There’s no sermon from yesterday to upload. It is the only Sunday in the year when we have no preaching and simply let the story do the work. It is our custom on Palm Sunday to read the Passion story – that’s the story of the end of Jesus’s life from whichever gospel we have been reading through the year.
Here at St Mary’s, the congregation, who are the body of Christ, read the words of Jesus whilst two people at the front narrate the rest of the story.
Yesterday is probably the chilliest Palm Sunday on record. Here in this part of the world, we usually associate Holy Week with a growing sense of spring. New life is all around us. This year, it feels as though it hasn’t quite arrived.
However, that’s a reminder that Holy Week is celebrated in all kinds of contexts. I struggle a bit working out how people could celebrate Easter in the autumn, but that, of course, is what happens in the southern hemisphere. There must be places where Palm Sunday is always held in the snow and it is hard to imagine what that is like.
As it was yesterday, there was not much snow here. Much of the rest of the country was covered in it but it was a clear, if bracing day.
I found myself taking to liturgical gloves.
Brrr.
We do a similar thing here at St Stephen’s Church (Fargo, North Dakota) with the Passion Gospel (brought with me from my experiences at Grace Cathedral, Topeka, Kansas). We use three readers for the Sunday of the Passion Gospel Reading with a sung response (Taizé) that varies by year that amplifies the particular evangelist’s text. Yesterday was ‘Jesus, remember me,’ for example. The custom for the last six years has been to have the people take the part of Jesus on the Good Friday Passion Gospel (without a sung response). We’ve found the three reader versions to be preferable to the dramatis personae which is lovely only if you can get everyone together for a couple of rehearsals.
I wish we’d had liturgical gloves yesterday – my hands only really thawed out come the Offertory after our wee walk from the Meadows!