Palm Sunday

Jesus enters Jerusalem with his followers at the outset of Holy Week.  We call the scene Palm Sunday, remembering the leafy branches laid on the road as Jesus rode into the capitol city on the back of a borrowed colt.  The branches and the simple outer garments of some of this followers  (the only coats they have)  create a humble "red carpet" for our Lord.
It is the group travelling with Jesus, in front of him and behind, that are shouting their "Hosannas!"
On Sunday I asked everyone to imagine the Palm Sunday procession in their mind's eye.  Are you someone who is watching Jesus come into town, or someone travelling with him?
If you are "on the move" with him, you are part of a fascinating crowd, all people whose lives have been changed by his love.  You are walking in the midst of poor people from Bethany, the "House of Poverty," people like Mary and Martha and Lazarus, who are giving testimony to the new world that is coming!  You're alongside a former Roman tax collector named Matthew and his fellow tax collectors, "sinners" you would have shunned in the past.  Brushing shouders with you are previously untouchable men and women who had been marked with leprosy, along with those who had been isolated with delibitating diseases, and others broken by severe traumas.  Today they walk upright with our Lord!
Look around you and see the children whose voices and well-being have been of little political concern to anyone until now, where they are embraced and prioritized by Jesus.  Their parents are relieved and empowered.  There's a woman near you who had a flow of blood for twelve years and suffered under many physicians, but whose reach to Jesus resulted in a new wholeness.  At least two different men were once labeled blind and shunted to life's roadside; today they offer God's people not only sight but vision.  There's a formerly deaf man from the Decapolis, a Gentile region, whose ears have been opened and his tongue freed to new expression.  You are able to marvel at Jews and Gentiles walking together as brothers and sisters.  Look!  There's the fellow who was paralyzed, whose friends brought him to Jesus and busted through the roof to get to him!  All five of them are trotting next to the colt!  Coming down the road is Simon the Zealot, an armed revolutionary who's  being reshaped into a  nonviolent activist.  And of course there are the fishermen, the first ones, whose promise and purpose Jesus had perceived even after a fruitless night out on the lake. 
This is what the movement looks like! Are you with him?
What has Jesus been doing in your life?   What might you have in common with the people around him that I described? Just how powerful is this love  of God?