Worship Leader:  Paul Whiteley, LLWL                                                                    Music Director: Tim Hallman, B.Mus.,B.Ed.

PALM SUNDAY, APRIL 13, 2025

“Making an Entrance”

WELCOME / ANNOUNCEMENTS / CELEBRATIONS

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

LIGHTING OF CHRIST CANDLE

 CALL TO WORSHIP:
One: People of God, do not be afraid, for your Savior is coming,
All: riding on a donkey, daring to raise the branches of liberation.
One: Shout your hosannas in the street and in the sanctuary.
All: Hosanna in the highest! Our Savior has come to set us free!
One: Palm branches and praise mark this day with hope.
All: Hosanna, come and save us!
(from Worship Ways, 2024, used with permission)

HYMN:  VU 123 “Hosanna, Loud Hosanna”

PASSING OF THE PEACE

OPENING PRAYER:
Humble God, you have shown us the way to enter all the Jerusalems of this world. You showed us not to enter our lives with fear, but with humility and courage.
As we worship this day, we draw upon your example of Jesus on that humble donkey and we raise our palm branches in rejoicing!
We raise our voices, shouting along with your people of every age, “Hosanna in the highest!”
Come and save us this day, O Jesus of Jerusalem. Amen.
(from Worship Ways, 2024, used with permission)

SCRIPTURES:
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 “Give thanks to the Lord” (VU p. 837 Part One, Three and Four)
Luke 19: 28-40 “Coming into Jerusalem”

ANTHEM: “Palm Sunday Welcome”

REFLECTION:   “Making an Entrance”
The last time I preached here was at the beginning of Lent, and now we are at the end of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week: the road from Palm Sunday to Easter. The United Church has seen different approaches to Holy Week, not only from community to community but also from time to time, even in my lifetime. For a while the trend was towards Palm/Passion Sunday, after a perceived decline in participation in Good Friday services and a motivation to make sure that people didn’t move from Palm Sunday celebration to Easter celebration without the key moment of Good Friday – the mystery and seriousness of Christ’s death on the Cross – in between.

This year I’ve decided to say out loud what I’ve thought silently to myself other years when the question has come up, of how to treat this Sunday: I trust you. I trust you to know the way the story flows, that Palm Sunday leads to the last supper and perhaps ironically-named Good Friday, and only then to Easter. I trust that people who need a Good Friday service will come out to see Father Mike and myself one last time at the Anglican Church on Friday, or will go somewhere else that works for them. I know that there have been years – probably many years – when what I needed to hear on Holy Week was the mystery of Good Friday and the gift of painful love, more even than the Easter and the mystery of new life. I trust you to discern what space you need to be with God and to be in Christian community, and to find that space. And I trust you to know that whenever you make space to be present with the reality of God, that the Spirit will be there for you.

And so, today, the theme I have chosen from the gospel is “making an entrance’. The last time I preached here on Palm Sunday I tried to decode the story in terms of its elements, the signs of the king who comes, and talked about how they are turned around into symbols of a different kind of kingdom, of a new way. Today, though, I want to zoom out to take in a bigger picture, looking at what kind of entrance Jesus made in Jerusalem and the entrances – the comings and even the goings – that make meaning in our lives. Many of us have memories of Palm Sunday in terms of parades, as Sunday schoolers or adults walking through from church hall or gymnasium, or of waving palms while the children or the choir walk past on our behalf. Other than a well-choreographed Christmas pageant, for some of us Palm Sunday was our main chance to experience movement in a service, to make an entrance or to see an entrance made outside of our ordinary routine.

The choir in Ottawa where I’ve been singing for the last couple of years, Capital Chamber Choir, isn’t known for its choreography. Normally we assemble and walk to the front to sing, and walk to the back when we’re done singing; that’s our routine. But there were occasions in the last year or so where we’ve broken out of our routine. We sang a piece last year with another choir, a piece dealing with homophobia and violence, and the moment when our collaborators in Tone Cluster – quite a queer choir – came from the crowd to join us on stage and we spread out to invite them in: well, that was probably for some the most moving moment in a moving piece of music. When we sang Handel’s Messiah, the conductor asked some of us to move out of our routine places to surround the orchestra for a threatening crowd number, and that added a moment. This past fall we sang a piece based on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, and for that the lower voices gathered around the conductor, already intoning wordlessly, before moving to our places at the front, and the upper voices  began singing from the back as they joined the performance. And after the music has represented the road from town to town as walked by weary pilgrims over the centuries, we continued singing off the stage, out the door and onto the steps of the church as the journey continued (and continues).

Today I didn’t ask for us to gather in the Church Hall for a walk into the church with palms. I feel that as a community after Covid we may each value our personal space and not be quite so ready to move out of our comfort zone even this one day of the year. But I invite each of us to reflect on how we are inviting God in Christ to make an entrance into our lives. The crowds in Jerusalem were ready for a king. They were living under the iron fist of an unjust empire; they experienced day to day with the uncertainty of puppet rulers who paid only lip service to their faith; and they felt a sense of signs, portents and end times that is reflected first in the eclipse described in the Gospel for Good Friday, and then in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple a generation later and the scattering of the faithful in a diaspora that eventually brought those of Jewish and Christian faith to all parts of the world.

They were ready for a king but they found, what our Protestant forbears like the Moravians would call, a lamb. They were ready for a hero on a high horse but they received an ordinary guy sitting across a donkey. They were calling out to be saved, but the salvation they received was different from anything they could have expected.

I don’t know about you, but I have mixed feelings about parades. I remember grainy images from my childhood of May Day in the old Soviet Union; of tanks and artillery and missiles on parade – kind of a perverse inversion of the Santa Clause parades that I also remember from those days. And I remember, vaguely, what it felt like for me as a kindergarten child to gather in a crowd for the slow-moving train when the last queen made one of her visits to Ontario. I’m not sure, even now, how I feel about some of those parades, and I tried to ignore the impact when the former Pope, John Paul II, passed through in the popemobile on his parades. But I know what it feels like to wait for hope to come. I know what it feels like to wait outside, in the rain, to begin walking in hope and believing with those beside me in a demonstration that change is possible. And I hope, above all, that we in the United Church have not forgotten what it feels like to make an entrance,

and to see God make an entrance  - even in the ways we do not expect.

RESPONDING HYMN:   VU 126 “Ride On, Ride On, the Time Is Right”

INVITATION FOR OFFERING

OFFERING HYMN:   VU 541 “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”

OFFERING PRAYER

PREPARE OUR HEARTS FOR PRAYER – VU 400 “Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying”

PRAYERS OF PEOPLE / LORD’S PRAYER:
God of Abundance, we thank you for your many gifts: the gifts you bring to our senses, the gifts you
bring to our hopes and yearnings, and the gifts you bring to us through your spirit dwelling within us.
God of Grace, the desire of our hearts for our gifts today is that they be a source of healing, bringing
together what is broken, soothing what is painful, and allowing your people to move forward in the
abundance of life with which you bless us.
Comforting God, amidst the distraction and drama of the world around us, focus our hearts and minds on
you and your love. When we look past you and depend on human efforts, awaken us to your presence.
When we feel uncertain and unsettled by change, remind us of your blessing. When events upset us and
leave us adrift, give us the confidence of being loved. Reassure us now.
And in full assurance, we pray together the prayer Jesus taught his friends and followers: Our Mother,
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
them that trespass against us. And deliver us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine
is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.
(With text by Karen Boivin and Gil Le Fevre, Gathering, used with permission)

HYMN:  MV 189 “Jesus, We Are Here”

BENEDICTION

SUNG COMMISSIONING:  VU 884 “You Shall Go Out With Joy”

 

 

 

 

 

         "A Village Church With A Heart For The World"

Christ United Church

12 Perth St., Lyn, ON, K0E 1M0
(613)498-0281 (Phone)   (613)498-2589 (Fax)

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