We head into Holy Week at a difficult time.
I didn't grow up with a Holy Saturday tradition. My church didn't do an vigil, for me it felt mostly like "the weekend". We had Maundy Thursday services that I found meaningful mostly because they were informal, often in the church basement. Friday was only notable because the Catholic students left school early for services.
When I was new to ministry I was invited to be one of the preachers at a Friday service of Jesus Seven Last Words. Wikipedia was not at my finger tips in those days, so I read the gospels searching for some seven word sentence. For those of you equally uniformed, by "seven last words" people mean seven *phrases*!
This year, my heart is focused on Holy Saturday.
Holy Saturday
We all want the difficult stuff going on to be over. Each thing we do, letter written, protest made, our five calls, our donation to legal action, our support for trans right, each thing we hope will make a difference. Jesus followers in Jerusalem, and their long wait through his trial and death, the very long Saturday sabbath, these remind us that change isn't instantaneous. In fact Judas' story might be that when we try to make things better, it seems to make them worse. We are going to be in this present tragedy for more than three days.
Talk about the civil rights protest of the sixties is a sign of how long change takes -- those protests started long before the sixties. The sixties is just when white news media started paying attention. And the violence against black and brown people was "supposed" to end after the civil war.
Before Jesus died he predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, and his prediction came true about forty years later. None of the disciples were alive when the church began to grow to numbers too big to have dinner together every night. The Kingdom of God began with Jesus, and 2000 years later it is noticeably incomplete.
It took the Czechs more than forty years to end communism in their country. Pol Pot managed to kill off 2 million people in just three years of leadership in Cambodia. South Africa lived with apartheid for forty six years. World war II was six years. The modern slave trade lasted for four hundred years.
During all of this, and other, horrible events, ordinary people kept living ordinary lives. And they resisted. And their resistance worked. It took a long time. A lot of people were abused, denied their humanity. A lot of people died. The ordinariness of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, of going to work, of connecting with neighbors feels impossible, and yet people kept doing it. They celebrated whatever beauty and joy could be found. The world around them looked hopeless, impossible, and unbearable and yet they kept going.
On Holy Saturday we remember a time when no one knew if the Jesus movement was over. When hope was at it lowest moment and the sadness was overwhelming. When frustration at the futility of fighting the powers-that-be was at its highest.
The truth is we don't know if the U. S. experimental form of democracy, capitalism, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is over. When the history is written, it may tell us that it was already destroyed today. Or it maybe some event from today is the turning point. Maybe what we are doing today will be like the civil rights protests in the fifties -- mostly forgotten. But it doesn't mean it wasn't important.
If the resistance succeeds, something new will come to be.
On Thursday, this holy week, we celebrate God is with us in times of trouble. On Friday we consider the trial without due process, and Roman Empire's indiscriminate use of the death penalty. On Saturday we keep watch, remembering that the disciples did not know what they were watching for.
And indeed, we have some values we want protected, but we do not know the new thing to come. We just know that we must stand up for what is right, care for those being attacked, and continue to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.
How are you feeling this week? Hopeful? Frustrated? Despair? How does your congregation engage in these issues? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening in your neck of the woods.
Plant a garden in Babylon. The idea is that when God's people were in Babylon all they could do was settle in where they were. Today we use this to imagine how to have ordinary life in the middle of the oppression and chaos of these times. Here is a blog post by Bethany J about planting a garden in Babylon.
One way to get through Holy Saturday is to connect to others in your church. One way to get through these times in the United States is to connect to other organizations. This article from Sojourner's Magazine describes making one connection.
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