Praise

This week's sermon theme, as it is Palm Sunday, is PRAISE. As we've done throughout Lent on each week's theme, we'll be looking at how Jesus' faces it, and how we can face it. What we've ended up really seeing in all of these is that in and of themselves theses (expectations, resistance, praise) are actually quite healthy. What turns them into dangers are when they are extreme or expressed in unhealthy ways. Really, it's much the same as what C.S. Lewis explained about sin in The Great Divorce.

Here are some quotes and stories about pride and praise I've come across as I prepare. They come from www.sermonillustrations.com and www.thinkexist.com, both sites I use, or at least look over, somewhat regularly:

Academy Award-winning actor Charlton Heston has not always had rave reviews. He says he learned "The most valuable single truth about criticism" from Laurence Olivier: We'd done a blank-verse play on Broadway...and the blank verse was not Shakespeare. The critics slaughtered us--before the opening-night party we were doomed. Forty minutes later I found myself alone in a restaurant with Olivier and a bottle of brandy. I was young, green and striving for mature detachment. "Well," I said philosophically, I suppose you learn how to forget the bad notices." Olivier gripped my elbow.. "Laddie!" he said. "What's much harder, and far more important...you have to learn to forget the good ones." He was right. (American Film, January 1992.)

My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
-Indira Gandhi, Bits and Pieces, April 1990, p. 11.

“There is not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself.”
-William Shakespeare

“I praise loudly, I blame softly”
-Catherine the Great

“We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess”
-Mark Twain

“The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”
-Norman Vincent Peale