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- Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against your holy laws. We have left undone, those things, which we ought to have done. And we have done those things, which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. Oh, Lord have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those oh God, who confess their faults. Restore those who are penitent, according to your promises declared unto mankind, in Jesus Christ our Lord, and grant oh most merciful father for his sake that we may hereafter live a Godly, righteous and sober life. To the glory of your holy name, amen. Hear the words of assurance from Psalm 21. "The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?" Let us say together our Lord's prayer. Our father who art in heaven, hallowed would be thy name. Thy kingdom, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen. (orchestra music) (bright orchestral music) (choir singing) The Lord be with you and with your spirit. Let us pray Almighty God who shows us in your son, the true way of blessedness. Give us grace to take up our cross and follow him in the strength of patience and in consistency of faith. And grant us such fellowship with him in his suffering, that we may know the secret of his strength and peace, who now lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit. One God forever and ever all, amen. (air whooshing) 

- Our scripture lesson for today is taken from Lamentations 5:1-9. "Remember oh Lord, what has befallen us behold and see our disgrace. Our inheritance has turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens. We have been orphans, fatherless, our mothers are like widows. We must pay for the water we drink, the wood we must be bought. With a yoke on our necks, we are hard driven. We are weary. We are given no rest. We have given the hand to Egypt and to Syria to get bread enough. Our fathers sinned and are no more and we bear their iniquities. Slaves rule over us, there's none to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the peril of our lies because the sword in the wilderness". The second selection is taken from Matthew the 21st chapter, first three 11 verses. "And when they drew near to Jerusalem and come to Bethlehem, to the Mount of olives, then Jesus sent two disciples saying to them, 'Go into the village opposite you and immediately you will find an tied and a coat with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say the Lord has need of them. And he will send them immediately'. This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet saying, tell the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a ass. and a coat, the fold of an ass. The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They bought the ass and the coat and they put their garments on them. And he sat thereon. Most of the crowds, spread their garments on the road and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds then went before them and the have followed him, shouted 'Hosanna to the son of David, blessed be he who come the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest'. And he entered Jerusalem. All the city was stir saying, 'Who is this?' And the crowd said, 'This is the prophet, Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee'". Thus says the lesson, (bright piano music) (choir singing) 

- Let us say together the unison affirmation of faith. We believe in God who has created and is creating, who has come in the true man, Jesus, to reconcile and make new. Who works in us and others by his spirit. We trust him. He calls us to be in his church to celebrate his presence, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope, in life, in death, in life beyond death. God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Oh, thou from whom to be turned is to fall to whom to be turned is to rise and in whom to stand is to abide forever. Grant us in all our duties thy help, in all our perplexities thy guidance, in all our dangers thy protection and in all our sorrows thy peace. Today, we remember the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem and we are grateful and ashamed, for he was beginning the end and doing so with great humility and concern. We remember that Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple and healed the blind and the lame in the temple and we realized that our lives are neither lives of disruption nor lives of healing. Much less both. We pray for your mercy, oh God, and your justice in our own lives that we may be of used to others in human bondage. We also come before you with our prayers for all the people of the world, oh eternal God of peace and love. We pray today for the liberation of all the oppressed peoples in our world. Those oppressed because other countries wage wars on their land, those oppressed by governmental systems, which do not help destroy people, those oppressed because they lack the money and the political power to change their lives, those oppressed because of the color of their skin, those oppressed because of their sex, those oppressed by members of their families who do not love them and those oppressed because their bodies or their minds are not well. We want you, our God, to enable us to love and care about all these oppressed peoples. Even though we do not even know their names or faces. We all know what some kind of oppressed feels like and we know it hurts and kills. We know that if the kingdom of God is ever to be part of our lives, oppression must stop. We all have visions of what a world without oppression would be like. And yet most of us don't have the desire or the motivation or the time to spend our lives working for the liberation of our brothers and sisters. We know our hands and feet and minds are needed, but we hide or burden ourselves because we know that praying for others is hypocrisy, if we don't pray for action from ourselves. We know that we are here on earth to do your work and bidding. Kindle in us the desire to change our world. And then impassion us with the motivation so that we will all make time. Help us to feel the desperation of the oppressed peoples so that we can work under a sense of urgency. We know dear God, that we cannot bring in your kingdom alone, but we also know that with your help and our hearts, heads and hands, we can change many things about us that hurt and kill. We pray that together with you, we can provide liberation for others and ourselves. All this we ask in the name of Jesus, the Christ, amen. 

- It is a great honor and privilege for me to be here this morning, through my associations with the national student, YWCA, I have met many duke students over the years, and they have been become my friend and a part of my support community. And so it is beautiful to be back amongst them and here with you on this Palm Sunday. The old Testament lesson this morning from Lamentations might very well have been written about late 20th century America. Many of us are in a depression and disillusioned with the great hope of the sixties. When we believed that we in America were on the verge of creating a new Camelot, a just and a great society. But a few well aimed rifle shots, the rapid wind of change, politicians who shape our lives, so often seeming like strangers, inflation, racism, the Kerner Commission Report, which stated that this nation is headed toward two nations, separate and unequal, the Lettuce Boycotts, women's liberation, the breakdown in family structures, wounded knee, the communications explosion, the population explosion, the intergenerational gaps have shown us as often a rootless and a restless people. Our nation seems to be suffering as well from a profound sense of spiritual dryness, a lack of soul power. Listen to the words of the Old Testament lesson. Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens. We are like orphans. We must pay for the water we drink. We have given the hand to Egypt and to Assyria in order to get bread enough. And there is a way in which morally and psychologically, we do get bread at the peril of our lives. Slaves to a dehumanized system rule over us. And seemingly there is none who would deliver us from their hand. We are a collectively troubled people and somehow all of our intellectual knowledge and best thinking have not provided us with the solutions. There is an all of folk on poem that emerges from the sixties that I think best describes our human condition. And it says, "Millionaires and poppers, we walk the lonely street. Rich and poor, we are companions of the restless feet. Strangers in a foreign land, we strike a match with a trembling hand. Have we learned too much to ever understand?" The time is here to redeem the soul of America. For even if some of us do not feel personally the oppression or dehumanization, and I suspect that most of us do at some level, present in this time, around many of these issues, there are brothers and sisters all around us who do. And as long as they are bound into a struggle for liberation, we are all bound. If we do not have to cope personally, with all or many of the pressing issues, we will all surely have to cope with the results of not attacking those issues. All of us in America will continually bear the consequences, if not the burden, of oppression. We can run, but we can't hide. Therefore redeeming the soul of America or building liberation is the business of all of us. For example, the auto industry can be given a year's grace in building the non combustible engine and we don't have to get involved in that dispute, I suppose, but we will still be breathing that filthy air. We can watch technology obliterate thousands of jobs a year right out of the job market and feel bad, but not too bad because we have jobs, but then watch our tax money drained off into escalating welfare costs because we have not insisted on the retraining programs that we need to help people function in new ways in a technological society. We can run, but we can't hide. Example, we can commit no conscious act of discrimination against a person to deny them an adequate education because of their race, but as long as we allow poor schools to do that and do not demand that they adequately teach our children to function, we are creating those two societies, which will divide our nation and possibly be its downfall. We are undermining our own future. We can run, but we can't hide. It is time to redeem the soul of America. Now enter this dilemma enters Jesus and the Palm Sunday event. What do we know about Jesus? First of all, he was a most unusual man, a Jew who had a sense of being a child of God, born to be God's anointed one, born for the sake of the people, born for a purpose, born with a destiny, born to live a life of liberation that made it possible for him to understand that all people longed for liberation. Beyond that, we really don't know that much about him, except that somehow he came and the fullness of time in a time when the people, the Jewish people, were trying to understand what it would mean to have a Messiah and what it would mean if the prophet's vision came true, that the kingdom of God would come in their midst. And we know that he lived with the lonely to gather up the disinherited and that he formed a little band of them, just to be together and to be for each other and to be for others. And they discover as they went along, that they had a certain power to heal, to make well, to comfort, to ease the pain of those around them. And they spent their lives doing that. But Romans as well as Jewish establishment often were irritated by such disruptive people, especially when the crowds began to follow and listen. And then there were the Pharisees. You know, the Pharisees were okay people, really. They just wanted to keep religion Orthodox and make sure that nobody followed up the theology or the faith beyond some kind of traditional recognition. As Herman Hesse said, the Pharisees were like so many of those of us who see ourselves as custodians of what we have traditionally known, says Hesse, and I quote "Humanity, which they loved as we did was for them something complete that must be maintained and protected". While for Jesus, and perhaps for those who struggle for change, while for Jesus, humanity was a distinct goal toward which all people were still moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down. And so Jesus was seen as offbeat and it didn't take much persuasion to get the Roman crew living in Jerusalem to put into death. And when it happened, probably most of the people of Palestine, didn't even notice because after all that was before the day of TV. But there were a few who did. And after his death, they kept feeling his presence and a new spirit began to build from within their midst, which included a new sense of themselves. And they started a great oral tradition and began to remember what he had said and what he had done and measured with in and against the context of his time, they decided that indeed he could be the Messiah. Jesus tried to symbolize and proclaim and dramatize, through his actions of holy week, the signs of a new age, a new possibility for the world. Jesus entered the traditional celebration of Passover with the awareness that in the midst of that tradition, his own destiny was going to breakthrough to something quite new and quite different. He wanted to redeem the soul of his times and because he was so attuned to the reality that God acts through men and women to recreate, to redeem the world, we have the image of a trembling Jesus at Gethsemane, begging that the cup by I passed from his lips, yet turning toward the city. For he knew that once he accepted obedience to the will of God in the lives of people, he could run, but he couldn't hide from fulfilling that will and that destiny, You and I in America today are in a similar spot. Our actions or our inactions to redeem our times as Christians is innocent, except when juxtaposed with some other dramatic events. And our inaction as Christians is devastating when juxtaposed with that obedience of Jesus, whom we come here today to call Lord and to cry hosanna at. Take the image of a fiddle player. Everybody loves a good violinist. But Nero became famous because he decided to exercise his art while Rome burned. Howard Hughes couldn't wait to fly out of Managua, Nicaragua, a half an hour after that country was devastated by an earthquake. And that was all right, except that Roberto Clemente couldn't wait to get in. Our actions or our inactions as Christians are innocent, except when juxta with the other dramatic events and demands of our time. And therefore, when we honestly look at ourselves in the light, and in that light, we too know in a most profound way that we can run, but we can't hide A great third world, Latin American theologian by the name of Paulo Freire has been Kind of storming the western world, talking about soul force and the struggle for liberation. And in a letter that he wrote to a young divinity school student, he talked about the Christian imperative for action. And he said, the following, says Freire, "The Christian message is not an invitation to sit back and watch oppression taking place, nor is it the devilish for enslaving people. And hence the first requirement of knowing how to hear the word of God, and not only hearing it, but putting it into action is a willingness to dedicate oneself to the liberation of persons. Such a process though demands a historical commitment. It requires a transforming activity, one that will embolden us to challenge the powerful of the earth. In the final analysis, the word of God is inviting me to recreate the world. And the true humanization of humanity cannot be brought about in the interiority of our minds. It has to take place in external history". Now, if this is true or even feasible, then what are some of the meaningful questions for us on this event of Palm Sunday, as we sit here trying to live our lives, What will it require of us, this challenge, to be the vessel through whom God can, once again, be known, How do we mobilize our power to be catalysts in building a spreading band of those who out of the religious traditions and constitutionally democratically mandated in the promise of our nation? How will we mobilize our power to take on the new Pharisees and the pharaohs of our time? For it is not just an individual question that comes, but a collective one. This folk song that many of us song that Pete Seeger wrote says, "You know, one man's hands, can't tear a prison down and two person's hands can't tear a prison down. But if two and two and 50 make a million, we could see that day come around". Well, what will it mean if we take our power seriously? And what will it require to be faithful? Some thoughts briefly that I would like to leave. First, it will require of us a risk of the past. God has always come, especially to the oppressed. And God came to Moses and commanded him to lead the children out of Egypt. Jesus was not a man of power. And why does God use the seemingly powerless in our society or in history so dramatically? Is it because it is more imperative to struggle to create a new society, if it is seen as a matter of survival. We must divorce ourselves enough from such identification with the mainstream so that we can risk the future. But to do that, we have to live our lives in the edge of faith, that we are not called to do it alone. We must believe that there is a power which burned through Moses, which burn through Jesus, which burn through all the prophets, which can burn through us, which can transform our talents and our skills into ones of healing. Unless we believe in that power, we will never be able to risk the past, because we are too insecure to believe in an open future. Without faith in the creative power to move through us, liberation is impossible because we will never let die what must die so that the new can be born. Secondly, We must use our skills and discipline and spirit power to overcome our sense of hopelessness. Bill Coffin, who is the chaplain at Yale once said, one of my favorite things that he once said, was that "The only thing worse butting one's head against a closed door, is butting one's head against an open one. It tends to throw one off balance". Jesus's journey through the streets of Jerusalem was a journey against cynicism and hopelessness. He knew that such cynicism and hopelessness had become the feeling of his time and compounded into mediocrity had become, not only the public spirit, but public policy of his day. He saw that in order to create the new order, he had to participate in a hopeful act, a trustful act, which even though to the world appeared to be tragedy, would in the end become victory. There is no greater act of hope or non cytisism than giving one's life for one's brothers and sisters, believing that it will make a difference. The exact price that any of us will pay to be faithful, may vary, but taking the opportunity and making the opportunity to be prophetic when it comes, no matter how great or small is a profound act of affirmation, of the possibilities of new life. May we be delivered from butting our heads against the open doors. Thirdly, we must dare to be vulnerable to the winds of the struggles that are blowing around us. We have become insensitive to suffering. We have become dehumanized to apathy. Technologically, we have all the resources we need to feed the hungry, not just in America, but in the world. There do exist, potential Henry Kissingers of the domestic front. We are overflowing with expertise of all kinds. Our problem to redeeming the soul of America is not knowhow, but willpower. Jesus was finally great because out of his humanness, he made himself vulnerable through caring about the winds of agony that blew around him. And so it is that you and I will have to face the mirror image of our social condition and inadequacies. If racism will die, we must kill it. If sexism is to fade away, we destroy the myths and rebuild the new relationships. If kids are to be educated so they can survive the complexities of this age, all kids, then we must initiate the cry and devise the plan for equal education. There is an old Chinese proverb that says, "If you give a man a fish, he can eat for an evening. If you teach him how to fish, he can eat for a lifetime". It means knowing that we are not our brother's keeper, but our brother's brother. God through Jesus, showed us even a defeated person, broken, unjustly condemned, killed, could be as great as the greatest in the world. If out of him, the spirit was not drained, love did not waiver, faith not only religious faith, but a solid unshakeable faith in mankind survived. We must care enough to be vulnerable, care enough to offer ourselves towards acts of healing. Martin Luther King, for many of us, another prophet who heard the beat of the same drummer, called the believing community to redeem the soul of America, to restore its vision and its demand for justice and dignity for all its people. Well, it is a fearsome task starting that road towards Easter, but we see what God can do with us and we can, and often we'll run from that task, but we cannot hide from it. It calls us from every direction. For we know that to let life leak out, to let it wear away by the mere passage of time, to withhold giving it and spending it, is to choose nothing. May God grant us the strength to meet the challenge of change and may we know that if we stumble, we still will have fallen forward faster, and that we will at least have been on the road, keeping faith with the journey. Hosanna. Let us pray. God, our holy parent, we thank you for the gift of your son and your gifts of power and prophecy to all thy children. Keep us right side up when the world is upside down, fill us with a deep Hosanna, that we might make an ever and more just world because of what you have done for, and with us. Be thou our vision. Amen. (orchestra music) (choir singing) (orchestral music) (choir music) (bright orchestral music) (choir music) (bright piano music) (choir music) (bright piano music) (uplifting choir music) (bright piano music) (choir music) 

- Oh God, of whose gifts we have all received, accept this offering of your people. Remember in your love, those who brought it and those for whom it is given. And so follow it with thy blessing that it may promote peace, justice and power among all people, amen. (bright orchestral music) (uplifting choir music)