Last Day!

As my brother pointed out this morning, the appropriate emotion for today in Holy Week is perplexity (or aporia) -- being at a loss. Remembering how bewildered and lost the disciples must have felt after Jesus died.

We had a very beautiful Easter Vigil service this evening; a first for our congregation that grew out of our Sunday evening Vespers, newly begun this fall. Vespers was on Saturday instead of Sunday this week, and we drew on a traditional Vigil liturgy, but it still had much of the feel of our Vespers service. About midway through the service, the light was brought into the church; all the lights were turned up and candles lighted, and we moved from sorrow into joy.

Happy Easter!

PS - Since this is the end of Lent, it also marks the end of my Lenten blogging -- for this year, at least. Perhaps I will pick it up again next Ash Wednesday. It has been a very useful discipline, and I think it has made sermon writing a little easier, either because I'm just writing more or because focusing on "the spiritual aspects of life" daily and developing certain ideas a bit means I have a head start on potential items for sermons. Meanwhile, I'll probably do better about posting to my other blog.

Thanks for reading!

Good Friday

I love Good Friday. I'm a bit sad that I didn't make it to church this year, but the day was too full of caring for baby, etc. One of my favorite college professors said that Good Friday takes seriously the terrible cost in this world for justice to be achieved.

Perhaps by way of observance, Tim and I went over to see The Big Sellout at our friends' apartment. It's a great film about the terrible effects of corporate globalization and privatization on people's lives -- AND the ways those people are fighting back. From a mother trying to get medicine and dialysis treatment for her son in the Philippines, to the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee reconnecting people's power when the company shuts it off, to a union leader train driver in England, to the popular uprising over privatization of water (by Bechtel, no less) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, they were stories that were inspiring as well as troubling.

Maundy Thursday

I've been trying to keep my heart in tune with Holy Week, with mixed success. It's hard to know how to feel on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. So I'm excited that we are finally here at Maundy Thursday, remembering the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples, the way he washed their feet and gave them a new commandment: to love one another as he had loved them.

Maundy Thursday is named for that new commandment (mandatum in Latin, mande/ in French), and the more I think about it, the harder it seems to do. It seems to require even more than "Love your neighbor as yourself." Because I think Jesus was better at loving people than most (all?) of us are at loving ourselves.

Last year was my first Holy Week at Cleveland Park Church, and one of my favorite parts (I have lots of favorites...) was the service that we will have again tonight, which begins with communion and then goes into Tenebrae, the service of shadows that remember the events around Jesus' arrest, and end with "then they led him away to crucify him." The service ends in silence, and it is a powerful lead-in to Good Friday.

The tongue (and ear) of a teacher

I was reading today's lectionary readings, trolling for inspiration, and I was struck by the first verse of the first reading: "The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens-- wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. (Isaiah 50:4)"

It seems to me that having your ear awakened to "listen as those who are taught" is an amazing gift for teachers or preachers, or anyone who hopes that people will listen to them... and I think the best teachers and preachers possess this gift. I think it's the challenge for me and the other people involved in teaching Sunday School to kids; how do we put on the "ears" of elementary school students (1st grade is very different than 5th grade, and the individuals vary greatly as well)?

Knowing, or imagining, how someone will hear your words is an important step in deciding what to say -- it's also a way of being gracious.

compassion and solidarity

Back at the beginning of Lent, I thought I should write about my take on Christian ethics. So, briefly, here goes:

It seems to me that at the heart of thinking about what we should do, are two core values: compassion and solidarity.

Compassion is a sort of prerequisite for the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you); you have to imagine yourself in someone else's situation before you can imagine what you would want if you were in their situation. That's part of loving your neighbor as yourself, and compassion is certainly something that Jesus modeled in life (and perhaps even in death).

Solidarity is another piece of loving the neighbor as the self. Compassion could stop short of action (although I do think that often it does compel us to action). But solidarity requires us to act in the best interests of the other... and, I think, to let them define what that means. Of course, "compassion fatigue" (I think people were talking about this after Katrina) is a problem. We have too much information connected to too small a sense of agency, and the world's problems sure do get overwhelming. I think "solidarity fatigue" might be a problem as well.

Dr. Wright

With all the flack Obama has been getting about his association with the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, it's about time someone presented an image of him as something other than the mirror-image of a white supremacist. Finally, the Post has an article about how the members of Trinity UCC view their pastor (who recently retired) *very* differently than the media soundbites have portrayed him. Not that I would expect Black liberation theology to play well in a U.S. presidential election.

Donkeys

As I've been working on my sermon for tomorrow, I recalled that last year for Palm Sunday, I chose my title, "A Royal Entrance (Riding on a Donkey)" before I started my in-depth work with the text. I really had read through it already (I swear!), but because the story is so familiar, the details from the different accounts meld together in my perception, I failed to notice that in the story in Luke, which I was preaching on, Jesus rides "a colt," not a donkey.

This year, the text is from Matthew, where it does specify that Jesus rides a donkey, but actually goes further to specify that he rode a donkey *and* its colt, which is Matthew going out of his way to make clear that Jesus' entrance fulfills the prophecy in Zechariah about the restoration of Jerusalem by a ruler who brings peace to the nations.

I haven't figured out a way to work this into my sermon, but all this thinking about donkeys reminded me of a very nice scene about acceptance from Shrek, which is burned into my brain because Grace (my now 3 year old niece) was obsessed with Shrek when we lived with her, and at one point the DVD malfunctioned and would replay this one scene over and over... where Shrek (the ogre) is trying to get rid of Donkey, who really wants to be his friend. And it becomes clear that Shrek assumes he can't have friends because he's an ogre, and everyone hates and fears ogres, but Donkey for some reason doesn't know he's supposed to hate and fear ogres... and it's a beautiful moment, although I appreciate it much more now that it's been over 6 months since the time I had to watch it over and over and over trying to fix the DVD.