Ways to Celebrate Easter

So, how did your church celebrate Easter? Did you have special music? Maybe a special brass section? Was your church filled with flowers? Did you have a breakfast? An Easter egg hunt?

My church has 3 services, and I attended two of them. I decided to skip the sunrise service, and I was Assisting Minister for the 8 a.m. service, which was the most meaningful for me. We read the lessons for the day and sang lots of traditional music. We also affirmed our baptism, and the children sprinkled the congregation with water from the baptismal font and a palm frond.

Our 10:45 service was jam-packed, and the focal point of the service was the Easter Cantata. While I enjoyed it, the service felt more like a concert, and less like worship--except that we had a baptism, a great way to celebrate.

I've carried tissues with me all week, but yesterday, when I had no tissues, I cried and cried. The little boy being baptized reminded me of my nephew and his baptism. The song, "Borning Cry," always moves me, and reminded me of my sister's wedding. Happily, these relatives are still alive, so at least I wasn't in the position of my spouse: the anniversary of the death of his mom fell square on Easter Sunday this year.

The other issue I had with the Easter Cantata was that much of it focused on the Holy Week story. By the time we get to Easter, I'm ready to leave the cross behind. Of course, as I looked around me, I realized that I hadn't seen most of these people at any point during the past week, so maybe it was good to remind them of what brought us to Easter morning.

We came home, made our Easter festive meal (lamb on the grill, two kinds of potatoes, and asparagus) and watched Jesus Christ, Superstar, which I had never seen. After a very slow start, I found it compelling. The ending felt strange to me--no Easter, no resurrection, just people getting on a bus and that empty cross.

When we watched it again with the commentary on, I noticed the figure walking across the bottom of the screen at the end. A symbol for the risen Christ? Norman Jewison, the director, says he didn't plan it, but decided to leave it in. It was one of many spooky synchronicities that made the film so intriguing.

All in all, a good Easter week-end. Now to think about Pentecost . . .

One of my Poems for Spring and Easter

Happy Easter! He is risen indeed!

I usually save my poetry self for my other blog, but today seems like a good day for one of my poems. It first appeared in my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard (Pudding House Publications, 2004).

The poem is based on real events, and I wrote it to remind myself of the possibility of miracles.


Rainy Redemption


She told us the X-ray showed a black
spot on her lung. We assumed the cancer harbored
in her breast had set on an odyssey
for new land, and when we didn’t see her
again, we assumed the worst.

Three years later, the flowers bloomed in their annual
tribute to spring, and I saw
her in a parking lot. At first, I thought I saw a ghost, but I held her fleshly
form, still sapling-thin, and knew she had returned,
Lazarus-like, to live among us again.

Our culture focuses on the lost, the missing
in action, but we forget the world commits
to resurrection and reunion. The twig of a tree
sends sap to its tips, the crispy lawn returns
to a life filled with chlorophyll, muscles
wait for the mind to remember what they never forgot,
each generation resurrects the music of its elders,
babies look towards the sky for the familiar
face of the missing parent, history holds
us in its hands and offers rainy redemption.

Strangest Good Friday Ever

One of our Good Friday services was at the Labyrinth. People could come and walk, and we had a bulletin about the Stations of the Cross, which coordinated with bricks that were numbered. The church did this kind of self-directed service last year, and it was well-received.

I planned to be at the Labyrinth from noon-3. We needed people there to hand out the bulletins, to answer questions, to tell people that we had water in the cooler. I expected a peaceful, meditative afternoon.

When I got to the Labyrinth, I found out that someone had vandalized it. As you see in the photo in the post below, we used old roofing tiles when we laid out the Labyrinth. They're fragile, in some ways, in the same way that your dinner plate is fragile: if you jump on it, it will break.

It looked like someone had jumped on at least a quarter of the tiles. The tiles were still in place, so we decided to go ahead with the Stations of the Cross opportunity that we had planned. In many ways, the broken clay tiles made a great symbol of Good Friday.

After 3, we decided to replace the broken tiles, thinking that to leave them broken would be akin to leaving graffiti on display: it would just encourage more vandalism. So, I spent 2 hours on Good Friday piling broken clay pieces into a wheelbarrow and moving whole tiles into place. The first hour, I didn't have gloves, because we had 2 pairs of gloves and 3 workers.

I had lots of time to reflect as I was working. My thoughts ranged from the mundane ("I'd been wishing I had more chance for an upper body workout!") to the despairing ("We're making no progress! There are so many broken pieces!") to the poetic ("So many great symbolic elements here: broken clay, aching hands and feet, resurrection . . .").

When we first assembled the Labyrinth, I was part of a different church, but I was invited to help put it together, which I did for an hour. Now, I've helped put it back together again. The whole experience has made me think about how often our human plans end in tears, yet even in tears, there is room for hope. We're thinking of ways to make it clear that the Labyrinth is sacred space, by planting shrubs and other greenery. We're thinking of moving one of the labyrinths (the square, Roman-style one) to a different place on the property, since we used a lot of its tiles to resurrect the circular labyrinth.

I was expecting the Tenebrae service to be the highlight of the day. While it was meaningful, my time with the Labyrinth was even more profound. I found myself moved to tears at the thought of clay vessels broken open (what are humans, anyway, but clay vessels?). I found myself moved to tears at the thought of all the plans of God, gone terribly wrong because humans muck it up. I found myself profoundly affected by thinking about all the ways God redeems creation, no matter how many times we ruin things.

And now we wait for Easter.

Walking the Stations of the Cross at the Labyrinth for Good Friday

photo by Pastor Keith Spencer

Good Friday, Tenebrae, and the proper amount of drama

I tend to judge churches based on their music and the sermon, and I can be quite negatively judgmental if a church abandons the readings from the Common Lectionary to chart their own course. Lately, I've been thinking that how a church conducts Good Friday service might also be a way for me to tell whether or not the church is a good fit for me.

As a child, I had two favorite services: Christmas Eve (of course) and Good Friday. Yes, even before I became a drama major, I had a sense of good theatre. I liked both services for many reasons, but mainly I liked them because they were so different from what we did the rest of the year and because they were so richly symbolic.

I'll never forget the first time I went to a Good Friday service at my last church. Sun streamed in through the windows because we had the service early in the evening, in the hopes that our many elderly parishioners would come if they thought they could be home by dark. The lights blazed throughout the building. We didn't have any additional candles. We zipped through the readings in a perfunctory, monotone voice.

And then, to my shock, the service was over. No big booming slam of the Bible. The lights were still on, the candles still lit. We left the building not in silence, but in chattiness at the door as people coordinated the Easter decorating.

In disgust, I went home and watched Jesus of Montreal, a perfect film for Good Friday.

I stayed with that church for ten years. I always tried to move the church towards doing more with various worship services. That church did Christmas Eve really well, but I could never convince anyone that the Good Friday services needed fixing.

Tonight, at my "new church" (we joined in December), we will have a full, Tenebrae service. Our pastor has mentioned his high school drama teacher, and we've had fascinating conversations about being English majors in college, so at last, I've found a pastor with a similar mindset to mine (my former pastor was a History major and a volunteer fireman/policeman before he was a pastor--make of that what you will). A worship service has many similarities to a good theatre performance, and we ignore that at our peril. And with a service like Good Friday's, where it doesn't take much to figure out how to inject drama and symbolism into the service, it's insane to treat it as if it's a Thanksgiving Eve service or something similarly expendable.

First Foot Washing Service

Tonight, my church has a foot washing service as part of their Maundy Thursday service. This will be the first time I've ever taken part in a foot washing service. At least, I'm pretty sure it is.

A foot washing service seems like the kind of thing we should have done in the groovy 70's, in our youth groups, if nothing else. But I'm pretty sure we never did such a thing. A Seder meal would have been as far as the churches of my youth would have gone. Foot washing? Where we touch each other? Not likely.

It seems like the kind of thing we should have done in college. We communed each other--you'd have thought we would have come up with the idea of a foot washing component. But I'm sure we didn't do it in my Lutheran Student Movement days in the mid 1980's.

So, foot washing. I'm open, although I must admit I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about my shoes, trying to determine which ones leave my feet in the best shape for them to be handled by a church member.

I also must remember to take some tissues. I've spent the last several weeks feeling close to tears at various points in various services, so I'd be surprised if I don't get weepy at some point as we move through the end of Holy Week to Easter.

If you live in the South Florida area, or if you're down here for Spring Break, I'd invite you to worship with us. Go to this blog and look for the information on the left margin to see all of your options.

Meditation on this Week's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, April 12, 2009:First Reading: Acts 10:34-43

First Reading (Alt.): Isaiah 25:6-9

Psalm: Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Second Reading (Alt.): Acts 10:34-43

Gospel: Mark 16:1-8

Gospel (Alt.): John 20:1-18

Finally we move through Holy Week to Easter Sunday. At last, our Lenten pilgrimage draws to a close.

But perhaps you still linger back at Ash Wednesday. Perhaps you find the Good Friday texts more evocative than the Easter texts. It's interesting how our emotional lives aren't always in sync with the liturgical seasons or the Lectionary.

This year might be particularly tough with so many of us out of work, and those of us who remain employed in fear of losing our jobs. This year might be the year that the anniversary of a death of a loved one falls right smack on Easter day. This year might be the year that someone we love faces a tough medical diagnosis. The world offers so many impediments to our joy.

The stories we hear during Holy Week remind us of how to move from lives that have been reduced to ash back to lives full of resurrection. This year, the Maundy Thursday story speaks to me, perhaps because I've just read Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.

She observes, as many theologians have, that the teachings of Jesus revolve around the things we do, not the things we believe. The Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed came much later in Christianity. Long before we had creeds, we had Jesus saying, "Do this. Now do this. Now do this." We are to feed the hungry, care for the sick, protect the widows and orphans. Taylor comments on the Last Supper: "With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do--specific ways of being together in their bodies--that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself" (43). We have "embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and feet" (44).

I have an atheist friend who says she envies me my belief. I argue that my beliefs come because of my practice, and that she could enter into spiritual practices, and she would be a different person in a year. She proclaims not to believe me, but she also refuses to try my experiment. Marcus Borg, in The Heart of Christianity, says "We become what we do" (192). Holy Week reminds us of what we are called to do.

We are called to break bread together, to drink wine together. We are called to invite the outcast to supper with us. We are called to care for each other's bodies--not to sexualize them or mock them or brutalize them, but to wash them tenderly. Thus fortified, we are called to announce that the Kingdom of God is breaking out among us in the world in which we live, and we are called to demand justice for the oppressed.

Of course, Holy Week reminds us of the risk. Jesus was crucified--that was a capital punishment reserved for those who were considered a threat to the state, people who would foment rebellion, for example. The world does not often respond kindly to the call for social justice.

But Easter promises us that our efforts will not be in vain. N. T. Wright's book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, is a great Easter text (I've underlined something on almost every page), and Wright says forcefully, " . . . what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff" (208). We may not understand how God will transform the world. We may not be able to believe that bleakness will be defeated. But Easter shows us God's promise that death is not the final answer.

Spring reminds us that nature commits to resurrection. Easter reminds us of God's promise of resurrection. Now is the time for us to rekindle our resurrection selves.