This newsletter comes to you with an invitation. The daily devotional thoughts from the ministers challenge you to set aside undistracted time every day and take an intentional inward look in anticipation of Easter.
The week preceding Easter is known as “Holy Week.” Perhaps more than any other time of the year, the life of Jesus comes into conversation — and sometimes collision — with ours. Before Easter comes with its promises of new life, we do well to reconsider what it means to live at all, at least to live in the way that Jesus calls us to. This year, we listen to sayings drawn from the four Gospels’ stories of Jesus on the cross — the traditional “Seven Last Words of Christ” — and reflect again on what Jesus is telling us.
To walk with Jesus through Holy Week takes us not only to the pain of Good Friday and its cross, but also with Jesus to the whole new creation proclaimed in his resurrection. Like the first disciples, we can stand in awe, wonder, and holy fear before the new thing God has done in Christ. Park Renshaw captures it powerfully in his essay, “If It’s True It’s a New World, Does That Scare You?”
“Something has gone wrong — or has gone so right they can’t take it in. But one thing they knew, somehow it was clear to them that the world was not the same anymore. It was a new world. They just didn’t know what to do with it yet. But they would find out. In raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, God showed us the world according to God. In Jesus Christ the world is now a new world. It is a world where the meek do inherit the earth, even when they don’t have a deed to it registered in the courthouse. It is a world where the poor in spirit have the only riches, and among the poor the bread is blessed and broken and everyone has enough.”
In 2020, perhaps more than any other year, our well-worn pathways to Easter are being rerouted by physical distancing and stay-at-home orders. Now more than ever, the resurrection hope of Easter is in deep conflict with the lived reality of pandemic threat. It is a call to pray, examine ourselves again, and listen deeply for the Holy Spirit — responding to the ways that God is forming us for God’s purpose in the world, even now. As you listen again to God, may you discover how the promises of new life, new work, and new hope are part of your life every day.
Grace and Peace,