Palm Sunday: Jesus' Call to Humility

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church earlier today.]

Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 21:1-11
Today, as we celebrate Palm Sunday, I want to talk with you about humility. Both our Gospel lesson from Matthew and our second lesson, written by the apostle Paul to the Christian church in the Greek city of Philippi, underscore that Jesus accomplished His mission of saving all who believe in Him from sin and death through His humble submission to the will of God the Father.

In recounting Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday when crowds hailed Jesus as a conquering king, our Gospel lesson remembers the Old Testament prophecy of Zechariah:

Tell the daughter of Zion, "Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey… 

Prophetic fulfillment or not, it may have been at this moment of seeming triumph that some in the crowd began to suspect that Jesus hadn’t come to be the sort of king for whom they were looking.

The people didn’t expect Jesus to be a humble Savior Who submitted to death on a cross as the ultimate and only atoning sacrifice for sin. They wanted Jesus to be a conquering king who fulfilled their expectations of Him,  destroying their Roman conquerors, lining their pockets with money, and making their lives easy.

You can imagine why, within a few days’ time, disappointed and angry that Jesus wasn’t the king they wanted Him to be, many in this same crowd who hailed Jesus as king would, by Thursday, call for His execution.

They wanted Jesus to exhibit humility, alright: a humble submission to their wants and whims and not to God the Father Whose intention it was (and is) to offer us much more than ease in this world.

He offers instead, an eternity of life with Him. And that eternity with God begins in this life, where God refashions us, sometimes in ways that bring us pain and humiliation, into the people God wills us to be, the people we were made to be.

Jesus was humble before the Father and so not only fulfilled His mission of dying and rising for us, but also reclaimed His rightful place as King of all creation, as your King and my King.

Look at the hymn to Jesus Paul quotes in our second lesson. You can find it on our Celebrate insert. Paul writes:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

Just as Jesus, Who never knew sin, had to humbly submit to the will of the Father in order to claim new, everlasting life for all who believe in Him, we who are sinners must humbly submit to God so that our old sinful selves can be crucified day by day and God can give us the life Christ has won for us.

That entails submission to Jesus Christ and His Word, the Bible, as the final authority over our lives.

It also means confessing our sins and humbly seeking and accepting His forgiveness.

And it means submitting to the death of the arrogant presumption we all inherited from Adam and Eve, that we can turn our backs on God's will and “be like God.”

The apostle Peter, who knew a thing or two about repenting for his sins and swallowing his pride, writes in 1 Peter 5:6, “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.”

Jesus’ plan for those who follow Him is that, with Him, we will rule over creation for all eternity. But that will only happen when we humble ourselves, surrendering to Christ and Christ alone.

Now, please look at the very first verse of our processional Gospel, Matthew 21:1-11. That verse establishes this theme of humility. Look at what it says:

When they [that is, Jesus and His disciples] had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage [a town close to Jerusalem], at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples… 

Then Jesus gives instructions on how they’re to prepare for their celebration of the Passover.

The other day while preparing for this sermon, I noticed something in that first verse that I’d never seen before: The two disciples Jesus sent aren’t named.

Think about that! These two disciples are sent on one of the most important missions in human history and Matthew doesn’t see fit to give us their names. They aren't given any credit.

You already know why: Because who Jesus sent wasn’t important; Who sent them—Jesus—was everything.

Paul once quoted a Greek poet who said that in God "we live and move and have our being.” Those who simply walk in the good actions God has prepared for them beforehand to be their way of life don’t need credit.

All the credit and the glory go to God. Those who humbly trust in Christ have the simple and awesome privilege of living as God made human beings to live, imperfectly now and fully in eternity! “Have this mind you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes. Be humble as your King is humble.

The question which all this talk of humble submission to Christ lays before me anyway, is, “How humble am I willing to be for Christ?” How low am I willing to go in order to place myself completely under Jesus' Lordship?

Two weeks ago, I recounted the true story of Pastor Jim Cymbala’s encounter with a homeless man after worship on an Easter Sunday and how Cymbala’s revulsion melted and he was able to share the Savior Jesus with this man who desperately wanted Him.

During worship, right after I delivered that sermon, I prayed silently, telling God, “I try to share Jesus with people in my ministry all the time. But unlike the other people in this sanctuary, who don't have  credentials, titles, or clerical collars standing as walls between them and other people, I don’t always have the opportunity to share Jesus personally with others. Please give me that privilege, Lord.”

As I told the church council this past Tuesday, "Be careful what you pray for." Within minutes of my offering that prayer, a member of this congregation told me about someone who needed to hear about Jesus. On the following Monday, I got a call from a member telling me about someone else who needed the same thing. I went to both of those people, in absolute awe of the ways in which God answers our humble prayers. Later that week, I was able to share the Good News of Jesus with the family and friends of that second person when I was asked to preside at her funeral.

In the face of these answered prayers, all I could do was thank God and express my awe of His greatness and of His willingness to allow an imperfect sinner like me to play some small role in bringing Jesus to others. It was amazing!

Be in awe of God. But, please, do not be impressed with me! You see, this past week, I fell off the humility wagon.

Another phone call. Another person from outside of the congregation in need. But this time, like the priest and levite in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, I was preoccupied with my own agenda, bothered by this inconvenient interruption. I was curt with the person who made the request for help. “I can’t do everything,” I said. But, of course, God hadn’t asked me to do everything. He asked me to do just one thing…and that one thing was something I had actually asked Him to send my way!

Now, I can be thick-skulled. It can take me awhile to figure things out…or as Ann might put it, it takes some time before God’s two-by-four penetrates my consciousness. But yesterday, as I kneeled by my bed for my daily devotional and prayer time, I found it hard to pray. I sensed God telling me, “Don’t even think of praying right now. You have business to attend to.”

I remembered Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:23-24: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.“ I realized that I couldn’t offer my praise (or my requests) to God until I had done what I could to set things right with this person I had wronged.

So, I rummaged through my trash (that's humbling) until I found the discarded paper on which was written the telephone number of the person with whom I felt I’d been so short. I called. There was no answer. But thankfully, there was an answering machine on the other end of the line. I mentioned who I was and apologized for my wrong.

I don’t know if they’ve gotten the message yet. But I can tell you that I sensed a wall between God and me had been torn down. I was actually able to pray. I was able to come into God’s presence with joy once again. Remember what Peter wrote: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.”

We can’t manufacture humility. We can’t resolve to be humble. Humility is a gift we may not always want, but which truly is a gift. God will give us humility only as we submit to Jesus Christ, asking the Father and the Holy Spirit to give us the same humble spirit that caused Jesus to willingly ride a donkey into Jerusalem, knowing full well what horrors lay ahead of Him in the next few days.

As we prepare for Holy Week and Easter, pray that God will fill you with the humble spirit of Jesus.

If you pray that prayer, there will be times, I suspect, when you too will fall off the humility wagon.

But it is the humble, those who willingly lay their whole lives under the authority of the God made known in Jesus Christ, who experience oneness with God.

They know the exhilaration of being part of God’s holy plans and work in the world.

They have the privilege of seeing what happens as they fulfill the great commandment to love God and neighbor and the great commission to make disciples in their neighborhood and in the world.

And it’s those who humbly surrender to Jesus Christ, believing in Him, who can look forward to a day when they will be exalted and hear those words of Jesus, which, as I’ve told you before, I long to hear more than any others: “Well done, good and trustworthy slave…enter into the joy of your master.”

Ready?

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Luke 12:32-40
Like the other three gospels in the New Testament—Matthew, Mark, and John, the Gospel of Luke tells us about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But each of the gospel writers do this in their own style. In Luke, chapter 9, verse 51 through chapter 18:14, a section that the scholars call the Great Interpolation, we see Jesus’ movement to His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension as a journey, a journey Jesus was intent on taking no matter what the cost, a journey that would bring all who repent and believe in Him everlasting life in God’s kingdom.

The careful reader of this section of Luke will notice that in Jesus' journey, there are echoes and allusions to another journey, the one taken by the ancient Israelites when God led them out of slavery in Egypt to a land that God had promised to give to them. That journey had taken forty years and had been filled with challenges, difficulties, and temptations. In the end, only two people from the original generation that left Egypt ended up crossing the Jordan River into the promised land. One was Caleb. The other was God's designated successor to Moses, God's hand-picked leader of His people, a man named Joshua, whose name in Hebrew is Yeshua, in Greek is Yesus, and English is Jesus. It's a name that means, God saves.

One-thousand, five-hundred years later, God the Father would send another Yesus, Jesus, this one both a sinless man and the incarnation of God Himself, to once again save people, this time from sin and death, and to lead those who believe in Him to a better place. So, there are good reasons for Luke to portray Jesus’ movement to the cross and beyond as a journey, not the least of which being that you and I are on journeys too; we call it life.

Along the way, we, like the ancient Israelites, as we read in the Old Testament, and like Jesus and His first followers, as we see in Luke's Gospel, face challenges, opposition, and temptations.

Will our journeys culminate in our living eternally in the presence of God and in the fellowship of all who trust in Christ?

This is a question being answered daily throughout our own life journeys. Forgiveness, life, and hope are free gifts from the God most fully revealed to us in Jesus. But, as was true of Jesus’ first followers, it's possible for us kick all of God’s free gifts away. That happens when we trust in ourselves, or our own reasoning, or wealth, or power, or acceptance, instead of trusting in Jesus Christ alone. Doing any of these things constitutes betrayal of Jesus and builds up walls between God’s grace and us that can only be torn down when we turn from sin and surrender to Christ.

During His journey to Jerusalem, when the temptation to look out for Himself must have been incredible, Jesus spent most of His time encouraging His first followers—and you and me—for our journeys through life, assuring us of God’s love and and grace and favor for us. Today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke comes from Luke's journey narrative. If you would, please pull out your Celebrate insert and find the Gospel lesson.

Our lesson can be divided into two major sections. The first is verses 32 to 34. Here, Jesus is finishing up some teaching on money, possessions, and worry. Those three things always seem to go together. And after twenty-six years as a pastor, I can tell you that this cluster of issues is one the most important causes of marital discord. Most couples who call me up to talk about tensions in their marriages will immediately mention this as a major cause of tensions. So, Jesus’ words are really important here. Read along silently while I read these verses:

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms [alms are gifts of charity for the poor]. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Here, Jesus addresses His flock—the Church—and all its individual members. “Don’t worry about your finances [Notice that Jesus doesn’t say to be reckless spendthrifts. He says not to worry about finances.]” Then Jesus says. “Just as it brings God pleasure to give You His kingdom, give to others.” The God Who gave His Son and gives us, as James puts it elsewhere in the New Testament, “every good and perfect gift,” frees and commands us to be givers as well. Secure in all of God’s good gifts, we are set free to be the loving, giving people we were meant to be.

The WELCA group members know that, this past week, I read about two modern American churches that have tried to live out these words, not as a means of earning God’s favor, but as a way of expressing their thanks for God’s grace and as a way of saying that in the journey of faith, their fear of poverty would not trump their trust in God.

In one church, a pastor wondered one day how much money was being spent on altar flowers every Sunday. He then proposed setting up a fund made up of money the congregation otherwise would have spent on altar flowers; the fund was designated for the emergency financial needs of members of the congregation. Their sanctuary may not have been as pretty on Sunday mornings without the flowers, but all who gave and all who received were drawn closer to Christ!

In another congregation, members reached a stunning—and seemingly impossible--decision: “There will be no needy among us.” The church set up a fund to provide for the needs of its members.

These churches took seriously Jesus’ admonition not to allow our purses to become weighed down or worn out from carrying the stuff of the world. Instead, they invested in what lasts—the love of God and the people of God.

How might we do this at Saint Matthew? Where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also!

Do we treasure Jesus more than we do our wallets? That is a question that Jesus challenges us to ask ourselves every day!

When we do value Jesus more than anything, we will see our money not as an end—a god to be worshiped—but as a means of sharing Christ’s love. (I am still learning this, by the way.)

In verse 35, Jesus changes subjects. After He’s gone through cross, resurrection, and ascension, He says that one day, He will return to the world. When Jesus does that, He will set all of creation right. How should we live as we continue this journey of life before Jesus' return, then?

Again, read along silently with me while I read verses 35 to 38.

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.”

In first-century Judea, where Jesus lived, weddings would begin whenever the groom and his party showed up at the door of the bride’s house. And the celebrations could go on for two weeks afterward. (And you think you've been to some wild wedding receptions!)

There was no telling when the groom would come back to his home. In this little parable, Jesus says that the smart servants or slaves of a groom would be ready for his return at any time. Elsewhere, the New Testament describes the Church as Christ's bride.

Are we in the Church ready for Christ the groom’s return?

Are we trusting in Jesus more than anything?

Are we heeding the authority of Scripture more than our own supposed wisdom or cleverness?

Are we seeking to love God and love our neighbor?

There are many congregations that are more social clubs than churches.

Some are more political organizations than churches.

Some are places for the elite to meet and exchange business cards.

Some are hubs for the self-righteous to look down on the rest of the world.

Jesus says that if, when He returns, we are serving Him and sharing His good news with the world, He will do something extraordinary. He’ll fasten His belt—that is, cinch up his robes, to be ready to work—and He will serve us. The God of all creation, Who has already given His life for us on the cross, will serve us!

That’s a fantastic promise. But it’s followed by daunting words from Jesus. Again, read silently along with me, if you would, verses 39 and 40.

“But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Thieves don’t announce their break-ins in advance. Jesus says that, just like a thief who arrives unannounced, He—the Son of Man—is returning to this world at a time we cannot predict. In 2 Peter, in the New Testament, we’re told: “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some of you think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

Jesus’ return to the world has been delayed by a God Who wants to give we Christians the opportunity to share the Good News of new life through faith in Jesus with our neighbors, friends, and relatives, people who will be separated from God forever apart from repentance for sin and faith in Jesus Christ.

But, as surely as He first came into this world, as surely as He died on a cross, and as certainly as He rose from the dead, Jesus is coming back one day. Are we prepared?

We prepare ourselves for the return of Jesus by valuing Him more than anything on this earth—including our money.

And we prepare ourselves for the return of Jesus by turning from our sin, by trusting in Him.

We prepare by telling all we know about the God Who wants nothing so much as to love us, to give us His blessings, to forgive our sins, and to feed us on His grace for all eternity.

We prepare also by being steady in our praying, laying the whole world before God, asking His Holy Spirit to move in every facet of life, and by remaining steady in our serving others in Jesus’ Name.

Whenever Jesus returns or if we see Him face to face before He returns to this earth, may we be prepared. May we be found to be faithful. May we hear those words which I have said before I long to hear more than any others, "Well done, good and faithful servant!" Amen