Palm Sunday can seem to be a little schizophrenic. If you grew up, like me, in a tradition that was very much opposed to observing the church year (save for Christmas and Easter), Palm Sunday was a bit of an abberation. Maybe we celebrated it a little bit because the kids looked really cute waving those palm branches around. I don’t know. I do know that the preacher’s sermons confused me.

Because the last thing we wanted to do on Easter morning was have a “downer” service, we’d cover all of Holy Week on Palm Sunday. That meant we’d start off with the triumphal entry (complete with a story about Jesus’ donkey for the kids) and end with the crucifixion. Talk about an emotional roller coaster!

While that may not have been the best emotional roller coaster to go on, Palm Sunday isn’t the easiest day to figure out. On the one hand, we celebrate the king coming into Jerusalem to take his rightful place on David’s throne. That’s certainly what many of the contemporary Jewish people thought was going on.[bibleblock]Matthew 21:9[/bibleblock]
Their cries of “Hosanna!” (which is an exclamation meaning “save!”) echo Psalm 118:25-26.[bibleblock]Psalm 118:25-26[/bibleblock]
And who is “he” who comes in the name of the Lord? The Davidic king. Who rides on donkeys? Kings and those in authority. (See the books of Judges and Samuel.)

The Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible says in commentary on Psalm 118:26:

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. A reference to the king, who led the armies in battle against the enemy. In the New Testament, the crowds welcomed Jesus into Jerusaleme with this cry, thinking him to be the new divine warrior. He would win the ultimate battle against Satan (Mt 21:9), but the people would fail to understand or acknowledge it.

Jesus was welcomed as king. We sing Psalm 24, “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates. Behold, the King of Glory waits.” Jesus was welcomed as king but he came to do a very unkingly thing in their eyes (and in our eyes, if we’re honest). He came to die. That’s the other side of Palm Sunday. We celebrate Jesus’ entry but we know why he was entering.

Lest we lose hope, however, as somber as Holy Week may be, the story doesn’t end in death. That’s why though on Friday we grieve, on Palm Sunday (and Easter Sunday) we celebrate the king.

The Roman Mass uses the words of the Triumphal Entry in what is known as the Benedictus. Many composers have written settings of the Benedictus to be sung by Christians around the world to celebrate Jesus’ kingship. The words exist in some form in many of the liturgies of the church and are especially poignant to pray today.

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Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

εὐλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος ἐν ὀνόματι κυρίου

בָּר֣וּךְ ֭הַבָּא בְּשֵׁ֣ם יְהוָ֑ה

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.

I go to three churches. It’s not because I think I’m holier than other people and I need three spaces to contain my glory. In fact, sometimes I worry that I help out at all three churches because I’m so unholy that I need to do things to salve my conscience. I don’t think that’s really why I go all three places but, rather, it’s because I have the freedom and opportunity to help at all three places and so I do.

On Wednesday nights, I lead the music for the high school group at River of Life Presbyterian Church. I’ve been helping there since January and had a chance to get to know several of the students. One of the students is a Brazilian boy who speaks very little English. One of his friends must translate everything into Portuguese for him. Despite the obvious language barriers, he’s been coming for about 3 months now.

A lot of Christians, and especially Christians in the Reformed heritage, disparage songs that have a lot of repetition. You know, repetition. Like in Psalm 136 with “for his steadfast love endures forever.” Like in Psalm 150 with its echoing “Hallelujah”s. Like in Psalm 67, when we say twice

Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!

Like the four living creatures in Revelation 4 [bibleblock]Revelation 4:8[/bibleblock]or the cry of the twenty-four elders [bibleblock]Revelation 4:11[/bibleblock]

(Note: I really hate that I have to put a disclaimer here. “You can’t say everything when you say anything,” as Richard Pratt [incompletely] states but I feel I’ve got to say something so that I won’t get a bunch of hate mail. Since some people read statements like “repetition can be good” or “repetition is in the Bible” and immediately assume that I’ve drifted into apostasy, I must clarify. I don’t mean repetition in the sense of saying a mantra, seeking to go into a trance or repeating a phrase so many times that the words lose their meaning.)

At youth group, we’ve started to sing May the Peoples Praise You. The best thing about singing the song is, first of all, hearing the kids sing the words of scripture and internalize the Psalm. But there are also smaller victories about the song. Whenever we sing Psalm 67, I can look out and see one student singing “May the peoples praise you, O God; May all the peoples praise you,” and know that those might be the only words he speaks in English all day. I don’t know if his friends have translated the words into Portuguese for him yet, I hope they have, but seeing him sing the refrain is a picture of what the song says - all the peoples of the Earth praising God.

Often times, when we don’t know something, repetition is how we learn. It’s how my friend learned the refrain of Psalm 67; it’s how I learned the alphabet when I was a toddler; it’s why I practiced my scales when I was a freshman in high school; it’s why my band classes started the day the same way every single day with our daily drill. Repetition is one way that we both worship God corporately, “tune our hearts to sing his praise” and train our minds to think Biblically. I can imagine small Hebrew children singing Psalm 150 and not knowing any of the words except “hallelujah” (or “praise the name of the Lord”) but singing loudly on the words they do know. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” Everything, whether it knows the language or not. “Praise the Lord!”

Over the past few weeks I have been swamped with schoolwork. I spent my spring break studying, taking exams and reading books. (Of course, since I live in Florida I was doing all of that by the pool but it was tedious nonetheless.) One of the books that I had the pleasure of reading was Marva Dawn’s Is it a Lost Cause?: Having the Heart of God for the Church’s Children. I don’t use the phrase “had the pleasure of reading” in a tongue-in-cheek manner either. When most people talk about having had the pleasure of reading something they really mean that they trudged through book half-heartedly but they either want to appear respectful to the author or want to maintain a facade of being a sophisticated, well-read person. That wasn’t my experience with Is it a Lost Cause?

I will admit that I first approached the book eagerly anticipating what Dawn would say. I enjoyed her two books on worship when I read them about 4-5 years ago and my experience as a public school teacher has led me to some convictions regarding the role of children in the local church. I wasn’t disappointed. I anticipate having more to write about the book at a later date but I thought that this quote, found on page 77, was an important one regarding worship. In a section titled Worship to Form the Missional Parallel Society, Dawn writes:

You might think … that I am opposed to the “contemporary” side in many congregations’ “worship wars.” Actually I’m opposed to the “traditional” side, too, because both sides are asking the wrong questions and failing to nurture a missional people. The Church always needs both old and new music, continuity as well as reformation, a sense of the heritage of faith going all the way back to Abraham and a consciousness of the need to put that faith in accessible forms and new wineskins. The questions we must ask are those concerning how to be faithful to the biblical descriptions of what worship is, to the content of the faith we pass on, and to the God whom we worship.

Here, Marva Dawn sounds quite like my professor and friend, Reggie Kidd. This paragraph nicely wraps up a lot of what Reggie has to say in his book With One Voice as well as what he presents in class. While I don’t think that Dawn and Kidd would agree on everything (and I have no doubt that they have differences of opinion), both communicate well the ideas of “heritage” and “accessibility”.

“For Lent, I’m giving up sex, drugs and drinking,” remarked one of my suitemates with a touch of sarcasm in his voice. I was in my second semester at the University of Houston and living on the first floor of Taub Hall.

“Gosh, that’s rude,” I thought to myself. (And I probably used really coarse language like “gosh” when I was a freshman in college.) I had heard a lot of second hand rumors about Lent when I was a kid but had never really been exposed to actual flesh and blood participants until I lived in Taub Hall and had several Roman Catholic girls living down the hall.

I suppose that my suitemate meant well. I suppose that he thought that mocking the observance of Lent was fighting a war for true Christianity against vain superstitions. Real spirituality isn’t in giving up chocolates and ice cream, it’s found in prayer and Bible study, or so he (and I, though I was too polite to admit it) thought.

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A few years later, while living in Austin, I was observing Lent for myself for the first time. I was hungry for a Christianity rooted in history prior to my birth in 1978 and saw the ancient practice as a way of preparing myself for Easter and connecting with my roots. For the season, I chose to give up caffeine (a major sacrifice for me). I got rid of all of the Dr. Pepper in my dorm room and started drinking water and the occasional root beer. Those root beers were magical. They really were. I remember thinking to myself, “Barq’s Root Beer has got to be the finest beverage on God’s green earth.” I was convinced that the new heavens and the new earth would have Barq’s Root Beer flowing out of every rock. Of course, you can already see where this story is headed. The slogan of Barq’s is “Barqs has bite!” And where does that bite come from? Caffeine. I discovered this fact about 2 weeks before Easter and sheepishly got rid of the root beer for the next two weeks.

I remember the first day of Lent 2001. I had decided to go to my first early morning Ash Wednesday service. I got up before dawn, showered and prepared my things. I had quite a bit of packing to do, as it was the day I left on a Wind Ensemble Tour through Central Texas. I loaded my bag, my tuxedo and my horn into my car and set out for a small Episcopal church on my way to school. I had big plans that year. Not only was I going to give up caffeine again, I was going to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday for spiritual devotion. I made it about 7 hours. Finally, in our van, I didn’t want the other students to think I was strange and so I ate a box lunch and drank a Dr. Pepper like everyone else.

It’s funny, I seem to be able to remember Ash Wednesdays better than other days. Ash Wednesday 2004 - the day I kept ashes on my forehead all day long and told my elementary school students not to ask what they were or else the government would take me away and I couldn’t be their music teacher anymore. Ash Wednesday 2005 - searching for days to try to find a church in St. Louis having a service, misjudging the distance to the Lutheran church I finally went to, driving through the snow and ice to show up halfway through the homily, my fingers numb from the cold.

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If my suitemate is right about Lent, if it is simply a season of abstaining from our favorite foods or television shows or shoes or luxuries, I am the biggest disappointment in the history of Christianity. My Lents are marked by frailty, weakness and failure. Even when I try to give up simple things, I usually don’t succeed and when I do, I’m so prideful about it that it ruins any positive effect that it should have had. If that’s what Lent’s all about, I ought to quit right now.

Frailty. Weakness. Failure. Those things don’t just sound like my Lent observances, they sound like me. And they don’t just sound like me, they sound like everyone I know (at least, everyone I know who is honest). Maybe, just maybe, those things are what Lent is about as well. Giving something up isn’t so that I can add something to my spiritual resume, as though making it through Lent 2003 without caffeine is something to crow about. It’s about living in anticipation of the Resurrection. When I fail during Lent (and odds are that I will fail - several times), Jesus doesn’t say to me like Napoleon Dynamite, “Gosh! I knew you couldn’t do it. Looks like I have to go and get crucified.” Rather, Jesus picks me up out of my failure, dusts me off, looks me in the eyes so deep that I start to feel uncomfortable and says, “Eric, do you love me?”

“Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

“Follow me,” he says. And I do. At least I try to until I fail again and then again he picks me up, dusts me off, looks me in the eyes so deep that I start to feel uncomfortable and says, “Eric, do you love me?”

“Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

“Follow me.”

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The Collect for Ash Wednesday from the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

In one of my classes this semester, we were assigned Jaroslav Pelikan’s Fools for Christ. Pelikan looks through the eyes of six historical figures to see the True, the Good and the Beautiful in relation to the Holy. In the area of Beauty, he presents Friedrich Nietzsche as his anti-hero - futilely seeking the Holy through the lens of the Beautiful.

Pelikan writes on pages 132-133:

Precisely here has been the danger in the study of churchly arts like painting, music, and liturgy. One could be so impressed with the artistic magnificence of Christian cultural forms that the dynamic which produced these forms was entombed in the forms which it had developed. The perfumed charm of Gregorian chant or the virile tones of the German chorale could become the indespensable condition of Christian culture, rather than one example among many examples of how the dynamic of the Christian faith can become embodied in an art form. The identification of the Holy and the Beautiful has frequently become the identification of the Holy with this Beautiful or with that, so that a particular cultural and artistic tradition was endowed with a divinity it did not have. To be sure, it was more comfortable to live with an art form than with God, and this has been the fundamental temptation of the identification of the Holy and the Beautiful - that in aesthetic rapture I had enough commitment to satisfy me, yet not so much that I lost my self-respect.

The paragraph is worth reading and rereading several times to allow Pelikan’s meaning to sink in.

Thankfully, rather than leave the reader with the somewhat depressing tale of Nietzsche, a man who ended his life in madness and despair, the final chapter focuses on a man who understood both the depths of his sin and the glory of Christ’s redemption - Johann Sebastian Bach. With Lent approaching, I’ll be listening to and writing about Bach with some frequency. I’ll close now with how Pelikan sums up Bach’s approach to the Beautiful:

Bach was led by the overpowering mercy and overwhelming grace of the Holy to acknowledge a new dimension of life and value. … [T]hat Holy which is not the answer to every riddle but itself the enigma in every riddle - that Holy has been made fleesh and has dwelt among us in Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Last summer, I read Worship by the Book, a collection of essays on Christian worship edited by D.A. Carson. The four chapters are written by Carson, Mark Ashton, R. Kent Hughes and Tim Keller.

While I would have supposed that the Keller chapter would have resonated with me more than the others due to our common theological commitments as Presbyterians, it was a quote by Ashton, an Anglican, that was itself worth the price of the book. In fact, I’ve even remembered that the quotation is on page 83 though I hadn’t looked at the book again before this morning.

Mark Ashton writes about three questions that should be used as guidelines for planning a service. In asking the first question, “Is it biblical?”, Ashton writes:

If it is no longer appropriate to chant psalms, we must find other ways to incorporate them into our services. Psalms are the main biblical medium for the expression of human emotion. (Expressions of sorrow and joy, confidence and despair, anger and elation, abound in the Psalter.) As the psalms have disappeared from our church services, so other expressions of human emotion have welled up, some of which are much less healthy than the psalms, and almost all of which are less biblical. But the psalms can still be used — as frameworks for prayer, as antiphonal readings, for meditation.