​Today we’ve begun reliving the drama of the last week of Jesus’ life.  As we move through this week, we will gather at key moments in the narrative: we will gather to remember and give thanks for Jesus’ last supper with his disciples when he gave us the sacrament of Holy Communion, we will meet again on Friday to remember Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, death, and burial in the tomb.  We will meet finally, where it all leads, at the jubilant resurrection at the Easter dawn, when we see the power of God triumph over sin and death.
 
Today we are gathered around the moment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  And what a parade it was.  Jesus was hailed as a hero as he entered the streets. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” they shouted.  And “Hosanna!” or “save us.”
 
At least some of the people thought Jesus had come to reestablish Israel. 
“Free Israel, make Israel great again!” 
They welcomed their Messiah, their Christ, with shouts of acclamation. 
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the Highest!”
 
The people expected a savior, a triumphant king.  And Jesus clearly had the support of this crowd.  Jesus could have raised an army, aided by the host of heaven, and established God’s perfect kingdom through the annihilation of Rome and any other forces that would defy God and God’s people.
 
But this king came laying down his life.  God in the flesh did not go to war against our hate, but met it only with forgiveness and love, he absorbed it himself. 
And it killed him.
 
Against our violence, the king of Israel—the king of the universe—did not take up arms.  God looks on us, all of us, with steadfast love and mercy, and shows us a way that leads to life: even from death. 
So, the triumphant king came, not to wage war against our evil, but to expose it—absorb it, and even to forgive it. 
He came not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17).
 
Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, as the crowd surely supposed, was indeed a foreshadowing of the victory Jesus would obtain for their sake.  The result, however, is not one great nation or another; not even a perfect people or perfect society.  Christ’s victory is God’s prevailing relationship with us, even when we will have none of it. 
 
Nothing can separate us from the mercy and love of God, not even God’s death on a cross.  
No tomb will contain it. 
 
Are there yet things from which we need the salvation of God? 
Illness and famine.  Our own hate and intolerance toward one another.  Our own ways of selfishness and greed.  Our propensity to forget the blessings we have from God and to extend blessing and love to all people around us.
Yes.  There are yet things for which we still cry “Hosanna, save us!”
 
And in that, the triumphal Jesus, who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, into a parade with the streets lined with coats, palms, and shouts of acclamation, stays with us. 
 
He shows us his way—a way in which death is what leads to life.  Humility leads to exaltation.  The hungry are fed, while the rich are sent away.
The way of the cross.
 
We look to Jesus, who shows us the way of love for God and one another.  We look to Jesus who offers forgiveness and mercy when we forget his way for us.  And we ask for his salvation in a world still governed by violence and greed, hunger and illness, reminding ourselves that “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the Highest!”

“The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant…says the Lord.  Not like the one they broke, this one will be within them—written on their hearts!”
 
The covenant we hear in our Old Testament lesson today is the last in our Lenten series this year and embodies the unfolding intimacy of God’s relationship with God’s people. 
 
The covenant Jeremiah is proclaiming looks forward to a day when the people of God do the good works of God because, they are driven by faith, not obligated under the law.
 
It is a day when God’s kingdom, and Christ’s presence is all over because we are living it—"God’s will be done on Earth”.  The covenant looks to the day when we all know God because we are Christ’s body in the world—when we know God because we live in the presence of Christ.
 
Jesus uses the language of new covenant when he gives to his disciples his body and blood in the bread and wine of Holy Communion.  The new covenant is for us, in our baptism and our life in Christ.  In our baptismal covenant, and fed from the Lord’s table, God is with us, we are Christ’s body, and Jesus feeds us with himself.  The words we hear when he shares the cup, “this cup is the new covenant, my blood shed for you for the forgiveness of sin.”
 
The wonderful news and promise we hear in both these iterations of new covenant is that God will “remember our sin no more.”  Now, this doesn’t mean that we are off the hook and that we go on sinning as much as we can because God won’t remember it or hold it against us.
Rather, it means that, through all our fault, God still chooses us as God’s partners.  We are still God’s people, though we will continue to sin. 
 
In the Lutheran tradition we call it: simul iustus et peccator; “we are, at the same time, saint and sinner.”  We have an enormous capacity for good, for blessing the world and working with and for God. 
And we have an enormous capacity for evil, to create suffering for ourselves and for others. 
 
Anyone can see that people have both the potential for good and the propensity for evil, so as Christ’s people we claim it—we own it.  We are saint and sinner.  And the good news is that God, still, chooses us.  God chooses to remain our God, to call us partners in mission, and to never leave our side.
 
God stays in relationship with us.
 
The new covenant of which Jeremiah speaks says that “all shall know God, starting from the least of them to the greatest.”  Christ is alive and active, equipping us for being God’s agents in everything we do—all of us.  God’s will for us in this new covenant is that we will be the church, so that the world will know God.  Church isn’t just something to come to, to learn about God, but we ARE the church—Christ’s body, so that the world will know God.

Fellow sinners and saints, baptized in to Christ, you are God’s partners in blessing the world.  There is nothing that will stop that from being true, and nothing that will prevent Christ from being with you wherever you go.
 
Go, be the blessing you are in the world, doing so in Christ’s name.

​We’ve followed some big moments in the history of God’s interaction with humanity so far in this Lenten season, and this week we hear this curious tale of poisonous serpents. 
 
It begins, as happens a lot in the book of Numbers, with the people grumbling.  Now they have recently come out of Egypt where they were slaves and life was very difficult.  They are now in the wilderness, and God has been providing: manna—a kind of bread like substance—each morning.  When they complained about that, God caved and gave them quail to eat as well.  God has also been providing water for them, from rocks.
 
Then, the people say: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water. And we detest this miserable food.”
They are ungrateful for the provisions God has given.  It is a repeated theme in the book of Numbers.  The people have these rose-colored glasses when they remember their lives in Egypt—being worked to the bone by Pharaoh, given less and less food with more, and more work.
 
Under Pharaoh they were perishing.  God delivered them from there, and now, it seems they’ve forgotten. So almost like a reminder that God delivers these perishing people, poisonous serpents begin to bite the people, and they are again perishing. 
 
The text says that the LORD sent the serpents.  In the time when these stories were written, it was essential that everything happened because God willed it to be and made it happen.  For God to be God and be in control, God must be controlling every little thing.  But Jesus’ conversation in our Gospel lesson reorients this thought.  He compares himself to the serpent—specifically the one on the pole. 
 
See, the people asked Moses to tell God to take away the snakes. They knew they’d not kept God the priority in their lives, and they were sorry.  So God told Moses that the people’s cries were heard, that Moses should make a serpent and put it up on a stick for the people to look at, and God would heal those who were bitten when they looked.
 
Jesus says that he, as God’s self-revelation to people, came not to condemn the world (like the serpents that bit the people) but that the world through him might be saved.
 
See, as faithful Christians, we need not think about God as directing the bad along with the good.  And neither must we think of God as distant and having no interest or power in the day-to-day details of our lives. 
 
Instead, we know that all manner of things happen every day—bad and good, extraordinary and mundane.  And in all of it, God is with us.  Jesus walks with us through the dangers of this life and, in the midst of it, walks with us and opens the gates to eternal life.
 
Jesus points out that Snakes happen, and God may not take away the fiery serpents, just as God does not again flood the earth and drown away all flesh for its corruption.  But God does open the way to healing and eternal life even in their presence. 
 
When the Israelites looked upon the bronze serpent, raised up, God would heal them.  So too when we keep our eyes on God—revealed in Jesus Christ—we find a way out of the poison we encounter in life.
 
Beneath the cross of Jesus, looking up to him, we see that all the promises of God are true.  God looks on us with steadfast love, faithfulness and mercy, and chooses us as partners in blessing the world. 
 
Even though our actions will continually, like venom from a snake, lead to our own demise—even though we will continue to turn away from God and our neighbors—we are reborn new, again and again, in the waters of baptism—looking to the crucified and risen Lord, as if gazing upon the bronze serpent.
 
We have forgiveness, life, and a partnership, from the same one who was raised up on a cross and crucified—the same one who rose again, to show his love for the world—the same one that came to dwell with us, walk with us, so that the world might be saved through him.
 
God saves perishing people, and makes them alive together with Christ.

The cross is where we see, again and so very clearly, the love God has for us.  In Jesus Christ, God-made-flesh, we see that the promises of God, that the covenants God has made, are true. 
 
When God and people disagree about things, God does not run.  God does not turn God’s back on when the going gets tough.  Jesus would be tried and killed for the things he preached and the love he showed to certain kinds of people—but he stuck with it. 
 
Neither does God smite us for disobedience.  Jesus didn’t send armies of angels to rescue him from death on a cross—no more flood waters to destroy the earth even when God’s son was crucified.  God stays in relationship that is grounded in who God is for us—God is steadfast love and faithfulness, God is God who rescues from slavery, God is God who would die on a cross and rise again so that God could continue to love, claim, bless, and save us: And God is God who would adopt us, through baptism into Christ, that we might join God in loving, saving, and blessing the world.
 
God is God of all the world, but in some foolish scheme God has chosen weakness as God’s strength.  God has chosen death on a cross as love’s victory.  God has chosen us to be a people through which God blesses the world: the followers of Christ to be Jesus’ body in the world today.
 
A quote attributed to Theresa of Avila is this: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
 
Though I’m not completely convinced that God works only through the church, I know for certain that God works particularly, and especially, through the church.  And that means that God is with you, Christ is in your good works, wherever you go, 24/7/365. 
 
The 10 Commandments are God’s covenant with a people chosen, ordained, and called to be God’s people—because God will be and is God to them.  In baptism, we are adopted into a new covenant.  Brothers and sisters, as Peter put it, “you are chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
 
It is our proclamation of the foolishness of the cross, it is the foolishness of weakening one’s self for the sake of the neighbor, and standing up for the least and the weak in the world, that shows the world the love of God in Christ Jesus.  God’s saving, loving, and blessing the world happens through God’s people, the body of Christ.  Your ten fingers, your ten toes, your 24/7/365 is where God has chosen for the love of Christ to dwell.  “Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.”
God said: “I am the LORD your God” and the cross of Christ shows us the extent of God’s love for us. 
 
As in the words of Psalm 19: May the words of our mouths, and the meditation of our hearts, be God’s love in Christ for the world today.