Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

The rector who was my first supervisor as a young priest used to tell the story of a fellow rector who checked in to a mental hospital for Easter Week nearly every year. I, myself, share openly that when Jesus emerges from the tomb on Easter morning I am ready to climb in behind him for a long nap.

Holy Week is a marathon. We enact so much in so short a time. At St. Andrew’s, the journey of Holy Week begins with our Palm Sunday procession from Green Lake to the church. It follows its usual course from Green Lake Park just west of the tennis courts at the park’s north end winding through our neighborhood and through the front doors of the church led by two donkeys. Street theatre, plain and simple. We then save the reading of the Passion for a dramatic climax at the very end of the Palm Sunday service, sending people out a little disoriented I hope.

Monday and Tuesday special evensong services offered a contemplative setting and a service of healing. Wednesday featured our third annual Tenebrae service.

Then on Maundy Thursday our community sat down to an Agape Feast and interpretive Seder meal that began at 6 p.m. featuring roast lamb and symbolic foods from the Exodus story. The evening moved on to a foot-washing ceremony then a shared prayer service with the Armenian Church who shares our building followed by the stripping of the altar. We were in church four-and-a-half hours that night.

Good Friday we had a a shared noon service with our local Lutheran Church and then our own service at 7 p.m. with Rafe Pearlman, a rock star cantor who wailed the Invocation of the Angels at the place in the Passion Story where Jesus gave up the ghost and then sang the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

The Easter Vigil began at 8 p.m. with the lighting of the new fire. Our Evening Worship Team led the Service of Light and Lessons that opens this service in the style of Taize with long silences and deeply repeated chants.

Then Sunday morning the great feast of our faith was celebrated in services at 8 and 10 a.m. followed by the traditional Easter Egg hunt on the church’s lawn. We flowered a cross at the front door. The Brass Quartet was stunning. My children’s sermon was funny.

The whole thing was a beautiful, intense, multi-layered, impossible week. Why we felt the need to commemorate so much so literally and then so much MORE so symbolically and then even so much MORE mystically (we hoped . . .) is beyond me. The whole thing is beyond me.

But then, what are we commemorating? Is it anything less than God’s absolutely redeeming and freely given grace for salvation of all creation? No wonder our parades and meals and bowls and fonts of water and gifts of bread and wine and fires and incense and choirs and flowers and bonnets and eggs and feasting and Alleluias are still so inadequate to the observance of nothing less than our own salvation and promise of eternal life.

But we do the best we can. And then we take a nap.