Dear Friends,
Four years ago, my Friday “Extra” going into Holy Week was all about how we were going to be able to observe Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday, and Maundy Thursday virtually. We invited people to come by the church and pick up palms, so they could wave them while watching worship from home. We invited people to come by the campus throughout the week, faces fully girded with masks and socially distant from others, to walk through the prayer stations that we set up in the Fellowship Hall. Oh, just reading that email makes me feel a variety of feelings – from admiring how quickly we were able to pivot from in person gatherings to virtual ways of being community, to feeling sick to my stomach over how weird and exhausting that whole process was.
Three years ago, we were just starting to gather for in person worship again. We decided to start a couple of weeks before Easter, so we could figure out our process before the typical larger-than-usual Easter gatherings. That ended up being a wise move on our part because it was yet another learning curve that we figured out in conversation with other churches and with the confidence that we were all simply doing our best. So, in that year’s Friday missive I was walking us through the registration process, our masking policy, and our mantra of “respect the noodle!” as we tried to be distant and together at the same time.
How lovely it is that this year we are not on those same tenterhooks. We are cautious and respectful of one another, yet we gather with very few of the precautions that were once our best attempt to love one another well. In that vein, I invite you to join us for our celebration of Palm and Passion stories this Saturday and Sunday. I invite you to join us for our Maundy Thursday service, at 6:30pm on March 28. We will remember the night Jesus shared his bread and wine with those who would betray, deny, and abandon him. And, of course, the weekend of March 30-31, join us for our Easter celebrations at 5:00pm on Saturday, then 9:00 or 10:30am on Sunday. I’ll speak more about those services in next week’s message.
For now, let’s reflect on where the pandemic experience has left us. I am utterly grateful that there is not a raging pandemic ongoing that is keeping us in a mode of hyper-vigilance. Our hearts now are turned toward some of the effects of the pandemic – long COVID, people who lost loved ones and were unable to grieve or observe that loss in the ways that we ordinarily do, and the odd effects of that experience on our country politically. It seems that everyone was radicalized in some ways during the pandemic. Normal healthy questions about science and health were exaggerated into absolute dogmas and charges of conspiracy at every level. Typical political tensions were amplified into physical confrontations or family and friends who could no longer speak. I think we were as unprepared for the onslaught of social challenges as we were for the scientific and medical challenges of pandemic. And it has left many bruises on our national psyche.
So, this weekend, we will see the whole gamut of communal experience in our biblical stories, from the defiant celebration of Jesus as a new king in broad daylight, to the shameful seizing of Jesus under the shadow of night. And we will look specifically at how “the crowd” is changed through this traumatic event. It is haunting. Yet it opens up some space for us to consider how even the most well-intended or zealously religious among us can be thrown into chaos when the center of our expectations breaks down. If I may, this weekend gives us a chance to celebrate the parade and grieve the charade.
Mark of St. Mark
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