Dear Beloved Community,
With each passing year of our living, one truth never fades – God is always, always at work making all things new, surprising us again and again with presence and change and hope in even the darkest of places.
I confess I forget that sometimes! But if there is any takeaway I have from our Holy Week and Easter celebrations of 2025, it is the reminder that God is a God of powerful (and power-full) surprises!
Perhaps none of us imagined that a car wreck into an electrical transformer on Fifth Street would knock out our power halfway through worship on Easter Sunday, packed with the largest Easter crowd we’ve had in years. Yet you, dear church, were as resilient as ever, and our sunlit, acoustic Easter worship was as full of life in its ending as our resounding, resplendent beginning.
These other moments of Holy Week will stay with me for a good long while, and perhaps you too. Being led by our children and youth on Palm Sunday, with their hosannas and celebrations. Watching you wash each other’s hands, and pray with embodied hope, and gather again at the table of love. Walking the Stations of the Cross with you, with violin and piano as our guide for the lament. Remembering Jesus’s final hours, and sitting in the uncomfortable ache of the darkness. Waiting through the silence of Saturday. Gathering in our joy on Easter morning – flowering the cross, sharing a meal, extending spirited greetings to one another. Weeping, yet again, as the sounds of brass, bells, organ, choir, timpani, and the voices of so many filled our Sanctuary with the good news that “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” Sharing in Easter worship with my parents, my brother, my husband, and children on Annabelle’s 10th birthday.
These movements of Holy Week made our Easter joy precise, didn’t they? The irony isn’t lost on me that our Easter worship ended in the dark… which was precisely where that first Easter began. I wasn’t thinking that the “clearing out” of Lent should apply to the power on Easter, but what a reminder of its Source for all life and light and hope!
Enjoy the pictures in today’s eBlast and video across our social media accounts for a glimpse into these holy days. None of these experiences together would be possible if not for the countless number of you who welcomed guests, built and set up Stations, planted ferns, organized lilies, flowered the cross, fed the crowds on Easter, served communion, played music, led in worship, helped children wave palms, sang the songs of our faith, and brought the fullness of who you are into our beloved community this week. A special word of gratitude to our Worship Ministry Team, Hospitality Ministry Team, musicians, and staff for their leadership through it all! Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear church!
On this side of Easter, may we not soon forget the hosannas and the remembrances, the bread and cup and basin and towel, the shroud of shadows, the garden of our tears and of our witness, the Love that stirred “early in the morning while it was still dark” and stirs every moment since.
For these good gifts and the God who is giver of them all, we say hallelujah!
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily
Ps – Here’s our family’s annual Easter photo – one from the five of us, and one from my side of the family too. (Yes, Liam is taller than me now, my goodness!) We love you!
