“And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.”

(Exodus 24:17)

“Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest.”

(Luke 19:38)

Jesus led a parade on Palm Sunday.  He made a public demonstration to show who He thought He was.  Over at last were his long, secret discussions with His disciples about His messianic consciousness.  Past were His doubts and hesitations over how He must fulfill His divine destiny.  His day of decision and action had arrived.

Jesus made his dramatic Palm Sunday parade the public proclamation of His Messiahship.  He carefully acted out the ancient prophet’s predicted image of Israel’s coming Savior. As he rode the borrowed colt into the Holy City it was as if He were saying: “Behold, your God.”

Jesus confronted His nation – both his enemies and his friends – in such a way that they must either reject Him or accept Him.  Those who accepted Him sang, “Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord.”  Those who rejected Him cried: “Crucify.  Crucify.  We have no king but Caesar.”

Phillips Brooks once said, “That which represents in our personal life the great event of Palm Sunday, is the entrance of the authority of Christ into a man’s soul – or – the rejection of that authority.”

We’ve just witnessed the outward sign – the symbolic rite – of this spiritual reality in the lives of these boys and girls who have taken their solemn vows of Christian discipleship.  They have verbally accepted the authority of Jesus as Lord in their lives.  They have experienced a conversion from a life where self is god to a life where Christ is God.

But let me warn you, new communicants, of the mistake you might make of assuming that your experience of God at this point in your life must be normative for the rest of your life – that you have arrived at your destination in meeting and knowing God – and there is nothing more in the religious department of your life to experience.

This is a danger that all of us run – not just young people – whenever we take instruction in the Christian life with a view to making a decision for discipleship.  The danger is that we might assume that at the stage of our understanding, at that level of our emotional development, that our experience of God, our Christian fellowship, and our ethical duties have become fixed, unchangeable for the whole of our lives. Nothing could be more of a caricature of that glorious adventure which is intended by God into the unknown with Jesus Christ as Lord.

Most of you young people have yet to come to the deep emotional upheavals of adolescence.   After you have passed through the upper teens and early twenties you might look back to this day and say, as some have said : “They did me wrong – my parents, my Church School teachers, my ministers, by letting me make a decision for Christian discipleship when I was so young.  They cheated me out of having a traumatic emotional experience of being rescued from sin – deep, passionate sin.  Now I’ll never know what it means to have Jesus Christ as such a savior.”  You may say such a thing – and it may be true in your case, but you must also confess the truth in the same breath that you have known the joy and the strength of a Savior who kept you pure and defended you from many an unlost battle of the will.

The tragedy of so many in Israel and in Jerusalem that first Palm Sunday was their inability to behold their God coming to them in the present moment of their lives.  They could look back into their past – in their nation’s history and in their own experiences and behold their God.  They could see and believe that God had been with Moses on the smoking mountain when the Ten Commandments were codified.  “Then the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the Mount in the eyes of the Children of Israel.”  They could believe that God was there with Isaiah in the temple when the prophet saw the Lord high and lifted up, and heard the seraphim singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God of hosts, The whole earth is full of his glory.”

But Jesus contemporaries, even the religious people, couldn’t behold their God coming to them in the mixed, confused, and muddled events of their time, especially in the person of the Galilean carpenter, meek and riding on an ass, as a mission of peace.  So Jesus wept, saying: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how many times would I have gathered your children about me as a hen gathers her chicks, but you wouldn’t allow me.  You don’t know the things that belong to your peace.  You are unaware of the hour of your divine visitation.”

How many people there are in our time who can behold, in retrospect, God coming in their own past experiences and in our nation’s history, but cannot for the life of them imagine Him riding on the red horizon to today.

How many cannot imagine the Holy Spirit speaking today in anything but the Elizabethan English of the King James Version of the Scriptures.  But some are just as sure that Jesus words to Nicodemus still are true:  “The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.”

The temper of our times is to banish God from His universe and to topple Him from man’s consciousness.  In such a time the church has been too timid to proclaim as loudly as she should the twin doctrine of her gospel – the doctrine of man’s sin and God’s grace.  Since people have not really believed there was anyone there above them for man ultimately to be responsible to people have concluded that sin is an illusion, a nightmare guilt superstition that the liberated should purge from their thoughts.  Oh, what glorious freedom!

But alas man has discovered, in the vast emptiness of a god-evacuated universe, that there is no one he has there to grant the needed forgiveness.  People have been found plunged in a gloom of unspeakable despair.  Up to their chins in sins – which, of course, can no longer be called sins.  No.  We have new names for them:  pollution of man’s environment by the excrement of man’s selfishness, the garbage of man’s pornographic thoughts, the stink of his controversies and conflicts, the vomit of his over-indulgence, the carnage of his self righteous courage.  But the reality of the hellhole man finds himself in is beyond doubt.

These are new and desperate conditions of lostness in an age that has banished the notion of sin but still needs the grace of God to come to us wherever we are and find us.

One friend was telling another about a sermon she heard.  She said the preacher had preached on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  “But what did he say,” her friend asked.  “Busted and disgusted, away from home and can’t be trusted.”  But in that state the boy came to himself — the treasured memory of a Father’s forgiving love got through. Confessing, “I have sinned,” he arose and went to receive the Father’s gracious welcome.

One of the dearest names for the Holy Supper of our Lord the earliest Christians used was “Sacramentum.”  This was the familiar word the Roman Legionnaires gave to their vow to defend the Emperor with their lives.  The Roman Soldier’s sacramentum was renewed annually on the first day of the new year.

Each communion service the Christian pledges his vows anew – not because he beholds his Lord coming to him in saving grace and power only in the elements of the bread and wine but because he is confident that his Lord is ever coming – in every experience of gain or loss, shame or glory, to meet our desperate, sinful need, with forgiving love and transforming righteousness.

Behold your God, O Christian; ever riding on in Majesty, in meek approachability, in compassionate concern for our condition whatever it is, riding to us to bring redemption and release, if only we will receive Him.