Nine years ago I was ordained on a Palm Sunday. It has become a fun and beautiful tradition to share that with you, or remind you of it, every Palm Sunday, so thank you for playing along and letting me celebrate a special day in my life with all of you. Ha. But I also want to talk a little more about that journey.
LGBTQIA+ ordination became possible in our denomination in 2011. I was nineteen. Same-sex marriage became legal in our denomination in 2014 and in our country in 2015. I was twenty-two and twenty-three, respectively, and in my first two years of seminary. While in seminary, I was also honestly reminded by professors that, as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I would have to work so much harder and be so much better to be considered an “equal” pastor alongside my straight peers. This has and continues to be true also for women.
In my final step toward being certified and ready to receive my first call, after I had finished all my requirements, I was asked to publicly apologize to the Committee on Preparation for Ministry for my “homosexual lifestyle.” And a good number of you know me well enough to know that I refused. I very much love this side of who I am. I was approved by one vote. A single vote carried the weight of whether I would be ordained or not.
In 2017 I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament in my home congregation in rural northeast Colorado, in the same church that taught me people like me would be punished by God.
In 2018, our denomination voted to affirm the full welcome, acceptance, and inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people, especially transgender and non-binary individuals. And in 2019, God led me to you and this congregation.
I tell you all of this because I am thirty-four. Eight years ago people like me were finally affirmed by our denomination. Eleven years ago people like me were allowed to get married. Fifteen years ago people like me were allowed to be ordained in our denomination, not all Christian churches, but ours. And today LGBTQIA+ rights, especially rights for transgender people, are still be debated.
What is half of thirty-four? Seventeen. For over half my life, at the age of thirty-four, I did not have the same rights as the majority of people in this room. Friends, there are also people in this room who are LGBTQIA+ in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. For them, less than a quarter of their life.
My very presence in this pulpit is because of prophetic political words spoken from God’s pulpit. Words spoken before I was ordained and before I was even born. And that is true for all the pastors – Pastors Stephanie, Kathryn, Moufid, and Abraham – women and immigrants of color – in this church. Without prophetic political words, without public witness, our Session and our Board of Deacons both would lose the gifts of over half of their members. In the church: women would be told to serve their husbands. People of color would not be allowed to worship with us. And we definitely would not worship in Arabic or Chin-Burmese.
I say all of that because Palm Sunday is personal for me, not just because I was ordained on this day, but because Palm Sunday is the day Jesus enters the city in public. People see him. People hear him. People respond to him. Something happened in the crowd that day. One commentator says Jesus’s message here is “public and provocative.”[1] And it is!
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus enters Jerusalem with great intention. He sends disciples ahead. He tells them where to go, what to find, what to say, and what to bring back. They find the colt, untie it, answer those who question them, and bring it to Jesus. Cloaks are thrown over the colt. More cloaks are spread on the road. Branches are cut and laid down. People move ahead of him and behind him. Voices rise. The Gospel of Mark tells the story in such a physical way that it is right to call this embodied faith.
And it happens in Jerusalem during Passover. Passover was the story of liberation of the Israelites from slavery, so everything about this moment is alive with questions about power.
Jesus enters that moment on a humble colt, and the crowd greets him in royal language, quoting the Psalms. Something kingly is happening here, but, as one scholar writes, Jesus arrives with “a heavy dose of tension and irony.”[2] The crowd recognizes something real, yet the shape of Jesus’s reign is already different from the power they have learned to expect.
Jesus is making a public claim, but he is making it in a way that reveals the character of God’s kin-dom. And our Reformed tradition has never taught that public life is outside the concern of God. John Calvin wrote that civil magistracy is “holy and legitimate,” even “the most sacred and honorable in human life.”[3] Which means the issue the Church must address is how authority is used in public life.
Palm Sunday reveals a Savior whose authority is exercised through justice, mercy, truth, compassion, and love.
And once we hear Palm Sunday that way, “Hosanna” begins to sound different too. It’s a prayerful plea: “Lord, Save us!” And in this moment the crowd is not only welcoming Jesus but are also bringing their needs and concerns to him in public. Their cries carry longing and hope. They cry out because the world is not yet the world God desires it to be.
And that cry of Hosanna isn’t just a word. The crowd’s prayer takes visible form. They take off their cloaks. They spread them on the road. They cut branches. They arrange their bodies around Jesus. A public witness to the good that they believe will come! The people do not have the whole picture yet. But they have seen enough of Jesus to respond with what they have.
That has often been true in the life of the church as well. Public witness rarely arrives at a moment of perfect clarity and universal agreement. More often it comes because some people are willing to act on what the gospel has already made clear enough. For example, clear enough to ordain women and queer people. Clear enough to know that slavery and segregation are sins against people of color. Clear enough to bless those who once were denied dignity.
And I think we have seen glimpses of that even in our own public life this week. Yesterday, people gathered in No Kings rallies, bringing their bodies and their voices into public space because they believed something had to be said out loud about power, accountability, and the danger of any ruler asking for the kind of loyalty that belongs to God alone. I am not bringing that up because the church exists to echo every political movement around us. I am bringing it up because Palm Sunday gives us a theological lens for recognizing why public witness matters at all.
Another example: this week Ms. Rachel, who has become one of the most beloved educators of young children in our country, said in an interview, “It’s political to believe that children are worthy of love and care, and that every child is equal, and that our care shouldn’t stop at what we look like, our family, at our religion, at a border.”[4] That line names something many of us already know. There are moments when love gets called political because love has expanded to include those it once excluded.
And if any of us wonder whether people who care for children should ever be part of that kind of public witness, I think of Fred Rogers. Many of you still carry a connection to him through The Rev. Dr. Bill Barker, a former pastor of this congregation. In 1969 on his tv show, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons, a black man, to cool his feet in a small wading pool at a time when public pools still carried the wounds of segregation. And when Officer Clemmons stepped out of the pool, Mr. Rogers helped dry his feet with a towel.[5] That moment was a moment of public witness.
A crowd throwing cloaks into the road before Jesus. People gathering in public because they believe power must be accountable. A teacher for toddlers insisting that children deserve love and care no matter what border contains them. Mr. Rogers sharing a pool and a towel with Officer Clemmons at a time when our country was still trying to keep human dignity segregated. None of these moments are identical. But all of them help us see that public witness can be courageous and deeply embodied without losing tenderness.
So this is where Palm Sunday leaves us. It leaves us with a Savior on a colt, a crowd in the street, and a cry for salvation hanging in the air. Jesus comes to the people to expose what kind of power we trust and what kind of kin-dom we long for.
And that is why the story does not end with the parade. Jesus enters the city, and the whole week begins to move. Before long he will overturn tables, share bread, pray in anguish, stand before violent power, and die on the cross. The procession into Jerusalem is only the beginning of a much deeper revelation, because by the end of this week Jesus will show us, with his whole body, exactly what kind of Savior he is. He is the Savior who receives the cry of “Hosanna” and then walks all the way into the suffering that cry contains. He is the Savior whose throne will be revealed as a cross with a crown made of thorns.
We cry “Hosanna” with honesty. We enter this Holy Week ready to see, once again, that the good news is not only that Jesus came to save, but that Jesus came and will come again to show us how to live, how to love, how to serve, how to bear witness in this world. Our Savior is here, and with him, the promise of God’s kin-dom.
Amen.
Scripture
Lenten Daily Prayer Services
Watch the Livestream
[1] Matt Skinner, “Walking the Palm Sunday Path: A Lenten Sermon Series for 2026,” Working Preacher, January 21, 2026, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching-series/walking-the-palm-sunday-path-in-lent-a-sermon-series-for-2026.
[2] Ira Brent Driggers, “Commentary on Mark 11:1-11,” Working Preacher, March 28, 2021, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sunday-of-the-passion-palm-sunday-2/49620.
[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 4.20.4.
[4] “Ms. Rachel Fights to Close ICE Facility That Detains Children,” Variety, March 2026, https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/ms-rachel-ice-facility-detains-children-dilley-texas-1236696574/.
[5] Fred Rogers Productions, “Officer Clemmons / François Clemmons,” Mister Rogers, accessed March 26, 2026, https://misterrogers.org/articles/officer-clemmons/.