- Easter Sunrise Service at 6am. Regular Easter Service at 9am.
- Easter Egg Hunt at 9:15am.
- Lenten Fridays with INC continue this Friday at the Orange United Methodist Church at 6pm.
- Lenten Home Contemplative Practices with Owen and myself can be found on our website with a new one posting each week until Easter.
- Discussion Group & Confirmation Studies April 27th after Church.
- Watch the recording HERE
Anybody ever seen Disney’s Aladdin? I bet there’s a few people here who could sing for us, but let’s not embarrass them. Many of us have seen it. Remember when Prince Ali comes into town?
Make way for Prince Ali…
He's got seventy-five golden camels
Purple peacocks, he's got fifty-three
He's got ninety-five white Persian monkeys
sixty elephants, llamas galore
bears and lions, a brass band and more
Sorry to those who will now be humming this all week.
I think this might be how many imagined Jesus would ride into Jerusalem. With drums and bells and whistles. With camels and peacocks.
He doesn’t come into Jerusalem with monkeys, elephants, and llamas galore. He turns to his disciples and says, we need one donkey.
One donkey.
We’re waving palms, waiting in anticipation for…something. We’re not sure what Jesus is bringing, but we’re sure it’s going to be good! It’s going to be big and it’s going to bring all those people we don’t like down to their knees! We can’t wait!
And he comes in on a donkey. Jesus doesn’t come into Jerusalem in all his crown and glory.
He doesn’t come into highlighting his divinity. He comes into Jerusalem highlighting his humanity. PAUSE. This is confusing. Where are the monkeys and lions?
We’re used to meeting pride with pride, ego with ego, anger with anger, hate with hate, swords with swords, but it’s deep humility that is the message of this week.
In Aladdin, we know that Aladdin’s pride and arrogance as Prince Ali is not going to get him very far in love. PAUSE. Jesus knows that this isn’t true or real.
Jesus shows us how to be truly human. We are shown the incredible human potential. He doesn’t get caught up in pride or ego, but begins to strip himself down to bare and beautiful essentials.
Humility. We’re (kind of) okay with (at least talking about) humility, but this is going to quickly become humiliation. We’re not really okay with humiliation, at least not when it’s directed at us.
It takes deep and incredible courage for Jesus to walk into Jerusalem, to face ignorance and death…armed with a donkey, palm fronds, and open hands. He is walking from humility right into humiliation.
Jesus shows us how to be incredibly brave and human in the face of things that are most terrible. He teaches us courage. Real, deep courage. Notice that those with the most power and pride are the ones acting in the most horrible ways? Taunting. A crown of thorns. Flogging. Torture.
His torturers, and taunters, can no longer see Jesus as human. They treat him…inhumanely. PAUSE We are only capable of this when we forgot our common humanity. PAUSE. We are only capable of this when we stop seeing others as like us. PAUSE
Jesus could claim his divine side in all of this. He could protect himself with his divinity. He doesn’t. He claims his humanity, which tells us that we too can meet this world with this same courage and humility. All humans have this same potential within them. We are beloved by God, as Jesus is Beloved by God.
Aladdin highlights this too. When we come in all bound up in pride and wealth and glory…we make walls. Walls block out love. When we come as we are, weak and fragile and vulnerable…we build bridges. Bridges toward friendship and love…and connection.
Jesus takes little steps, on a little donkey, to awaken awareness and a capacity to love and connect. This is not an act of grandiosity, it’s an act of humility with and for all people.
The culmination of the story is humility, forgiveness, and love. The incredible little things that are most precious and quietly powerful. Jesus’s humility. Jesus’s forgiveness (of even the worst of criminals and the worst of abusers). Jesus’s love of God.
Jesus’s love of and belief in people. The power of transformation with and through the most terrible of events and acts. A tiny sentence in scripture is of the centurion, a torturer, who says: this must be the son of God. Transformation is possible for everyone. We believe in miracles.
Jesus, here, teaches us our potential when fear and doubt and despair come into play…and they will. It’s a timeless lesson.
Jesus helps us to uncover the big questions. Who am I? Who are we? What is our call? What is our work? What kind of world do we want to build and be a part of? PAUSE
Division destroys us. We will see this in the coming week. This is a week of incredible destruction in the Story.
It is connection, and the outpouring of connection (love, forgiveness, mercy, tenderness, kindness) that saves us. PAUSE. Jesus quietly shows us the incredible power and simple grace of humility and gentleness in the face of the opposite.
Jesus is here to teach us to be more human. Lots of hum- words here.
Human, humanity, humility, humiliation, humane.
Human means “of belonging to man”. We belong together as human beings. We have more in common than not. We, all of us, want the same things and need the same things. It is when we forget this that we can fall into a meanness that can lead to dehumanizing one another.
Humanus means of “earth” or “dirt”. We are all…humble beings from humble beginnings.
Humility means to be “close to the ground”. We are not meant to build towers taller than heaven.
Humiliation means to “lower someone” or “to bring them closer to the ground”. Perhaps, Jesus teaches us that the person who misses the mark, who loses in this, is the humiliator not the humiliated. The humiliator risks their humanity (their heart and soul) by dehumanizing and humiliating.
We are called to be human and humble. We are asked to be closer to the earth. PAUSE. Perhaps that is a call to connection. PAUSE. We are all, all of us, part of this earthly world, we are connected to this earth, and responsible for this earth.
This is Jesus’s human moment. He will die. PAUSE We will too. PAUSE
How do we want to spend our time here on earth? Collecting more money to buy more things we don’t need? Dividing ourselves from one another? Denying? Doubting? Living in fear? Hoarding…”just in case”? Humiliating? Torturing? These too are the humans in this story…showing us just how easy it is to miss the mark…badly. Showing us who we might become if we are not careful of our hearts and souls.
It is said that our work is to spread the Gospel and that we should use words only if necessary. If we are spreading the Gospel simply by our actions…what does that look like?
Humane. It looks deeply…humane. To follow Jesus is to share all that we have. It is to connect with one another. To believe in one another. To encourage our fellow human beings. To have faith in, not just Grace, but also in each other. It is to live in hope, not despair. It is to lift up, not drag down. It is to tend and heal, not to break and betray.
To be humane is to have compassion. Compassion is where the passion of the Christ leads us—to suffer with. We don’t like to be humiliated and we sure don’t like to suffer, but this is the path of Jesus, to be in challenge with courage and grace. To be humane is to be kind. To be humane is to be considerate of one another. To be humane is to be merciful and gentle with all of creation.
Jesus brings himself closer to the earth, closer to people, closer to God, closer to truth. Closer.
Jesus guides us toward one another. Toward Love. Toward Forgiveness. Toward the earth, toward humility and toward extreme humility…humiliation for what matters most. Jesus never loses sight of who he is and who he wants to be and what example he chooses to set.
Jesus builds bridges. Always toward Love.
This week will call us us to have deep faith and deep courage. A faith and courage shaped not by violence, but by open hands and open hearts.
This Sunday, Palm Sunday, we are reminded to hold up our palms and to be humble, to be gentle, and to arm ourselves with love and courage.
Community Church of North Orange & Tully 