Broken

Something happens on Palm Sunday that happens on no other day in the Christian year.

We walk in waving branches. We shout Hosanna. And then — in the same service — we read the Passion. The betrayal, the garden, the cross. We hold the parade and the death in the same hour, in the same hands.

The church does not do this by accident. It will not let us skip to Easter. It insists we carry the whole thing.

I have been sitting with this week's texts for a while now, and the word that keeps finding me is one I didn't go looking for.

Broken.

Not in some soft, therapeutic sense. In the way the Psalms mean it. In the way the Passion narrative means it. In the way that some of you — I suspect most of you — know it from the inside.

This Story Was Written for You

The readings for Palm Sunday are not for people who have it together. They are not an invitation to admire Jesus from a safe distance. They pull you in. They ask where you are in the story. And the honest answer, for most of us, is: closer to the disciples than we'd like to admit. Tired. Afraid. Trying. Falling short.

Palm Sunday has something to say about that. About what God does with broken things. About where God actually shows up — and it is not where most of us would have guessed.

Don't Skip This Week



I want to ask something of you this year.

Come for the whole week.

Not just Sunday. Come Thursday night and let Jesus wash your feet — and sit with what that costs him, knowing what he knows. Come Friday and sit in the silence after. Come Saturday night and stand in the dark and wait for the fire.

There is something that happens when you stay with Holy Week all the way through that does not happen when you jump from palms straight to Easter lilies. The resurrection means something different — something realer — when you've let yourself stand in the dark first.

Easter will mean what it's supposed to mean. But not if we skip what comes before it.

I'll be preaching Sunday on what these texts have to say to those of us who are carrying something heavy into this week. And I suspect that's most of us.

Come broken. Come tired. Come not sure what you believe right now. That's not an obstacle.

That has always been who is welcome here.