04/13/2025 ~ Liturgy of the Palms ~ Sixth Sunday in Lent ~ Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Luke 19:28-40 ~ Liturgy of the Passion ~ Sixth Sunday in Lent ~ Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56 or Luke 23:1-49 ~ YOUTUBE VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYzqjuNXZ1k
VIDEO OF FULL SERVICE: https://vimeo.com/showcase/7960701/video/1076425325

In the Image of God

“Christ, though in the image of God, / did not deem equality with God / as something to be clung to— / but instead emptied self, / and took on the image / of oppressed humankind: / born into the human condition, / found in the likeness of a human being. / Jesus was thus humbled….” — Philippians 2:6-8a.

Some of you have heard me say dozens of times I served a church in rural Upstate New York for 23 years. Here’s what I mean by rural. It was a town of less than 7,000. By some standards, especially those in Northern Maine, that’s a good size town. In fact, it’s a good sized town compared to where I was serving churches in Waldo County.

But you did have to go an hour in any direction, get outside of that county, to hit a larger town. In between, there were hills, forests, some farms, not much else. The town was the county seat. So at least for that neck of the woods it made it a metropolis.

Despite its size, there were a bunch of Mainline churches— Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist, Congregational. Except for the Lutheran Church, all those churches from different traditions, were established before the mid-1800s.

Early in my tenure the Director of Music Ministries wanted to do a Palm Sunday anthem but it needed a larger choir than we had and good tenor solist. The Congregational choir had tenors but no soloists. However, the Methodists had a tenor who regularly did solos.

So she asked the Methodist choir director if it might be possible to put the choirs together for Palm Sunday. And yes, she did that without telling me. Then she asked me if I could talk to the Methodist pastor about joining the two congregations as one for Palm Sunday.

Why did she think this could happen? My choir director knew the Methodist pastor and I got along famously. And so that pastor and I met and we went out on a limb because we came up with what was, for that town at least, a precedent shattering plan.

Both congregations would meet at the Congregational Meeting House and start the Palm Sunday service with a blessing of the Palms. Then the members of both congregations would march out the front doors and processed the three blocks up the main street of the town to the Methodist Church for the rest of the Palm Sunday Service. A farmer in the area even supplied a donkey for the procession.

What happened as we processed? We waved our palms at people in passing cars. Guess what? Many drivers, smiles on their faces, honked their horns and waved back.

We repeated this year after year and by the time I left in different years and in different combinations at one time or another the Baptist, the Episcopalians and the Lutherans had all joined the Congregationalists and the Methodists in this public display of faith, this public act of worship.

And yes, having a procession out in the open was a very public act of worship, a public display of faith. But my read is, at least in part, each of us probably lays claim to the thought that religion, faith, worship, should be private. But is that accurate? (Slight pause.)

Here’s my take: faith is personal. But faith, by definition, is never, ever private. Why? Faith, at its core, is about two things: relationship with God and relationship with others.

Additionally, faith needs to be both something on which we act and a way of life. If it is about God, others and a way of life, faith is, by definition, public.

In short, faith is about acting on and through those aforementioned relationships with God and others. So faith is unquestionably personal but not private. Faith is public because faith involves a way of life and therefore involves action. (Slight pause.)

These words are in the work known as Philippians: “Christ, though in the image of God, / did not deem equality with God / as something to be clung to— / but instead emptied self, / and took on the image / of oppressed humankind: / born into the human condition, / found in the likeness of a human being. / Jesus was thus humbled….” (Slight pause.)

It’s likely at one time or another you’ve all heard what is commonly referred to the Prayer of Saint Francis. Francis of Assisi valued humility, simplicity, compassion, care for the poor and has come to be an example of what it means to live a Gospel life.

Now, I refer to the Prayer of Saint Francis as being attributed to this Saint. Why? There is absolutely no trace of that prayer anywhere before the year 1912, some 700 years after Francis died. Does that mean the words of the prayer are bad or should be ignored? No. It just means they are not 900 years old.

These are the words of that prayer: “O God, make me an instrument of your peace, / Where there is hatred, let me sow love; / Where there is injury, pardon; / Where there is doubt, faith; / Where there is despair, hope; / Where there is darkness, light; / Where there is sadness, joy. // O Holy One, / grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; / to be understood, as to understand; / to be loved, as to love. / For it is in giving we receive. / It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, / and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” [1] (Slight pause.) This prayer is filled with humility.

When pastors talk about humility, we are sometimes met with a strong backlash in church circles. In our culture humility is sometimes confused with humiliation, confused with making one’s own self less than one should be. And, after all, why should we not think of ourselves as great? God has created us in God’s own image. Right?

But thinking humility is about humiliation or making one’s own self less than one should be, proves our culture does not understand what humility really means. Humility isn’t about denying we are good (or even great). Humility isn’t about wearing sackcloth and ashes, beating up on ourselves, having low self-esteem.

Rather, humility is about refusing to deny who other people are. It’s about seeing others as created in the image of God. Humility is not about making ourselves ‘less.’ It’s about seeing everyone as standing together before God. (Slight pause.)

One message Palm Sunday proclaims is Jesus was very, very public about faith— public even onto death. And so we are presented with a question. What does it mean when the Apostle Paul says (quote): “…Jesus was thus humbled— / obediently accepting death, / even death on a cross.” (Slight pause.)

The humbleness expressed by Jesus is clear because despite being highly exalted Jesus sees others as created in the image of God. The self-emptying of Christ was the fulfilling of a vocation: attending to the needs of humanity.

Christ humbled self by resisting the temptation to follow an easier calling, which would have denied an authentic self. But there is no hint at all of self-deprecation.

So on Palm Sunday when we say, “Blessed is the One who Comes in the Name of our God,” we are saying Jesus is not just public about faith in God. Jesus is also humble. (Slight pause.)

Perhaps on this Palm Sunday we need to remember the humility found in that prayer of Saint Francis which says: “O God, make me an instrument of your peace,…”

Perhaps being and becoming an instrument is not personal, nor is it private. The very words— make me an instrument— invite us to action. Action is, by definition, public. Amen.

04/13/2025
Elijah Kellogg Church, Harpswell, Maine

ENDPIECE: It is the practice of the Pastor to speak after the Closing Hymn, but before the Benediction. This, then, is a précis of what the pastor said before the blessing: “As I said, faith is personal not private. If that were not the case there would be no need to gather as a community of faith. We would each worship our own personal God alone with no connection to anyone else. But this is clear to me: the Christian faith is enwrapped by and enfolded in community. That is one reason why the Congregational tradition exists. The word congregation tells this is an assembly, a group, a community of faith.”

BENEDICTION: God has written the reality of love within us all. We are empowered to live in this love, through the Redeemer, Jesus. In Christ, we experience God’s presence together. Where Christ leads, let us follow. Where God calls us to service, let us go. And may the peace of God which surpasses all understanding keep our hearts and minds in the knowledge of God, the love of Jesus, the Christ and the companionship of the Holy Spirit, this day and forevermore. Amen.

[1] Slightly adapted from the traditional words of the prayer as found on the wiki web site.