You are invited to the in-person Palm Sunday Service on March 24 at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.
You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441 or Meeting ID: 965 881 6441
You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.
Palm/Passion Sunday
Sunday, March 24, 2024, 10 am
Children’s Time: “Who Is the Greatest in God’s Kingdom?” by Pastor John
Choir Anthem: Jerusalem (1884)
Words by Nella, Music by Henry Parker
Message: Kenotic Path of Jesus by Rev. John Song
Part 1) “Poured Out for You”
(Jesus) said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.”
~ Mark 14:24
For the vast majority of the world’s spiritual seekers, the way to God is “up.” Deeply embedded in human religious and spiritual traditions – and most likely in the human collective unconscious itself – is a kind of compass that tells us that the spiritual journey is an ascent, not a descent.
There’s another route to God that Jesus took: a more reckless path and extravagant path, which is attained through throwing it all away – or giving it all away. The unitive point is reached through the free squandering of it; not through acquisition or attainment but through self-emptying; not through “up” but through “down.” In whatever life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying – or to put it another way, of the same motion of descent: going lower, taking the lower place, not the higher. This is the way of kenosis, the revolutionary path that Jesus introduced into the consciousness of the West.
“God is the prodigal who squanders himself.”
~ Karl Rahner, the 20th century German Jesuit theologian
