As a follower of God in the way of Jesus, today is Palm Sunday. And it’s Passion Sunday. Which, at my church, meant it was Palm/Passion Sunday. We’re just all hip mashup like that. Today marks the beginning of what we call Holy Week. That is, the week leading up to Easter. Today we remembered and celebrated Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The rest of this week we follow Jesus around, remembering and reenacting major events like his last supper, his trial, conviction, crucifixion and death.

It’s a lot to cover in one worship service. At least if you want to keep the gathering to about 60 minutes. Which we do. So the temptation is to skip the Passion part, rationalizing that we’ll get to that on Thursday and Friday this week. But lots of our people won’t come to those worship gatherings. So for them, they’ll just go right from triumphal entry to triumphal Resurrection. As my friend, Sean Ferrell tweeted today: “Christianity is meaningless sans cross.” Including the Passion was necessary today.

Now I’m about to violate everything I’ve just said. I want to skip ahead and talk about Easter. And engage in some shameless self-promotion while I’m at it.

I am the guest blogger of the week over at The Hardest Question, a blog that is “a weekly foray into the hardest questions of the week’s lectionary Bible texts.” I have the honor of offering some thoughts about two of the lectionary texts for Easter Sunday. They’ll go up sometime today and be up all week. I hope you’ll click your way over there, read and react with a comment. The Hardest Question is also on twitter and Facebook.

Hope to see you there!