Leaning Into Lent | Leaning Into Possibility (3-29-2026)

It is Palm Sunday, and Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "Leaning Into Possibility."

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Transcript

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As we close out Lent today, today is the last Sunday of our Lenten season. If you gave up a Lenten sacrifice, you are almost there. You just got to make it a Friday. Technically, Lent ends on Friday with a cross, right? Because as Jesus dies, we're no longer waiting for getting. So on Saturday morning, if you give up chocolate, you can have all the chocolate there is. And just know that we support you in your endeavors. As we conclude Lent, I hope you have enjoyed this season of really diving into the scripture together. For uh weeks, um, we have been uh recording podcasts and uh and uh videos and summaries, writing summaries or having these summaries put up on the website of us journeying through the lectionary text, the Old Testament, the New Testament, uh, the gospel lesson. We've been talking about it in our groups. Pastor Mike has been leading a group. This has been a very rich Lenten season, and I hope you have gotten as much out of it as I have. And it leads me uh to want to land the plane here on Lent, talking about the future. I did change the title of the sermon just a little bit, and I forgot to tell the people who make slides. Sorry, guys. You too. Thank you. Uh, instead of leaning into courage, which is part of it, I would actually like to preach about leaning into possibility. Will you pray with me? Lord, we we thank you for your word. May it always be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. May the words of our mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. And all God's people said, Amen. You know, there's a thin line between confidence and arrogance. It's uh uh people won't follow a person who's not confident, but they also won't follow a person who's arrogant. And there is a particular kind of confidence that only belongs to the people who haven't been through enough of life yet to know better. You probably know the feeling I'm talking about. We've all kind of treaded this line. I'm sure I've floated over the line into arrogance more than I would like to admit. I'm sure that there are those among us who can say, yeah, you get pretty close to towing up, or that's just a generous statement, so thank you for that. But but what I'm describing is is not so much that, as like sincere confidence. That of like a teenager or a uh a young person in their 20s. It it is the type that you carry right after you graduate high school, and and you're ready to go to college or embark out in the world and you believe that you have everything figured out. You know that that type of confidence. It's the night before your first real job, right? When you haven't made any mistakes yet, and you don't know what you don't know. It's that moment in your early 20s when you lay out exactly how the next 10 years are gonna go, right? You you know uh uh the career you're gonna have and the relationship and the city you're gonna live in. It is all uh planned out in your mind, and there's nothing that could go wrong. That's the type of confidence born out of optimism. I uh I remember having this level of confidence when I started as a freshman at Huntington College. You know, I was the leader in my youth group, I was a leader in the FCA, I declared I was gonna be a religion major, I told people I was gonna be a pastor, only to run into the hardest religion professor at Huntington College and get a C in Old Testament. I thought I knew everything, but don't worry, I got humbled, I got my act together, I stopped slacking off. It taught me to buckle down, and I got mostly A's from then all the way through my master's degree. So most of the time I know what I'm talking about up here. Not all the time, let's be honest. But but when I do a Bible study, you know, I think that I've I got that uh I got that humility I needed to really buckle down. And and although we sometimes scoff at youthful confidence, there's something genuinely good about that feeling of optimistic possibility. And even if it doesn't always survive contact with reality, the the capacity to believe that things could be different from what they are is one of the most exhilarating emotions. It's a wonderful thing to believe that the future might actually be as open as it appears. A kind of possibility, it's not naive. I think it's a conviction that is pretty close to faith. And if you understand that level of believing and possibilities, then you get where that crowd was on the day when Jesus entered the town of Jerusalem on a donkey. In Matthew 21, it opens with the logistics, right? Jesus sends two disciples ahead of him into the village and tells them exactly what they'll find there: a donkey and a colt tied up and waiting. If anyone asks what you're doing, just tell them the Lord needs them. Which is kind of like if somebody's like, hey, I'm gonna take your donkey, excuse me? The Lord needs them, it's okay. It's a little suspicious, but they go out, they find it, and exactly as Jesus describes, it happens. Matthew is helping us see before the crowd appears that Jesus is not swept up in the events. He's staging something. He's intentional, he's deliberate, he knows what he's doing and what it will mean to anybody who's familiar with Scripture. Because Matthew has been stacking Old Testament echoes and references since chapter one of his gospel. Matthew is very keen on making Jesus appear to be a new and improved Moses. There's a lot of Old Testament references in Matthew that we don't find in some of the other gospels. And Matthew wants to make sure that the people know that these Old Testament prophecies, they're pointing to this guy. And so in this text, once again, Matthew doesn't let you miss this reference. He stops everything and he quotes Zachariah. Say to daughter Zion, see, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a donkey. This is what was prophesied. And so Jesus is fulfilling the prophecy. And if you know your first kings, you know that when David was dying and it was time for him to anoint his son Solomon, he told his servants, Put Solomon on my own mule and bring him down to Gahan to be anointed. Solomon was the king's son, riding into the city as the king's on the king's own animal, and he was going to be recognized as the one who would sit on the throne. And here is Jesus making this moment like that moment. Matthew wants you to feel the weight of what's happening, the importance of this procession. He wants you to understand that Jesus is doing all of this on purpose. And so setting that scene there, uh, in it's Passover in Jerusalem when we read this text. The Passover festival is about to begin. Normally, the population of Jerusalem is about 40,000 people. But during the Passover festival, it swells to over 200,000. And that's why there is so much fervor and excitement. The city is like at a fever pitch because everybody is there to remember that God rescued Israel from an empire that owned them. They were about to sit down and have a meal where they share the stories of how God once parted the waters and brought the people through them. And it is into this environment that Jesus comes riding on a donkey. And when he does, the crowd erupts, right? They spread cloaks on the ground as a sign of honor, which is borrowed from 2 Kings, when the people laid out their robes, whenever Yehu, the newly appointed king, comes into town. They cut branches from the trees as they shout from Psalm 118, Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. This is a phrase, a prayer that the people know well. They've sung it before when they read the Psalms. And as I said, the word Hosanna means save us, save us. This is their prayer, it is their cheer, it is their hope. The crowd doesn't fully distinguish between if it's a prayer or a cheer. They're just excited. It's that there's this fervor. They're praying and shouting because they're so full of optimistic possibility of what this means. When Jesus enters Jerusalem, Matthew tells us the city was stirred. And that word stirred there is used another time in Matthew's gospel. It is the Greek word that harkens back to chapter 2, when King Herod heard the Magi were coming to look for the king. It says the whole city was in turmoil. That word turmoil and that word uh stirred, it's the same word that says Matthew understands what happens to the city when Jesus shows up. Something happens when this king comes to town. So he flags it both times. And then the people ask, some might be in the crowd not aware what's going on. Hey, who is this? Who's this guy riding in on a donkey? And the crowd has an answer. And though it's not technically wrong, it's a little incomplete. They say, this is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee. Calling him a prophet from Galilee, it's not nothing, but they definitely don't have the full picture yet. It's almost like uh there was something that was happening that they couldn't fully name. This is such a fun story. I love this story every year we read it, but I do think every time that I come to it, it might be one of the harder texts for us to appreciate and identify with. Not because of the theology, not because of the story itself, but because I think sometimes we have lost the ability to feel what the crowd felt. I mean, we live in Mardi Gras country, and so it's not that we can't get excited for a parade. We're really good about parading around here. That's not the problem. The problem is that I think a lot of us have been disappointed too many times to get to that level of hope that the people on that road were carrying. The crowd lining that route, they had been waiting literally for generations for what they believe would be coming. They'd passed it down from grandparent to parent to child. They'd rehearsed it every Passover. They kept the possibility alive that one day a king would come and they'd set things straight. And something about this prophet from Galilee made them think maybe this is it. Maybe this is the moment we've been hoping for. Most of us know what it feels like to believe something great is about to happen, but only to have the floor pulled out from underneath us. We have felt this sting of disappointment. For some, uh, it was that job you were certain you would get that went to somebody else. Or it was that relationship you thought was going somewhere, or texting back and forth, and all of a sudden ghosted. That's what the kids say. Maybe it was uh that plan that you'd built for your uh whole life that we talked about, but then you carefully watched it fall apart. Life has a way of teaching you that there's often a gap between what you hope for and what actually comes to pass. Have you ever read John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men? Remember that book? It's about two men, George and Lenny. And they had this dream about owning a small farm, something quaint, just a few acres, a cow, some pigs, and they'd be living off the land. And George would describe it to Lenny regularly, almost like a liturgy. He'd say it over and over uh the rabbits and the vegetable garden, and that they belonged to themselves, and they had this dream. And if you've read the book, then you know it has one of the saddest endings of every story ever told. But ultimately their desire, their dream, it doesn't survive reality, it doesn't come to fruition. And I think Steinbeck's point is not that the dream was foolish, the dream was good, but that rather the world being what it is has a tendency is really good at crushing our dreams. Uh the book is just two people rehearsing a good possibility until they can't anymore. And I'm reminded of how many times I've journeyed alongside individuals and families who had a hope that something could happen, but then it didn't. And I'm reminded of how hope deferred is one of the most crushing defeats, and how some people say that hope is a fool's luxury. And I'm painfully aware of how accumulated disappointment is real. I mean, that kind of defeat, it does something to us, it makes us careful, it makes us cynical about anything that might look too much like a parade, about anybody else being excited. And so when when I read about this crowd waving the branches and shouting, save us, I wonder how many of those were just optimistic youths who hadn't experienced life? But how many of those people had been disappointed before but learned to hope again? How many people in there knew what it cost because they'd gone through life, but somehow they were still able to get back to that point where they believed in the possibilities. How do they take the bitterness that builds up and still believe that this man on that donkey could actually be what they were hoping for? And there's one more thing I don't want you to miss about this Palm Sunday crowd. They're not wrong for feeling what they felt, right? That they to build this excitement is a good thing. But I think that they have the wrong script in mind for what's gonna happen next. Right? Because they wanted a king like David. They wanted somebody who would drive out Rome the way that David drove out the Philistines, and that they would restore the territory and give back to Israel what had been taken. They could see the signs, right? They could see that he was in the lineage, he was the son of David, and they knew the symbols, the donkey and the branches and the Psalm 118. And so their Hosanna was a prayer for very specific kind of salvation. They said, Save us the way we want to be saved. But what's crazy is that within a week of these people saying, Hosanna, save us, that same city who is praising them starts shouting, crucify him. Within one week. And it wasn't because they changed their minds about wanting to be saved, but it's because Jesus wasn't gonna save them the way they had in mind. When it became clear that he wasn't gonna raise an army, that he wasn't gonna storm the Praetorium, that he wasn't gonna do the conquering king thing that he was supposed to do, their disappointment became apparent. But here's what Matthew's gospel uh wants you to see. That underneath the layered Old Testament references, all the things he's been stacking up since the first chapter, Matthew doesn't want you to miss the fact that the king arriving on the donkey, it's not a consolation prize. It's actually what they were hoping for, even if they couldn't understand it. Jesus rode into Jerusalem carrying these possibilities that they'd hoped for, but it wasn't for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy, it was for a new creation. Jesus was doing something new and unexpected. And the path that that donkey ran went directly through the cross. You can't get to the Easter possibilities without going through Good Friday. It didn't look like anything they'd imagined, but it was exactly what they'd hoped for. And so this week, you know, we were reading through our Old Testament lesson. We read from Isaiah 50, where the servant shares his own words about this resolve that I think Jesus has in this moment. Isaiah writes, I set my face like flint, and I know I will not be put to shame. Like this posture, it's not arrogance, it's this deep, settled confidence in the God who vindicates. It's like Jesus carried this same confident belief that God was watching this procession, that Jesus wasn't going to be swept up in the emotions of the crowd because he knows the road leads through the cross, but he set his face toward it anyway. The possibility that Jesus carries into Jerusalem is larger than anything the crowd could have expected, but it doesn't look like what they hoped for. It's a lot harder. And I wonder how many of us are stuck in places that lack possibility because we're looking for the wrong thing. We've created in our mind the perfect way to be saved, or exactly what we think we need. We want God to work the way the world works, right? We want this decisive intervention, we want this visible turnaround, we want this war horse arriving with enough force to change everything at once, but God keeps showing up on the donkey. And so we miss it. It can be deeply personal, right? Right? It can feel like the person who's lost too much money making bets. And they have this hope that the next one's gonna turn everything around. Or the person who's been praying that their child will behave the way that they want without asking what the child is actually going through on the inside. It might be the person who wants God to take away their grief without them having to walk through it. We've all looked for miracles in one place when God is working something new somewhere else. Somewhere else in our lives shining a light that we refuse to see because we stay in the darkness of our own ideas. It could also be bigger though than just the individual, more than just ourselves. I think about this for the communities that we love, right? We want our community, our town, we want Spanish fort to be fixed. We want our country to be fixed, we want our church to be fixed, we want everything to be right just the way that we want it. And so we keep looking for somebody powerful enough to make everything right on their own, right? We hope somebody's gonna show up on that white horse and he's gonna get rid of all of our enemies just the way that the Israelites were hoping was gonna happen to the Romans. But Jesus keeps showing up on the margins, he keeps showing up in the neighborhoods where nobody's watching. He's in the faces of the people that we'd rather pass by. The crowd on Palm Sunday wasn't wrong about wanting to be saved. Their Hosanna was the right prayer. They just had too small of an idea of what salvation actually looks like. And so they couldn't make room in their minds for how it would actually take shape. I wonder, what would you have room for if you loosened your grip on how you think things are supposed to go? What could God do in your life? What new thing might God be speaking if you could make room for God? In that Isaiah 50 passage, the prophet he had been through real suffering. He'd been beaten, he'd been mocked, he'd been publicly humiliated, but he came out on the other side, not defeated, but settled. He said, The Lord helps me, so who can declare me guilty? That confidence, it's not the confidence of somebody who avoided the hard thing or somebody who was too young in their life. It was a confidence of somebody who went through the hard stuff and found that God was there too. That God did not abandon them just because the way was more difficult. That's a different kind of possibility than what the Palm Sunday crowd was looking for. And it's a different one than the one that we try to find when we go through our struggles. We're looking for the easy answer, the quick fix, somebody else to come and just like do it all for us. But but there's this assurance that our faith gives us that although things might get hard, God still has possibilities that are bigger than we can imagine. And God doesn't abandon us as we go through them. Your king comes to you gently, riding on a donkey. And if you're watching for the war horse, you're gonna miss it every time. You know, I imagine that some of the crowd, they had that innocent confidence, but I bet a lot of them were like us. They'd gone through life. They were living under occupation for one. I'm sure many of them had been sick. Maybe they'd lost somebody they loved. They knew what disappointment felt like. But somehow they were still able to stand there and shout, Hosanna. They could still believe that God wasn't done. It was not naivete, it was. Something bigger than blind ignorance. It's a people who knew exactly how many times they'd been let down, but still chose to believe that something could happen, that there were possibilities left in the world. And that is what actual faith looks like. It's what you believe even when you're not given a reason to. It's trusting in God even after having experienced life's disappointment. Faith is to continue to believe even though you've gone through the hard things. It's not trusting God just because somebody else told you to, or because you haven't gone through anything yet. It's saying, yes, things have been hard, but I still believe in God, and I will not give up because He will not give up on you. That's why it's kind of ironic that we know more than the crowd knew, right? Having read it, we we know about Good Friday, we know about the empty tomb, we know about uh the possibility of Jesus riding into Jerusalem to accomplish wasn't stopped at the cross. But even though we know all these things, and it should cause us to wave our branches even more, too often we give up and we lose our shouts of Hosanna. This Palm Sunday, my prayer for you, for all of us, is that we can lean into the possibility that the king on the donkey knows exactly where he's going, and where he's going is worth following. I pray that we will continue waving our branches even when things are tough. That our shout of Hosanna is both a shout of praise and a cry to save us, save us. Because that is a prayer still worth praying, because it is where we will all find ourselves at some point. And when, even when you can't see how things are gonna work out, I pray that you can set your face like Isaiah, firmly on the one who vindicates and who will not ever abandon you. I'm reminded of that Palm Sunday hymn. We didn't sing it today because we, you know, we're doing the combined thing, and so we we're very selective with what we chose. But have you ever heard that the song the hymn, All Glory, Lord, and honor? It's a good Palm Sunday hymn. It's got that memorable third stanza to you before your passion. They sang their hymns of praise to you, now highly exalted, our melodies we raise. It's a hymn about what we've been talking about, about Jerusalem, about the processional, about the hymns, it's a hymn about possibility. But what I love is how it starts. It starts like this All glory, Lord, and honor to you, Redeemer King, to whom the lips of children made sweet Hosanna's sing. Ring. At the end of all of this, I'm reminded of how he started with those kids coming in, waving those branches, those like 40 something, seven, fifty, a thousand kids is what it looked like to me. They were walking in, they're waving their branches, they're shouting, Hosanna, these children who are full of promise and possibility, who see the whole world in front of them and are still full of hope because we haven't tried to dash them with our own cynicism. And I'm reminded of what Jesus said when he told us that the little children will lead us. And I pray that we can see the world with the same possibility they can. That we too will believe in the wonderful future God has for us, no matter what we've already been through, that we can lift up our branches and shout, Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.