God's Toy Box, Part 6: Rocking Horse

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

 

 

 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

March 24, 2024

Palm Sunday

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

 

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

We’re so excited to follow Jesus this Palm Sunday. It’s a party!

We happily rock with the crowd.

But as the week progresses, and the heat around Jesus intensifies, we become unsure.

We don’t move, and we let the motion of the crowd rock us.

By Friday, when Jesus is Public Enemy #1, we’re nowhere near him.

Conveniently, our rockers aren’t designed for forward movement, so we allow that to absolve us of responsibility.

Where will we be by next Sunday?

God, help us find a better way to move.

*Hymn                        All Glory, Laud, and Honor                 #280, v 1-3

Prayer of Confession:

God of the back and forth sway, we try to trust your momentum and follow where you push. But in seasons like this one, where following you means making hard choices about our character, our integrity, and who our friends are, we suddenly find ourselves stuck in the grooves we make in the carpet. Forgive our hesitation, and forgive us when we think we’re doing a lot of work, but we’re not actually going anywhere.

Assurance:

Hear the Good News: if Jesus could untie a baby donkey and make him the head of a parade, he can create real change with us, even when we think we’re stuck in one place. Trust the Unmoved Mover. Amen.

Scripture Reading Mark 11: 1-11

Jesus’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem

11 When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples 2 and said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. 3 If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this: ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’ ” 4 They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, 5 some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6 They told them what Jesus had said, and they allowed them to take it. 7 Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. 9 Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,

“Hosanna!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

10 

    Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

11 Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple, and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

Sermon                      God’s Toy Box, Part 6: Rocking Horse

Friends, we’re now in part 6 of this sermon series I put together for the season of Lent, where I’m using the book Toy Box Leadership by Ron Hunter and Michael Waddell. In the book, Hunter and Waddell look at how the toys we played with as kids teach us lessons that apply well to the business world. For this sermon series, we’re looking at how those same toys teach us lessons about faith, and our Creator. Now that it’s Palm Sunday, we’re in the home stretch!

Unlike most of the other toys we’ve talked about in this series, the rocking horse doesn’t have an “origin story”. Little kids like rocking and bouncing movement (if you don’t believe me, come to my house, my kids will have you convinced in 5 minutes and you’ll be dizzy the rest of the night). Little kids like horses. And in centuries past, horses weren’t just farm animals that said “neigh,” they were the second most common mode of transportation after feet, and they were essential for everything from construction to war. So just like we made dolls so kids could model their parents caring for their baby siblings, we made rocking horses so our kids could ride horses just like the grownups around them, while also getting our fussy little ones to self soothe. Indeed, as a parent you learn to work smarter, not harder.

The rocking horse also stands out among the toys I’ve been playing with in this series because most of the toys we’ve talked about show you the positive–what you should do, what you are capable of, where creativity may get you if you keep trying. This toy shows us the negative–what we, people who claim to, and aspire to, follow Jesus, look like when we’re all talk and no action. Or, what happens when we’re super busy, but we’re not actually accomplishing anything.

And, unfortunately, the rocking horse perfectly reflects the disciples in a lot of Gospel stories, and acutely so during Holy Week. The holiday we celebrate this morning, Palm Sunday, was the apex of the discipleship experience. Jesus, by now a greatly beloved man with low-key celebrity status, arrived in the capital, Jerusalem, during the Passover festival. He was followed by his entourage of not just the 12 disciples, but also all the people who have become so fascinated by his healing and teaching that they want to be around all the time. The capital was packed with people who made the pilgrimage there, which means there were plenty of eyes to put on Jesus. He made an unassuming entrance, on a baby donkey, but still got his own parade. This was a very fun, very gratifying day to be a disciple of Jesus.

The physics of how any rocking toy, like the horse, works is about inertia and momentum. Give the horsie a push, and he’ll keep going for a little while until his rockers use up all the energy you gave him. The rocking horse doesn’t do anything on his own, he simply responds for a short time to what you do on or around him. The same had been too frequently true for the disciples, who had been very susceptible to peer pressure, and who had been quick to disbelieve or give up when the odds seemed long in the past. On this day, when nearly everyone in town was partying with Jesus, the disciples responded to that energy in kind, and celebrated, without adding anything of their own. For today, that was just fine. But all didn’t stay just fine for very long.

One of the most dangerous aspects of fame is that it’s very fickle. Fame comes from the opinions of a large population of people, and it gets its energy from the bandwagon mentality. And the bandwagon can turn on a dime. On Palm Sunday, nearly everyone loved Jesus, save for the very, very quiet background hum of Pharisees, who had been Jesus’ haters since he began his public ministry. If Jesus lived now, and in a society that looked like ours, and he had a social media presence like many other beloved, young celebrities, Instagram would be full of pictures of Jesus parading into town on that cute baby donkey. The retweets would all be in the spirit of adoration. #Hosanna would be trending. And the comments would be 99% positive, but also very shallow. “<3”. “Love him!” “Palm branch emoji.” Like a toy with a painted smile, the masses would be cheerful, with no substance, and no real love underneath. 

The negative YouTube comments, the Twitter trolls, and the “angry” and sarcastic “haha” reactions on Facebook would come in a sinister trickle from the Pharisees’ accounts. On Palm Sunday, the Pharisees’ negativity would come off as one jerk getting swiftly buried by an avalanche of praise. But as the week progressed, the balance of praise and scorn would shift, and Tik Toks questioning who this Jesus guy thinks he is would start trending. Clickbait articles would start popping up, with headlines like “10 cringe things about Jesus. #3 will shock you!” The Instagram pictures would shift. On Sunday Jesus would get tagged in celebratory party images. By Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Jesus would be followed around by suspicious people with camera phones trying to get a shot of him doing something embarrassing, something that makes him look bad. Thursday would be the major turning of Jesus’ fame tide. After observing a quiet, no phones allowed dinner with his twelve disciples, and after washing their feet as a final loving act, the disciples who were supposed to pray with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and guard him, would get distracted watching cat videos. The major thing that’s as true now as it was in the First Century is how quickly money corrupts, so that detail in this story would be no different: for the right price, Judas would tell the Pharisees where and when they could find Jesus at his most exposed and vulnerable. Ironically, the one disciple who broke out of the rocking horse mentality, who didn’t stand in place, and who actually did something in this story, was Judas. But he chose to move in the direction of evil and getting rich quick. He got the Pharisees the upper hand they’d been after for a year. By Friday, as Jesus faced an immense backlash of public hatred, and ultimately his trial and death, his reputation would be worse than Janet Jackson’s after the 2004 Super Bowl.

At any time, in any place, in any culture, with any technology, what saves anyone from the mob mentality, from entrapment, and from unjust accusations is support and friendship. Many forces, all brought together, killed Jesus–the militarism, classism, and racism of the Romans, the greed and insecurity of the Pharisees, the powerlessness of the women who stayed by Jesus’ side, the apathy of the more rich and powerful in Jesus’ time who couldn’t be bothered to stop his crucifixion. But his disciples, while not crucifying Jesus, dealt the most devastating blow by abandoning him, and giving up on their loyalty to their teacher and closest friend. Like rocking horses that bounce around a lot but are incapable of forward movement, the disciples planted their feet in the ground on Palm Sunday and didn’t take another step forward with Jesus after that.

How can we do better? How can we act with more faith and more integrity? How can we do the real work of following Jesus instead of making a bunch of empty noise? How do we make real progress as a church instead of running on the never ending treadmill of paperwork and committee meetings? And how can we get off our rockers and act during trying times?

The brainstorming about the rocking horse I did this week brought to mind an old proverb about a similar household item, the grownup version of the rocking horse: the rocking chair. That proverb holds that “worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.” 

I’m only as smart as the diplomas on my wall, but in the 12 years I’ve been doing this ministry thing for a living, I can tell you that nothing turns a church into a rocking horse (or chair) faster than worry and anxiety. Anxiety sucks up all of our focus, all of our attention, all of our direction, and all of our purpose. It’s a monster with a bottomless stomach that eats everything it touches. It overcomes committee meetings with talk about what’s on our nerves instead of what’s on our hearts. It makes us constantly look over our shoulder for the next perceived threat. It overtakes joy, adoration, and even love.

Like Judas, we, too, are swayed by the hanging bag of silver, and a ton of church anxiety gets started over money, and the fear that there won’t be enough, and all work in the church starts moving away from Jesus and toward penny pinching and fundraising. But, not all church anxiety follows that path. Sometimes we just can’t figure out how to adapt to something new, something unfamiliar, something different.

We thrive, and start moving forward, when we acknowledge the anxiety and instead of pushing its rockers, we take away its momentum. We take away its momentum when we decide we love Jesus, and one another, more. When we support one another and stay together instead of abandoning one another, even if we’re carrying the weight of a cross right now.

Take a centering, focusing moment with me right now. Put your feet flat on the floor, sit straight to the best of your ability, and just take a second to quiet your mind.

I have a few centering questions for us, as we face Holy Week, and as we face it with forward movement, and not like rocking horses.

-What distracts us, or steals our attention from Jesus?

-Who are the people in our lives that steer us toward our faith, even when we feel tempted to abandon it?

-What’s our goal this week?

Let’s not rock, but walk with Christ this week.

Amen.

*Hymn                               Go to Dark Gethsemane                           #290

 

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

We pray to you, Lord of palm-branches and the cross,

for you understand us and in love you have promised

not to push away any who come to you.

So we pray for people who feel pushed away:

pushed away from a living faith in Jesus by pressure from friends and family;

those who feel pushed away by other people in churches

if they do not share the same kinds of ideas, or ways, or clothes;

for people who are pushed out by those who want power,

whose main love to be noticed, to have control.

We pray for your church that all those who trust in Jesus

will be made able by your Spirit to follow his humility,

to see and imitate his servant life, to welcome and not to condemn.

Help your church to be like Jesus.

We pray to you, Lord of palm-branches and the cross,

for you know the warm glow of being praised and the loneliness of being hated.

We pray for world leaders,

quick to stand in the limelight taking decisions which affect everyone in the world

but slow at times to do the steady, less glamorous work to which they are called.

We pray for world leaders to understand their role to serve the peoples of the world,

that posturing will be replaced by practical action to make a difference,

and jockeying for position be replaced by genuine efforts

to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and care for those who are weak.

In days when food banks are required in our land

to feed families who struggle to provide the basics for life,

we ask that you will re-arrange our priorities and help us to live more like Jesus.

We pray to you, Lord of palm-branches and the cross,

because you know how quickly life changes to death.

We pray for those who have recently lost those whom they have loved.

In the shock, confusion, pain and sorrow especially of unexpected loss,

we pray for hearts to be open to the comfort of your Spirit,

shown through friendship and community and as deep calls to deep.

We remember those we know who mourn in these days,

who need to be sure of that you invite those in sorrow to turn to you;

and we name them before you now...

We ask, God of grace, that you will make us more like some of the crowd:

that we will follow Jesus and give him our praise in the way we live;

that we will turn away from wrong and evil and stand on the Master’s side,

that we will be faithful in worshiping the one who has come in the Lord's name

through our singing, our worship, our prayers, our attention,

in giving our skills, time and means through the days of our lives;

and in the offering which we make now.

Bless, we pray, all that is given to your glory and the good of many.

Through Jesus who is the Saviour of all. Amen

~ written by Rev Grant Barclay and posted on the Church of Scotland’s Starters for Sunday website. http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                        What Wondrous Love Is This?                        #292

Benediction

Benediction Response  God Be With You Till We Meet Again    #672 v 1

Postlude

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Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant