Invitation to a Holy Week

Tomorrow morning, children are invited to come at 10am and walk the way of the cross.  It will be an opportunity to experience the story of Jesus' Passion using every sense and all of our imagination.  We'll recreate the entire story--from the joy of Palm Sunday, through the Last Supper, into Gethsemane, through the tragedy of the cross, down into the tomb...and then...back out again.  It is so important that children have an opportunity to engage with this story, to learn it and feel it.  We do children a disservice when we "protect" them from the sadness and ugliness of this story; it is the story of our salvation, and they should know it, too.

Then on Sunday we'll begin this holiest of weeks by experiencing that great paradox of worship services: we'll enter church shouting "Hosanna!" and waving palm fronds, only to hear a few minutes later the story of how quickly a similar joy 2,000 years ago turned into mob violence and death.  It is an emotionally confusing day, one that won't let us stay too long in one frame of mind.  Which seems to me to be profoundly appropriate as we begin our week-long journey toward the cross.  It's not easy or simple.  But life isn't, and neither is faith.

This coming week at St. Peter's, we will join with billions of fellow Christians by commemorating the fateful last week of Jesus' life.  We will hear the way he broke bread with his friends, washed their feet, prayed fervently with them, was betrayed and abandoned by them, rejected violence, and accepted an unjust death.  The gravity of this week, the weight of these stories, the magnitude of what they tell us about Jesus, about God, about how God will stop at nothing to be with us for an eternity...it all commands our reverence and devotion. 

Billions of Christians will stop their normal routines this week.  They will set aside work and play in order to go to Jerusalem, to Calvary, to the foot of the cross.  And that is because for the faithful, there is nothing more important than journeying with the one who poured out his life so that we might have it, and have it abundantly. 

I hope you, too, will dedicate yourself to walking the way of the cross this week.  I hope you will commit to attending worship on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  I hope you will allow your heart to again be broken.  For it is through brokenness--Jesus' and ours--that we are born to eternal life.