Palm Sunday - Heart of a Servant

Pastor Phillips’ Sermon

Palm Sunday, April 5, 2009

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, as we have now arrived at the beginning of Holy Week, Palm Sunday, this big Sunday when we celebrate the triumphal entry of Jesus, we pray that you would bless us with your Holy Spirit, that you would touch our hearts and minds as we think about you. Bless us to grow in our faith to see things in a new light. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

In past years, we have remembered Palm Sunday and this whole weekend with all the pomp and circumstance of Jesus’ triumphal entry. We’ve thought about the crowds that gathered as He came into Jerusalem, how they waved palm branches and shouted out His name and they took off their cloaks and laid them down on the road and then more branches were laid across the road as sort of a carpet of honor and tribute for their Messiah. And they shouted, “Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” And Jesus rode in on the back of a donkey.

Typically, we talk about the crowd and how, that day, they celebrated. That day, they looked with hope at Jesus and they thought about Him as the Messiah. And then we reflect on how, in only a few short days, a similar crowd, maybe even some of the same people, gathered again and shouted things like, “Crucify Him.” It’s a strange thing to consider how a crowd can turn like that.

And that’s typically how we would remember Palm Sunday. But this year, let’s change things up a bit. This time, instead of talking about the crowds, let’s focus on Jesus riding on a donkey. Here’s Jesus, the God of creation, at work with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the very beginning. Jesus, the author of our salvation. Jesus, the king of all kings in authority over every ruler, every president, every king, every dictator in the whole earth. Jesus, the Savior of the world, worthy of all praise and all honor and all glory, riding on a donkey.

About Him, the apostle Paul wrote in a letter to the Colossians, “In Christ, all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. Jesus is God in flesh.” All these great realities about the identity of Jesus make His actions even more remarkable. Today, we will focus on Jesus. We’ll focus on the heart of Jesus, the heart of a servant.
In William Paul Young’s book, The Shack, there is a concept on serving that I found very helpful. The concept is this: That a servant is someone who, in love, chooses to limit themselves for the benefit of someone else. There are three components to this concept. First, they must be motivated by love. Second, that, in love, they choose to limit themselves. And third, they limit themselves for the benefit of others. To be our Savior, Jesus, in love, chose to limit Himself. Philippians 2 which was read earlier says, “Your attitude,” now this is my translation, “your thinking, the way you think about things should be the same as that which was present in Christ Jesus, who being in the very form of the very nature of God did not consider equality with God something to be taken or stolen or grasped but He emptied Himself, making Himself nothing, taking the very form or nature of a slave being made in human likeness.”

In love, Jesus chose to limit Himself in many ways. The first way is that He limited Himself in terms of time. Jesus, who was co-eternal with God the Father, co-eternal with God the Holy Spirit, stepped out of eternity and into time and limited Himself to about 30 years of life on this earth.

The second way that Jesus limited Himself was in body. Jesus, in love, chose to limit Himself to the realities of a physical body. He experienced hunger. He experienced thirst. He experienced the pain of the whip on His back and the excruciating pain of the nails in His hands. He experienced exhaustion as He traveled about through the country side, day after day, walking great distances, preaching and teaching and healing. He experienced exhaustion. He very rarely slept because people were always asking Him for something, always seeking Him out.

The third way that Jesus, in love, chose to limit Himself for our benefit was in terms of His ability. Jesus chose not to use His divine powers. He chose not to provide for Himself when He was hungry but allowed the normal circumstances to provide. He chose not to protect Himself when attacked. He chose not to take revenge on His enemies when they threatened Him. Instead, he set aside all those divine powers that He could have used at any moment. He even said, “I could call on a legion of angels if I wanted.” But He chose, in love, to limit Himself from those divine powers.

The final way that Jesus, in love, chose to limit Himself was through setting aside His divine privileges as God. Obviously, as God, He’s worthy of all praise and honor. He’s worthy of every being, every creature bowing down before Him and worshiping Him but Jesus chose to limit Himself by becoming human, by being born into poverty, by becoming a helpless child that was vulnerable to the threat and attacks of wicked King Herod. He chose, in love, to limit Himself by living a humble life as the son of a carpenter and to receive the insults of those who didn’t agree with Him. He chose to limit Himself in honor and endure the physical abuse of His interrogators, to be falsely accused and even convicted of crimes He never committed and, ultimately, He set aside His privileges as God as He was nailed to the cross.

These are the many ways that Jesus, in love, chose to limit Himself for our benefit. But He also calls us to do that. He also invites us to be His followers and to love as He has loved, serve as He has served. This is how He describes it in John 13:34-35, “A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you so you must love one another.” John 13:34. As followers of Jesus, He calls us to love as He loved us and so limit ourselves for the good of others. It’s a challenging thing to do. It goes against our nature, our sinful nature that’s very self-absorbed and occupied with our thoughts and concerns and dreams and not really naturally inclined to reach out for other people and be concerned about them.

But an excellent example of this kind of limiting of a person and their own privileges is given to us from history in the person of Florence Nightingale. Today, she’s known as a pioneer of the science of nursing but she was much more than that. When she was born, she was born into a family from England with noble birth. She had a title. She had prestige and honor and wealth and privilege. And yet, when God called her to become a nurse and to be a servant to those who were sick and dying, her family was enraged. They had all these plans for her. She was supposed to marry well and continue to extend the family name and honor and all of those things. And at that time, the nursing profession was considered a low-class occupation. Usually people who were nurses were underpaid, underprivileged and women of questionable moral character. Hum.

She had to overcome tremendous family and social pressure to pursue her career in nursing. She even wrote a letter back to her mom one time describing how joyful she was in nursing school. She was talking about an activity that she was doing as part of her training, scrubbing the floors. Now I have a daughter who wants to be a nurse and I’m kind of eager to see her go through that phase of her training. Things have changed. What a remarkable woman, though, a pioneer in the science of nursing. She was a hero before she really stepped into the limelight and the glory that she’s really famous for. She is a hero to be a pioneer but then a war came, the Crimean War, and this is the early 1800's, mid-1800's. And most people don’t know much about the Crimean War but it’s sort of made famous by the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. You might recognize a few lines, “Forward the light brigade. Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew someone had blunder’d: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.” Half a million soldiers died fighting heroically in this war but historians tell us that the nurses were equally heroic in their battles.

Florence Nightingale led a staff of 38 nurses that fought enemies of cholera, typhus, dysentery, filth, vermin, inept facilities, insufficient supplies and the prejudice of being a woman in the male-dominated culture of war. In the midst of this misery and suffering, death and disease, she was known as the lady with the lamp because, at the end of the day, when all the other medical personnel had retired and gone to bed, she would be seen in the dark of night visiting patient after patient with a small lamp in her hand. And the legend says, as she would arrive at the bedside of a dying soldier, she would bring great comfort and love to all she saw.

Before the Crimean War, because of her pioneering activity, she was already a hero to many in England. But by the end of the war, she was more highly esteemed than the queen herself. Florence Nightingale, in love, had turned her back on her own comfort and convenience and served the wounded and the dying. Out of love and dedication, she had limited herself for the benefit of others.

This weekend, today, Palm Sunday, we stand at the beginning of Holy Week and we can look over the next few days and remember all the key points of Jesus’ passion, the triumphal entry, the Last Supper, His prayers at the Mount of Olives, His betrayal, His arrest, His trial, Peter’s denial, the abuse He suffered, His crucifixion and death and, finally, His resurrection. These are the final ways that Jesus, in love, chose to limit Himself from being God Almighty to being your Savior and my Savior.

Because God knows all things and Jesus knew all these things that were about to happen, there was no surprise in store for Him as He went through those days of Holy Week. In fact, it was a plan that had been laid out in advance for Him to follow as it says in Philippians 2, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.”

Now you can see it all through Jesus’ eyes, the cheering crowds calling out, “Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” the hope that was surging through the crowd, calling out to Jesus, the carpet in tribute of honor of cloaks and palm branches laid out before Him, the crowd surging as far as the eye can see and Jesus, the author of our faith, riding on a donkey, the disciples getting full of it all and thrilled at the idea that they’re with Him. “They love Him, they’re worshiping Him and we’re His friends. We’re sitting pretty good.” And Jesus riding on the back of a donkey, not impressed, unfazed by all of it because, beyond the crowd in the distance, Jesus can see the cross, the whole reason He came. It wasn’t to be popular and loved or anything else. It was to die on the cross for our sins.

So as we walk through this week, Holy Week, and reflect on the events of His passion, I want you to remember the three components of serving: 1) To be motivated by love; 2) In love, to choose to limit yourself; and 3) To limit yourself for the benefit of others. I also want to challenge you with this question. How will you, in response to God’s great love for you, how will you, in love, choose to limit yourself to benefit someone else? Will you limit yourself for your friends? Will you limit yourself for the benefit of your children? Will you, in love, choose to limit yourself for your spouse? For the homeless? For the sick? For the hungry? Or for those who grieve?

In response for God’s great love for you, how will you choose to limit yourself? Amen.

Copyright 2009 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church