Dear Grace,
What a Holy Week! We got a full-dimensional picture of the beauty of Grace. Our Holy Week a.m. devotions were a wonderful time of reflecting on the timeline of Jesus’ march to the cross, all in the context of a multi-generational gathering around breakfast and conversations that followed. Journey with Jesus was a creative and moving depiction of Jesus’ final week end. My family had to just sit on the floor in the lobby of the church, processing what we experienced. I always knew we had some amazingly gifted and creative folks, but this was another level.
Good Friday service was creative and simple. Christine and the team invited us to consider Jesus’ death on the cross through our senses. Remembrance through communion in a slow and intimate way deeply moved all of our pastors. You are so beloved to the Lord and to us. What a beautiful work God has done and is doing among us!
Then there was Easter. By the time Lent had run its course, and Holy Week had intensified, I was ready to declare resurrection! The energy, the beauty, and the “largeness” of the occasion was fitting. We ended up baptizing 39 people on Sunday. About a dozen of them were impromptu baptisms! In fact, a group of about 50 people ended up staying after the ending of the 1:00 gathering to witness and celebrate five more people who got baptized after most had left for the day. I didn’t get home until 3:45!
In view of the past weekend, my prayers and longings are that God would cause the seed sown into our hearts to bear fruit: to not be choked up by the enticements of life or withered by the worries of the world or snatched away by the evil one (Mark 4). Join me in praying for fruit to be born 100-fold!
As we look into this coming month, I was reminded by Pastor Thomas that we celebrate the resurrection every Sunday. It’s true – each week we gather, we declare that Jesus is alive. Only he has the power to unite us and bring us together from all different backgrounds as one family.
I shared with our staff this past week that we are so good at leading up to an event, anticipating it, “hyping it up” (as my son would say), but we are not good at sustaining an occasion. We move on so quickly to the next thing. Let’s not move on so quickly from the resurrection (did you know that in many liturgical traditions Easter is a season of 40 days?). The earliest disciples never got over the resurrection. The transforming message and news continued to grow in intensity and effect as more and more people experienced Jesus’ power through His Spirit. Oh, that God would do that work among us!
Thomas suggested several ways to “practice resurrection” (borrowing the phrase from Eugene Peterson). They’re so simple that they don’t need much explanation.
- Celebrate resurrection every Sunday in corporate worship
- Foster a spirit of gratitude and joy – Jesus is alive!
- Enter each Friday as a day of gratitude (especially if you’re launching into Sabbath)
- Foster a sense of hope in the renewal of all things – seasons of renewal and cycles of life come again and again, bringing us closer and closer to God. Related to Lent, what is God putting to death and bringing to life
- Practice sacrificial service and love – incarnating Jesus to one another
These may seem obvious, but I found them helpful. Pray for me this week. I’m getting us back into Ecclesiastes and the next section, Eccles 7:15-8:17, is a doozie. I haven’t been this stretched and confused by a passage in a long time! I’m praying for clarity and brevity as we hear from this important section.
Finally, as the rains have passed and the sun is out, be reminded that God is continually at work. I look out my back window and the trees are all barren. Everything looks like the winter has killed it. Yet, the branches all have these little buds, signs of life. Resurrection reminders. That’s what we’ll be celebrating again this Sunday. I hope you’ll join us!