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Pastoral Missive: Easter Come, Easter Go
With the rotation of the earth, our liturgical calendar has made another turn as well. As a community of worshipers we have journeyed through the Lenten season together, culminating with three Easter services on April 12th. In so doing, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in all the remembrance and celebration – and the work – that come with the times. Many of you were able to join in on one or more of our Saturday evening services this spring, which along with our Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services were conceived and led by our growing music and worship planning team. I cannot say enough about the spirit with which these individuals have each contributed their time, creativity and faith to this project. These kinds of worship experiences cannot be fashioned by one person alone. Lent is a long internal journey expressed externally in worship, and that journey is inescapably central in the slow transformation of our souls. It is also a journey best taken together – as we work and live our way together into an opened grave!
Besides, depending on one or two people alone for the formation of our worship would defeat one of the central purposes of putting creative worship together – the opportunity to engage the scriptures together for the sake of the worship leaders themselves! Anything at all a believer chooses to do – anything in the name of following Christ – can become a rich opportunity for growing closer to the one in whom we believe. And the task of growth, like the task of learning to love, is always best accomplished in community – where two or three are gathered – rather than as lone wolves seeking only a private peace far from the sometimes maddening crowd.
Liturgy means literally ‘the worship/work of the people,’ and life in every arena of our gathered community of faith is liturgical work. When Jim and Katie Pazan left us at the beginning of January this year, a question was raised at their reception about how as a congregation we could help fill in for all the things they had been doing for the pastor. My response is emphatically still what it was then: it was never what they had been doing ‘for’ the pastor, but what they had been doing ‘with’ the pastor for which they would be missed. In the same way, our imaginations would be best served by thinking not of what our pastor is doing ‘for’ us as what he or she is doing ‘with’ us – namely attempting to the best of our abilities to follow the great commission, gathering followers, building disciples and sending apostles into the world. My point extends more meaningfully to life within our individual families as well as throughout our family of faith – it is working ‘with’ one another rather than merely ‘for’ one another that makes Jesus’ yoke easy and his burden light.
So where might this reflection lead you in the present season of your own life of faith? I don’t know. But I think that as Easter comes and goes, our dedication to the journey must remain. I invite you to pray that God might lead you wisely into new and fresh encounters with your calling with the living Christ through new and fresh encounters with his church wherever you find it. For after the resurrection, we are now his living body, engaged joyously in the liturgy of his continuing mission on the earth.
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