Celebrating Palm Sunday
By Melissa Hurley
Picture yourself standing on an old dirt road leading into an ancient city. The sun is hot on your face as the afternoon rays beat down on you. As you make your way down the road you notice a crowd is beginning to build in front of you. People are leaning over one another and waving leafy braches around, puzzled you turn around to see a figure riding towards you. And immediately you recognize that something is not normal, he is not riding on a horse as a king commonly would, he is riding…a colt? Yet, as you look around you people are shouting, they are laying down their cloaks and branches for this man riding by. Could this be Jesus? Who everyone has been talking about? Here? In your town? You are quickly handed a branch and begin waving and shouting with the rest of the crowd, surely this will be a day you will not soon forget.
This Sunday we will begin Holy Week with Palm Sunday. This day commemorates the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It is a day that we are asked to rejoice, to wave palms, to picture ourselves in that crowd, in that moment. And yet the whole time, we know what is coming as the week carries on. We know that Palm Sunday turns into Maundy Thursday and the Last Supper, and from there we enter Good Friday and the death of Jesus. Even as we wave palms and celebrate we know great sorrow will accompany this joy.
What do we do with this information? Well, we have spent this entire church calendar at Middletown and Kelseyville talking about how telling the full story is important, how each part of the story, even the things that are difficult deserve to be told. So that is what I challenge us to do this Palm Sunday, I challenge us to hold the full narrative while still celebrating and waving palms as Jesus enters Jerusalem. This life we experience is not one dimensional, and neither is this Sunday. I want to encourage us to authentically engage with the whole story of Palm Sunday, to use this service intentionally as a call to be present for each of these next seven days. Because, I guarantee you, there is more to this story.
Melissa Hurley is Pastor at the Kelseyville United Methodist Church and Middletown Community United Methodist Church. Please join us in Kelseyville at 9 a.m. or Middletown at 11 a.m. as we begin our Holy Week with Palm Sunday.
Living in grace through humility
By Chris DelCol
As we enter into Holy Week we can’t help but focus on Living in Grace by being humble just as Jesus humbled Himself. We are forever reminded as Christians that the events of Holy week are an example of what our lives in humility ought to be like. We see that humility begin as Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday knowing the shouts of joy that day would turn to screams of hate and ultimately His death on Good Friday.
Clearly Holy Week was a humbling time for Jesus and an eternal example of our need to be humble in this world. With that said, what is it like to live humbly?
True humility is shown by Jesus in bowing down and washing His disciple’s feet, embracing a leper, spitting in the mud so someone could see, having a centurion of Roman stature accept the reality of God before him and seeking help that only Divinity could provide, or how about riding to his death on a lowly donkey on the day they waved palms in celebration of Him.
Humility is accepting the need to be a servant to all no matter what the cost. It is looking past the desire to accept glory or be prideful and instead turn it over to the only one who deserves it. It’s as simple as offering forgiveness to someone of their sin in an effort to be like Jesus who forgave everybody.
In Lake County there are many ways to be humble. The most important is by being a servant to the lowliest of the low and accepting of the fact that through this humility, we can do wonderful things. How about humbly befriending your neighbor, sharing a joke, enjoying a laugh and working together in your own fashion to make the community a better place. As for First Lutheran Church in Lucerne and many other properties in the neighborhood, we sure could use some help to clean up these buildings by offering more community work events where we all get to express our love for God through projects designed to make this neighborhood flourish again. When you see something worth fixing, set about fixing it and then step back to observe that others will follow suit. And do it all without expecting glory through of a prideful attitude. There is no pride in humility and none needed here.
The Bible says that God did not choose the wise and the beautiful and those who had everything together to do His work. He chose the weak, the poor, the sick because they understood the only way they could ever accomplish anything of any value would be through God’s power. And so, whenever something good happened, they would naturally give all the glory to God. They get this from living in absolute humility, just as Jesus did. With that said, what we need here in Lake County is:
•more servants and less pedestals
•more you and less me
•more give and less take
•more laughter and less depression
•more love and less hate
•more good and less evil
•simply, more Jesus and less Satan …
When you are on your knees, it is amazing what you see in front of you, beside you, and above you. You see a County in desperate need of God’s Grace and you see a cross on a little church at the corner of 11th and Country Club where we can get it.
We will dig deeper into this on Palm Sunday, March 25th, so please join us for Bible Study at 9:30am, worship at 11:00am, and a hot lunch immediately following the worship service.
Chris DelCol is pastor of First Lutheran Church, located at 3863 Country Club Drive, Lucerne, CA, phone 707-274-5572. All are welcome so please, come as you are.
