| New Book now Available Here is an anthology of over 1100 brief prayers and thought-starters, for each day of the year, with almost 400 original prayers by Bruce Prewer. Included is both a subject index and an index of authors-- an ecumenical collection of about 300 different sources. |
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| Title: Brief Prayers for Busy People. Author: Bruce D Prewer ISBN 978-1-62880-090-6 Available from Australian Church Resources, web site www.acresources.com.au email service@acresources.com.au or by order from your local book shop or online on amazon. |
Year
C/ PALM/PASSION SUNDAY
Luke 19: 28-40
(Sermon
1: “Joy and Tears”)
(Sermon
2: “An Autumn Meditation”)
Philippians 2: 5-11
Isaiah 50: 4-9a
Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29,
or Psalm 31: 9-16
PREPARATION
In sunshine and shadow, joy or grief,
this is the day which the Lord
has made,
We will rejoice
and be glad in it.
Look ! Your Messiah comes to you;
Humble and
seated on an ass, he arrives.
Hosanna! Wonderful is the one who comes in the name
of the Lord.
Peace in
heaven and glory in the highest!
If we should keep quiet the very stone would cry
aloud!
Peace in
heaven and glory in the highest!
OR ¾
Christ Jesus humbled himself and became obedient
unto death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him, and bestowed
on him a name
that is above every other name.
That at the
name of Jesus, every knee should bow
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the
Father.
The amazing grace of Christ Jesus be
with you all.
And also with
you!
PRAYER OF APPROACH
Holy God, your love goes beyond all limits. In the
passion of your true Son, you take us beyond our highest ideals and beneath our
deepest fears. We thank you for the sweet-sour celebration of Palm Sunday; for
both the joy and the tears. Foster in us the desire and the will to follow
Jesus without reserve, that we may be led into a peace that holds in time of
trouble, and into a love that persists far beyond the outer rim of our present
understanding. In the
name of Christ Jesus our Saviour.
Amen!
PALM SUNDAY
Along the pilgrim way they went
where seers and saints had trod,
he sensed the blessing of pure
hearts
that look upon their God.
They cheered and laughed along the road,
Hosannas
thick and fast,
but he wasn’t fooled by human
praise
he knew the first was last.
He did not watch how Judas scowled
or dote on Peter’s smile,
he simply did what he was
asked
and went the second mile.
The pilgrim crowd were on a high,
their palms a waving mass,
he went in trust all of the
way
though he was just an ass.
© B.D. Prewer 1991
CONFESSION AND ASSURANCE
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the
Lord. Seek the grace of Christ Jesus while it may be found, call upon him while
he is near. Let us pray.
Because your words and deeds are perfection but our
goodness is like soiled and torn clothing; Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Because we become locked into mediocrity, having
lost enthusiasm for reaching high because of bruising knock backs; Lord have
mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Because from personal experience you, merciful
Friend, know how hard it is to keep the faith when the future appears to be
threat and pain; Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Loving God, Friend and
Saviour, please continue to forgive our sins and heal
our fractured faith and love.
Restore among us the joy of
salvation and the simplicity of uncluttered goals.
We pray for hands eager to
serve you ,wills keen to follow you, and for minds
that are wild about exploring the height, depth, length and breadth of your
redeeming love in Christ Jesus.
Let this be, dear Lord, let
this be.. Amen!
FORGIVENESS
My Friends, if your pastor should keep quiet about
the Gospel, the very stones would cry out and declare salvation through Christ
Jesus! In him we are a forgiven family of God. Live as those who are liberated,
not looking back with remnants of guilt but looking forward to the fulfilment
of the promises of God.
Amen!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of
the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!
PRAYER FOR CHILDREN
Jesus, You Deserve It
Dear Jesus, king of love,
you deserve every bit of praise
your get.
It’s so ‘cool’ that on Palm Sunday
oodles of people became excited
and waved their palm branches
and shouted Hosanna!
We join in today
because we love you
a lot.
And we love you
because you first
loved us.
Amen!
PSALM 118: 1-2 & 19-29
O give thanks to God who is
all goodness,
whose love prevails for ever!
Let all of Christ’s people shout it:
God’s love
prevails forever.
Open for me the gates of grace and truth,
that I may enter and give thanks
to God.
Here really are the gates of God,
where the true can believers go
inside.
I thank you, Lord, for listening to me,
and becoming my Friend and
Saviour.
The stone which the builders threw aside
has now become the true
foundation stone.
We owe all this to our God’s saving deed,
and it looks absolutely
wonderful to us.
This new day has been made by God,
let us celebrate and be
delighted with it!
We have prayed: “Save us, please God,
we beg you, give us the
triumph.”
Wonderful is he who comes in God’s name;
in the house of prayer we
praise you!
God, our God, has shown us the true light;
join this peace march and wave
the branches!
You truly are my God, and I thank you;
you are my God, I will
celebrate you!
O give thanks to God who is
all goodness,
whose love prevails for ever!
Ó B D Prewer
SERMON 1: JOY AND TEARS
Luke 19: 28-40
There is profound tension in Palm Sunday.
We have a brief but haunting burst of sunshine as
Jesus is surrounded by the crowds, waving palm branches and songs of praise to
God. Yet the storm clouds are quickly gathering. There’s a brooding sense of
impending tragedy as Jesus stops his descent from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem
and weeps like a broken hearted lover.
The different churches are not of one mind as to how
best observe this final Sunday before Easter. Some go for an uninhibited Palm
Sunday celebration : Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Some keep
close to the Passion Sunday theme of Christ suffering. Other churches focus on
the hosannas in the morning and the tears at evening. At least in this way a
little of the true tension of the event is retained.
ONE POET’S ATTEMPT
Many poets have tried to capture the profound
tension. One attempt which speaks to me is in Clive Sansom’s poem, ‘The
Donkey’s Owner’, in which he compares the pompous entry of Pilate to Jerusalem
one day followed by the arrival of Jesus the next morning. (It is best read it
with a working man’s accent like you might hear in the pub at outback Menindee
or at ‘Young and Jackson’s’ in Melbourne)
THE DONKEY’S OWNER
.
Snaffled my donkey, he did --- good
luck to him!
Rode him astride, feet dangling,
near scraping the ground
Gave me the laugh of my life when I
first saw him,
Remembering yesterday --- you know,
how Pilate come
Bouncing the same road, on that
horse of his
Big as a house and the armour
shining
And half of Rome
trotting behind him. Tight mouthed he was
Looking as if he
owned the world.
Then today,
Him and my little donkey! Ha! Laugh
---?
I thought I’d kill myself when he
first started.
So did the rest of them. Gave him a
cheer
Like he was Caesar himself, only more hearty:
Tore off some palm twigs and
followed shouting,
Whacking the donkey’s behind
........Then suddenly
We see his face.
The smile had gone, and somehow the
way he sat
Was different --- like he was much
older --- you know ---
Didn’t want to
laugh no more.
Powerful stuff. At first the donkey’s owner
thinks it’s a just a laugh, but when he sees the face of Jesus, something
profound spears at his heart: “Didn’t want to laugh no more.”
LIVE WITH THE TENSION
Indeed there is something both gloriously joyful and
awesomely bitter about this day. Are we looking into the mystery of the heart
of God? How does God hold infinite sorrow and infinite joy together?
The lectionary readings for today
helps us live with the tension.
We started with the passage from Isaiah ( 50:4-9a) which is the third of the so-called ‘servant
songs’- the poems about the true
servant of God whose willing suffering will become deeply redemptive. Here is a
brief glimpse of a noble person whose back is bared for a flogging, and whose
beard in ripped out by the handful, and
I did not hide my face
from shame
and spitting.
Then comes the Psalm (31:9-16), where there is a
similar mood of impending suffering, although without Isaiah’s remarkable
concept of redemption.
For I have heard the whispering of the mob.
Fears are all around me.
They put their heads together
against me,
they
conspire to take my life.
This grim scene is followed by the Epistle
(Philippians 2: 5-11). These sentences are most likely a section from an early
Christian hymn, sung in honour of their Christ. It sings of a Jesus who does
not make a grab for power, but bends low like Isaiah’s suffering servant,
accepting mutilation and a cruel death.
You may think this is all very gloomy stuff. But that is not how it reads in the
Scriptures. There is no despair here. Hope rules. We are taken close to the
pulsing, passionate Centre of existence, to the heart of God, where we find
redemption at work through willing self sacrifice It is a thing of unsurpassed beauty
that such a sublime Love should give itself for healing a diseased world.
This is the path to the only genuine new age; to the
only sustainable new heaven and new earth. This
is true love, not that we loved God but that he loved us, and gave his son to
be the remedy for our degrading sins.
Of course, the teeming world around us does not
admit this. It wants to save itself by clutching at life, hoarding it, grabbing
all that one can, treading on other heads to get more
than our share. Looking after number one, feverishly
possessing, mastering, exploiting. Yet with every fierce grab they lose
more than they gain.
There are frenetic people everywhere chasing the big
lie. Sadly, in what they think will be gaining richert life,
is found much less; spiritual poverty, futility; despair; darkness.
LOVE AND TEARS
Yet here in the Gospel we have the Man from Nazareth
(secretly, many of our secular contemporaries see him as an impractical fool)
riding on a donkey with his long legs almost touching the ground. “Lose your
life and you will find it,” he is acting out, ready to go to the bitter end.
Palm Sunday begins the last Act in the drama of
purest Love, love in the jaws of humiliation. Like most of the profound moments
of life, it is joy mixed with tears.
Luke is alone among the Gospels in highlighting the
tears. In a few lines that other writers do not include, Luke tells how, when
Jesus rounded the Mount Olives and saw Jerusalem ahead of him with the golden
temple brilliant in the morning light, he broke down and wept for the doomed
city.
Recall the
other occasion where is said that Jesus wept? At the grave of
his friend Lazarus? In that case the Greek word for “wept” used by John is dakruo, meaning “shed a tear”.
Later in
Luke’s story of the crucifixion, as Jesus stumbled his way to the up the hill
to Golgotha, broken-hearted women wept and wailed as he went by. It is the
weeping of women who are utterly distraught with grief. Here the Greek word is kalaio.
This same
word (kalaio) is also used when Jesus
weeps on Palm Sunday. It’s not just the
gentle shedding of a tear or two as in dakruo.
It is the shaking shoulders and heaving chest of a very strong, brave man
caught in a flood of grief for the city he loved. It is kalaio.
Here is the
irony of Palm Sunday: Christ’s racking grief takes place in a celebration that,
on the surface, looks like the most triumphant day of his life. We are
delighted that for once in Jesus’ experience, this
adorable man is given the treatment he deserved. We want to join the cheering
and the waving of palms. And we do.
But always
there is the tension. Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday.
Happiness allied with profound grief; our joy in the Saviour, his sorrow over
that which is lost and doomed.
A
BROKEN-HEARTED LOVER
I said
earlier that Jesus broke down and wept like a broken hearted lover. That is in
fact the literal truth. Yet never was a lover equal to this. Never was the
beloved pursued with such an costly love.
Today we are
close to the final frontier; to that Divine Mystery who brought us into being
and follows us through all the hours of life. Close to that Lover who cannot
bear that even the least person should perish. The Christ who wept over
Jerusalem weeps over us, and him is the weeping of
God.
Tension.
Laughter and
weeping.
Trumpet and then
plaintive oboe..
God’s
redemptive suffering.
Hosanna!
Followed by a solemn prelude to “Father forgive them,
for they
know not
what they do.”
As the owner
of the donkey in Clive Samsom’s poem concludes:
Then suddenly
We see his face.
The smile had gone, and somehow the
way he sat
Was different --- like he was much
older --- you know ---
Didn’t want to
laugh no more.
SERMON 2: PASSION SUNDAY: AN AUTUMN MEDITATION
Hosanna!
Blessed is the king who comes in the name of God! Peace in heaven and glory the
highest!”
Easter season and springtime coincide in the
Northern hemisphere.
At times I have envied that wonderful congruence of
dynamic new life: snowdrops, daffodils, hyacinths and the green budding on
trees after the long, cruel winter, and the joyful greetings: “Christ is risen”.
Here in Australia, we miss that happy congruence at
Easter.
But on Passion or Palm Sunday, our Southern
Hemisphere season of autumn is most appropriate. Especially
in the southern states of our continent, and whenever Palm Sunday occurs later
in April.
There is a glorious yet melancholy feeling about Autumn.
Around us is ravishing beauty, yet we know it is to
be followed by grey winter. In the solarium of my home, where I spend my
morning devotions, I look out on the garden, and
beyond it to the small lake. All seasons are fine, but autumn is special.
In Autumn the gentler sun
highlights the colours.
In our garden, the grapevines, peach, plum,
nectarine and the
apple trees ( a little later) wear their golden and russet robes. I revel in it. Such beauty is a joy. Yet the
feeling of joy is suffused with sadness. This beauty will quickly be gone. The
warm sunshine will soon be diluted and often hidden behind clouds. Inexorably
winter will arrive and much of the garden will seem bleak and bare..
Passion Sunday is like that.
There is much to celebrate. We glory in the beauty
of Christ arriving at Jerusalem on that little donkey. In our mind’s eye we
watch the crowds and see the waving tree branches, and we are moved by the sight
of some followers throwing their cloaks down on the road in front of his
donkey.
We hear the excitement of the crowd of pilgrims
and listen to them shouting: Hosanna! Blessed is the king who comes in the name of God! Peace in
heaven and glory in the highest!” We
are delighted and grateful that for once he is getting a smidgen of the praise
his loving name warrants.
Yet like autumn, the sadness is here also.
Winter is near for Jesus. We know that this sunlit
scene is followed soon by the dark chill of Gethsemene, the ill wind of arrest
and trials, the hail of abuse and whipping, and the final storm of his
sufferings and cruel death.
We need to embrace both with open arms.
Joy and sadness are entwined in life. If we try just to milk the happiness and
avoid the bitterness, we will be stunted in our growth. In a peculiar way, that
I cannot adequately explain, the glory and the melancholy of the autumn season
are inseparable partners, and the experience is the richer for it. Palm Sunday
is a profound joy because it is inseparable from Good Friday.
Throughout life, we should not try to dodge the
bitter in our lust for the sweet.
Rank hedonism does not ennoble the soul but makes it
shallow and trivial. Religious hedonism,
customer-geared religion, suffers the same fatal flaw. Faith is not all “happy clappy.”
Journeying through of Holy Week, and especially Good
Friday, is important.
I have no time for those Christians who want to skip
over Good Friday and leap to forward to Easter. “Why be gloomy they declare.
Christ is not dead but risen. Put away those dismal thoughts and hymns.” In my
gut I know that is shallow. I need, profoundly need, to enter into the sufferings and death
of Christ if I am to really appreciate the astounding Easter event.
Grief and suffering, Christ’s and ours, should not be
dodged.
As with Holy Week, I have similar doubts about
Christian groups who claim that funerals should cut out the solemnity and grief
and be purely celebration of resurrection.. I believe
we need to experience our grief, and to experience it together in Christian
community. Loss should be faced, the reality of death acknowledged before the
wonderful Christian hope can adequately be affirmed and celebrated.
I remember one extremely distressing funeral
I conducted of a wonderful young woman who died
trying to rescue children from drowning. After the funeral a good friend
commented to me: “Thank you for you sensitivity and care, and for celebrating
Robyn’s life so wonderfully, but for my part I needed to do a little more
grieving than you allowed time for.”
I really heard his words and reflected.
I had done much of my own grieving with the mother,
but for some who had not fully faced the hard reality of death until they
entered the church and looked upon the coffin, it was different. Maybe I had
not given them sufficient time to grieve. I was grateful to my friend’s honest
comment.
Happiness and melancholy belong together this Palm
Sunday.
In Christ both can be embraced without fear, for he
enters into the fullness of both and from them “works an exceeding great
glory.”
If we should keep silent, the very stones would cry
out their joy and pain and praise,
THANKSGIVING
Loving God,
we give thanks for the joy of simple people and devout pilgrims as they followed
our Lord Jesus into Jerusalem.
We give
thanks that at least for one hour in his mortal life, Jesus was given a little
of the praise he deserved.
We are
thankful for those who cheered him, even if they did not understand the
heartache that he was already beginning to suffer.
We are
grateful for each of those waving tree branches and for every excited and
joyful shout of “Hosanna!”.
We thank you
for the awesome love of Christ, which resolutely took him from Palm Sunday into
the growing dangers of Holy Week.
Loving God,
we cannot plumb the depths that lay ahead of Jesus, but we do know it was for
us, and for that we are eternally thankful.
Amen.
INTERCESSIONS
Please give
us the grace, loving God, to pray with our hearts as well as our lips, and to serve
with our deeds as well as our prayers.
In places
where the church celebrates with joy today, where it laughs with little
children and praises with elderly saints, till hosannas overflow from every
loving heart; may your kingdom come,
And your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
In places
where the church gathers in sorrow or fear today, weeping with Christ Jesus for
the cross that must be carried in the face of misunderstanding and abuse; may
your kingdom come.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In places
where ordinary people are disillusioned with that greed and injustice that
wants the poor and the weak blamed for the deprivations that afflict them; your
kingdom come.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In places
where people are at their wits end, angry or frightened, ready to hit out
violently at those around them, or falling into despair and planning to take
their own lives; Your kingdom come.
Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
In places
where there are small hopes begging to be kept alive, programmes of compassion needing to be
supported, and the beginnings of faith requiring recognition and encouragement;
your kingdom come.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
God of
Christ Jesus and our God, enable each of us to enter into fellowship with the
Spirit of Christ, that our personal happiness and suffering may not be wasted,
but dedicated to your infinite purposes which are often baffling but always
loving. In Your name we pray.
Amen!
SENDING OUT
In sunshine and shadow, joy or grief,
this is the day which the Lord
has made,
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
Step
gratefully into this holy weak;
tread softly for many things are already bruised;
go
reverently for holiness is found in unlikely places;
walk lovingly for the love of the Crucified One
is
the key to all things on earth and in heaven.
Amen!
Even with our
small faith, may Christ live and rule in our hearts.
The
blessings of this Lord’s Day, through our Saviour Christ, in the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit, from the God who gathers all our joys and sorrows into one
mighty consummation, be with you now and always.
Amen!
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