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Dear friends, this is a post I was intending to post on the day before easter, but forgot about until now, so instead of waiting to figure out my thoughts about advent, I'm simply posting my thoughts about lent.
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I was just realizing that there was probably nothing in my
new journal about lent, the church season we are about to leave, so I was going
to go get my journal from my bag and make some comments when I realized that my
journal is in Houghton.
Therefore, this is a xanga post, the first in an achingly
long time. So now it is Holy Week. Last night I went to the first celebration
of Maunday Thursday I have ever been a part of. It was informal, a handful of
us gathered in one of our friend’s flats, and we all sat on cushions on the
floor and sang hymns and washed each other’s feet and shared a sader meal. This
meal was similar to the Jewish Passover feast, but the litany we followed was
Christian, celebrating Christ as the paschal Lamb, and looking forward to next
year not in Jerusalem
but forward in hope to the wedding feast with the lamb in the new Jerusalem.
There were some creative college student revisions to the meal… instead of lamb
we ate chicken, instead of parsley we ate romaine, but on the whole it was a
rich and beautiful picture of the Lord’s love for us. I had been a little
crypic about the fact that we all had to stay for orchestra the night break was
starting, but I was so glad that staying gave me such a beautiful opportunity.
Today has been a strange day in that I spend a good deal of
it packing, cleaning up my part of the house, getting ready to see my family,
driving home, running around to different libraries to find books for
children’s lit. Much of the time after 2 pm when my parents came and picked me
up was passed swapping stories about the adventures of being a second semester
junior for stories of their getting their rental car broken into in France, and visiting friends down south, and
just missing the tornados in Georgia.
But tonight I went to my church’s Good Friday service. I
must say I went a little skeptical, for though I love my church incredibly
dearly, I’m not always amazingly moved by the special services we have. I have
been to such good Good Friday
services, (at St. Paul’s in London, Lenten services my choir was involved
with, Episcopal Compline) that I wasn’t really expecting to be much impressed
upon. The man speaking was a pastor of the other OPC church in town who I have
in previous hearings been a little critical of, but I left the church ashamed
of myself for my presuppositions. Were many of the hymns in major, when I would
have appreciated a more meditative and dark tune to set the words? Yes. Was it
a very simply set service, with nothing but scripture, singing and a homily?
Yes. But what a homily.
He started by reading some scripture, but to make a point he
changed the text of Deut. 27: 15-26 to read
“Cursed is Jesus Christ, who carves an image or casts an
idol—a thing detestable to the Lord, the work to the craftsman’s hands—and sets
it up in secret.”
Then all the people shall say,
“Amen!”
“Cursed is Jesus Christ, who dishonors his father or his
mother.”
Then all the people shall say,
“Amen!”
“Cursed is Jesus Christ, who moves his neighbor’s boundary
stone”
Then all the people shall say,
“Amen!”
And on and on it went. I was shocked into a new and powerful
realization of what it means for Jesus to “be sin for us.” What it means to
“carry our iniquities.” Paster Judd spoke of Paul’s desire to know nothing but
Christ and him crucified, and that we must not waver from this foundation to
all we believe. He talked of the passage about Paul’s message not being with
wise or persuasive words, (I might add, or expertly arranged and played music)
but with the Spirit’s power. It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I left
wanting still more of this goodness, this probing Lenten glance that I seem to
have found myself too busy for in the last 38 days.
I came back to the house and went for a book of sermons by
James Van Tholen, the former pastor of the Rochester Christian Reformed Church
who died several years ago of leukemia at the age of 36. He was a very gifted
speaker, in that the sermons he writes are both intensely personally
challenging, and stretch the listener’s understanding of God. In as much as the
sermons are well crafted and theologically intricate, they also honestly and
emotionally cut right to the heart. The book of sermons we own is of Sermons
for the liturgical year, so I went looking for a Good Friday sermon, and found
that there was nothing between Palm Sunday and Easter, so I turned to Palm
Sunday instead.
I wish I could type up Van Tholen’s whole sermon for you to
read. It is so, so good, but since this post is getting so long already, and I
don’t want to discourage everyone from reading it, I won’t add in another five
pages of sermon but know that it is good. In it, he embraces the complexity of
Jesus’ triumphal entry, showing how Jesus
is “blessed to come in the name of the Lord” though the coming leads him to
the cross. Let me type up just a paragraph or so…
“Neither the crowd who honored Jesus Christ on Sunday, nor
the soldiers who nailed the charge above his head on Friday had much of an idea
how just right they were. The crowd thought, “Maybe, finally we have a
deliverer, a king to drive out our enemies.” When they shouted “Hosanna!” on
Palm Sunday, when they shouted, “Save us,” it was the Roman corruption they had
in mind, not their own. They were praising a messiah who was going to kill to save them; what they didn’t
realize is that they had so much more – they had a messiah who was going to die to save them” (from page 86 of Where All Hope Lies: Sermons for the
Liturgical Year.)
There is more that I would love to share… this evening’s reading
from The Book of Common Prayer, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, The Dream of the
Rood, John Sander’s The Reproaches,
T. S. Eliot and lent and John Piper, and all these things that have enriched
how I look at the death and victory of Christ. But as I sit in my bed curled up
in a fleece blanket as I write these things, I realize that enough for me may
be far too much for you. Thanks, to those of you who kept reading all of this.
The peace of the Lord be with you all.
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