sermons
For a Time Such As This
A Joyful Resistance
Steve Watson
Mar 29, 2026
We began this season talking about all the thieves out there – all the people and forces out to steal, kill, and destroy – to steal our joy, rob us of our peace, harm our neighbors, destroy our democracy.
And we’ll end this season, or close to it, with joy, a joyful resistance.
Two reasons.
One, I asked God at the start of this season what would a resilient Reservoir Church look like? A community that no matter the troubles of our lives, and the deep troubles of this world, is unshakable in faith, hope, and love?
And the picture that came to me was of us singing together, loudly, joyfully. I think our capacity for joy, and for full-throated song is a sign of life, of strength, of joyful resistance. It’s so good to sing.
And two, we end here because the holiday invites us to.
It’s Palm Sunday, which is an ancient festival of Jesus’ joyful resistance that every year in the church, the Spirit of God invites us back into.
We’ve got palms. In the ancient near east, they were a symbol of life, of victory, of joy and peace.
And we’ve got this old word that started in Hebrew: Hosanna, which means Save us. Deliver us. Heal us.
Because that cluster of words are all connected, all intertwined. Save us, rescue us. We need help in times of trouble. “Deliver us” speaks to the external – bring us into freedom and safety and well-being, by removing that which threatens us, or if it can’t be removed, at least diminishing its power over us. And “heal us” speaks to the internal – make us well, make us whole, restore our peace and our joy, because life is a killer sometimes. And we need help getting well again.
Save us, deliver us, heal us – that’s what hosanna means.
I’m going to share three hosanna stories, three stories of joyful resistance, and each time, I’ll invite us to wave the palms as high and as vigorously as we can and shout: Hosanna. And I would love it, if you’ll go all in with me. I think you’ll love it too.
And we can practice at the start here, because I’m going to read the Palm Sunday story now from the good news of Matthew, and three times we get that word: Hosanna. And I’d love it if you were ready to shout it with me and shake those palms.
Can we practice once?
Hosanna.
Alright, let’s go.
Matthew 11:1-17 (Common English Bible)
21 When they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus gave two disciples a task.
2 He said to them, “Go into the village over there. As soon as you enter, you will find a donkey tied up and a colt with it. Untie them and bring them to me.
3 If anyone says anything to you, say that their master needs them.” He sent them off right away.
4 Now this happened to fulfill what the prophet said,
5 Say to Daughter Zion, “Look, your king is coming to you, humble and riding on a donkey, and on a colt the donkey’s offspring.”
6 The disciples went and did just as Jesus had ordered them.
7 They brought the donkey and the colt and laid their clothes on them. Then he sat on them.
8 Now a large crowd spread their clothes on the road. Others cut palm branches off the trees and spread them on the road.
9 The crowds in front of him and behind him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
10 And when Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up. “Who is this?” they asked.
11 The crowds answered, “It’s the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”
12 Then Jesus went into the temple and threw out all those who were selling and buying there. He pushed over the tables used for currency exchange and the chairs of those who sold doves.
13 He said to them, “It’s written, My house will be called a house of prayer. But you’ve made it a hideout for crooks.”
14 People who were blind and lame came to Jesus in the temple, and he healed them.
15 But when the chief priests and legal experts saw the amazing things he was doing and the children shouting in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were angry.
16 They said to Jesus, “Do you hear what these children are saying?”
“Yes,” he answered. “Haven’t you ever read, From the mouths of babies and infants you’ve arranged praise for yourself?”
17 Then he left them and went out of the city to Bethany and spent the night there.
So you know what happened this year that made me think of Palm Sunday, long before today?
It was the Superbowl.
And not the game itself, which was a tough one for the local team, but the half time show, and Bad Bunny’s Palm Sunday, joyful resistance moment.
Now honestly the Palm Sunday connection for me first was all the grass. The field full of sugarcane and grasses, bringing the ecology of Puerto Rico to the stadium was really cool, and I had no idea at the time that there were like 380 people who got paid $20 an hour to wear the grass suits and turn that field into an island landscape. That was really cool, and it kind of looked like Palm Sunday – with all that green waving around.
But the real connection was deeper, it was the joyful resistance.
Now Bad Bunny has become wildly popular and wealthy and successful singing really interesting, catchy booty-swinging dance songs. And if he had wanted to use his Superbowl moment to just fill a stage with his band and an army of dancers and grass and bang through his greatest hits, that would have been fine. That’s his right as an entertainer, that’s what normally happens in that space.
But instead of just that, he brought a whole beautiful, colonized, American island’s history and people and culture and language to life to be recognized and celebrated as unmistakably its own glorious thing, and also at the same time indisputably American.
And in an era when Puerto Rico has been repeatedly neglected, disrespected, and in many ways spat upon by the country that claims it as its own, this was a powerful act of joyful resistance.
Now don’t get me wrong, Bad Bunny – talented as he is – is not Jesus Christ of course. His joyful resistance is not explicitly religious. It is more secular than spiritual, if we can even really make those distinctions.
But there was at least something of the good news of Jesus being channeled through his show that night. Because core to that good news is this repeated refrain in the scriptures that the proud will be humbled and the humbled will be exalted, that when God makes the way for the good news of Jesus to break through, mountains will be made low, and valleys will be exalted.
And in a hemisphere where one country, this country, has flexed its powers for centuries to dominate this American hemisphere and have its way again and again, we were invited to proclaim God’s blessing on all of the Americas – no one higher, no one lower. We were given a witness to Beloved Community – together we are America. And we were asked to believe the good news of Christ that love is more powerful than hate.
And all of that sounds like Jesus to me.
Hosanna. Hosanna. Hosanna.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
And that one who comes in the name of the Lord is firstly Jesus, but that night for a moment, Jesus spoke to us through Bad Bunny as well.
Now Jesus’ own Palm Sunday moment happened a long time before football and televised half-time shows, and booty-swinging Reggaeton were invented.
But Jesus was also a colonized person, in an old and proud culture that had been conquered and terrorized by a mighty empire. That day, on the other side of town, Roman armies were streaming into Jerusalem on war horses, armed with swords, for crowd control and intimidation, to remind the Jews they were in charge.
And Jesus entered on the other side of the city, sure that his message of love and justice would not play well, and would get him crucified.
You would have understood if Jesus wanted to come up to Jerusalem quietly, use his final days to seek out his favorite falafel and humus vendors, or something. But Jesus does the opposite of that. He comes in big with a dramatic, attention-getting march on the other side of town.
He finds his path, his call in the history and scriptures of his faith, as he so often did, that proclaimed God’s true leader would have no interest in weapons of war, but would be armed with love and the respect and praises of God’s people. And God’s true leader wouldn’t ride a proud, intimidating war horse, but would ride humbly, on a steady, earthy, slow-moving donkey.
So that’s what Jesus did.
The crowds saw something special. They longed for deliverance and healing and salvation. So much was not well in Jerusalem, which bristled with corruption and oppression and violence.
And so as Jesus rode in, they waved and threw down their palms for the kind of would-be king that represented the best of their culture and their faith, and they shouted this two-part prayer – Hosanna. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna.
I heard another pastor break down this two-sided prayer in a way that was helpful.
It’s saying – save us, deliver us, heal us. And then it’s saying here is the way those things will happen.
To go back to the Superbowl for a second, imagine in an alternative universe, the Patriots had had a chance and were down by just one score near the end of the game. And their quarterback Drake Maye dropped back to hurl his last pass, in hopes of a big score. And some people in the stadium are yelling, come on, throw a touchdown. Don’t mess it up. That’s the Hosanna part. And at the same time, other people in the stadium are like, you have got this, Drake Maye. We believe in you. This is it. That’s the Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
And so it was with Jesus. As Jesus rode on that donkey, and palms were laid down, and Jesus spoke with joy and power as he flipped those moneylending tables in the temple, and prayed for the sick, and celebrated the voices of children, some people shouted Hosanna and hoped beyond hope that this could be a day when God’s help had come. And others whispered with a quiet confidence: this is the day. I think this is what love looks like. If God were to come back to our city, I think this is what it would look like.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Friends, there’s a lot in the Way of Jesus here that’s worth remembering.
Safe people who represent something of God to us are never loved and respected by everyone. Sometimes they are crucified. But often, they earn the love and trust of children.
Also, the most important instruments of God’s help and healing are not likely to be our politicians or are latest technologies, no matter how much they say they are. To put a point on it, neither AI nor the next Democratic nominee for president is coming to save the day, and if they say they are, they are lying.
Jesus doesn’t save us through some new great power that will set all things right, or some flashy tech that will marshal in a golden age of ease and efficiency. Nah, he saves through awakening love and courage in the hearts of people, and through helping us pay attention not only to ourselves, but to the rocks and the children and the better possibilities for healing and deliverance and justice for us all.
Also, it’s worth remembering that our saving – the answers to our hosanna prayers, won’t mean that everything has a happy ending. On Palm Sunday, Jesus is on his way to crucifixion after all. But it does mean that by the grace of God, joy and peace and love that go past all our understanding can yet break through, anytime, everywhere.
I saw that happen once in this very room while a dear woman was on the way to her untimely death. And that’s the last joyful resistance moment I want to celebrate.
It happened in a prayer meeting in this room, in 2014. It was called by one of our members, Julie O’Connor. She had been diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer seven or eight years earlier and told she had maybe two years left to live. And after a remarkable run of beating those odds, she had no more treatments left to try, and lots of cancer in her body still, and she was dying.
So this prayer meeting wasn’t so much to pray for a final miracle but to gather her friends and faith community and to say thank you and to bear witness to all God had done for her.
I think for some folks in the room, it was difficult. Because to pray Hosanna, save us, deliver us, heal us God was to pray for another miracle, that Julie would not die at all but that this cancer would be eradicated entirely.
After all, Julie was only 55 years old. She still had two school aged kids at home. She was a force of a leader, at home and in her career and in this church. She’d been the project manager for the redevelopment of this church when we bought it, and she was still on the Board of the church until her final year of life. I remember one hospital visit I’d made to see Julie in her final year, and Julie wasn’t content to have me catch up with her and just pray for her. She brought me down the hall to someone else she knew on the floor, someone who didn’t have a pastor, so I could meet that person and pray for them as well. Julie was a force.
And surely, a good, saving God with the power to heal would do more, right?
But Julie didn’t see it that way. When we gathered here for that evening prayer meeting, she stood up and thanked this community and thanked God for how good we had been to her, and how good God had been as well.
As I remember it, she had two main things to say, two ways she’d experienced the goodness of God.
One was all her extra years. Julie had been diagnosed in her late 40’s and told she could hope to reach 50, maybe. But she’d beaten those odds by bunches. She’d gotten five or six more years of her children’s lives, five or six more years to be a mom to them. Five or six more years of marriage, of friendships, or career contributions, of good meals, and of the kindness and generosity and warmth of her church, that she wanted to thank for walking with her and praying for her and loving her this whole time.
Julie attributed these extra years to great work of her medical team and also simply to the goodness of God. She didn’t count herself as cursed but very much blessed.
And the other thing Julie wanted to say was that she was so thankful that God has sustained and deepened her faith through this trial. She said she was raised to believe God always had a plan and was always in control, that all things that happen, happen by the will of God. But she said, if her faith hadn’t changed, she couldn’t have kept it through her illness.
She could not believe that it was God’s good will for her to get cancer in her 40’s, for it to be caught very late, and for her to eat at her body until she died in her mid-50s’, without even seeing her children reach adulthood. A God who willed and planned something like that would not be good.
But she had learned in this church different ways to trust and understand God’s goodness and power. She learned that a loving god is always fighting evil in its many forms, but that this God was always loving, and love doesn’t control, love cooperates. And sometimes people and all the other creatures of this earth don’t cooperate with God. Cancer cells certainly don’t. Sometimes they respond to treatment and go away or stay quiet for many decades, but sometimes they don’t, and that’s not God’s fault.
It was so important to Julie that she could know God loves her, and God loves her family, and God loves us all, even if she had suffered and had to die too young. She was losing years she wished she could have, but she hadn’t lost her faith or her joy and her peace, and for that she was thankful.
Her hosanna prayers had been answered in the love of her community and the extension of her years and the preservation of her faith, so that she could still say, Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Jesus had been God’s blessing to her. And this church and all who loved her had been as well.
Julie’s faith was important to so many of us. She gave us another picture of how, as some old words in our tradition say, even as we go to the grave, we will still sing Hallelujah.
No one and nothing can eradicate the goodness of God. No one and nothing can steal our faith, steal our joy, steal our peace, because nothing can separate us, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna….
For Julie O’Connor, and all the beloveds who have gone before us here and elsewhere, and for our own fragile little lives, friends, I pray that every time you say your hosanna – deliver us, save us, heal us, you will have eyes to see how Jesus is coming to you in many forms, that you be blessed by him who comes in the name of the Lord. And that this blessing will sustain your faith, sustain your peace, sustain your joy.