ALL SAINTS CHURCH

This next week the Church celebrates Holy Week.  The marking off of space  from ordinary usage is at the heart of what we mean by being holy.  Of course one could argue that every week is holy and that God is always everywhere, but we know that this is more avoidance than a declaration of faith. Churches are designed to consecrate space and time in order to help people gain sight of the fact that although we live in this world, we in fact belong to another world.  This other world encompasses depth and meaning that cannot be found in ordinary time.  This other world is concerned with the eternal questions of life and death and the transformation of our souls.  This is not something we are likely to read in the Wall Street Journal.

In Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday: The Passion of our Lord, we become actors in a drama. Our liturgy is a work (liturgy means the work of the people) that helps to shape our minds and spirits to the mind and Spirit of the Christ.  It teaches us how to face our mortality and how to find life in the midst of death.  We enter Jerusalem with Jesus and recall the high expectations of the ages and also of our youth.  Soon we meet the rejection of our optimism as a manifestation of our human social condition.  We too reject the promise, we reject the hope and we choose expediency and conformity.

Palm Sunday encompasses this drama, and is followed by a commemoration of the other major events in the last week of Jesus’ life. His farewell meal with his disciples as he teaches the church that the way of life is the way of service (the foot washing) and love. Good Friday allows us to imaginatively suffer with Christ as we recall his passion and embrace our mortality. We come to understand the tragedy inherent in every human life as well as how human injustice is meted out to the innocent.  

Finally we celebrate Easter: The Feast of the Resurrection.  If one has not entered into the drama of the passion, Easter can ring a little hollow or saccharine.  But when we come to realize that death is answered by resurrection, we enter into the divine dialectical dialogue of transformation.  We come to understand that the way of the cross is the way of life and this is not just a drama that gets played out on the day we physically die, but is a constant drama that is designed to help us enter into the eternal mind of Christ.

Please join us and become actors in this work/dance/liturgy of the sacred mysteries.  Perhaps you can watch some of it on TV and you can read about it in books, but here you can be a player in the Sacred Drama, this Sunday and the rest of the week as listed in our schedule.