Palm Sunday, we must admit, is a very strange liturgy — in fact, it’s downright schizophrenic.  This participatory liturgy begins with the congregation physically gathered outside the church bearing palm leaves or branches.  As the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is read, the congregation actively participates by declaring, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  The people then make their symbolic entry into the church.  But almost immediately after we triumphantly cross the threshold of the church, we are transported to Good Friday — not simply denying the one coming in the name of the Lord but actively participating in that one's rejection and death as the Passion Narrative is read and the congregation assumes the role of the crowd.  And although many clergy complain that the only reason our liturgy is this mixed up is because we don't believe that our congregations can be trusted to be back in church on Good Friday to hear the Passion, it is my belief that the liturgists of the church knew exactly what they were doing and that the disjointed nature of this service is quite intentional.  For you see, when you take the lessons of Palm Sunday* together as a whole — the story of the triumphal entry and the Passion — you realize that what is being described is not merely an historical event some two thousand years removed.  Rather, these lessons are describing the struggle of the spiritual journey as we experience it every day in our individual lives. 

 Each and every day we must choose how we will live our lives — will it be according to values of the Dream of God?  Or, will it be according to the values of our culture?  Do we trust God?  Or do we trust our selves? our possessions? our various status symbols?  Can we risk love?  Or do we isolate our selves in order to protect ourselves?  These are the very spiritual issues that we humans encounter each and every day.  And these “Palm Sunday” choices are presented to each of us in the course of daily living.

 One of the great fallacies that the institutional church and our culture perpetuate is that our world is a dichotomy that is divided neatly into two seemingly distinct realms — the sacred and the secular; the holy and the mundane.  For most religious people this gets translated into a church realm and the realm of, well, "real life."  And these two realms are understood to be antithetical.  Our experience of the sacred becomes relegated to realm of our religious observance on Sundays and with the conclusion of our weekly observance we simply pick up with our lives with no further thought of the holy until the next Sunday.  Thus, on Sundays we welcome the one who comes in the name of the Lord and come Monday, religion is understood to be irrelevant at best and we may in fact be equally as deliberate as the crowds crying, "crucify" in our attempt to keep religion out of our way as we wholeheartedly embrace the self-serving values of our society and culture and seek to assure our importance in the world.

 Yet, when we look at Jesus' life, we are confronted with a completely different understanding of the spiritual life.  The life of Jesus is incarnational.  The values of the dream of God are meant to be embodied and manifest in the "real world" — even (and especially) when life is challenging and things aren’t going your way.  Life is not segregated into sacred and secular; holy and mundane.  Life is a whole.  Life is holy.  God is present in the exact place that we find ourselves.

 The liturgy and lessons of Palm Sunday demand that we examine our lives and acknowledge the superficial manner whereby we attempt to live spiritual lives by conveniently segregating the sacred from the secular and convincing ourselves that life is necessarily (and expediently) dichotomous.  The life and death of Jesus, as depicted in the lessons for Palm Sunday, insists that life is whole and holy.  In Jesus’ life and through his death the two seemingly impermeable realms of heaven and earth are joined together.  And suddenly, the dream of God has come near. 

*Texts to reference:  Matthew 21:1-11; Matthew 26:14 — 27:66