Preached · March 29, 2026
Good morning once again. My name is Anthony Parrott, and I'm one of the co-lead pastors here. This sermon was written in a couple hours yesterday, so you will give me all of the grace in the world. But it's Palm Sunday; we're not breaking tons of new ground here. We have our kids in the room with us this morning, so we're going to try to keep them entertained. We'll do our best.
On Palm Sunday, we're doing a couple things simultaneously. We are finishing up our Jeremiah series, so we're going to talk a little bit about Jeremiah. And we are launching into Holy Week, or Passion Week, this last week of Lent, where we recognize Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, the institution of the Last Supper, Good Friday — what my son accidentally called Fun Friday; not so fun for Jesus — and then Holy Saturday and Easter, Resurrection Sunday.
If you have a Bible, you can join along in Jeremiah chapter 42. I'm going to keep this short for us. Today, we're going to talk about three ways to respond to empire.
Option One: The Retreat
Option one, which we see in Jeremiah toward the chronological end of Jeremiah's life, is the option of the retreat. Running away is the option that you have. When you are faced with the bad guys, when you are faced with violence, when you are faced with empire, you have the option of running away.
In Jeremiah 42, at this point, Jerusalem has fallen. Exiles have been taken to Babylon. And there is a frightful remnant, a group of people left behind. And they come to Jeremiah, and they say the right thing. They say, Jeremiah, pray for us. Whatever God says, we will do it.
God's answer, fascinatingly, takes ten days. Even for the prophet Jeremiah, he has to wait ten days to get an answer from God. And when it comes, God's answer to Jeremiah is to stay. To the remnant: stay. Stay in the land. Don't be afraid. God says, I will build you up, not pull you down. I will plant you and not pluck you up. Whatever you do, don't run to Egypt.
Because what the folks who are left behind want to do is run away and retreat. Run away to Egypt. Because they think they're going to be safe there. Now, is it safe? Eh. But it's known. Egypt is a known quantity. And sometimes the chains that are familiar feel safer than the freedom that's unfamiliar.
So, Jeremiah 42:10:
Don't go. I will build you up. I will not pull you down. — Jeremiah 42:10
And the people hear Jeremiah's word. They go to Jeremiah. They say, pray for us. What does God say? And Jeremiah says, stay. Don't go. And they reject it. They call Jeremiah a liar. They go to Egypt anyway. And they drag Jeremiah with them.
And they didn't disobey because God was unclear. They disobeyed because it was scary to do what God said. When the answer required trust — stay put, face the unknown — they chose the familiar cage instead of the unknown freedom.
For the kids in the room: have you ever asked your mom and dad for permission to do something? Have your parents ever told you no? If they've never told you no, there's a parenting seminar afterwards. And have you ever done it anyway? That's what's happening here. Now, the consequences are a lot bigger than losing screen time.
So the option that you have when you are facing empire, when you're facing dominion, when you're facing living under violence and oppression and you're scared, is to run away and retreat. To run back to what you know. Even if what you know is a cage.
Option Two: The Counterattack
But there's another option. And it's the one that probably most of us, many of us, think of first. And that's to attack. To fight back. When the retreat doesn't work, the obvious alternative is to fight back. So you want to gather up your army. Get your sword. Wave it in the air. Get on your horse. Yell "death." And run toward the enemy.
And there's actually a story in Jewish history where that's exactly what happened. It's the reason that we have palm branches today, and what they mean.
About 165 years before Jesus — three, four, five generations before the life of Jesus — there was a Jewish family named the Maccabees. That was a nickname. Anybody know what "the Maccabees" meant? The hammer. That's right. There was a guy named Judas. He saw enemies come into his land. And so he picked up a hammer, and he started swinging — not at nails, but at people. Do not try this at home.
So Judas Maccabeus and his family, the Maccabees, lead this military revolt against the empire occupying Israel at that time, the Greeks. And they actually won. They actually managed to keep their land for a while. So the Maccabees take over the land from the Greeks, and they march into Jerusalem. And as Judas Maccabeus marches into Jerusalem, do you know what they're waving? Palm branches.
In our Catholic Bibles, you can read about this in 1st through 4th Maccabees — about this whole era, and about the Maccabees coming into Jerusalem and being celebrated by waving palm branches in the air, waving them as victory banners. The Maccabees go into Jerusalem. They cleanse the temple by force. And they become national heroes. And this is what Hanukkah celebrates.
So when you hear palm branches in the Bible, that's what it meant to a first-century Jewish person. Palm branches meant military victory. It meant liberation by force. It meant charging the enemy.
So when the crowd on Palm Sunday waves palm branches and marches toward the temple, they know what story they're reenacting. It's 185 years ago. It's the story of the Maccabees coming into Jerusalem. And they're expecting a warrior liberator who will drive out the Romans the same way the Maccabees drove out the Greeks.
But that's not what they get. The Maccabees won. They were heroes of their tradition. And their way still wasn't God's final answer. Fighting fire with fire sometimes works — until it doesn't. Violence wins battles, and it loses the very thing that you're fighting for.
So we've got two options on the table so far. You can run away in retreat. You can counterattack. To be clear, I love this scene. I love Lord of the Rings. I listened to this song on the drive here, and on the drive home. I get the feeling. But that's not what Jesus does.
The Third Way: Jesus on a Donkey
What does Jesus do? He comes into the city riding not a war horse, but what? A donkey. Jesus shows us a different way, a third way. It's the same palm branches. It's the same city. A little bit later, Jesus is going to clear out the temple. But everything about what Jesus does is different. And that difference is the whole point.
Now, when Jerusalem was filling up for Passover, typically what would happen is that you would have, from your perspective, to the west, Pontius Pilate. He was the governor over Judea and Jerusalem, and he lived in a palace fortress to the west, toward the Mediterranean Sea. And when Jerusalem was filling up for a festival, he would gather up his centurions and his Roman army, and he would march into the city using the western gate to basically remind the Jews who were coming into the city: don't forget, you are doing this by the grace of Rome. Rome is allowing you to do this. But don't forget that you are surrounded by Roman centurions and an army. So the Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, comes in with his war horse and his military parade, right into the city.
Simultaneously, from what we know of historical sources, you have Jesus coming in at the eastern gate of the city. And there's also a parade, but — maybe other than Peter and his sword — there are no weapons. There are no war horses. It's Jesus on a donkey coming into the city.
Two processions, the same city, the same festival, and opposite claims about how power works. Generals entered on war horses. Jesus chose the animal of a peaceful king. It would be like, during that military parade last summer, your response being to ride in on a bicycle. The crowd saw this, and I think they would have understood the contrast. And the crowd joined him anyway.
And they shout, "Hosanna." Hosanna means, God, save us. Save us, please. And Psalm 118 was the parade liturgy. The crowd is quoting it directly:
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna. Hosanna. Save us, please. It wasn't a pep rally. It was a prayer. It was a plea. It was a cry. A desperate, public, and illegal prayer. It was a protest. An illegal protest. Because Rome did not tolerate rival kings. Shouting "Hosanna to the son of David; Hosanna to the son of the king; Hosanna to the king that we expect to come and save us" within earshot of Roman soldiers was not a smart, safe thing to do.
And the religious establishment, the Sadducees at the temple, didn't tolerate it either. When the chief priests heard children shouting in the temple, they were furious. And when they told Jesus to stop — be peaceful, obey, do what we tell you — Jesus refused. If I stop the children from singing, even the rocks will cry out. Matthew 21:
Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you have prepared praise for yourself. — Matthew 21
Even the kids were part of the protest. Especially the kids.
So, laying out the options side by side. You can retreat to Egypt — you can retreat to the familiar cage. You can fight fire with fire — you can win the battle and lose your soul. Or you can ride the donkey. You can refuse to retreat and refuse to match the empire's violence.
The people in Jeremiah's day asked for God's word, and then they ran from it. The Maccabees took matters into their own hands. And the crowd on Palm Sunday did something more difficult than either one. They showed up, unarmed, in public, shouting for a king who rode a donkey.
Moana's Third Option
Now I'll show you a movie clip, because I feel like the clip gets it better than I can explain it. Anybody here familiar with a movie named Moana? In Moana, we get these three options that we just talked about. The villagers in Moana's village just want to hide on their island, pretend like everything's okay — that's the retreat. Maui wants to fight Te Kā with force — the counter-violence. And then watch what Moana does. Different from both.
[Clip plays.]
So did you see it? Three options. Hide, fight, or walk toward something scary with something that the empire doesn't have. Love, humility, joy. And the monster turns out to be self-defeating. Its own rage is destroying it. All Moana had to do was show up with something different. And that's what Jesus did on Palm Sunday. That's what we're invited to do.
Candles in Leipzig
In 1982, in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, under surveillance by the Stasi secret police, a Lutheran pastor named Christian Führer started hosting Monday evening prayer services at St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig. And every Monday at five o'clock, they would offer prayers for peace. And a handful of people showed up. Sometimes dissidents. Sometimes just ordinary folks who had nowhere else to speak freely. The communist state didn't allow it anywhere else, but the church they couldn't fully control.
They met for seven years. And almost nobody noticed. And then, in the fall of 1989, things shifted. The prayers swelled. Dozens became hundreds. Hundreds became thousands. And on October 9th, two days after the regime's 40th anniversary celebration, the government decided it had seen enough. Eight thousand armed security forces were deployed. Hospitals began to stockpile blood reserves and cleared beds in preparation for wounds. There were credible rumors of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown.
That evening, over 2,000 people packed into St. Nicholas Church. When the prayers ended, they walked outside, and they were met by 70,000 more, filling the streets and holding candles, sometimes one in each hand. And what Pastor Führer said: "It takes two hands to carry a candle. One to hold it, and one to shield the flame. Which means you can't throw a stone, and you can't swing a fist." The candle was the discipline.
And so 70,000 people processed through the streets of Leipzig, carrying fire in their hands, chanting, "We are the people." And the soldiers refused to fire. And a month later, the Berlin Wall fell. A procession out of a house of worship, into the streets of an empire city, carrying not weapons, but lights.
Joining the Parade
So what does it look like for us to join this parade today, this week, in this country, in this moment?
Yesterday, people across this country — people in this church — joined the No Kings protest. And that's a Palm Sunday sermon all by itself. Palm Sunday was an illegal protest. A crowd of ordinary, frightened, hopeful people marching through the streets, declaring that their allegiance belonged to a different kind of king. Not the one in the palace, not the one with the army, but the one on the donkey. And when they were told to stop, they refused. When the authorities got angry, Jesus quoted the psalm about children's praise, and the parade kept going.
It's not triumphalism. It's survival testimony. The psalmist in Psalm 118 says:
Out of my distress I called on the Lord. The Lord answered me and set me in a broad place. I was pushed hard so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me. I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of God. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. — Psalm 118
The psalmist has been surrounded, pushed to the edge, and has come out the other side saying: God showed up. The rejected thing became the foundation.
Joining the parade does not mean that we have it all figured out. The crowd on Palm Sunday didn't know what the week would bring. They didn't know about the arrest, and the trial, and the cross. They joined the parade before they knew the ending. And that's what trust looks like. Not certainty, but movement.
Living in the Saturday
All right, let's bring this plane to a landing. We have been living in the book of Jeremiah for a few weeks now. In exile and in uncertainty. In the long middle of a story that does not resolve neatly. And the truth is, we are all still living there. Living in the in-between. Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Between the ascension and the hope for return. Between the world as it is and the world that God promises.
And Saturday — Holy Saturday — is the hardest day. Friday has its grief, and Sunday has its joy. But Saturday is just not knowing. It's sitting in the ambiguity. It's wondering if the parade was worth it.
The crowd on Palm Sunday joined a parade in what they thought was the beginning of liberation. And by Friday, they watched Jesus die. By Saturday, they have nothing but silence and uncertainty, and locked doors for fear. And yet, even if they didn't know it, Sunday was coming. They didn't know it, but Sunday was coming.
We live in the Saturday. And the invitation is not to run away to Egypt. It's not to pick up a sword. But it is to keep marching in the parade. To choose joy as an act of defiance. To trust that the donkey beats the war horse, even when the evidence is thin. To refuse to let the empire tell us who we are or what is possible.
The best image that I can come up with is any Pride parade. Any time a people show up as fully and authentically themselves, celebrating in the street, refusing to hide even when the world has told them to hide. Not because the future is certain, but because hiding is no longer an option.
As Samwise says in Lord of the Rings, "There is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for." And that fight is not with a sword or a rock. It is with hope and it is with joy.
And so our invitation this morning is to join the parade. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
