2023.04.02 | Parade Ready
“Parade Ready”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Palm Sunday 2020
April 2, 2023
Matthew 21: 1-11 (NRSV)
The focus for today’s message is Matthew 21:5. Here, Matthew quotes Zechariah 9:9, in which the prophet said:
“Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
If you are listening or reading closely, you will note that the messiah is described as riding on both a donkey and a colt. Did you catch that point?
Perhaps you, like me, are familiar with the old adage: you can’t ride two horses. Now a horse is not a donkey, and a colt is not a mature donkey, but all three are beasts of burden. So we are left to wonder if Zechariah truly envisioned the messiah riding on both a donkey and a colt.
These subtleties in the Bible are lost on urban people, but country people like me know that you shouldn’t ride a horse or put any significant weight on the back of a draft animal until it’s at least three years old. You could injure the animal and negatively affect the health and growth of it.
Given this fact, I think it’s unlikely that Jesus actually rode two animals in the first Palm Sunday parade. Instead, I suspect that he rode the donkey, and that the colt tagged along at its mother’s side. Here’s why:
1) A colt would have still been nursing and needing to be near its mother for survival.
2) The mother of the colt, which is known as a “jenny,” would have been hard to handle if she had been separated from her colt. Mother Nature builds a bond between a donkey and her colt at birth, and reinforces it with the need for the colt to nurse or the jenny and the colt suffer the consequences of a painful udder and an empty tummy.
3) Since the donkey is in service, and away from its pen, most likely the colt was halter broken and trained to follow a leadline, or the animals were in such familiar circumstances and the colt was so young, it wasn’t inclined to wander off.
4) Another possibility is that the colt was not used to the environment in which we find them today, and that they were actually brought into the City to be socialized and to get used to the chaotic urban environment in which the colt would eventually be used to haul commodities or other products to and from the market.
II
If you grew up in a rural environment you may already know this basic information about training beasts of burdens. If not, I invite you to join me today on a virtual cultural field trip to Emma & Ed Claussen’s farm, RFD (?), Lincoln, Iowa, where they raised a Scottish breed of draft horses known as Clydesdales.
If you’ve been to the Alameda County Fair, you have likely seen some Clydesdale horses associated with an adult beverage that originated in Southern Bohemia in the 13th century. This beverage is now bottled and distributed in the US, in St. Louis, Missouri. I trust you know which one I am referring to.
My great aunt and uncle have gone to God, and so has their only child, Marilyn, and her husband Harry. But before they did, they passed on the special knowledge needed to raise Clydesdales to their grandchildren and their children. All three are still involved with draft animals.
My cousin Becky lives on the family farm, and still cares for and shows the family’s Clydesdales competitively all over the nation—from as far east as New York and Pennsylvania, to as far west as Colorado and Wyoming.
My cousin Dianne lives about 40 miles away from the family farm, and serves as the head groomer and fitter for her family’s show animals, and has a side gig doing the same for others.
Becky and Dianne’s younger brother, Roger has had the most interesting jobs in the draft horse business. His dad and grandfather taught him to not only drive the family’s eight-horse rig, and to shoe their big boys’ and girls’ feet. But he also went on to drive for Budweiser and the Olds Gold See Company’s 40 horse hitch. Before Roger made it big, he and his family participated in a lot of local parades and livestock shows in Iowa.
Whenever the family had a new colt in the herd, they tied it to the back of the show wagon or tied it next to its mother, so that the colt could get a feel for the crowd and get conditioned to the chaos of parades. In my family, we call this type of livestock training “getting parade ready.”
This is what Matthew was describing in his Palm Sunday story. This was what Jesus was trying to do with his followers. He was trying to get them acclimated to the chaos of Jerusalem and to life as his disciples.
III
Similarly, Jesus was trying to get his disciples “parade ready.”
He was trying to teach his first followers how to handle burdens, follow the leader, and cope with a chaotic environment. And, by extension, he was trying to get us parade ready—ready to serve others for the glory of God—and ready to mentor young people in our lives and community.
Mentoring is not easy work, but none of us are called to do it alone. Mentoring is a group project. Jesus always sent his disciples out two by two.
As a religious community, Eden Church has been in this arena for 158 years, helping families raise children, and helping our community mentor youth. Some of the ways that we do this follow:
Nursery Care
Children’s Gatherings
Sunday School
Confirmation
Youth Group (GenZ)
The Cherryland Youth Leadership Institute (ChYLI)
The Cherryland Computer Cafe
NCNC UCC Camps & Conferences
Contributing to and sponsoring the Eden Area Scholarship program
Hiring and mentoring youth leaders into employment and their first jobs
In these and many other ways, we raise “parade ready” youth, who follow Christ’s example, and who are capable of leading others through seasons of uncertainty like this time we are experiencing right now. To God be the glory. Amen.