Prayer as We Gather: Lord, Holy Week’s dizzying descent from Palm Sunday’s thronging adoration to Good Friday’s crucifixion hysteria trumpets scripture’s brutal truth: the crowd is false, always. May this holy hour find us grappling with our own spiritual vacillation. Grant us the obedient spirit of Jesus’ donkey-fetching disciples, and may their simple response serve as our only defense necessary for doing his bidding: “The master needs it.” Amen.*(Mitchell Simpson, inspired by Luke 19)
Call to Worship:
Give thanks to the Lord,
Whose faithful love lasts forever.
Thank you, God, for answering me,
For being my saving help.
The stone rejected by the builders is now the foundation stone!
This has happened because of the Lord;
It is astounding in our sight!
This is the day the Lord acted;
We will rejoice and celebrate in it!
You are our God, we will lift you up high! (from Psalm 118, The Common English Bible)
Morning Prayer: Thank you, Lord, even as paranoia and distrust are daily modeled at the highest levels of government, for Jesus’ calm response to the cowardly military and religious leaders afraid to confront him in the light of day, closing in to seize him at night: “Day after day I was with you in the temple, but you didn’t arrest me. But this is your time, when darkness rules.” In these days when darkness seems so much in the ascendant, grant us unwavering courage to withstand Herod’s blasphemy and a healthy awareness of our own propensity, with Simon Peter, to deny our Lord. Comfort us, when darkness rules and heroic voices are rare, to trust you for evil’s sure defeat at God’s own hand, as promised by the victim of the state-sponsored death penalty who taught us to pray, saying … *(Mitchell Simpson, inspired by Luke 22)
Prayer of Confession: Have mercy on us, Lord, with all our vaunted academic credentials, for failing Isaiah’s clear expectation of education’s highest use in your service: “The Lord God gave me an educated tongue to know how to respond to the weary … “ To the contrary, we are prone to see educational advancement as a feather in our own cap, an income-enhancing springboard to separate us from the vast, unwashed middle, whose lack of schooling gives us financial gain and considerable power over them in the marketplace, we assume. Forgive our Ivory Tower elitism, the filters of wealth and privilege which blind us to the needs of the poor and mute the cries of your weary children outside the entrenched ranks of white, male power. Amen.*(Mitchell Simpson, inspired by Isaiah 50)
Assurance of Pardon: Hear the good news! Apostle Paul’s portrait of our suffering Messiah provides all the example required for how to receive God’s blessing. Self-emptying, obedient servant-hood was on display for all the world to see when Jesus submitted to grisly torture and death on a cross. Far from the notion of Jesus as a stand-in, atoning substitute for us, by which an angry God’s fatherly wrath was somehow assuaged, the truer picture is of God, in human form, taking on the sinful burden of our rebellious willfulness, showing how inexhaustible is God’s love for us. The more we learn to empty ourselves on behalf of all God’s hurting children, the more we resist the false boundaries of religion and entitlement, the more we adopt the attitude that Jesus modeled, the greater will be our joy in this life and the fuller our awareness that the Kingdom of God is truly right here among us! Thanks be to God for the privilege of a cross-shaped servant ministry, and the nurturing fellowship of our beloved community at UBC!*(Mitchell Simpson, inspired by Philippians 2)
Thought for a Palm Sunday: “If you learn to use adversity right, it will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn’t have gone any other way.” -Tony Bennett, UVA men’s basketball coach (UVA, 2019 NCAA men’s basketball champions, was a #1 seed in the 2018 tournament, but lost in the opening round to the #16 seed, the first such loss in NCAA history.)