"Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt."

Luke 19:30

I find these polls both entertaining and interesting, a wonderful snapshot of the culture in which we live. But here's a poll I'd like to see. We asked our readers which Sunday of the year is their favorite. I think it's a pretty safe bet Easter would rank #1. Christmas would probably come in at number two, though that would say something about how often people go to church since technically Christmas only falls on a Sunday once every six or seven years!

If such a poll were ever taken my guess is that Palm Sunday might very well rank number three. It's certainly one of my favorite Sundays of the year. I love the palm branches and the processional and the joyous feeling in the air.

We join our voices this day to the voices of the whole multitude of disciples on the road that day in shouting Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

We shout for all sorts of reasons. We shout because winter's over and spring is here and our blood is rising in our veins like sap in the trees. We shout because we can feel Easter coming in our souls and in our bones.

We know, without even having to turn to the Bible, that new life is right around the corner and that resurrection is indeed possible.

We shout because, well, people are born to shout, just like we're born to play. Sadly these tendencies get washed out of us through life's many rinse cycles, like the color in blues jeans. And, darn it, it just feels good to be a kid again, and to let loose with a sanctified shout!

And we shout, of course, because we have followed Christ on his journey to this point, to the outskirts of Jerusalem. And like the multitude who followed him into town on that first Palm Sunday, we recognize him for who he is. And so we shout in reverence. We shout in celebration. We shout in gratitude.

We shout Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

With all the shouting and the processing, Palm Sunday always feels like one big parade. And it is. But it's no ordinary parade. As always with these ancient stories, there's much more going on here than meets our 21 ^st century eyes.

For this is a tale of not one, but two processions. Jesus was not the only divine being who rode into Jerusalem that day, not the only emissary who claimed to be the Son of God.

As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan document in their excellent new book, The Last Week , two processions entered Jerusalem on this spring day, some 2000 years ago. As they put it, "one was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession" (pg. 2).

Someone else was riding into town at this same time, claiming these same titles. That someone was Pontius Pilate. According to Borg and Crossan, Roman governors routinely rode into Jerusalem from their ocean-side palaces on the coast to attend the major Jewish religious festivals.

And especially this one. For Passover, remember, is fundamentally a celebration of how God delivered and liberated the Jewish people from an earlier empire, presided over by Pharaoh, an earlier version of Pontius Pilate.

So of course Pilate would be present, just to keep an eye on things. Pilate and a garrison of his favorite troops, that is.

You can imagine what his procession was like, given the grandeur of Roman imperial power: soldiers on foot, marching under Rome's own banners, the elite soldiers on horseback and in chariots, brandishing spears and shields. Trumpets blaring, drums thundering out the cadence for the marching troops.

It would surely have been an awesome display of military might. But again, we modern readers might miss something here. This is not just an awesome display of imperial power; it is an intentional display of imperial theology.

For in those days the Emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome. He, always he of course, was also considered to be the literal Son of God. '

Inscriptions from that time refer to the Emperor as "Lord" and "Savior," the one who had brought "peace on earth." It seems it didn't matter to the Emperor, or to his loyal subjects, that such peace was bought at the price of the Jewish people's freedom. It only mattered that he could ride into the capital in a chariot.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a man who is also claiming to be God's son is riding into town on a donkey, a sign of solidarity with the poor and the peasant class.

On one level this seems like a charming, quaint, perhaps even quixotic gesture. A man claiming to be God's son is riding into the seat of imperial power on a donkey or a colt. But in point of fact, this procession is anything but charming and quaint.

It turns out to be a premeditated and absolutely audacious way to say No to imperial power and to the domination system that prevailed in those days. A way to say that power over others is not the way of God. Indeed, that the way of God is not about power at all, but about something else, namely about love and service and grace and humility.

I remember well an experience I once during my time in Africa that brought the events of this first Palm Sunday vividly to life for me. At the time I was living in Kenya, where I was a volunteer with Food for the Hungry International.

Ethiopia was just beginning to recover from those terrible famines that plagued the countryside in the mid-80s, and I had been sent there to write about what FHI was doing to facilitate the recovery effort.

At the time Ethiopia was occupied, perhaps like ancient Jerusalem was, by a sort of Imperial power. A man named Mengistu Haile Mariam had turned Ethiopia into a one-party Marxist state, and he presided over the state with approximately the same code of ethics as Pilate presided over Palestine.

As fate would have it, I happened to be in Addis Ababa, the capital city, on May 1 ^st . You may remember from the hey day of the Soviet Union that May 1 ^st is international worker day. And so the streets of the capital were filled that day with tanks and missiles and soldiers. As was the case with that first Imperial procession in ancient Jerusalem, this procession was intended to flex the muscles of the State, to convey the point that the Emperor has got power and you, the people, do not.

Meanwhile, it also happened that Orthodox Easter that year fell precisely on that same day, May 1 ^st . So the streets of the capital were also filled with Orthodox priests armed with nothing more than crosses around their necks.

And with ordinary orthodox pilgrims all dressed in white, processing through the streets of the capital as a way of professing their faith in God and not the state. They might as well have been riding donkeys through the streets for all the power they seemed to have next to those missiles.

So what we had in Addis Ababa that day is the same thing we have here, in Jerusalem in our story today. We have a tale of two processions. One peopled by a multitude of disciples who believe in the power of love.

And another procession peopled by soldiers who believe in the power of power.

It's an eternal struggle, really, between these competing processions. And it's worth pausing right there and making just one point because this point is directly relevant to the goings on in Jerusalem, and it may be directly relevant to what's going on in our world today.

In these politically correct times, many of us have become acutely sensitive to the patriarchal language that dominates scripture. It's language in which only male pronouns and male imagery are used for God, and for Jesus. Father, son, kingdom, him, he, his. And it's language that has worked its way into our creeds and into our hymns.

It's good for us to be aware of this pattern. And it's also good for us to expand the language we use for God, and to honor the feminine aspects of the Divine One, our Creator.

But I also think it's important for us not to throw the theological baby out with the bathwater. And to remember that in the era in which these stories took place, the language we now find limiting was then subversive and revelatory.

Jesus is named the Son of God not necessarily to privilege men. He's named Son of God because Pharaoh was named Son of God in ancient Egypt, and because Caesar was named Son of God in ancient Rome, and because somebody had to take that title back, someone who was actually sent by God to show us a different way to live and relate to one another.

And Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. He could have talked about the people of God, or the family of God, or the community of God, but he says Kingdom of God because that's what ancient Rome was, a Kingdom.

And somebody had to take that concept back. If people were going to live in a Kingdom, and that was all they knew, well then they had to understand Kingdom in a different way, a way in which the last and the least were as important as the first and the greatest.

So, it's important for us to remember that, for the language in this story is about big stuff. Real stuff. Now stuff. Stuff that continues in our time. For this tension is still alive between people who believe in the power of love, people who believe in the power of the donkey, and people who believe in the power of power, the power of missiles and tanks.

So this is a story about big stuff. Real stuff. Out there stuff. But it's also about little stuff. Personal stuff. Inside stuff. Cause here's something else to remember here: the crowd turns.

That's what the rest of this week is about, isnt' it? And it's what what our last hymn is about. It's about how the crowd turns. How this joyous processional becomes an angry mob.

Maybe the reason for that is that there are two processionals always waiting to break out inside of us.

The line separating those who would cry "Hosanna!" and those who would cry "Crucify him!" is thin. And maybe that line does not just run through the streets of Jerusalem and Addis Ababa, dividing them into camps of soldiers and camps of disciples. Maybe that line runs through us, too, threating to divide us unless we chose which side we are on, the side of love, or the side of power.

So today and this week and every week, may we be people of the donkey and not the chariot. And may the Son of God and not the Emperor rule in our hearts, so that with the multitude of disciples throughout history we can say:

Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!