Thank you for your willingness to share in so many ways as we’ve journeyed together this Lenten season through Hope in Dying. We will have several opportunities to gather as we move through Holy Week in the coming days.
Think of your neighbors and friends and colleagues who do not have a church home. Many of these folks will look for a church this Easter and we hope you’ll invite them to join us at The Table.
HOLY WEEK SCHEDULE
April 2 6:00 pm Maundy Thursday Meal & Holy Conferencing in Social Hall
April 3 6:00 pm Good Friday Worship in Sanctuary
April 5 Easter Sunday 6:30am McKinley Park, 9:30 & 11:00am in the Sanctuary
Our Easter gatherings will be rooted in Mark 16.1-8.
Frederick Buechner writes about Easter in this way: “The Gospels are far from clear as to just what happened. It began in the dark. The stone had been rolled aside. Matthew alone speaks of an earthquake. In the tomb there were two white-clad figures or possibly just one. Mary Magdalen seems to have gotten there before anybody else. There was a man she thought at first was the gardener. Perhaps Mary the mother of James was with her and another woman named Joanna. One account says Peter came too with one of the other disciples. Elsewhere the suggestion is that there were only the women and that the disciples, who were somewhere else, didn’t believe the women’s story when they heard it. There was the sound of people running, of voices. Matthew speaks of “fear and great joy.” Confusion was everywhere. There is no agreement even as to the role of Jesus himself. Did he appear at the tomb or only later? Where? To whom did he appear? What did he say? What did he do? … It’s not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn’t have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth. If the Gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster. Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt” (originally published in Whistling in the Dark).
What is the significance of Easter for you? If someone were to ask you why Easter matters, what would you have to say?