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think you said and how good and how pleasant it is when brothers and sisters gather together in unity thank you for this invitation our text tonight comes from the gospel according to Matthew the 11th chapter verses 1 through 11 as we come to this text will you join me in prayer Shadows have lengthened evening has come and the busy world is now hushed So God, we are ready to listen. By your gracious Spirit, speak. Amen.

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Listen, church. When they were approaching Jerusalem at Bethpage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and he said to them, Go into the village ahead of you and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it.

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If anyone says to you, 'Why are you doing this?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.' They went away and found a colt tied near a door outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, What are you doing untying the colt? They told them what Jesus had said, and they allowed them to take it.

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Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. And those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

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Hosanna. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor, David. Hosanna in the highest heaven. Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple.

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And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve. Friends, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. One of the things that saves my ministry is a group of colleagues who gather annually to swim in the text and buoy each other up with friendship.

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During our week together, we begin each morning with worship, and at least one morning in every year we have met, we've included in the liturgy questions we all answered at our ordinations. Will you, in your own life, seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, love your neighbors, and work for the reconciliation of the world. Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?

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Energy, intelligence, imagination, and love. I love those words so much that I commissioned an artist, Michael Podesta, to make them into a print. Scholar Tom Long, familiar here, calls them bracing words, saying the wind ruffles through your hair when you hear them. Never once in an ordination service do we hear the words HVAC, folding chairs, offering envelopes, wi-fi routers.

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They don't ruffle your hair or look nice hanging on an office wall. But the truth is that ministry is made of the minute, mundane details. Ministry is walking from one Sunday school class to the next to find the one dry erase marker that works. It's praying to the Amazon.com gods that the angel halos you ordered will arrive before Christmas Eve.

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It's setting up tables for the second committee meeting of the night. It's visiting in nursing homes with saints who will never remember that you were there. Or as the disciples in tonight's story found out, ministry is wrangling a last minute donkey. It's fascinating to me that over half of this text is about that one small detail.

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This is the Palm Sunday text the moment of Hosanna the joyful aha that the king is coming to town and yet Mark seems preoccupied with the measly details about acquiring an animal where to go to find it what kind of cult to see what to do, what to say. For hearers down the road, knowing what we do know about where this story goes, these details might give us goosebumps as Jesus fulfills the prophecy of Zechariah, Rejoice, Zion, your king comes riding on a colt.

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And the king we hail doesn't come on a war horse, thanks be. but on a lowly creature, proclaiming a humble and reliable peace. But I doubt these two disciples had goosebumps. I bet they felt more like goose droppings, when amid the big parade, Jesus points to them and says, You too, donkey detail.

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Mark doesn't tell us the disciples' names, but I wonder if it was James and John who only hours before had proposed to Jesus, Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left in your glory. Tom Wong says it hardly matters which two they were. All of the disciples had been jockeying for advantage, arguing about who was the bestest. So it's deliciously ironic

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But on this very glorious day of Jesus' ministry, they find themselves engaged in a most unromantic form of ministry, mucking around a stable, looking suspiciously like horse thieves, and trying to wrestle a bulky animal toward the olive groves. You can almost hear them saying, We left our fishing nets for this? All of it fails their expectations. they had heard what cousin John the forerunner had said, what we hear in the first three breaths of Mark's gospel, the voice crying out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord.

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How could those disciples have known that the work of preparation, of making smooth the way of the Lord, of clearing the path that God's good news could find its footing in a Good Friday world, was most often achieved by humble and humdrum tasks. Scholar Joel Marcus notes, Mark understands the preparation of the Lord's way in a rather prosaic manner as the arrangements people make for the ministry of Jesus. Arrangements, people.

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Sounds about right. This wouldn't be the first time the disciples would don hospitality crew name tags. They arranged boats for teaching, herded preschoolers away from and then toward Jesus' knee. They cleared paths through crowds of curious folk and sick ones.

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Eventually, they found an upper room to share the Passover. It's odd how the term making arrangements has come to be a euphemism for the end of life. Type in making arrangements in your Google browser, and you'll get Thomas Lynch's page, funeral homes, and florists.

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For many years, I served as associate pastor for pastoral care in a congregation in Kansas. I helped families make arrangements at the time of death more weeks than not. We had a beautiful columbarium at that church, It had a fountain in the center of its octagonal room, mimicking the eight-sided font upstairs in the sanctuary.

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The fountain was surrounded by a sculpture of an empty cross and a number of doves. The Latin word columba means dove. It's where columbariums get their name, little houses for doves. The niches in that columbarium were small, just large enough to hold a small box of cremains.

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So when a widow, Julie Childress, handed me a two-foot pottery urn with her beloved Peter's name lovingly glazed on its surface, a mere 10 minutes before the committal service, I had an internal moment of panic. I smiled at Julie, traced Peter's name with my index finger, tenderly received this large urn in my open arms, and then gently told her that I would need to find a smaller container to use to inter her husband's ashes. Julie was Not fully present in this world, but she fully trusted the church that had been her home for over 30 years.

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So she just nodded at me willingly, okay. The family was setting up pictures for the reception that would be after the service, volunteers helping to find tabletop easels. So I had a few minutes to troubleshoot. Surely I could find a suitable container.

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I walked down the hall and threw open the folding doors of my office closet, tossed out three-ring binders filled with seminary notes that were no help to me in that moment, no offense. And I found a smallish glass container that looked promising, but pulling it out, I was deflated to see that it was a jack-o'-lantern candy dish used at Halloween. Nice All Saints connection, but no good. I kept raiding the closet and finally settled on a small stationary box, nondescript, most importantly, well-sized.

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So I grabbed the box and my robe. I opened the beautifully glazed urn and became paralyzed with the new knowledge that Julie had emptied the cremains out of their plastic bag. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust were all loose. Bits were clinging to the side of the ceramic urn.

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How was I to transfer this beloved creation of God into a cardboard box that had a seam at the bottom? So I rushed to the kitchen and found 90-year-old Inez Simon, one of those church states who shows up to help at every church reception. Also the kind of church lady who knows where everything in the church is located. Inez, I said, I need help.

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Do you know where any gallon-sized Ziploc bags are? She looked at what was in my hands, eyes wide, and got to searching. After a sprightly 90-year-old jaunt through the industrial-sized kitchen, she came back with one of those cellophane shopping bags with a giant yellow smiley face on it. Have a nice day, it read.

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I know! She shrugged her frail shoulders and opened it wide. Peter's cremains in, I placed him in the box. I left Inez to wash the urn, and as calmly as possible, I walked downstairs to the columbarium. And my eyes landed on a circle of family, some made of blood, others made of faith.

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And my ears honed in on the sound of water that was always in that fountain, splashing the sound of grace. And my heart settled on that promise that in life and in death, we belong to the God of the empty cross, the God of unyielding life. My previous 10 hectic minutes of panic weren't about me. They were about getting ready for God to do that.

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The work of resurrection the work we witness to every time we gather. We recited the words of the 23rd Psalm, and Julie, who wasn't always sure of her youngest grandchild's name, remembered each and every phrase. And I placed that cardboard box in that small niche, and I said, In sure and certain hope,

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of resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ. We commend to almighty God, our brother Peter. Energy, intelligence, imagination, and love, closets and cardboard and church ladies and cellophane. Brothers and sisters, you and I are called to make arrangements

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for the ministry that Christ is doing. In the end, it's not about us, it's about Him. We are just on donkey detail, finding ways for the Prince of Peace to make his way through this weary world. When we utter brave words in committee meetings, price out vans for the mission trip, set up tables for hungry folks to have a hot meal,

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replace magnets on those member name tags, schedule coffee with neighbors. We're making arrangements for the ministry of Jesus Christ. As my friend Rebecca Messman said, It's not about us, but about Christ for whom we can but line up transportation so that his message of grace can get to the place where it most needs to go. I told you that what helped save my ministry is that group of colleagues.

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My confession is they also intimidate me. I love them, but their energy seems endless and their intelligence exceeds my own. But our text from Mark has this little phrase tucked in there that helps me keep my eye on the ball. The two disciples, they find the colt, they untie it, and they say to anyone who asks them,

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The Lord needs it. He needs it. The Lord doesn't always need the best things, the huge things, the smooth and flashy things. The Lord needs tiny chores of great love done over and over

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again the Lord the Lord needs us to do those the way is ahead and it needs preparing so let us with every bit of our energy intelligence imagination and love be about our detail in the name of Jesus Christ Hosanna blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord Amen.