This week's sermon for Palm Sunday has been one of those that doesn't want to be written. I knew what I wanted to work with but it has been a hard slog to get it any kind of shape.

We are using the Matthew 21 Palm Sunday story (where you can, if you so wish, picture Jesus astride two donkeys simultaneously - to what does the final 'them' refer in verse 7 refer, coats or donkeys?) and the great kenosis hymn from Philippians 2.  It is the latter reading that I have been more drawn to, and which better serves my desire to enter into the mystery and intensity of Holy Week, and I have being playing around with ideas around what it means to say that Christ Jesus was 'emptied' or 'poured out.'  What is the relationship between the emotive outpouring of praise on Palm Sunday and the pouring out of Jesus blood on Good Friday?  What is the connection between Christ relinquishing divine privilege and Jesus expending his life's energy for others?

The sermon itself is trying to get people to engage more with Holy Week, to move beyond the idea of famliar stories and towards something of the mystery of Easter, to avoid skipping blithely from happy to happy and yet to recognise that we cannot unknow what we we do know.  I'm not sure how well it does/will succeed, but it has helped me to begin to focus.

And with it come a resoution to abstain from blogging next week simply in order to take the time to ponder and reflect some of what Holy Weekis about, not in a pious, self-righteous way, but in an attempt to allow it to confuse and unsettle me as my comfortable routines are disturbed.

In my preprations for Sunday, I came across a prayer by Dorothy McRae-McMahon in Liturgies for the Journey of Life,which I have adapted to form the invitation to communion (her words in italic, mine plain text)...

Life is a journey on many different roads

But God is always with us

 

Sometimes we lift our faces to the sun

And God is with us

 

Sometimes the journey is harder

Through pathways of pain

And fears in dark places

But God is with us  

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus

 

Jesus travelled a journey

From the excitement of Palm Sunday

Through the poignancy of the Last Supper

And the agony of Gethsemane

To the abandonment of Calvary

And here, today, by God’s Spirit, he is with us

 

In our journeys

Of life

Of faith

Of love and laughter

Of sorrow and pain

We meet

To eat

To drink

To remember

To celebrate

To anticipate

And God is with us 

 

So come, for all is ready…