Dear Beloved Community,
This Lenten season of “clearing out” has been clarifying, hasn’t it?
We’ve felt it in our church house, as the first floor has, quite literally, been cleared out for new floors and paint, refreshing these well-worn spaces with new energy. Perhaps you’ve felt it in our American life together, as the clearing out of so many norms and institutions we’ve held in common has reinvigorated conversation about why they matter to the many. And maybe you’ve felt this in your personal life, where a practice or rhythm has needed examining, or a relationship has needed reordering, or your relationship with God has needed decluttering.
Clearing out has a refining effect. It essentializes and prioritizes and hollows out what needs shedding. To what end? These practices have prepared us for this very week, the remembrance of the final days of Jesus’s life. And why? So we can draw near to God, near to Jesus, near to the Breath of the Holy, and give ourselves over to the possibility of transformation.
For on the night he was betrayed, Jesus knew his disciples in every foot he washed, every mouth he fed, every movement he predicted, every person he met on the way to his trial. On the way to that hill faraway, Jesus saw the people for whom he died in every tear, every insult, every word he offered from the cross. And early in the morning while it was still dark, God in Christ so loved the world that even the tombs of death could not contain such love.
Friends, I invite you to complete your “clearing out” work this Lent by journeying with your church family to the table, the cross, the tomb. It’s a journey with Jesus, of course, but it is too a journey to the center of ourselves. Come meet at the table of Love and hear again the new covenant Jesus left his friends (tonight – Thursday, 7:00pm). Face the darkness of Good Friday by walking the Stations of the Cross (Friday, 6:30pm) and reliving Jesus’s final hours in our Service of Shadows (Friday, 7:00pm). Rejoice through our Easter morning fellowship (Sunday, 9:30am on the front lawn), and our Easter worship (Sunday, 11:00am). Together, we will know and see and love the truth — that God’s love for us knows no boundaries, that in Christ, all things are made new, that with the Spirit’s help, the worst thing is never the last thing.
Now we see through a glass dimly, but soon, clearly, face to face.
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily