when men and women together were fulfilling the responsibility to fill and manage the earth. In the same way, the image of God is presented well as men and women do the work of the Kingdom of God in the world together. 

The overture of the ministry of the church plays at Pentecost and the lyric is from Joel. The word of the Lord comes heralding the day when the sons and daughters of God will prophesy as the Holy Spirit rains down. That day has come in Acts 2. How the church that began under such words would become one in which the women would be excluded from having a voice in the family meetings around the family table is mystifying. The Corinthians were told that the men and the women could pray and prophesy as long as the men looked like men and the women looked like women. To be sure the disruptive wives were to be silent and ask their poor husbands at home. And it is not without cause that Paul tells Timothy to urge a quieter and more serene demeanor from the overbearing women teaching in Ephesus. 

Still I hear with louder, clearer tones the words of Paul to the Galatians, who are plummeting back into legalism, that now because of Christ the Jew-Gentile distinction is done; the slave-free distinction is done; the male-female distinction is done. I am thankful that God has worked to restore the wonder of his image in the life of the church as men and women work together without power and authority other than the power of love and the authority of the giftedness distributed by the Holy Spirit. This is not a matter of caving in to the demands of contemporary culture; it is the matter of restoring an ancient, honorable culture of man and woman together before the fall in the fellowship of the Father in the quiet of a garden.