Palm Sunday Memories

Yesterday - March 29, 2026 - was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week leading to Easter. Do you remember Palm Sunday from six years ago, way back in 2020?

I looked it up, discovering that it was April 5, which meant that it occurred less than a month into the COVID pandemic. March Madness for college basketball had been cancelled, as had the Master's, Major League Baseball, and the NBA season. Georgia, along with many other states, was in a "shelter-in-place" mode which meant that churches were not holding in-person services.

Churches responded to the challenging circumstances. Facebook Live and YouTube streaming became instantly popular, along with sending out services and devotionals viz email or posting on websites. Outdoor services would soon pop up and then we'd shortly see churches getting creative with social distancing inside buildings. Ultimately, many congregations would deal with strong disagreement about the correct responses, but in most of that was still out in front of us in early April.

I was serving Providence United Methodist Church in Fayetteville, Georgia at the time. We streamed a couple of Facebook Live services that Palm Sunday, and I remember watching our neighbors' two young daughters circling their home waving pine branches and shouting "Hosanna." I'll always remember that as such a powerful witness to our neighborhood!

75 miles away, the church I'm currently serving - Fort Valley Methodist - faced the same circumstances. This congregation sits at the intersection of Church and Miller Streets just a block from downtown Fort Valley. It's the quintessential small-town church and I can only imagine how sad and lonesome it had to be to see it dark on a Sunday morning, no light shining through the sanctuary's beautiful stained-glass windows.

Well, they weren't going to just skip Palm Sunday, not if Mrs. Ann Lanter had anything to do with it. Miss Ann, as we call her, has provided the branches for the last 30-40 Palm Sundays at Fort Valley Methodist Church. They come from a palm bush planted in 1917 at her in-law's home in Savannah, Georgia. The bush moved some years later with the family to Thomasville, Georgia and then it migrated north to Middle Georgia and has remained since in Fort Valley in Miss Ann's yard.

So, on Palm Sunday 2020, Miss Ann made sure to cut branches and to place them at one of the entrances to the church. People could come by and get a branch, thus providing them a tangible connection to their church and to its observance of the beginning of Holy Week. That's what you see in the picture above - the stack of branches and 18-month-old Piper Absher with her branch.

Likely, Piper doesn't remember that morning. But I bet her parents never let her forget it.