A few years ago an Orthodox friend of ours went shopping with a Jewish friend on a Sunday. They were both surprised to find all the stores closed. How had they not noticed that it was western Easter that day?
Actually, it's getting easier and easier not to notice.
The Christian calendar moves this day around within a range of about 28 days each year. Why that is, and why it doesn't always line up with Passover or Orthodox Easter, is a somewhat more complicated story. But that's a different post.
What is startling to me is how much more driven all of us are with each passing year by calendars other than liturgical ones. Our far-flung families have already driven people to "have Christmas" on whatever wintry day they can manage to gather everyone. Fewer and fewer retail establishments manage to close for an entire day on any day of the year, much less one as narrowly observed as western Christian Easter. School districts generally pick whatever week falls more or less mid-term for their spring break, regardless of what religious holidays might fall or not fall during that time. Even death -- that event that we cannot schedule -- is less likely to make us interrupt our carefully planned work and leisure plans. Thanks to cremation, families can schedule a funeral whenever it is most convenient for everyone.
It gets harder and harder, in this culture where time is precious but rarely conceived as holy, to just stop and gather collectively around the greatest mysteries of our existence.
You won't find me complaining during Holy Week about the workload. This is, in fact, the center point of my vocation, not an "extra" placed on top of other duties. It's a relief to know with certainty that inviting others into gathering around Jesus' death and resurrection, and to lead them in pondering these mysteries, is exactly what I should be doing.
I only wish it were easier for others, who don't have the luxury of a life built around this vocation, to give themselves permission to stop. Gather. Listen. Rejoice.
It is
winter. . . .still winter, we might say. 4th Sunday of Easter and
the scene outside seems stuck on constant loop, and the lectionary has bumped
us all the way back to Hanukkah. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ description of
Narnia under the witch’s reign – always winter, never Christmas.
The Feast of
the Dedication, or Hanukkah, that’s the context of this scene. Jesus is walking
in the portico of Solomon during the feast, the commemoration of the time when
the Jews had been banned from worshipping God for over three years, and finally
after the Maccabean revolt had an opportunity to re-dedicate their temple.
It is
winter, they are remembering one rededication, but doing so rather carefully
because even as they are celebrating the freedom they gained in the past the
Jews look outside their window and see history stuck in a loop. . . another
empire, another foreign ruler watching over their shoulders and making sure
that their demands for freedom don’t go too far.
The porch of
Solomon was a site of memory but also a place of slaughter. It was a place that
had been rededicated but only after too much blood had been shed, too many
children had died. In Jewish lore of the time there was speculation about
where, when the anointed one, the Messiah came, the new age would begin. Where
would the anointed one declare that the reign of God was at hand that the new
age of God’s people worshipping without fear would begin? Some people thought
it would be at Rachel’s tomb, since Rachel was the mother of all the exiles,
the one whose weeping would not be silenced. And some thought it was here, at
Solomon’s Porch, at the place where the innocent had been slaughtered and God’s
people had not given up on longing for God’s reign.
And in this
place, Jesus uses language that evokes the kingship of David, where he speaks
of being a shepherd, the kind of leader who will gather the scattered and
protect the vulnerable.
Because
vulnerable is what they are – and it does not matter where they are
Even this
massive temple is not safe, and it too will some day in the not too distant
future be destroyed. Even this place of celebration can be in a moment marred
by violence. Even this holy place can be desecrated.
Like seeing
Back Bay turned into a scene of bloodshed
Like seeing
a passenger plane used as a weapon
Like seeing
an elementary school attacked.
Even our
most sacred places can be violated. . . and our most revered heroes fall
The next
verse, by the way, is that people took up stones to stone Jesus for what he said
And the next
story is that his dear friend Lazarus is dead.
Death is all
too close, all the time. Illness and violence strike randomly, even to Jesus
himself.
What makes a
shepherd a shepherd is not that he leads us away from every danger, but that he
leads us through.
It is not
mere protection Jesus offers, but assurance, the knowledge of being known, of
never being alone. Of being unsnatchable.
We tend to
imagine that the important word is FOR. That what God does FOR me makes me a
Christian and what I do FOR God and neighbor is what it’s all about. So we ask
what our church life does for us; and what our church does for their
neighborhood. We occupy ourselves with doing more and more of the right kind of
service for the world and build communities intent on telling people what the
church can do for them.
But Wells
argues that the heart of the Gospel is instead the little word WITH, as in when
the angel says to Mary, this child shall be Emmanuel, God WITH us, and when
Jesus says, Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth.
Thou art
WITH me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
What a
shepherd does for the sheep is first and foremost simply being with them,
through good and bad.
Shepherds,
after all, don’t cause the grass to grow or the waters to be still. They do not
make wolves and lions go away; they cannot make sheep more perfectly sensible
and independent. But they are with
their flocks, and in that with-ness, the flock is assured.
And so, as Jesus is standing on this porch of
Solomon, talking about being a shepherd,
he emphasizes that he is a shepherd because he is WITH his Father, and in his
communion with God he offers us communion with him. He is a good shepherd
because about to enter into the ultimate with-ness of humanity, entering into
the suffering and death which is always part of the human experience.
My Sheep are
with me. And no one will snatch them out of my hand
What might
that mean, if you lived as if you were unsnatchable? What might it mean to give
witness to all God’s sheep being unsnatchable.
How would we
life,
If it did
not matter whether you look good enough, or work hard enough, or are liked by
everybody? If you believed that even the scariest events of our time could not
separate you from God’s love?
What would
it mean to live knowing that goodness and mercy will pursue us, like sheepdogs
nipping at our heels, all our lives? That even when the scene outside our doors
or inside our hearts seems stuck on a constant loop, a Groundhog Day blizzard
over and over again, even then goodness and mercy will keep invading our lives,
keep running into the chaos, into the bloodshed, into the hurt with Words of
strength and acts of compassion.
What might
it mean to be a church that knows that being with God means being with our
brothers and sisters, and that no one, not even the most unloved by the world,
is considered lost by our good shepherd?
Such a
witness does not run from the places of darkness. Such a witness is not
paralyzed when it seems like there is nothing we can do for the hurting or the wounded. Such a witness says simply, let us
be wth God’s world because God is
with us.
It was
popular to say this week that we are all Bostonians or all Texans, but wise
voices from outside this country reminded us that we ought to remember how
often violence invades the lives of people throughout the world, sometimes at
the hands of our own government.
So yes, said
one journalist at Britain’s the Guardian, "I'm all up for us all being Bostonians, today.
But can we all be Yemenis tomorrow, and
Pakistanis the next day?" Can we be with one another even then?
Jesus is
with us because God has chosen to be with us. And when we pray with one
another, when we hurt with one another, when we enter into this life WITH one another, we give witness to that God who
has said, YOU are unsnatchable.
We have
received that promise at our baptism . . . You belong to Christ
And we are
commissioned in that same moment to witness to that reality to the world – we are
anointed, chosen. We who count ourselves one with Christ, we are anointed to be
one with God’s world.
You belong
to Christ. We invite you to hear these words, to receive a sign of that
anointing, and to live it
As the sun
was just coming up one fall morning in 1970, an Iowa-born, Minnesota-educated
agricultural scientist named Norman Borlaug was in his laboratory fields in
Mexico, working with research assistants, as he did every morning, testing
varieties of wheat that would produce greater yields.
The fields
were a good 40 miles away from the city where he and his wife were lodging at
night, so when he looked up to see his wife running across the fields toward
him, he knew it would only be for big news.
He turned to
his assistant and said, “That’s my wife, coming to tell me that my other has
died.” Why else would she have hired a ride to come all this way?
But when his
wife arrived, she called, out, “Norman, . You’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize!”
Those who
were present at the time confirm that his first reaction was, “No I haven’t” Not that he didn’t believe his
wife, but he thought maybe it was a prankster with a Norwegian- accent. The
peace prize for a botanist? Death would have been much easier to believe.
I suspect
Borlaug didn’t really believe the news until he’d talked on the phone himself
to the committee, until the reporters started calling, until he got on the
plane to Oslo and actually was called away from his rice fields and research
long enough to see his work from a global perspective. In fact he said later
that he finally understood the prize as being not about him so much as about
the “ the vital role of agriculture and
food production in a world that is hungry, both for bread and for peace".[24]
---
We are so
accustomed to the story of Easter morning that we perhaps don’t even notice any
more that NO ONE reacted to the resurrection with an alleluia. Or even joy,
right away.
No one said, WOW! Or Yay! OR “yes, I
knew it!” or “Oh yeah, all right”
At best the reaction was “Wha??” or stunned silence. Some of the gospels report people running
away, afraid. In Luke’s gospel the men who
first here from Mary and the others react the way people have for
centuries—nonsense.
Our translators have protected us. nonsense, “bullshit” drivel, garbage. A hoax.
Here they were the people who had been closest to Jesus, who
had been with him almost constantly for years, who had seen him feed the
hungry, and cast out demons, and still a stormy sea, and heal the sick and even
raise Lazarus from the dead
These people who seemed to believe that Jesus was from God,
they heard the news and said – no way. No way. We know what crucifixion does
and no one was survived it. We know that Jerusalem is the city that kills
prophets, we’ve seen that headline. The
dead stay dead, that is just reality.
the people we have held up as heroes of the faith for generations,
and when they hear the news they say, that’s a bunch of crap.
No one
responded right away with Alleluia – that took a while. It took going to see
for themselves, it looking living into it.
It took a
little while to get to alleluia, and in most cases it meant people had to go
see for themselves.
Because,
honestly, what good is resurrection if
it’s just something in a news report; what good is that? We read news every
day, and most of it doesn’t stop us in our tracks. We might hope for news on
the scale of Borlaug’s stunning announcement – maybe that’s why we can’t stop
checking our email, why we jump when the phone rings, why we worry that we have
missed some vital message if we are out of touch for even a few moments.
We hope,
maybe, that the news we will hear will be someone offering us a stunning
opportunity, and you, only you, are the
right person for the job. Or the news of a miracle drug being discovered that
will save your loved ones life, or someone coming to say that our property is
sitting on vast mineral rights and could we please sell it to them for a
billion dollars.
But most of
the time it isn’t that. The emails are a long succession of mostly the same
things, headlines are full of awful news – another shooting, another head-on
collision, another war, another 100 jobs lost, another celebrity break-up. We
scan them and occasionally shake our heads, but really what do we expect?
And the
truth is, in day to day living, it’s awfully hard for us to see anything other
than the reality of death as well – one day after another, another . . .
We accept
this reality all the time until it hits home, until death comes to our house,
our neighborhood, our family, and then some deep part of ourselves protests.
Some part of ourselves has an inkling that this is not what God intended.
This
inkling, this risky sense that the story is not over is what Flannery O’Connor
meant when she said faith is what you
know to be true, even if you really can’t believe it.
St. Vincent
Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting
away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth
with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.
The answers quick & keen, the
honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness
of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
What
happened on Easter, and what took everyone quite a while to come to terms with,
was that Jesus story was not going to end the same way all the others did. That
God, God was not resigned to seeing the message of the kingdom of God at hand
just stop with another unjust death.
When God
raised Jesus from the dead he joined us in saying, I am not resigned
I am not
resigned that Jerusalem will forever be a place of death instead of life.
I am not
resigned that the ones with the most power and the most weapons will always
win.
I am not
resigned that children go to bed hungry
I am not
resigned that history should be a list of one war after another, listing the
winners as those who fought the most battles.
I am not
resigned that death will always be the final word.
I am not
resigned that the message of God’s shalom will always end in another dead prophet.
God was not resigned, and instead
raised Jesus from the dead.
In Jesus God
gave us a sign of a new creation, one which is so astonishing it first makes us
fall silent, and then so beautiful we
can only sing alleluia!
And as we
live into this news, as we sing alleluia not just this Sunday but every Sunday,
we learn how to live to look for that new creation everywhere we go.
Every Sunday as we gather at this table, even the
most ordinary Sundays, we say “It is our duty and delight at ALL times and in
all places, to give you thanks, because on THIS day, you overcame death and the
grave.”
Every Sunday
we say those words, because on THIS day – and next Sunday and next Sunday again and again on the 8th
day of every week we celebrate that God has begun something new in Jesus, and
we are witnesses to that reality that everyone longs for but hardly anyone can
fully take in.
We come here
again and again because this news is not easy to take in, And even though we know it to be true we can’t quite believe it.
and also because we will never believe it
until we go out and experience it for ourselves.
In this
community,
We go and see Christ risen ourselves as we take
800 pounds of food to VEAP from our food drive.
We see
Christ risen as we build relationship with our sisters and brothers in El
Salvador, and see to it that not only our children have chairs to sit in but
they do as well.
We Christ
risen when all families eat together at this table and then go out together to
advocate for equality together.
We see Christ
risen as we promise to create supportive housing for homeless youth in this
part of our city.
We see
Christ risen as we will join with Lutherans from across the state to advocate
for cleaner energy.
We see
Christ risen even when we hold one another in grief, and we pray for one
another when they cannot pray for themselves when we bury our dead,.
We move back
and forth from nonsense to alleluia,
and we come
back again and again to get a glimpse of that new creation, where where there
is abundant bread and peace for everyone.
On this day
Christ overcame death and the grave, and we shout Amen and alleluia with those on
another shore and in a greater light.
The
subtitle of the cover article in the latest Lutheran caught my interest: “from
Sunday into Monday.” But I opened the article and found stories of retirees
packing snacks on a Tuesday, or who chose to locate a worship center near a
community crossroads. While there were
wonderful examples in the article of congregations that have paid attention to
community needs and developed vital and meaningful programs around those needs,
the article still left me wondering: “where are MOST of the members of these
congregations on Monday morning?”
All too
often, our understanding of the “ministry of the laity” in the Lutheran church
has been reduced to the volunteer things we do for the church. While it’s great
that some of those volunteer hours are served outside the church walls, I wonder how many working Lutheran adults
are weary of hearing that they should
get more involved in volunteerism, while they struggle to figure out what faith
means in the 40-60 hours a week they are in paid employment, and the many other
hours they spend caring for their kids or their aging parents. The question is not "what new thing do I add to my schedule to act out my faith," but "how can what I already do every day reflect Christ crucified and risen?"
Lutherans
are always reluctant to reduce faith to ethics, or to give prescriptive answers
to the dilemmas so many adults face. But if the church is to be vital in the
future – that is, if we expect persons under 65 to get engaged – we had better
figure out, and quickly, what best supports the Monday morning faith of those
who spend their weekdays in the working world.
It’s Easter, and I have to say I’m going to miss Holy Week. Though I love the joyful music and the heady scent of lilies, there’s something about our typical Easter celebrations that can get strangely disembodied, at least compared to the fleshiness of waving palms and washing feet and placing hands on foreheads of every shape and size. Why is it that the celebration of Christ’s resurrected body can be so lacking in touch, compared with Holy Week?
Someone – I can’t recall whom – asked in the midst of this week’s commentaries: ‘Why is it that those who most decry the church’s nervousness about human sexuality are those who also get most nervous talking about Jesus’ resurrected body?’ Even more, one might ask, why is it that those who are most likely to fill the bellies of others at a soup kitchen, or advocate for affordable housing and health care; those who are most likely to give to mosquito nets or clean water halfway around the world; those who are most likely to write letters about prenatal care and meaningful sex education -- why is it that we who so willingly stand up for the real embodied needs of our neighbors and try to heal the wounds of those who are most vulnerable in our world are so nervous talking about a physical resurrection?
Maybe, just maybe, it's because we share with Thomas a commitment to reality, and we worry that a declaration of resurrection somehow diminishes the reality of others' suffering, as if we're pasting a happy ending on a story that most certainly isn't over yet. This is where the faith of Thomas is so important to me -- because Thomas is not about to let us forget what happened to Jesus' body.
In John 20, when Thomas declares that he won’t believe until he has seen Jesus in the flesh, he is not just asking about Jesus’ body in general. It’s not a question of whether Jesus is just solid or not. He is asking, quite specifically, about his wounds, the signs of his mortality, the evidence that Jesus suffered a horrible and humiliating death.
It is this wounded one Thomas calls Lord, because no body that wasn’t wounded in this way would be worthy of the name. Thomas needs to know that the way Jesus went was real, that when he went to Jerusalem and his death, it was no joke. And he needs to know – perhaps for the sake of his twin whom we never meet in John– that it is this wounded Jesus that will meet him on the other side of the grave.
In this sense he enacts the central statement of John 1: The Word became flesh –and we have seen his glory.
Jesus' appearance to Thomas is a gift to us as well. He not only offers his wounds to Thomas, he blesses the rest of us who are still not in the room. Those who have not seen, and yet believe.
Perhaps that is why it is so important for us to gather in person. It is why no church worthy of the name of Jesus can ever be totally virtual. Because all the stories in the world over a phone or Internet line don’t compare with the flesh and blood of others. It’s one thing to say Christ is risen in theory. It’s quite another to say it and hear it said standing next to a person who has come close to tasting death themselves. To say it in the presence of those whose loved ones’ flesh is now enclosed in a columbarium; to say it in the presence of bodies that are about to give birth and survived wars and carried heavy loads and undergone chemotherapy. Bodies with stretch marks and wrinkles and acne and limbs bursting with energy.
We dare to say, in the midst of this company, that Christ is indeed risen. That the empty bellies and malaria ridden communities and groaning creation of our world are where we can meet him, wounded yet living, like us, and calling us forward into a new reality where peace reigns and a word of forgiveness can create a whole new reality
A lot is often made of Jesus’ “seven last words” – that is the seven last things he said from the cross spread through the four Gospels.
But of course, these were not the seven last words – just the ones before death.
And the seven words we’ll be looking at aren’t really his first. I imagine his real seven first words were pretty typical – things like Imma and Abba—Hebrew for Mommy and Daddy.
But the Gospels tell us so little about these moments after the resurrection, these conversations he had after the great surprise of Easter morning, it is interesting to imagine why THESE things are said, and why the Gospel writers pass them on to us. There is so much that is left out of Jesus’ story, that we have to assume that what we ARE told is more than just reporting.
We can guess that there was more to it than this. Two of the four gospels mention Jesus eating with the disciples, so if they actually shared a meal, you have to assume there was more conversation that this.
Or, maybe not. One thing is certain: Jesus after the resurrection is not “settling back in” to life on earth. He is on the move – going to Galilee, going to his Father in heaven, setting the disciples up to be on their own again. Whatever life after the resurrection is going to be, it’s not really life as usual, even if it does involve some food and some fishing.
This week at Bonfire we focused on Matthew 28, where Jesus first words are simply, “Greetings!”
The women have already seen an empty tomb and heard from an angel. They are starting what some have called the breathless period of the New Testament. You could say that really , the whole message of the early church from this point on is. . . . (huff, huff, pant. . .” He is Risen!”)
The women are in the middle of this when Jesus shows up, and simply says “Greetings!”
I mean really, don’t you think you might have said something more than “Hi!”
But then again, what else would he say?
There’s a great moment in the movie Jerry Maguire where, after their marriage is on the rocks, Tom Cruise suddenly has this running back to his loved one moment. By that time Renee Zellweger is already consoling herself with her girlfriends.
“Men are the enemy.” She says. And they all laugh
“Don’t get me wrong, I still love them, but they are theenemy.”
And right then Jerry walks back in, says “Hello, I’m here to see my wife.” . .and then he launches into some long explanation and she just says, “You had me at hello.”
Because, really, in a moment like that the important thing is that he’s there.
“Greetings.” The word Jesus uses is a little more packed than that: in Greek it is Xairete, which is something like Aloha, or Shalom. It’s one of those words that can mean hello and good-bye and peace all at the same time – and its root is “Joy”
Joy has already made its appearance in this story, joy mixed with fear, because that is of course what they are feeling at this news. And there were plenty of people who might have expected Jesus to come back with some revenge in mind. ..
And just to remind them that he is not here to kick ass, Jesus says, “ Go and tell my brothers”
Because after all, that’s what they are. They are the brothers who denied him. The cowards who ran away. They are the brothers who didn’t remember anything he said about resurrection and were not expecting anything to happen on Sunday morning..
But they are his brothers, and he is alive.
And so are we. Over and over again running scared, Jesus greets us and says, “Hello.” Peace. Joy. It’s me. Go tell my brothers and sisters. Because that is what we are.
Our children bury the Alleluia every Lent -- and they get to "find" it again for us on Easter. Somehow, it seems that my children always find my alleluias for me.
On Holy Saturday I found myself throwing out the first page of my Easter sermon. It wasn't bad -- it just didn't quite lead to the primary meat of the sermon, found on page three, about proclaiming resurrection in the face of killing lies.
But I still like the Easter bilby, and think the Australians are on the right track to declare a vulnerable native species their own mascot for Easter, so here it is:
PROCLAIMING RESURRECTION (page 1)
What if you had to celebrate Easter in the absence of spring – it’s a thought that has probably crossed our minds a few times this year, as snow fell again this week and temperatures have been a little slow to climb.
Of course, as much as we think of Easter as a celebration of spring, there are plenty of Christians in the world who celebrate it without green grass and budding flowers. A whole hemisphere in fact.
You’ve got to feel for them, folks down under. having to proclaim new life in the midst of death. If you were in Australia now, instead of celebrating Easter after the spring equinox for them it is when the days are growing shorter, when the darkness is creeping in and spring blooms are long gone.
Add to that the problem that the symbol the Western world has chosen for this day is a persistent invasive pest. Yes, in the mid 1800’s three – count them three pair – of European rabbits were introduced to the continent, and within a few generations they were overrun with them. This symbol of fertility, New life springing up turned out to be threat to the things that they most needed – like food.
So a few enterprising Australians have taken matters into their own hands and have begun a campaign to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby.
What is a bilby? A bilby is a native marsupial, It’s kind of cute – think aardvark crossed with a field mouse with really big ears. OK, maybe not as cute as a white rabbit, but definitely cuter than your average house mouse that shows up unwelcome in your kitchen cabinets.
The bilby, unlike the bunny, is native, and it’s having a rather hard time these days. There are probably fewer than a thousand left in the outback, and Australians figure that if new life in the midst of death, celebrating the resurrection in the midst of autumn needs a small mammal as its mascot, the bilby is it.
After seeing snow on the ground we too might wonder whether Easter might need better timing here in Minnesota, but if you think about it, proclaiming new life in the midst of a dying planet is what we do all the time.
This year, feeling a bit burnt out on the Gospel of John, and really excited about the opportunities this late Easter provides for preparation for the Three Days, we decided to depart from the lectionary on lenten Sundays. The jury is still out, and I’m sure we’ll have a lot to learn from our actual execution of the idea, but it has been enormously energizing to use this time to focus on the “big stories” of Easter Vigil in our Sunday morning worship. How often do you get to preach on Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego? (Answer, if you never stray from the RCL: never.)
There are four elements to the plan:
1. On Sundays, we read or tell the “big story” – always a Hebrew Bible story – as part of the children’s sermon. This gives us license to use a children’s Bible, or give people speaking parts on the fly, or add motions, all as means of preventing the zone-out that so often happens with long readings.
2. We’ve been intentional about trying to have the Sunday School kids also prepare in this season for Vigil. They are learning songs that will be used during Vigil for each story, and one week we had an guest speaker (the incomparable Earl Schwartz) talk to older youth and adults about the Passover during education hour.
3. In sermons, we try to give adults some elements to grab onto that go beyond the knowledge of the story itself. So many people get hung up on the historicity of the Bible these days, and miss the richness of the literature itself. These stories of deliverance are so full of human nature they almost have their own scent – and that’s a great place to start preaching deliverance with adults.
4. Each week on Monday we publish (on the website, and link in our e-newsletter) a “page-turner” devotion designed to get people thinking about the text ahead of time.
Liturgically we’ve made a few other adjustments. We read a psalm instead of a New Testament lesson as the 2nd reading. We rewrote the Eucharistic prayer so that these stories are reflected as part of salvation history. Some weeks, due to the length of the service, we have shortened up hymns or other elements in the interest of time. (But seriously, those John lessons were LONG anyway!)
So here it is folks, in all its complicated and messy glory. Though I miss the connection to what other congregations are doing with the common lectionary, I think the opportunity for drawing the paschal season together as a whole, especially in this year when most families will not be on spring break over Holy Week, is too good to pass up. As Vigil gets closer I'll post again about our thoughts for making that event truly the liturgical highlight of the year.
(Note: we switched around the chronological order of Noah and the Exodus because we had a guest speaker who could only come on Lent 1. This also worked great for still reading the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness – but you could easily switch Lent 1 and 2 and work in biblical order).
Lent 1: The crossing of the Red Sea (I used the Spark picture Bible from Augsburg Fortress, which has a nice recitation of the plagues with a refrain that kids can join in).
Psalm 103
Matthew 4:1-11
Lent 2: Noah (Genesis 6, 7, 8)
Psalm 25
John 9:1-7
Lent 3: Daniel 3; the Three Men and the Fiery Furnace
(This story is remarkably absent from many Children’s Bibles, including Spark. However it makes a great participatory reading, if you hand out “instruments” and have people join in each time you say “Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego”. Try reading it with a tone of Dr. Seuss.)
Song of the Three (Benedicite Omnia Opera)
Matthew 7:21-27
Lent 4: Jonah
Psalm 145:1-8
Matthew 20:1-16
Lent 5: Ezekiel 37:1-14 (which happens to also be the RCL assigned first lesson)
Psalm 130
John 12:30-33
Other resources
songs from Justin Roberts’ Why Not Sea Monsters? CD of Songs from the Hebrew Bible. Justin has great theological instincts and kid-friendly melodies.
Paul Andress (one of ECLC’s musicians) has a lovely rendition of Isaiah 43: “Fear Not for I have Redeemed You”) Contact ECLC for permissions information.
David’s Lose’s offered Confession from www.workingpreacher.org for Lent 1 works very well with all of these texts, as we seek to move from fear to freedom.
In this month's Christian Century, Rodney Clapp reminds us that the primary feast of the Christian year is Easter, not Christmas. If we're feeling stressed out about all there is to do with nine days to go, it is good to remember that
"The pressure to keep up a relentless facade of merriment is not a Christian pressure. We may not be able to completely escape this, but perhaps we can lessen it by not confusing it with discipleship."
Tonight at ECLC we'll do our part for relief from that pressure toward merriment by hosting a Blue Christmas service -- one designed to give space for those who are grieving or finding the season difficult. I know there are many such people. Indeed, today I received a caringbridge update from the sister of a friend who died in December two years ago, just a couple days after her own 43rd birthday.
The fact that Easter is our primary feast is hinted at in a number of Christmas carols, though sometimes the "facade of merriment" makes us uneasy with verses such as this second verse from What Child is This?. Who wants to hear about nails and spears on December 24? But the fact is that the Incarnation and our redemption through Jesus' death and resurrection are bound up together. If Jesus had not been born a mortal, he would not have been fully human. If this baby had not eventually died at the hands of the Romans (and, say, had become a successful violent rebel instead), his witness to a God who wishes "peace on earth" would have been null and void.
So we can sing with some gratitude that, like we will, Jesus died. And since he rose again, we too can join in Easter songs as well. Hail the Word made flesh!
