Palm Sunday 2013

When I was at college we were encouraged to be creative in our devotions and worship space. It's not always easy to find the time to be creative when you are in full time ministry so it's been a while since we've done anything a bit 'different' in worship. Palm Sunday seemed an ideal time to be reflective and carve out space for busy people to sit with a familiar story and listen to what God was saying.

As people walked in, they were handed a paper bag. In the bag was a picture of a donkey, paper framed with palm leaves, a picture of a coat and a small stone. We began the service by looking at Zechariah 9:9 We took out the picture of the donkey and thought about the image of Jesus riding a donkey and what image we would have today of someone important coming to our city. We then looked at the symbolism of peace associated with a donkey and what it meant for Jesus to be riding a symbol of peace, when people were looking for a strong leader to rescue them from the oppressive Roman government. We spent time thinking about Jesus bringing peace into places and situations where we hadn't seen an opportunity for peace to exist. We thought about our own lives, where we were worrying, where we felt troubled, where we didn't feel peace and we spent time praying for those things and asking Jesus to bring us peace.

We read Luke 19:28-40. We thought about the people joyfully praising God in the street. We remembered Moses and Miriam leading worship to God after the Israelites fled Israel. God had saved his people before and God could save his people again. We spent time reflecting how we praise God for the things he has done for us. We pondered questions: "How comfortable are you to praise God in public", "When was the last time you spent time with God giving him praise for what he has done", "When was the last time you shared with a friend what God has done for you". We then took our paper that was framed in palm leaves out of our bags and wrote our praises on them and stuck them on the doors. The next thing we did was to take out the picture of the coat. I took some artistic license here and encouraged people to think about why people in the crowd would lay their coats on the ground for a donkey to trample over them. What would the path of coats look like when Jesus had moved on and the crowd had gone? We thought about the expectations of the crowd, maybe someone was hoping for healing, maybe someone else was hoping to stop paying taxes to Caesar, maybe someone was hoping to be able to do what Jesus could do? We thought about our own expectations of Jesus when we bring our prayer requests to him. We wrote a prayer request on our coats and put them back in the bag and brought them to God in silent prayer knowing that God answers prayer but maybe not in the way we expect.

We then brought out our stones. Jesus had told the Pharisees that if the disciples kept quiet, then the stones would cry out. (Luke 19:40) We noticed the Pharisees weren't crying out and wondered whether the Pharisees hearts were harder than stone. We felt hope that creation will always praise its creator. We acknowledge the sadness that will come later this week as we journey with Jesus to the cross but we remembered the hope that we have in Jesus, the risen Christ. We held our stones as we sang our final song and examined our own hearts for any hardness toward God. Afterwards it was good to hear people continue the reflectiveness and have conversations about the service and imagery. One group of people saw a lot of imagery in their stones which had cracks and dents. They felt these symbolically represented some of the things their hearts had been through over the years which they gave over to God. The stones were taken home which I hope will keep people reflecting through the week.

The praises we stuck to the doors were seen by our playgroup families during the week. A great way to share our faith with people in our community.

A way to take our Sunday service and look Beyond Sunday :-)