March 20, 2016

C17: Palm/Passion Sunday, Year C (2016)

Jim Somerville

“Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and it’s a good thing to be able to acknowledge the one and admit the other…” begins Jim Somerville, Pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church and co-founder of A Sermon for Every Sunday. Somerville admits that math was not his strong suit. In fact, he got put in remedial math in prep school and got an F on his first exam. He said, “I was only surprised that I got some of the answers right…[sometimes] the Christian life can feel like that…we’re trying to do something we don’t have any natural aptitude for, something that has a lot of complicated rules, where we will be judged by impossibly high standards.” He continues, “To be fair to the text—today’s text from Luke 19:28-40—it doesn’t tell us anything about what happened later in the week; it only tells us what happened on this day, the one we have come to call Palm Sunday. And on this day, apparently, the people got it right.”

Manuscript available: click HERE