Matthew

Luke 3:1-6
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate
was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother
Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of
Abilene,  2  during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of
God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.  3  He went into all the
region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the
forgiveness of sins,  4  as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet
Isaiah, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
    make his paths straight.
5  Every valley shall be filled,
    and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
    and the rough ways made smooth;
6  and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”’

We have no trouble asking God to forgive us. It is forgiving the person who hurt us — or wronged us, or disappointed us, or maybe just got under our skin — where things get complicated. This week, we land on the final lines of the Lord's Prayer and wrestle with what it really means to pray them honestly. Because a posture of grace toward others is not just a nice idea. According to Jesus, it is inseparable from the grace we ourselves have received.

We ask for daily bread — but if we are honest, most of us are living like we ordered the buffet. Somewhere between the original prayer and our modern lives, "enough" got replaced by "more." This week, we sit with one of the simplest lines in the Lord's Prayer and let it ask us a surprisingly uncomfortable question: what would it look like to truly want only what we need — and to make sure our neighbors have the same?

Every Sunday we say it together: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." But what if we stopped and asked ourselves — do we actually want that? Praying for God's kingdom to come means releasing our grip on our own kingdoms, our own agendas, our own definitions of what the world should look like. This week, we discover that the Lord's Prayer is not just a devotional exercise — it is a declaration of whose side we are on and what we are willing to do about it.

As with many traditions, we look back through the lens of nostalgia and celebrations of the past to form our expectations of the future.  This year, however, let's encounter Palm Sunday together with fresh eyes —as if we're hearing the hosannas for the very first time. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war-horse, while crowds praise him as King. The expectations of the people and of the disciples in that moment differ greatly from the story that is about to unfold.  Two thousand years later, how often do our own expectations of Jesus the Christ in our lives differ from the outcomes? This Palm Sunday, we're challenged to release our grip on what we think we know and allow God to speak in and through us as the Body of Christ.

When God calls us to harvest for the Kingdom, how do we respond to those who arrive late but receive the same grace? As harvesters in God's field, we participate in the beautiful cycle of faith—adults teach children who grow up to teach the next generation, each bearing fruit in their season. But when we place ourselves alongside other workers, do we fall into the sin of comparison, measuring our faithfulness against theirs and believing we deserve more? This week, we're challenged to remember that we are all equally gifted and beloved children of God, called to celebrate the harvest rather than count the hours.

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