We are poised on the brink of Holy Week. 

We are poised to witness Jesus’ ultimate journey 

         Where he brings his total embodiment of God’s Love Supreme into a confrontation with the powers of this world that have fallen from their true purpose, fallen and twisted from the good purpose for which God created them. 

         Jesus confronts these powers with the liberating power and promise and hope and demand of God’s love and justice. With Jesus we see the coming of the realm, the kingdom, the kin-dom of heaven on earth. Through Holy Week and into Easter we learn that however much this confrontation may bring suffering, through Jesus, God brings from it redemption and new life. 

         Here today we begin this journey with Palm Sunday. The setting is on the outskirts of the holy city of Jerusalem. It is a moment of New Hope.

Jesus has arrived from the countryside to Jerusalem for the Holy days of Passover, when his people remember and re-enact how God freed their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. 

The Hebrew people need that freedom now. They suffer again under a brutal empire – the Romans – and yearn for salvation.

Many people have begun to hope that Jesus may be the new Messiah, the Anointed, the Savior. He has been traveling the countryside healing people, restoring them to wellness, freeing his people from the powers of violence and fear that possess them and oppress them. He has come as the agent of the Holy One.

And so, when Jesus arrives at the Holy City, the people sing and cry out and cheer and take palm branches to wave and place at his feet. 

They sing “Hosanna!” “You have come to save us!” “We have New Hope!”

To this day, for whatever liberation we need, as individuals, as a society, as a world, there is New Hope in Jesus!

What does liberation by God’s love look like for you? For those close to you, those you care most deeply about? 

What does liberation by God’s love look like for our society, especially for those who most need liberation? 

How have you experienced this? How do you yearn for this?

What is the look and the feel of that vision, that hope, that promise, that reality?

What needs to be confronted? 

What needs to celebrated?

What needs to be surrendered?

What needs to be remembered?

What needs to be reconnected, reunited, renewed?

What needs to be healed?

What needs to be heeded?

         What can save us, and who?

         I want to honor what all comes to your hearts when you pray on these questions, and honor all the various circumstances of life from which you pray to God and look to Jesus. 

         But I will share with you that for me this week I very much have on my heart the terrible addiction to violence that’s so rampant in our society, and the cries of all of its victims. 

         So, when I hold my palm and sing Hosanna, imagining Jesus riding into Jerusalem athwart his mighty donkey, in mockery of all the pomp of the proud and powerful, I have on my heart that as he stood before Jerusalem, he wept over it: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the ways that make for peace.” 

         I have in my heart how Jesus had been teaching and showing those ways that make for peace. He has been healing his people’s hearts. He has been healing his people’s bodies. He had been healing his people’s souls. He had been teaching the ways of wisdom and holiness, blessing peacemakers, blessing our hunger and thirst for justice and right-relations, teaching that what we do to the least of these we do so to him. 

         I have in my heart how the first thing Jesus did when entering Jerusalem was go to the holy temple and drive out those who had been corrupting religion with the pursuit of profit and power rather than holiness and compassion and justice and peace. 

         I have in my heart how Jesus himself was soon to become an innocent victim of both mob scapegoating and state violence.

         I have in my heart how he descended into the realm of death, only to rise again to reveal the triumph of God’s gracious love for Creation over the forces of sin. 

         I have in my heart how he calls us to join in this resurrected life, and to follow in this way of courage and compassion and great faith.  

For all the ways we yearn for God and for God’s liberation, Jesus has come 

We bear witness, and cry “Hosanna!”

Jesus has come to confront the forces of fear and hate and domination

We bear witness, and cry “Hosanna!” 

Jesus has come to unleash the Spirit of love and hope and liberation

We bear witness, and cry “Hosanna!”

Jesus has come to bear our suffering and break through to life everlasting

We bear witness, and cry “Hosanna!” 

Amen