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Holy Week
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Welcome again. I'm Bobby. I'm one of the past ors on the team here. If we haven't met, I'd love for you to say hello to me. One of my favorite things in all the world is meeting new people.
Speaker 2:So really, you'd be doing me a favor. Today is Palm Sunday as you likely clued into when you were handed a palm frond by our connection team. This is the day in the church calendar where we begin the journey with Christ of holy week. Now whether or not holy week has been a meaningful experience for you in the past, we're just so glad to have you with us today as we revisit the stories of the final week of Jesus' life. Here at Commons, the pastoral team wears this clerical stole to highlight the special seasons in the church calendar.
Speaker 2:And if that's a weird thing for you, I invite you to check out the video that Jeremy posted this past week about the meaning of this very fancy scarf. You can find it at facebook.com/commonschurch. Let me simply say that I love seeing this marker of the seasons as well as wearing it. Hashtag clergy goals with a zed. Anything that helps to get my attention to the way that we spiritually tell time through the life of Christ is something that I am totally on board with.
Speaker 2:Every Sunday in church, we enact sacred time with our worship but holy week is a high holy time where we lean into the death and resurrection of Christ. Holy week tells us the truth about our suffering and the suffering of the world that it is not only seen but it is also felt and used by God. And there's a connection here to what Jeremy said last week in the parable of the net. What we suffer with in this life will one day be sifted out and burned away and I quote, this is the kingdom of God that indiscriminately sweeps up everything so that what is evil in the world, all that opposes God, so that everything that rejects what is good and true can one day finally be dissolved in love. So good.
Speaker 2:Right? Through the Palm Sunday story, we'll explore this beginning process of transformation as Jesus leads us to Jerusalem for the last moments of his life. But first, let's stand together while I read the gospel text from Matthew 21 verses one to 11. And I invite you to really engage your imaginations. As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount Of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples saying to them, go to the village ahead of you and at once you will find a donkey tied there with her colt by her.
Speaker 2:Untie them and bring them sorry. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, say the Lord needs them and he will send them right away. This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet, say to daughter Zion, see your king comes to you gentle and riding on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a donkey. The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them.
Speaker 2:They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread the cloaks on the road while others cut branches from trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest heaven.
Speaker 2:When Jesus entered Jerusalem, whole city was stirred and asked, who is this? The crowds answered, this is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee. Let us pray. Loving God, help us to follow you this holy week that we may be transformed by your love for us and for the world. Amen.
Speaker 2:You're welcome to take a seat. As you can see behind me, we have a really cool set design for holy week and for Easter. Hats off to the team that created this scene. Word is that it only cost them $21. So how's that for commons resourcefulness?
Speaker 2:I know. The only snag is that there won't be an outline on the slides because the slides are a little more obstructed than usual. So if you're a note taker and I know many of you are, I wanna give you a super simple outline right up front. The first half is about fragmentation, meaning the crises in our lives that sometimes make it hard for us to see the truth or that make us question meaning and identity. So first half, fragmentation.
Speaker 2:And the second half is about transformation. Meaning the beauty that comes when we face the fullness of our stories especially the hard stuff. In the Palm Sunday story, Jesus, his disciples, and his followers from the Galilean countryside, they make their way to the big city of Jerusalem for the final week of his life and Matthew so skillfully weaves together locations, citations, and symbols so that we can see how things work together to form the whole of the narrative. Moving us forward into holy week. So let's just dive in to locations.
Speaker 2:The story of Matthew 21 takes place in an important spot geographically, geographically, the Mount Of Olives on the road to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem, of course, is the center of Israel's spiritual home and messianic hope. If a deliverer was gonna show up anywhere, it was there. Ancient wisdom saw that the Mount Of Olives was a place where a long awaited warrior deliverer would plant his feet and fully defend Jerusalem from all her enemies. But this is only one version of power that God had in mind for a deliverer.
Speaker 2:In the Palm Sunday story, we see a deliverer who doesn't arrive on the Mount Of Olives with a supercharged might like many prophets foretold. This is no Dwayne Johnson aka the rock messiah. Although, that's kind of a funny picture. Instead, we see the messiah arrive with friends ready to show the world what power can look like when it's lowly and not marked by hatred of enemies or fear of the other. Fleming Fleming Rutledge described Jesus' triumphal entry on the road to Jerusalem like this.
Speaker 2:It is a most curious sight, this procession. Not only does the king ride an absurd animal but his close followers make a distinctly downscale impression. They are a retinue of fishermen, tax collectors, dubious women, street people, and riffraff of various sorts. I love that. Riffraff of various sorts.
Speaker 2:It has a truly ridiculous aspect to it and we need to remember that and try not to glamorize it. Every good story needs a good starting place and this is ours today. This particular location has layers, past king David layers, future prophetic hope layers, and the present layer of Jesus' arrival in his soon to be last great discourse in Matthew 24. What might look like an insignificant starting place has all the markers of what Jesus was on about. Yes, he was fulfilling the messianic promises by dropping pins into these locations but he was doing this in his own divine style.
Speaker 2:Not as a man of war but as a humble king. Matthew reinforces these layers by doing this mash up with three Hebrew scriptures to help us see more clearly what Jesus was fulfilling. First, there's this citation, say to daughter Zion, see your king comes to you gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. And this is a blend. You can kinda smell those floral notes of Isaiah 62 verse 11 and Zechariah nine verse nine.
Speaker 2:Many have considered the reason for this recipe of one part Isaiah and three parts Zechariah and Matthew is doing something really quite profound with these little snippets of scripture. He uses the words of Isaiah to widen the scope of the words of Zechariah. You see, Isaiah 62 verse 11 comes after a great rejoicing over Israel's particular restoration from Assyrian and Babylonian exile. But this verse sets its sights on a glorious age to come. The proclamation is addressed to the ends of the earth.
Speaker 2:The scope here is cosmic. Interestingly, the Zechariah verse comes from a more troubling text during a troubling time. The last half of Zechariah paints a pretty dark picture of this warrior God who will extend dominion to the ends of the earth through violence by wielding his own people like a bow and arrow marching to crush his enemies and drenching them or filling them with blood. Or as one interpreter says, making them drink their own blood. By the end of Zechariah's vision, this ultra tough warrior will stride into the Mount Of Olives arriving with exaggerated honor and all that's around him will be a decimated city.
Speaker 2:Now keep in mind that Zechariah was written by a prophet speaking to an oppressed people during exile. People who had been forcefully removed from their own homes. And I mean, I get it. A beaten down people need to write victory stories to make sense of their oppression, to maintain their dignity dignity. I mean, Jay z taught me that.
Speaker 2:But also bear this in mind, Zechariah's picture of a fragmented is is fragmented when it comes to deliverance. In the hands of Matthew, these words of the prophets reveal the kind of Messiah that God had actually sent. One who himself was God and who was not going to fill the longing in human hearts
Speaker 1:with more violence as if we don't already
Speaker 2:God do enough of that on our own. This is Jesus who comes in peace and he's remarkably quiet here as he sets his sights on healing the suffering and the violence of the world through his death. So then, Matthew bites off a bit of a psalm to show us that yes, finally, this is the one who truly deserves a praise of thanksgiving. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Historically, this psalm was sung when a victorious ruler returned home to Jerusalem and here people shout it to welcome the one who arrives, yes, with all authority but ultimately with all lowliness too.
Speaker 2:Look how accessible he is just riding on a donkey. Along with these hosannas of praise, the symbols in the story are pointing to an all powerful one who comes in true humility. First, there's a donkey or the donkeys, plural. There are definite king David links to these beasts of burden. Second Samuel and first Kings find David and his sons riding donkeys.
Speaker 2:And this is a big deal as Jesus was called the son of David in the story just before this one where he healed two men who were blind. This time, the title it really sticks. He does not deny it. Now Matthew is known to kind of stretch stories to fulfill prophecy. In other words, he makes creative he takes some creative storytelling liberty to tell a much bigger truth.
Speaker 2:It's likely that in his mind to use Zechariah well, he needed to include two donkeys where the other gospels only include one. But I like to think there's maybe another layer of meaning to this mother donkey and her colt. I mean sometimes don't we just want our mom around when we're heading for a really hard time? And isn't Jesus human if not more than we are? So like any good ex catholic, I see the company of the mother in the story to calm the colt, a shout out to Mary who accompanied her son right to his death.
Speaker 2:And maybe in some mystical way, king David is there too with Jesus. It is David's blood after all that runs through Jesus' veins and will in less than a week be poured out for all. Okay. Next, we have the cloaks and I'm not gonna say too much about them except that they're a great link to the pop culture symbol of a red carpet. But here, we need to go back to that Fleming Rutledge quote.
Speaker 2:This isn't a celebrity surrounded by an entourage of beautiful people. This is an everyday gaggle of people. Some healed, some holy, but most mainly just human throwing down their dusty old cloaks to say signify the royalty of the hosannas that they are caught up in. Will it last? No.
Speaker 2:It will not. Those in the march don't see what we see that this man has faced Jerusalem to die. And those branches, those palm leaves, today in church we actually transform them with our own hands into the symbol of his death, a cross. Back then, palms meant Roman and Jewish nationalism and pride. Now they mean the kingdom of God that looks nothing like a nation state.
Speaker 2:It looks like a family and back then palms meant peace through military might but now they mean peace and life through suffering and death. Back then, palms were stamped on coins to mark an economics of empire. Now, they mean loyalty to the living God who draws all people to a community of abundance. You see, Jesus went to this one location so that he could show up in all of our locations especially the places where we're hurting and where we're afraid. And the scripture citations used by Matthew, they can bend and not break as they bring the truth of God, the very things that we need to hear into the center of our lives.
Speaker 2:And everyday symbols like those of prophets and empires show us that nothing is too ordinary or too twisted to be out of the reach of God's meaningful touch. But here's the thing, just because these places have meaning and these quotes fulfillment and these symbols are signs of the kingdom of God, it doesn't mean that we'll always piece together the fullness of the story being told and that is okay. This is why we return like clockwork every year to holy week. In the week to come, Christ will let go of his life. He'll be separated first from his friends and then from his father.
Speaker 2:He will be utterly fragmented but he will face his death so that he can reorient the world towards resurrection and transformation. From the road to Jerusalem, Jesus set his sights on his suffering and in doing this, he also sets his sights on ours. But if you're not even sure where or how Jesus can show up for you in your own unique fragments in life, the crises that you or the loved ones you love are in, then I have a story for you. A long time ago, there was a man called Hubert. Hubert Hubert was the eldest son of the duke of Aquitaine in the Southwest of medieval France.
Speaker 2:And Hubert enjoyed all the perks of court life until the day his wife sadly died in child birth. But instead of facing his vulnerability and doing the work of grief, he plunged himself into hunting. It became his obsession and I mean, nothing says escape your pain like a good old hunting expedition. Am I right? I have no idea but I can imagine that it's true.
Speaker 2:So one Good Friday, Hubert ditched out on church, tisk tisk, to go hunting in the forest with his hounds. They chased a great stag and eventually cornered it in a thicket but rather than struggle to escape, the stag solemnly faced his hunter and told our broken friend as any talking stag would that Hubert was doomed unless he turned to God and embraced a holy life and shining between those antlers was a big crucifix. Now get this. You can you may actually be acquainted with this image if you have ever downed a Jagerbomb which I know nothing about. I had to ask my good husband about it and he explained it.
Speaker 2:And the logo for this German drink Jagermeister is the stag with the cross between its antlers. How's that for a fun fact you probably didn't think you'd learn in church today? But back to Hubert. He became saint Hubert. He repented and committed his life to the church.
Speaker 2:He became known as a man of peace. One teller of Hubert's life notes this, the Christ stag does not appear simply to make us feel guilty. There is love in his gaze. He wants to save us from ourselves. Now the beauty of the stories of the saints is that even though the facts might seem kind of improbable, the truth of them sticks.
Speaker 2:This is the reason the stories of the saints don't get lost through time. They tell us something more true about life than just the facts. And I don't know about you, but I can actually relate to Saint Hubert's story. I will do all kinds of things to avoid the pain in my life. For example, last month, I obsessed about getting new glasses.
Speaker 2:My obsession even started to keep me up at night, which is a problem. Thankfully, somewhere in a quotidian moment, it hit me. I had fixated on this purchase because I didn't want to feel what was going on inside of me, that I was feeling sad, that I missed parts of my old life in Vancouver. And even though there is so much good here in Calgary, sometimes I forget who I am. So, yeah, I got those new glasses and it turns out that they didn't take my sadness away.
Speaker 2:Surprise. In fact, they kind of hurt my nose. So the joke is on me. Retail therapy, man. It'll get you.
Speaker 2:There was a cross shaped invitation for me in this to face what's hard. There it is kinda hovering right above those cool glasses. And that's a bit of what holy week is about, facing our transformation. The transformation that comes when all of our grief and our fragmentation is handled by a loving God and God is no bully. God will wait for us to turn and to say, can you help me with this?
Speaker 2:And maybe no one will call you a saint for facing any of that least of all you but when you respond to the suffering in your life by facing it whether it's within you or something you are moving towards, when you really face that hard stuff with obedience to Christ and his way of peace and generosity then you participate in a very saintly way. You see the thing that Jesus and his followers had set their face towards at first, it's gonna feel like that cross could break him forever but through his fragmentation, there will be a great transformation. Jesus will go from one who lived in a body to one who can resurrect and remake them all. Transformation like this is brutal and it is frightening at first but if we really want the world to change it's got something to do with this non violent road to Jerusalem where the eternal one rode a donkey so that we can find a new way home. The triumphal entry ends like this.
Speaker 2:When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, who is this? Tis in Greek. Okay. I actually didn't even need to say it in Greek but I just kinda wanted you to know that I could. And the verse ends, the crowds answered, this is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.
Speaker 2:So let's walk through this end a bit. First, Jerusalem is freaking out. A prophet from the country has come to face down a city, not just any city but the city on which messianic hope and deliverance from oppression was hung. Of course, this is not the first time Jesus' arrival has created such a stir. If you remember back to Epiphany, the magi arrived asking where is this Jewish newborn king?
Speaker 2:And Herod freaked out in all Jerusalem with him. Now as Jesus Jesus arrives, the city is stirred again and the people say, who the heck does this guy even think he is? But where the infant Jesus and his family had escaped threat to go to Egypt, this time, there's no escaping violence. Jesus has been on a mission and that mission was about showing people the kingdom of God and that it had arrived not by force but full of mercy. First, it came through the birth of a vulnerable baby.
Speaker 2:Now it would be fulfilled through the death of a man we call Emmanuel, God with us. Jesus would get the job of deliverance done only he taught people that their imaginations needed to change. He taught them that the kingdom of heaven is given to those who realize their need for God. He taught them that if you are slapped on the right cheek, turn the other towards your enemy. He said, don't be afraid of those who can kill you.
Speaker 2:They can kill your body but they cannot touch your soul. And he taught them that a seed must drop into the dirt to die before it can burst from the ground with new life. He taught them that the kingdom of heaven has permeated every part of creation and now we get to wake up to its beauty and its newness like we're finding a treasure or like that treasure is finding us. In all the fear that we have in facing our own death, know this. Life can and will burst forth from it.
Speaker 2:Joseph j Allen, a professor of theology writes this about transformation. The uniqueness of the paschal mystery of the Easter mystery is this. The fact that the author himself entered nature and sanctified it by filling it with himself. In other words, you see those signs of spring all around you? Those only hint at what Jesus has done and will continue to do in the face of fragmentation and death.
Speaker 2:He will transform it with resurrection. But of course, that's Easter and we're not quite there yet. Growing up in Saskatchewan, I was always pretty aware of the closeness of death. Of course, animals come and go, crops grow and sit summer follow. And even more, neighbors and uncles and babies die in tragic accidents, and a whole community shows up to grieve together.
Speaker 2:My life has always been touched by death and I know yours has too. When Joseph Allen says that the author, the creator has sanctified death by filling it with himself, here's what I think just a little glimpse of that work on the cross actually looks like in our lives. Back in 2011, my cousin Ian got sick. He had cancer and it killed him at the age of 24. Having grown up with all of my cousins around in Saskatchewan, our hearts were truly broken.
Speaker 2:So we gathered like we always do around my aunt and uncle's kitchen table in spare bedrooms and campers set up on the farm for those of us who travel to be together. And Ian's older brother Brett who is an amazing Catholic theologian, he stood up in front of our family and community and he gave a homily that felt like one of the most hopeful and true addresses I've ever heard in my life. And I'm gonna read just a little bit of that. Brett had just finished speaking about a gathering where Ian, though he was terribly tired and very sick, got dressed up in his best outfit to spend some memorable hours with his family. And Brett said, when Saint Paul tells us in a metaphor that Ian could easily understand that what we have built, our life's work will be tested by fire, he is teaching us that trials show us who we really are.
Speaker 2:That trials purify us like gold. In a trial, we are given the great opportunity to leave behind that of which we are least proud of and become more the person we really are. Trials clean us up before the party. The Ian that came to the party at Clayton's house cleaned up and in his best outfit was not putting on a mask to hide himself. He was the real Ian who refused to let sickness be a mask that hid him.
Speaker 2:In his suffering, he became more, not less Ian. He did not let his sickness define him, but he let it refine him. In Ian's own words, he finally came to know himself. Brett's words are holy words. They are a perfect beginning to holy week.
Speaker 2:The people with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, they thought they were arriving for a freedom march. They didn't yet know they were headed for a funeral. This is the week where we face what we are most afraid of. Our pain, our loss, fear, and even our own death. You can start that journey like Jesus did with a few trusted friends around you but eventually, you'll have to face parts of what's hard on your own and when you do, know this.
Speaker 2:Jesus is with you every step of the way. Let's pray together. God of creation, a buried seed bursts apart to bring a tree and a baby is forced out of a mother's womb to assume an identity of its own. Each of these spots in nature include a form of death. This holy week, may we face our separation, our fragmentation, and our loss.
Speaker 2:May that which is old give way to new life in your spirit. Jesus, you walk with us and there is nothing too broken that you cannot mend and make new. Guide us with your humble triumphal way. In the name of the one who came to suffer and die, we pray. Amen.