March 29, 2026 (Palm Sunday) - Mr. Matthew Sanaker

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In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

(Please be seated)

On Palm Sunday, we are plunged into the paradox of Holy Week. Between the procession into Jerusalem and Jesus’ procession to Golgotha, the place of the skull, we are shaken like the crowds who experienced both processions. Many of Jesus’ disciples, more than just the Twelve, were present for both processions within the span of a few days. Their hope had turned to despair. Unlike us who live after the resurrection, they must have felt that all of their hope in Jesus as the Messiah must have been dashed.

We hear about Pilate giving the people of Jerusalem a choice of who they want to have released — the choice between Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas. The way of peaceful liberation through living a transformed life, and the way of violent revolution, trading one privileged ruling class for another but ultimately continuing to be ruled by the same narrow self-interest that leads to the oppression of others — the antithesis of God’s kingdom.

So this morning, as I usually do, I read The New York Times, and I want to read just a passage of an article to you.

It started with sharp pain in a tooth for about a week. Emmanuel Damas sought treatment while he was being held at an Arizona immigration detention center. Several detainees later told his family that Mr. Damas, who had migrated from Haiti in 2024 under what was then a lawful U.S. program, was given only ibuprofen. Soon, one of his brothers received a call that Mr. Damas was in a hospital intensive care unit. By the time his relatives were allowed to visit him nine days later, Mr. Damas, fifty-six, was on life support, unable to move or speak but still shackled to a hospital bed. An infection had spread throughout his body and Mr. Damas had most likely gone into septic shock, according to federal officials and interviews with his relatives. He died on March 2, one of thirteen people who have died in federal immigration custody in the first three months of this year, and one of forty-six who have died since President Trump took office last year and began his mass deportation campaign. According to the death reports and news releases made public by ICE, they let him rot in there and die like he had no family, said Presley Nelson, one of Mr. Damas’s brothers.

So I wonder, in this country, is there still a mob who is calling for the release of Jesus Barabbas, who worships Jesus Barabbas instead of Jesus Christ?

So it might be tempting for us to join in the celebration of Jesus as the Messiah in the procession of the palms and then quickly rush through the crucifixion, the death, and the burial and get right to the celebration of the resurrection. After all, don’t we proclaim that we are Easter people? It was Jesus the Christ’s resurrection that inaugurated the renewal of creation. We live in a post-resurrection world where the path to abundant and eternal life has been fully revealed to us in the risen Christ. We should focus on that, right?

But Christ could not get to the resurrection without first passing through death. And neither can we.

In preparation for baptism and in our continued journey of discipleship, we are called to die to ourselves that we may live in Christ. We are challenged to put on the mind of Christ, to live as he lived, emptying ourselves so that we can be open to God’s call to live lives of service to God and to our fellow human beings.

In the sacrament of baptism, we are joined with Christ in his death and resurrection. We can’t have one without the other. In contemplating the passion of Christ — his suffering, his death by crucifixion — what was his ultimate act of self-giving, we may reflect on those ways that we have not fully relinquished ourselves to the path of discipleship.

Jesus said that unless we are willing to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him, we cannot be his disciples. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake will find it.

We might consider: is there some part of us that might still shrink and hide from taking up our cross and following him? What might it look like to give ourselves over fully to following Jesus, to lose our life for his sake so that we might find it? This is the path of discipleship, and it will not necessarily look the same for everyone.

On Tuesday of this past week, we commemorated the life and death of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the martyrs of El Salvador who were killed in the 1970s and ’80s. Archbishop Romero was a prophet in the classical sense. He spoke truth to power for the sake of the Gospel on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed, and those who were being disappeared by a brutal authoritarian government in El Salvador. He spoke out on behalf of Christians — laypeople, nuns, and priests — who worked on behalf of the poor and who had been attacked and even murdered by the government. Archbishop Romero was assassinated while celebrating the Eucharist at a small chapel at a church-run hospital for the terminally ill on the twenty-third of March 1980. The U.S. government supported the government of El Salvador who killed Oscar Romero.

On Wednesday, we celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation of our Lord to the Virgin Mary. After the Archangel Gabriel tells Mary that she will conceive of the Holy Spirit, Mary gives her emphatic and unreserved yes to God, saying, “Be it done unto me according to your word.” While Mary, the Mother of God, is a saint in a way that no one has been since, we can still be inspired by her pure-hearted faith in God and her willingness to say yes when called to serve.

While most of us are not called to give our lives in the way that the Virgin Mary or Archbishop Romero did, we are all called by Christ to give our lives for his sake. In baptism, we are called to die to ourselves and live in Christ. Some may feel called to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of the vulnerable, like Archbishop Romero, or like the conductors on the Underground Railroad who helped to liberate slaves in this country, or like the Confessing Church who hid their Jewish neighbors when they were being hunted by the Nazi government of Germany.

Others may quietly do the work of Christ by dedicating themselves to the healing professions, giving of themselves for the physical and mental well-being of others. Some are called to the vocation of the cure of souls, ministering to the spiritual well-being of people in their communities. Some dedicate themselves to feeding the hungry or clothing and housing those in need. Some are called to teach or to care for children. Others commit themselves to caring for prisoners and ministering to them.

There are many ways that we can lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel, and in doing so, find our lives in Christ. Being baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are joined in his life and his death and his resurrection. It is only in dying to our self-centeredness that we can hope to live more fully into our resurrected life in Christ.

Amen.