It’s Holy Week

I imagine you're all well aware of this fact. It might have been the palms. It might have been the crazed look in your clergy's eye. It might have been the two weeks old dying palm fronds in the shapes of crosses at the grocery. Maybe you have a child who is asking every few minutes what day it is because they haven't yet arrived at the Age of having any true concept of time. If you're like me, the knowledge really sunk in when you arrived at church yesterday and realized you'd left a whole day off your acolyte schedule and so finally sucked it up to decide to let your oldest child train to be a crucifer because you were already tired and you just don't care anymore. As an aside, let me encourage all of you to have children, most especially because the church needs children to carry on the discipling work of attending at the altar. And if you are clergy, and you're just starting out, don't stiff yourself. Have several, if not more, children. I know it means ten years of finding babysitters for all your Holy Week services (no mean feat) but at the end of that decade, you will be looking at another fifteen years at least of fewer scheduling problems as you compel your children to do what God is calling them to.

Where was I?

Oh yes. It's Holy Week. And Holy Week means… lists. Lots and lots of lists. Lists of readers, acolytes, preachers, candles, different kinds of vestments, odd jobs, six even Easter baskets, Easter clothes, shoes, Easter dinner, cleaning, what else…I'm sure there are some other things. But it's not just lists. It's muscling through each day to prepare for church every evening.

No, that's not what I mean to say. I meant to talk about what a wonderful week it is. How much I love it. How much I look forward to it all year. How it is fitting and right that the highest, holiest pinnacle of the year, of the Christian's Life is to suspend everything else and concentrate completely and totally on the meditation of and finally celebrating of the Gospel Itself, of the Word.

It is a Holy Week. It is a week set apart, shrouded in the glory and majesty of God. It is a week where the trials and troubles and materialness of our every day lives intersects with God's physical, body sacrifice of himself. It is a week where the few, the faithful, gather again and again to be close to God, in his suffering, in his love, in his death.

But that also sounds not right. Too fancy, too spiritual. Because it is also an UnHoly Week. If I am going to sin, in thought and mind and word and deed, it's going to be this week. If I am going to fail, it is going to be this week. If I am going to be short with my kids, or wrongly align my expectations, and wrongly prioritize my time, it is going to be this week. It will be this week, as Matt and I wrangle with the scriptures, trying to be fresh and new with well worn texts, texts that we preach again and again, it will be this week that we bicker and fuss. It will be this week that we take offense were no offense is intended.

And this, this Unholiness, cannot be blamed of the intensity of the work, or the pace, or the stress, or anything other than bringing your own self under the shadow of the cross, of looking at Jesus in his suffering perfection and seeing the vast great distance between him and you, and then of admitting the distance, and then of going forward anyway.

So, I hope it will be a Holy and Good Week for you. I'm going to put this up and also another Sarcastic Devotional Moment. And, because I still haven't gotten to it, a sneak of one of the new rooms, both ready for the Last Supper, and then full throttle into that celebration.

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