Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 20 March, 2016 Palm Sunday

Readings:  Psalm 118  Luke 19:28-40

We pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our sustainer.  Amen.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…

This is the day, this is the day that the Lord has made…

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord..

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone….

This is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes…..

Both in song and in word, Psalm 118 is awash with phrases that resonate in our lives and our faith and that are drawn upon in the New Testament.  I suspect the only phrase that diverts us rather is ‘bind the festal procession with branches up to the horns of the altar’ which was possibly a liturgical instruction or rule for worship that accompanies the psalm.

Psalm 118 was said to be Martin Luther’s favourite psalm, one that sustained him in difficult times.  For the Jews this was and still is read during Passover celebrations. For Christians it is the lectionary psalm for Palm Sunday every year.  In all four Gospels the whole multitude of disciples welcome Jesus into Jerusalem with the acclamation from the psalm: ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’.

This psalm is a prayer of thanksgiving focussed wholly on the power and goodness of God.  Not on our goodness, our efforts to get through the gate but the righteousness of the one that has come to save and set free all people.  It is all about God: the one who brought the people out of Egypt, who sustained them through the exodus, and to whom they come to the temple to praise and give thanks to.

The psalm begins and ends with a core affirmation of faith: ‘O give thanks to our God, who is good; whose steadfast love endures forever.’  Under threat, in distress, outnumbered, pushed to the limit, in every circumstance we are buttressed on all sides by God, who is good and whose love endures.  So says the psalmist.

And as we connect this psalm to the gospel reading for today, the hosannas welcoming Jesus to the gates of Jerusalem, the procession into the city and the  drama, tragedy to come within the gates, there are a couple of themes that stand out quite strongly for me.

Why do we find it so difficult to live in thanksgiving for the steadfast love which surrounds us and (connected) where does God wish to lead today’s procession?

Like the people of the Exodus, we too can ride a bit of a rollercoaster in our relationship with God – heartfelt praise and thanks, anger and impatience, fear and courage and demand and gifting.  It’s all there and I suspect will also be so.  The thing that is troublesome though is not a lively and challenging relationship with our God – that is good - but when we allow fear to overcome faith and remove God from the equation.  When we decide God is not present, not caring or simply not interested in little old us and try to do it all by ourselves, rely purely on our own resources.  Where we forget that steadfast love and hunker down into our resources to keep us safe – that is when we get into trouble.

That is when community becomes self and shared experience isolation, busyness takes the place of being still in the presence, thanksgiving becomes material accumulation and joy becomes anxiety nurtured by ‘what ifs’.  Life becomes a chore, a box, a place of small vision and little hope. 

The thing I get from the psalm today is the absolute expansiveness of God’s love and promise that can only be responded to by expansive joy and exuberant living on our part.  It doesn’t take out the difficult parts of the journey but it holds them all in the confidence of God’s righteousness and enduring love and grace. 

All words you say – isn’t it human nature to hold back a little bit on the celebrations just in case there is a beastie waiting round the corner about to pounce.  Isn’t it a little in the face to dance and leap for joy when there are others who find little joy in life and it goes without saying that it is a bit undignified.  

But don’t we hear enough stories where the shining confidence of God with us in our daily lives speaks to those who look on – the Christians in modern day Palestine who have nothing, celebrating the birth of Christ and shining their light into the darkness surrounding them, the approach to the unappetising stranger made possible in the enduring love of God beside us, the people in this congregation whose faith illuminates them and us, the peace that surrounds us when we stop and give thanks for God in our lives, the moments of inexpressible joy that come to us in the laughter of a child, the beauty of creation, the neighbourly act, the gifting of grace to each other.  God is good and God’s love surrounds us.

Yet it is a bumpy ride – we walk with the procession, shouting our hosannas but, within, trepidation walks with us, unertainty is present, the wee beastie probably is around the corner.  Jesus entered the city knowing what was to come, that even within the glorious certainty of God with him  there were moments of despair, of reluctance – he never could have done what he did on his own, without his Father alongside.  And our procession today – even when we are certain of the presence of God, even when we feel cherished and sing out God’s grace in our lives, what intrudes on our procession?  And do we even know where our walk is taking us. 

Some of you will remember the White Paper that the Moderator Andrew Norton released last year – and now we have the responses published and some further thinking laid out about our choices of direction and being the effective missional church of Jesus Christ in Aotearoa.  And there are some hard messages in there, some directions that will strip us of complacency and encourage radical ways (also known as the ways of Jesus) of being church.  Yet it is in that direction that we must be shouting our hosannas, for if we continue as a muted, voiceless, divided, spiritless, inward looking community of faith we are denying the power and goodness of God to work through us and in us no matter where we process. 

Remember those words from the psalm: 

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…

This is the day, this is the day that the Lord has made…

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord..

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone….

This is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes…..

I would like to finish with a poem by RevMarty Stewart, a Presbyterian Minister in Christchurch.

A Palm Sunday Prayer
[Using the John O’Donohue poem Fluent]

'I would love to live like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise of its own unfolding '

This Palm Sunday remembrance suggests such a flow 
– an ease – feeling good, all going well, 
heads lifted to the shining sun and arms waving in the gentle breeze, 
with you O God, at the centre, 
and a vibrant path of possibilities unfolding before us.

But the thud of the real world comes upon us.
Not, so far (thank God), a cross, or a tomb,
But our feet do trip on stones, we bump up against hidden obstacles.
The skies fill with threatening clouds.
And the reality of what limits us revives our fears.

We long for a Hosanna but often we are left with a lament.

We look to Jesus.
Free. Resilient against the grumpy looks 
of those who cannot see for looking, cannot see that even the stones cry out in praise.

We look to Jesus.
Alive. Breathing the air, celebrating living.
Able to rejoice in the gift of the day upon him despite the clouds on the horizon.
We long for a Hosanna and are invited into one.
The hosanna of all creation shouting: “This is the day that the Lord has made!”

The Hosanna that invites us to live ‘…like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.’

Therefore, this day, and every day, despite the clouds
because your light has come, O God, and invited us into its freedom, 
we join in the song of all creation – Hosanna, Hosanna in the Highest! Amen.

Margaret Garland.