"Eight Days of God's Passion" - Sermon for Palm Sunday 3-29-26

What are you passionate about?

For some of you it could be a spouse or a lover, children or grandchildren, close family or dear friends. Maybe it is a certain artist or author or musician. Or a sports team. Or a hobby. If you are lucky like I am, you are passionate about your profession, your occupation, your work. And God: let’s not forget to be passionate about God.

Passion cuts two ways. Passion means love. Passion also means suffering. For which loves on your list have you suffered? Are you suffering?  Would you suffer?

God is passionate for creation, for humanity, and for you and me. God shows this passion chiefly in Jesus through the Incarnation: God’s Son taking our flesh – the Creator becoming creation – to proclaim that God’s Kingdom, God’s Dream, is at hand. To challenge us to forgive and to reconcile and to heal. To allow us to hope, especially when anger and anxiety and despair fill our days.

God lists and lives passion for you and me perfectly. In Jesus, God shows love for us that is limitless and unconditional. And in Jesus, God shows suffering that is real and redemptive.

God’s love and suffering in Jesus is what gives us the Church and the Sacraments. Holy Baptism, for instance, is our participation in God’s limitless and real passion for us in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Holy Communion is our share of Jesus’s Body and Blood, his sacrifice for us on the altar of the cross that is unconditional and redemptive.

Today is the Sunday of the Passion. It begins eight days of Jesus’s Passion. The Holy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the Passion, the Maundy Thursday of the Passion, the Good Friday of the Passion, the Holy Saturday of the Passion, and the Easter Day of the Passion. Each day we gather we will remember and take part in God’s incomparable Passion: Jesus’s love and suffering for you and for me, for humanity and creation. For all.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Palm Sunday A – March 29, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Eight Days of God’s Passion”