Sermon Preview: A Strange Entrance

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Sermon Preview for Sunday’s Sermon on March 25, 2018

Matthew 21:1-11

What was it Shakespeare said? “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances” (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII).  The speech addresses the seven stages of life, with our entrance coming in infancy. But as we all know, life is actually marked by many entrances – entrances into adolescence and young adulthood and senior adulthood – so that every exit becomes an entrance into something else.  

Such is Palm Sunday. It is an entrance into Holy Week, which in itself is an entrance into the season of Easter, where all things are made new. The strangeness of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday reminds us that Jesus’ mission was to meet God’s expectations and no one else’s, certainly not our own. So, for us to enter into the life Jesus came to bring requires us to conform to his image instead of expecting Jesus to conform to ours.  

This Sunday’s worship will give us the chance to begin to do just that by preparing our hearts to walk on with Jesus through the last week of his life so that we might join him at Calvary and meet him at the Empty Tomb. Following Jesus in this way will perhaps require of you to leave behind some expectations of those around you, but if you remember that leaving them behind prepares you to experience the new beginning the Risen Jesus always brings, then you will inevitably do so with Easter joy.