Altar Calls by Wil Triggs

I remember, as a boy, watching Billy Graham on our black and white television set. At the end of every broadcast, Graham would invite people to come forward to receive Christ, assuring them that "your friends will wait." And people would come forward, a lot of people. The invitation would go out to viewers to join in and call a phone number. 
 
The times I went on occasion to church with the lady who picked kids up around the neighborhood, or sometimes with my family or, as a high schooler, when friends with cars would come by and pick me up, that something happened at church, toward the end of the service usually. Music would be playing, and over the music, a preacher or another person of power and influence would be speaking, praying.  
 
With every head bowed and all eyes closed, if you want to raise your hand and say to God that you want to follow him, do that now. 
 
Sometimes the music itself carried the day and then the preacher speaking softly through a microphone or in the churches with no amplified sound, loud and urgent, a strange kind of intimacy. 
 
If you raised your hand, if you are ready, if God is speaking to you, if you want to surrender all, come down the aisle so that all can see that you are saying yes to Jesus. Come.  
 
Sometimes friends I knew would go forward. People of all ages. Those dressed in suits. Women in silk dresses or suits with matching hats. A working-class man who didn’t wear a suit. The rebellious teenager who walked down at least once a month. A little girl, uncertainly letting loose the hand of her mother, stepping into the aisle and working forward to join the others, if there were others.  
 
All of this while the rest of the congregation sang in unison, rejoicing and praying. We had sung the hymns. We listened to the choir. We passed the offering. We heard the sermon. God was at work. So this was how the service ended, people walking down the aisle for the altar call. 
 
Lorraine tells me that in the church where she grew up, some people judged the strength of the service based on the number of times they sang the chorus before the service ended. 
 
I think back on my experiences with this. In a church I began attending on a semi-regular basis, I noticed one lady going forward every week. A friend from high school went forward for the sins she had committed that week, a sort of Protestant confessional. I remember one guy joking that he went forward just so the service could end.  
 
Thinking back on those journeys down the aisle, I found this from a Christian History article: 
 
“Many people consider Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) to be the ‘father’ of the altar call. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1823, Finney did not begin giving public invitations until long after Methodists had made the altar call a regular part of their camp meetings. Finney, however, did more than anyone to establish altar calls as an accepted and popular practice in American evangelicalism. Finney regularly called anxious sinners to the front of the congregation to sit on an ‘anxious bench.’ There, they would receive prayer and often be preached to directly. The altar call was also one of Finney’s famous ‘new measures.’ He was convinced that ministers could produce revival by using the right methods, and that the altar call ‘was necessary to bring [sinners] out from among the mass of the ungodly to a public renunciation of their sinful ways.’” 
 
And this from a Gospel Coalition article quoted a description of George Whitefield’s call for immediate decision in a sermon:  
 
“Whitefield asked whether anyone wished ‘to take Christ for their husband.’ If they did, he extended an invitation: ‘Come and I’ll marry you to him just now.’ . . . A twenty-one-year old male convert said that when Whitefield ‘laid out the terms’ of the union with Christ, he found his ‘heart made sweetly to agree to those terms.’ Another convert ran to embrace a friend, exclaiming that the minister had ‘married my soul to Christ.’ . . . Whitefield wrote that many ‘were married to the Lord Jesus that night.’” 
 
I don’t think Whitefield was calling people forward when he invited people to be married to Jesus. Something else was going on of which the physical movement was a symptom. It wasn’t really the beginning, but something happening in the middle of faith for a lot of folks. 
 
The aisle doesn’t matter, but the heart does. We don’t do altar calls anymore, but there is a calling we must heed from God, the call to believe and receive and give our lives to God, not unlike marriage, a vow that lasts longer than marriage and earthly life. His promise to be faithful even when we fail.  
 
How can we even breathe apart from his lungs? How can we clearly see apart from his eyes? Every day he washes my feet. Every day of life, even in my sins and failures, falling back into nail-scarred wrists and the hole in his side, the shoulders of the Shepherd, the Spouse who is always at my side, nearer still to feel his breath on my sin-weakened frame promising peace, falling, rising, holding on to him, receiving new life to face this day whatever it holds. 
 
You still give me breath  
in the valley of death. 
In the pastures green you ever lead. 
My raging waves you still.
You drink the cup  
and do the Father’s will.
When I fall and want to hide 
There you are, at my side 
On the cross,  
empty grave,  
ascending the sky 
Your love is my love,  
I am still your bride 
Your love is my love ever even now, 
You conquer my sin,  
it’s gone away 
In my heart in your heart I hide, 
Faithful eventide. 

Starstruck by Lorraine Triggs

It was probably the timing—a week before our 35th wedding anniversary—that made me read an article about Michelin-star restaurants. In the September 17 New York Times article, “Michelin’s Coveted Stars Can Come with Some Costs,” author Julia Moskin notes that the “Michelin Guide—owned by the French tire manufacturer—is the world’s most recognized authority on fine dining.” Moskin discovered that in “interviews, dozens of restauranteurs, chefs and officials across the country said ‘the status the stars confer is priceless and comes with vast earning potential.'”

Those coveted stars had a humbler origin than I thought. According to the article, “the star system—one, worth a trip; two, worth a detour; three, worth a journey—was devised more than a century ago to guide businessmen as they motored around France on the company’s tires.”

The owner of Southern California’s only three-star restaurant noted that the stakes are higher today when someone is flying from Germany to San Diego to eat at your restaurant.

There’s also intrigue about how Michelin awards those coveted stars. Notes Moskin, “Curiosity has always swirled around how the company does it work: Who are the inspectors? How often do they visit? What does it take to rise from two stars to three?”  

I’d rather be tooling around the south of France on a set of Michelin tires than worrying about rising from two stars to three. But reading about the process of ranking and stars does have a certain appeal. 

It's a human thing. I mean, ranking and analyzing and thinking how some of us are better than others is just so natural. I begin to fret over my own set of stars. And in those mad moments, I think, what’s wrong with wanting more stars? Why shouldn’t someone confer four stars, maybe five, on my insightful (read right) opinions, my impressive CV and my curated treasures. And these stars come with a bonus—an overestimation of myself. Ta-da!

When status stardust blinds me to who I am, I need the clear-eyed words of the Apostle Paul: “Don’t cherish exaggerated ideas of yourself or your importance, buy try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith that God has given to you all.” (Romans 12:3, Phillips)

From that sane estimate flows another quality, a quality likely unheard of in Michelin Guide world—humility. Charles Spurgeon said that “humility is to make a right estimation of oneself.”

In the Christ follower's world, this right estimation has its beginnings and end in paradox. We hear this in a king's humble cry, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” (Psalm 51:1) We see paradox in an ordinary young woman’s extraordinary submission to God, and she sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.” (Luke 1:47, 48) 

The culmination of paradox is Jesus. Paul’s lyrical prose in Philippians 2 takes us to heaven, where Jesus doesn’t count equality with God a thing to be grasped. Then down to earth where Jesus not only is born in the likeness of men, but also takes the form of a servant, and we go down yet again as Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” And Paul takes us back to heaven where Jesus is not just exalted, but highly exalted.
 
That's another paradox at play. The paradox in our lives where we can have the mind of Christ our Savior, and instead of grasping for status, we shine as lights in a dark world. We give ourselves in service to him and to one another. The day will come when the king of paradox doesn't give us stars for what we've acheved but crowns for what he has done in and through us.

Walking Down the Aisle By Wil Triggs

On September 24 more than a few years ago, I did not walk down the aisle of College Church. I stood at the front of the church, my pastor on one side of me and my best friend on the other. I didn’t walk down the aisle, but Lorraine did. She walked alone, in loving memory of her father, who had died 21 years before. She walked toward me, everyone in the church looking at her, and then at me, and as we drew nearer one another, at both of us.

I was so overcome with emotion that I couldn’t sing. The words of the hymn we had so carefully selected would not come out of my mouth. What if I’m like this through the whole service, I wondered. I’m going to have to actually speak the vows. With God’s help and Lorraine’s hands in mine, I found my voice so everyone could hear. We were wed. Some people reading this were with us on that day.

Our wedding happened in church, the sacred and simple place where we planned to spend our lives together, with the people we would be spending our lives with. I know it’s not fashionable, but it wasn’t about fashion. For us at that time, there was no other place for our wedding to happen. This was before destination weddings, or at least we didn’t know about them.

I remember the wedding sermon, at least the part directed at me, as a call to die, to set aside my selfish desires to serve Lorraine. This was pretty sobering. Jesus dying on the cross for our sin and me being a Christlike husband to her. It has always seemed like the harder calling than the instruction to wives, which seems to generate all the anger and debate. Both callings are hard in their own way, which is why marriage is redemptive as we forgive and ask for forgiveness.

Every week we walk down the aisle of the church to sit in a pew and worship God with everyone else who is there. Every week God meets us there, too. He meets us in a special way at gathered-together worship. But what kind of a bride are we?

In Kindergarten Bible school, we just studied the gift of precious perfume poured out in worship on the feet of Jesus. People weren’t sure what to make of it when it happened, except for Judas, who found it especially disgusting. Some churches do foot-washing, but none that I know of pour out expensive and costly oils or perfume in worship. That’s just, well, kind of weird. Not responsible. A waste.

In the different debates about submission and authority, for those who are not married and feel as if they might be missing out, for those who grieve, or for people that think they have it all planned out just right, is love getting lost in laws and practices and debates about who is right?

If we give ourselves over to loving Jesus, what might we do? Dare we even consider the question? Jesus died for my sins, and I have new life in the resurrection. But does Jesus have my heart? Has he captured it or am I holding something back? I lost my voice for a few moments at the front of College Church as Lorraine approached me. But as Christ stands at the front and we draw near to him, how can we break the jar and pour it out onto his feet? Maybe it’s not losing your voice in the moment of love but finding it in the awe of the simple healing touch of his cloak. It’s not losing our voice but daring to speak of his wondrous works. Are we silent for fear that we might confuse people, or they might think we’re drunk or mad?

What kind of a bride are we? Church, not me, all of us together, mysteriously, are the object of his love and delight.

Let love burn like the Pentecostal fires, giving voice where once we dared not speak, love for Jesus in worship, and gratitude for how he did what no one else dared to do, for the wisdom of God that would dream of redemption that none of us humans would have ever devised or chosen even if we had.

We are waiting for that wedding day, when the kingdom that is now and yet not yet has come, and, in our resurrected splendor, we at long last see Jesus, there waiting and welcoming us—the One whom our hearts adore and worship.

Golden ring of eternity
When all the dross is burned away
Radiant we stand before his lovely gaze.
Hand in hand before the throne we go
Nothing left but to love and adore
Engagement ring, a thorn-crafted stone
Await the trumpet call, never again alone.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready (Revelation 19:7)

Above, Below, All Around By Wil Triggs

Long ago we drove, three friends and me, for hours across town, beyond the grapevine, into the valley, then up Sierra’s side to roads end.
 
We walked with dried foods and rolled up beds. For days we hiked, through cedar and pine, up to the place where nothing more could grow. Above the timberline we lay down on granite ground.
 
As the sun sank into night’s duvet, we looked up at the theater of the sky at the night performers: stars, planets, meteors, satellites, planes, but mostly stars leaving us entranced with awe.
 
They say there is too much man-made light for us to see this show in every-day life.
 
But then, there are other spaces to explore. Instead of looking above, we look below, and there it is again, awe springing out of the ground. Spring bulbs from the thawing mound of dirt. Spring and summer sprout all wonder—fritillarias, lavender, the blooming rose give way to autumn’s aster, mums all sing. Fount of bounty, plants burst forth. Tomatoes, corn, beans, leeks, root vegetables coming out like miracles of flavor out of the ground below.
 
Do grocery stores overflowing keep me from seeing the wonder that springs from the ground? Are the lights of modern agriculture and commerce too bright for me to see this other wonder of God?
 
Does my own focus only on the path ahead, my list of things to do today, keep me from seeing wonder? I want to check things off my list and move on. And then I must remember to add four other things I’ve just thought of to the other to-do's. Working my way through the list, this is my day. Where's my backpack when I need it?
 
But I don’t need to backpack for days or harvest a homegrown bounty to see the wonders of God.

Around me, people. Little worlds. Each one a universe of tragedy and comedy—epic, simple, different like stars or plants, collections of failure and success and seeing the good to which we all say yes, beautiful as the first snow blanketing like a wedding veil. Every person their own winter’s tale.
 
I only have to pause and look above the path or below or around me to see the awe of the shepherd, farmer, father, friend. Throughout the day and night again, in awe I live at home, at work, above, below, all around, alive and living in the song of being found. So sing the simple lullaby of awe not for the wonder of things made but the maker whose splendor will never fade.
 
All praise to You, my God, this night,
For all the blessings of the light.
Keep me, O keep me, King of kings,
Beneath the shelter of Your wings.

Forgive me, Lord, for this I pray,
The wrong that I have done this day.
May peace with God and neighbor be,
Before I sleep restored to me.

Lord, may I be at rest in You
And sweetly sleep the whole night thro'.
Refresh my strength, for Your own sake,
So I may serve You when I wake.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heav'nly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Estate Sale Season By Lorraine Triggs

It was estate sale season, and my then four-year-old son dutifully trailed my friend and me in and out of houses. It was a season of vintage cookbooks and bakeware, and chairs. Oh, so many chairs, two for $5, four for $20 or free,they’re on the curb for the taking. It got to a point where my husband issued a no-more-chair mandate.

I may have overdone it with the estate sales and the four-year-old.

The first clue was when he wanted to know why we went to people's houses and just took things from them. I explained that sometimes when people die or elderly people need to move, their children have a sale to help get rid of their belongings and make money.

The second clue was the yellow Post-It notes on the revolving bookcase, the lamp, the area rug, the framed prints, the dining room table andthe chairs. On each note, my son had scrawled random numbers: 7, 4, 1, 0, 2.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Putting price tags on stuff I’m going to sell when you and Dad die.”

I noticed the $2 price tag on the dining room table. “Well, I bet you could get more than $2 for the table.” And then I explained that Dad and I had no intention of dying anytime soon, so there was no rush for the estate sale.

Four months ago, my oldest sister—by three and a half years—had no intention of dying either. That changed when her cancer that had been in remission returned as angiosarcoma, a rare type of cancer. A few days ago, she wrote on her Caring Bridge, “So we are faced with a decision, have a huge operation or have no continued medical intervention.”

She and her husband are still asking questions, still seeing surgeons—and my sister could be seeing Jesus sooner than expected. And this most amazing truth of seeing Jesus is the one sure thing for my sister and brother-in-law, and they are full of anticipation in this heart-wrenching time.

This might be an inherited trait from our mother. Several years ago, my mother had surgery for congestive heart failure. For some reason, maybe the proximity of Chicago to Jefferson City, Missouri, I was the designated daughter to be with our mom for her surgery.

All seemed well until her doctor came out and asked me, “Have you noticed if your mother has had suicidal thoughts?”

“What?” I didn’t see that question coming.

“Well, just as we were giving her the anesthetic, she said, ‘It will be all right if I die.’”

My reaction shows why you never send the youngest sibling to sit by a parent’s hospital bed. I laughed right out loud. “Oh, that. Has my mother ever talked about her faith with you?”

“Well, yes,” the doctor replied. I’m sure she didn’t see that question coming. “It means a lot to her.” Go, Mom.

“Well, far from despair, my mother is full of hope that should she die, she will see Jesus.”

For my sister, the anticipation of seeing Jesus was honed long before this shadow of death that now hovers over her. It’s her eternal perspective in life that has shaped her perspective of death. It’s a lot like the Apostle Paul’s perspective in Philippians 1:21, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” And like Paul, she is “hard pressed between the two.”

It’s not always easy to be hard pressed between the two. Life just takes over. Schedules fill up with commitments. The financial advisor wants to know how to invest your money. Vacation plans need to work around school schedules. College trips need to be planned. The house needs more estate sale chairs (or not).

Life has a funny way of skewing the eternal perspective, until “we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.” (Hebrews 2:9, KJV)

We see Jesus. We have hope in life and in death.

The Food of the Kings and Commoners By Wil Triggs

I like to cook. Lorraine and I like to cook together. We unwind sometimes with me chopping onions, leeks, shallots, anything in the allium family, and Lorraine roasting a mélange of root vegetables—potatoes, beets, fennel, carrots, parsnips—tossed in olive oil, homegrown herbs and sea salt.

We like to read books about food and go to websites and blogs related to food—growing it, cooking it, eating it. “Are you a foody?” one of my small group members asked, after we had served them a meal. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure,” I replied. He and his wife both said, “Yes, you’re a foody.”

I think I’m too cheap to be one of those. I’ve never purchased a restaurant meal that would cost the same as my first home mortgage payment. We try to figure out how many different meals can we get out of a roasted chicken. Usually, we prefer preparing our own special dinners at home rather than dining out. With our anniversary and birthdays coming up, it’s time to start searching for what we want to cook or eat.

Kings and rulers have an altered relationship with food. They have to think about things differently. There is a word that describes the difference. That word is poison.

If something we cook goes bad, it’s not on purpose. We don’t put poison in dinner. But heads of state with enemies can’t necessarily be so sure that their food won’t kill them.

What’s a king or despot to do?

Consider the Beefeaters at the Tower of London.

“We know that King Henry VIII executed two of his wives on Tower Green at the Tower,” says Mick King, who began working as a Yeoman Warder (Beefeater) at the Tower in May 2000. “Both these wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, had supporters, Henry was paranoid that he would be poisoned, so he had his Royal Bodyguard to taste his food first.”

Vladimir Putin’s enemy Yevgeny Prigozhin, the one who was just killed in a plane crash outside Moscow, first connected with Putin as his chef. They were not always enemies. Imagine the lives saved if Prigozhin had just dropped a little arsenic in the borscht or used the wrong kind of mushroom in the stroganoff.

Did Putin make Prigozhin, or someone else now, taste his food before he eats it? What kind of anxiety does a human leader have to live with?

Another despotic leader, Idi Amin, reportedly almost killed his chef and the whole cooking team one time because his son got indigestion. “If my son dies, I’m going to kill all of you,” Amin allegedly threatened.

There are some plus sides to the job. Mick the Beefeater pointed out that, “We have always lived inside the grounds with our families, people outside these great walls were jealous in the Middle Ages as they couldn’t afford good meat, they were eating vegetables and fish from the River Thames. We the Yeoman Warders were eating the scraps and leftovers from the Kings Table in the great halls of the White Tower, the good meat, the good beef.”

Guilt over wrongdoing and a desire to protect one’s right royal self from harm would make a lot of people lose their appetite. Guilt would surely eat away at the edges of royalty brought about by the death of others. And to eat the scraps at the table, like the Beefeaters or the dogs in the Gospel, was better than the alternative for most people.

We Commoners also have a Beefeater or actually someone who makes the Beefeater look like a Commoner. Jesus is the Beefeater who not only tastes our food but eats it all especially when it is not safe to eat. He looked deeply into the cup of wrath, shuddered, prayed, then drank it all, every sin, every dreg of humankind, dying, satisfying God’s judgment on us.

Jesus is so much more than we can imagine. He is king, beefeater, chef and food. Jesus is heaven’s bread and drink—Living Water, Bread of Life.

It was right after the woman at the well had left with her water jug, that Jesus’ disciples began to urge him to eat. John 4:32-34 records Jesus’ response, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”  So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”  Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”

No meal at the well, but soon the disciples and a small intimate gathering of 5,000 or so would enjoy fine dining of loaves and fishes. Yet, Jesus, points to himself, the bread unlike the bread we humans eat, and invites his disciples to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

The king eats the food we’ve earned and dies for commoners like us. He gives us life beyond death.

Draw near to the table. Eat more than the scraps that fall from the table, but the bread and wine broken for us. This food unites when the leeks of Egypt divide. Jesus food ushers us from earthly kingdoms to heaven itself.

New Sway in Town by Lorraine Triggs

It’s that time of year when we wear our or our children’s college swag. There’s a new swag in town—debate swag. In a New York Times article, “The Secrets of Debate Swag,” published the morning of the Republican presidential primary debates, Vanessa Friedman wrote: “There will be a viral moment or two; a riposte that becomes a meme. Campaign staff will be watching. And before you can say ‘in my prime’ or ‘too honest,’ it will end up on a T-shirt in a candidate’s store.”

Friedman pointed out that campaign managers will “jump on any one-liner that can easily translate into merch.”

Like campaign managers, we’re fond of our one-liners, too. A stroll through Hobby Lobby or a scroll through Etsy reveals all kinds of merch proclaiming, “Rejoice,” “Be still” or “Great is your faithfulness.” I am under no illusion that political one-liners ever began as profound truths, but these of a more spiritual nature do have origins in profound truths, like “great is your faithfulness” whose origins go back to Lamentations 3:22-23: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

But there’s more profound truth behind the profound truth of these two verses. It’s in Lamentations 3:1 where we meet the man who has seen great affliction, and we enter Jeremiah’s lament that God “has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” (verses two-three)

Well, there goes the merch with that kind of attitude, Jeremiah.

As he continues with these painful words in verses seven and eight, “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer,” I am strangely comforted. I’m not alone in wondering why my cries for help go unanswered while other people’s cries are heard and answered.

David Powlison in his book Good and Angry makes it a point to say that this lamenting is not a lack of faith. “Grown-up, yet childlike faith is bluntly realistic . . . Faith is unafraid to credit God with controlling both the delightful and bitter things that happen to us—and faith continues to seek the help of the One who alone can help us.” In this painful passage, Powlison says Jeremiah finds “profound comfort.”

And guess what verses Powlison cites? Yep, Lamentations 3:22, 23, along with verse 21: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

In his deep profound pain, Jeremiah had a deeper profound hope because of an even deeper profound truth: God’s steadfast love and mercies. They don’t end when we sit in darkness or pain; they don’t end when the trial does; they don’t end when either delightful or bitter events come our way. They don’t end because our promise-keeping God is faithful.

On mornings when I pour coffee into my own merch mug, I now will look at its one-liner of truth--“Be still and Know”—a bit differently, and take heart, or better yet, take refuge in unceasing steadfast love and mercy.

A Morning Walk with My Dog by Wil Triggs

When I walk my dog in the morning and want to stay in the confines of our subdivision, there are only so many ways we can go.
 
Sometimes we walk down the street where his doggy girlfriend lives. Usually that route is for the afternoon, but sometimes we head in that direction in the morning.
 
One day early in the summer, we did go down that street, and I couldn’t help but notice this scene playing out in one of the driveways.
 
A young man approached a truck in the driveway. He had his lunch bag and was about to leave for the day. He looked like a man, not a boy. Behind him an older man and older woman followed and stood watching him. They went up to him. There were hugs and words exchanged. I couldn’t hear them, but they lingered and talked. Had he been visiting and it was time to go away?

The young man drove off and the couple watched as he backed the truck out of the driveway and then down the street. They stood there for a bit, looking at the street where the vehicle their son drove had turned.
 
Was he visiting of was it something else? I thought perhaps it was his first day at a new job and his parents were wishing him well, maybe even praying for him. There was something tender in the moment.
 
But then, we walked on that street again, and there they were, hugging, talking, lingering, driving away, watching.  If I walked the dog at our usual time and turned down that street, there the three of them would be. I started to feel like I was kind of part of something I shouldn’t be, so I stopped going that way most days, figuring that I would give them their privacy. I’m sure they didn’t care, but I felt a little awkward walking by them.
 
This week, on the first day of public school, I unthinkingly went down their street. Sure enough, there were the three of them. Besides his lunch sack, the young man had a backpack and he was headed off to…I don’t know. School, I assume. They hugged and talked. The mom put her hands of both sides of his face. I looked away to give them space.
 
Of course, on this morning, I saw other kids either getting into cars or gathering at the bus stops in our subdivision. New clothes. Backpacks. Cellphones in hand. High school.
 
The beginning of another year of school also means the beginning of another year of Kindergarten Bible school for Lorraine and me. We are excited to meet the new children this year and begin teaching about truths of Jesus and the Bible. We are grateful that parents bring them, giving them over to us and the church for a few minutes each week to share with them the wonders of God and the joy of being a part of a church that cares enough to come alongside parents with their children.
 
This first Sunday, there will be scenes not unlike the scene I walked by of the adult son and his parents in the driveway. Except the children are five years old or so, and parents are dropping them off for a little over an hour. For some, this is a scary parting when we start. There will be some tears. Child hands holding the hands of mom or dad, letting go and meeting us and our teaching team. It’s going to be okay.
 
Our lesson this week is Palm Sunday. This week’s Bible story says:
People walked behind and ahead of Jesus, praising God with a loud voice for all the miracles they had seen. “Hosanna!” they said. “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” The word hosanna means “save now.” The people welcomed Jesus as their promised King. They hoped He would save them from the Romans. Some religious leaders told Jesus to make His disciples be quiet. Jesus answered, “If they were to keep silent, the stones would cry out and praise Me!” Jesus entered Jerusalem and went to the temple. People who were blind and people who were disabled came to Him. Jesus healed them. Other religious leaders saw Jesus’ miracles and heard the children saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” They were very angry and asked Jesus, “Do You hear what these children are saying?” “Yes,” Jesus told them. The writer of Psalms had said, “You have prepared praise from the mouths of children and nursing infants.”
 
We all were once children, then students, now adults. Out of the mouths of Kindergarteners and their Bible school teachers and their parents come words of praise. But not only them. Everybody wants to be rescued from one thing or another. So wave the palm. Throw your cloak into the street as he passes.

So often we long for Jesus to rescue us from our own Roman empires be they private or worldly. Jesus performed the miracles and then he went to the cross, the grave, the sky. Hallelujah. For now, we live in this world, somehow, mysteriously and miraculously citizens of the next. We walk out to the truck, we walk into the classroom, we say goodbye for the day, we drive off to work or school. Citizens of the heavenly kingdom, we live and work in this earthly one. God has something for us to do this day, glorify him, speak of the wondrous works to ears who have never heard.
 
Hosanna. Save now.