Today we celebrated Palm Sunday. I don't always follow the church calendar or a lectionary or anything like that - other than celebrating Christmas and Easter and Mothering Sunday. But we celebrated Lazarus Sunday last week and Palm Sunday this week.
It's an interesting thing about Palm Sunday I never noticed until last week (err.. last night) as I was preparing the sermon for today. The passage in Zechariah prophecying about the coming of the Messiah - it has some awesome promises in it.
You know, it starts with
"Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey."
but then lower down in the passage, it promises,
"They will drink and roar as with wine;
they will be full like a bowl used for sprinkling the corners of the altar.
The LORD their God will save his people on that day as a shepherd saves his flock.
They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.
How attractive and beautiful they will be!"
They could have had all this that day, if only they accepted him as their Lord. But instead, they moved, in a few hours, from worship, to being angry with him, to questioning his authority, to wanting to have him arrested, to trying to discredit him, and finally to plotting his murder.
OK, we are the Christian church, we don't plot to have Jesus killed - but maybe that's just because he is safely in heaven. But how often we reject him we reject his claims over us, we accept his gifts but we don't like what he is asking of us, and don't want to follow where he's leading. I get so frustrated when I see this in other Christians - but then I often catch myself doing the same.
He is Lord - if only we would submit to him! He is our guide - if only we would follow him! He is our God - if only we would worship him in reality and truth!
I got to think a lot at these things lately, as we as a church have taken the biggest step of faith since I came here. It eventually became obvious to me as well as to everyone else that we will not be able to move in the main hall any time soon. In the meantime the lower hall was getting unusable as well - we used to use it for sports activities for the brigades and the youth club, and occasionally for the Romanian bunch. But plaster used to fall off the wall every time we played any ball games, and there were a few cracks in the floor. So I got this idea of remodelling the hall and moving the church back there - that is the hall the church started in, and we would be moving back to our roots in a way.
The church caught this vision, and it snowballed from there, to the point that we have placed all our budget into this, in the faith that the Lord will step in and take our church forward.
We had the vision confirmed in many ways, but it's still so scary. We are one week from the big inauguration service one Easter Sunday, and there is more than two weeks' work still to do. Tomorrow we are starting one week of prayer. We are at the point at which either the Lord steps in and does some amazing things in our midst, or we die as a church. It's crunch time, and scary as it is, I feel so excited about it all! I can feel the buzz in the air. As I look into the eyes of my people, I can see the doubts and fear, but also the excitement and faith. I can see people growing through it all.
'The church that would not die' is being reborn this week. Not on Easter Sunday - it is this week of prayer that is the beginning of a new page for us. It's funny that we begin this on my birthday - I haven't even realised this until tonight. I am going into this week with no message, no service, no preparation, no religious stuff - we are going to just wing it. All I want is to come before God and be open to him - and receive whatever he has for us. But as we go into this week, I was caught by this promise, "They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown. How attractive and beautiful they will be!"
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