Sermon: April 13, 2025
Reading: Luke 19:28-40
Every Sunday we have our call and response of offering God’s peace. And yet, in our world, we have our own contradictions to God’s love and peace.
We are told that war and military might are the best way to create peace. Yet, time and time again, Martin Luther King Jr. is proven right: “Violence only causes more violence.” We have an overabundance of food, yet starvation is a real thing because the economic value that’s placed on food is higher than the value of the people who are going hungry.
The privileged are strengthened by holding back the marginalized and vulnerable by limiting their access to quality healthcare, education, and other vital resources. Denying and limiting assistance places a proverbial boot on the throats of those in need and keeps them in their place. Governments and businesses seek to win at all costs, even if it poisons the Earth, all while they are praising and cherishing the almighty dollar over the lives of human beings.
The powerful of the world may put on a show with shouts and cheers of peace and offer of thoughts and prayers when tragedy strikes, but their actions towards others screams crucify him as they continue to deny Christ within all people.
And here’s Jesus, humbly mounted on a donkey, riding through all of it, weeping because of the world’s unwillingness to truly offer peace and wholeness to all of God’s creation. Jesus, recognizing our human brokenness, continues his journey to Jerusalem and the cross because he recognizes our need to be healed and experience the peace and wholeness that can only be achieved through him. This is the extent to which God is willing to go in order to share with his creation Shalom, his loving and life-giving peace.
We are invited to journey with Jesus throughout Holy Week. On Maundy Thursday, we join with Jesus as he washes the feet of the disciples and gives us a new commandment to offer peace and love to our sisters and brothers, just as he has loved us. On Good Friday, we cannot turn away in abandonment but join together at the foot of his cross.
Jesus is faithful to God’s will because he recognizes our need to peer into the tomb on Easter morning and experience his resurrection as He opens a pathway of reconciliation to God’s love and God’s blessing of shalom, the wholeness of mind, body, and spirit with God, to one another, and to all the world.
May the peace of Christ so rule your heart that it shapes your words, actions, and relationships, transforming you into the image of God’s love and peace. The peace of the Lord be with you.
