Planning Ahead for Easter (or A Case for Coming to Church on Holy Week)
We are still a few weeks away from Easter, but I know how quickly schedules fill up in the spring. I wanted to share our plans for Holy Week with enough notice for you to mark your calendars and decide how you’d like to honor this sacred time in the liturgical year. I also wanted to share what this week means to me and encourage you to think about attending services and inviting friends or family to join you.
We long to be an Easter people—people who believe that the forces of life will always overcome the forces of death, people who believe a humble message of love is powerful enough to defy the violence of empire. We are the faithful descendants of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker who declared,”I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one…from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” And yet, it is often hard to believe that is the case when we bear witness to so much hatred, violence, and injustice in our own times—as we watch schoolgirls in Iran killed by US bombs or fight to protect our own neighbors from inhumane immigration policies. It is demoralizing, and perhaps even dishonest, to hold onto such a faith without making room for struggle and lament; without wrestling with and atoning for our own complicity with violence and injustice; without making space to name and grieve the painful realities of our current moment. We know from experience that resurrection does not come easily or cheaply. We don’t get Easter until we confront the truth of Good Friday.
Holy Week provides us a chance to sit with the whole story and to move through each motion with attention, reverence, and open hearts. We begin with the defiant, anti-imperial “counter-protest” of Palm Sunday’s procession into Jerusalem. The story then invites us into a more intimate, tender, embodied expression of care and community with the shared meal and foot washing of Maundy Thursday. We see our own fragile, imperfect humanity reflected in the disciples' inability to stay awake and be present to their friend’s suffering, in Judas’s betrayal, and in Peter’s denial. On Good Friday, we sit with the painful reality of state-sanctioned violence. We remember theologian Dorothee Soelle’s assertion that,“The cross is no theological invention, but the world’s answer given a thousand times over to attempts at liberation.”We understand why those who have faced violence at the hands of the state identify with Jesus’s story, like black American theologian James Cone who compared the cross to the lynching tree. On Holy Saturday, we wait. We sit in the quiet, mournful, hopeful space between suffering and rejoicing where we spend so much of our lives.
And then, Easter arrives. We affirm our stubborn belief that “joy cometh in the morning.” We sing “Hallelujah!”, celebrate the triumph of life over death, and declare that a new way is not only possible, but already here. We say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is already present among us” and then we recommit to living our lives in a way that won’t make liars out of all of us.
It is a beautiful and powerful story, but one that needs to be told in its completeness. I hope you’ll join us in remembering it—all of it—together.
In faith,
Rev. Danielle