Holy Saturday 2021

 Holy Saturday • 3 April 2021

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Job 14.1-14; Psalm 130; 1 Peter 4.1-8; Matthew 27.57-66

+

Just as I cannot imagine moving directly from Palm Sunday to Easter without going through the daily services of Holy Week, nor can I imagine jumping from Good Friday to Easter, without pausing for Holy Saturday. Indeed, this day until sunset invites us to linger just a while longer in this strange space between Christ’s death and resurrection. I always had to beg the altar guild to give me just a little more time in the emptiness of the church, now a tomb, lonely without the reserve sacrament, before plunging into Easter preparations. (I never prevailed.)

The office for Holy Saturday is stark: no opening greeting, just a prayer,  two or three readings, a psalm, a hymn from the Burial Office, the Lord’s Prayer and a finally blessing. 

One might think the readings are a downer. The reading from Job begins:

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
comes up like a flower and withers, 
flees like a shadow and does not last. 

One is better off being a tree which, when chopped down, will sprout new shoots, than to be a mortal that will die and be lain low. The writer wonders finally: 

If mortals die, will they live again?
 All the days of my service I would wait 
until my release should come.

The response, Psalm 130, counters the gloomy reflection by professing confidence in God:

I wait for the Lord: my soul waits for him:

in his word is my hope.

With him there is plenteous redemption,

and he shall redeem Israel from all their sins.

The gospel relates how Joseph of Arimathea goes to Pilate, asks for Jesus’ body, takes it to his grave and places it in there. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary are there, sitting at the tomb. Later Pilate will order that a stone be placed in front of the tomb so that Jesus cannot escape.

Then the congregation responds with a hymn from the Burial Office, also from Job: 

In the midst of life we are in death;
from whom can we seek help?

From you alone, O Lord,
who by our sins are justly angered.

+

So many of us have experienced that strange time between a person’s death and their burial. It is time out of time, an agonising form of waiting, one of nervous energy, on the one hand, and emptiness for what and whom we have lost, on the other. 

That is where we find ourselves in the journey toward Easter. Jesus is dead and in the grave. We will not celebrate his resurrection until after sunset tonight or before sunrise tomorrow, if we keep the vigil or tomorrow morning. We wait.

The church traditionally marked today as the Harrowing of Hell, when Jesus descended to the dead.
Every Holy Saturday, I have read from an ancient homily on the holy and great Sabbath, which describes Jesus’ descent to the dead. 1

The homily begins: 

Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

The homily then describes Jesus’ search for Adam and Eve, ‘he who is both God and son of Eve,’ to set them free. God says that God did not create Jesus to be a prisoner in hell. ‘Rise, let us leave this place,’ God cries, ‘for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.’ The story of salvation unfolds in poetic form with the voices between God and Jesus intermingling.

The homily concludes, ‘Rise, let us leave this place.’ Humanity will never return to the first paradise, but will, instead, be in heaven with God. ‘The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you for all eternity. 2

I cannot say this last paragraph without tears, even after 25 years of reading it out loud in this office. Why? Therein lies all my hope: ‘The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you for all eternity.’ That is where you and I are headed and where our loved ones no longer with us already are.

The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you for all eternity.’

For a moment, linger in the wonder of that simply sentence. Think about those moments when you have touched the sense of eternity. They exist. And marvel that that promise is what this whole week’s journey has been about.


NOTES
1 http://www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/spirit_20010414_omelia-sabato-santo_en.html
2 Howard Galley, The Prayer Book Office (NY, NY: The Seabury Press, 1980), 735-37.

Good Friday 2 April 2021

 Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10.1-25; John 18.1-19.37
+

On a grey Good Friday, with snow flurries off and on (this is Vermont, after all), we enter closer and closer into liminal space, where heaven and earth come closer and closer and, eventually, touch. We touch the mystery of life and death and get a glimpse perhaps of eternity, which awaits us all.

Once again, the usual—and perhaps comforting—rituals of the day have been put aside because of the pandemic. I know that in other parts of the world of Christian expression, people have worshipped together last night, stripped the altar, set aside the reserve sacrament for today, kept vigil by the Altar of Repose where the sacrament sits, but where I am worshipping virtually, we are doing none of these actions.

Instead, the liturgy has been pared down to its barest form: words. The Good Friday office in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is rich and stands on its own. 

It begins abruptly, but we need to remember that the service is a continuation of the Maundy Thursday liturgy from last night. Good Friday is the hinge between Jesus’ life and his death and resurrection. We begin the liturgy with the recognition that Jesus is still alive; we end with him dead.

We always hear from the Gospel according to John. Its description of the actors in Jesus’ Passion remains problematic in its anti-Semitism, and is a sermon unto itself. Likewise, the many theologies about why Jesus died on the cross are problematic: they range from God needing to substitute Jesus on behalf of humanity; humanity being so depraved that the only thing God could do was kill God’s Son on our behalf to the cross being God’s self-emptying love in Jesus, a love that exceeds our comprehension. Again, the theologies are too many to consider here.

The Solemn Collects we pray uniquely on Good Friday are powerful in their petitions that cover every aspect of our common life together. They end with the collect we pray at ordinations, at the end of the readings of the Great Vigil of Easter (just tomorrow night or early Easter morning), a collect that offers a vision of hope: ‘Let the whole world see and know that things which were case down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord….’

This is but a synopsis of what we pray on Good Friday. This year, however, I want to focus on our mortality and what we can glean from Good Friday

+

If there is anything we have had to face this year, it has been our mortality. The COVID-19 pandemic that has turned our lives upside-down has snatched away over 553K of our citizens and 2,83M souls world-wide. The early days were terrifying in the acceleration of mortality; now, 54 weeks later of lockdown in Vermont, have we become inured? The 21 February front page of the New York Times had the devastating graphic of what 500K deaths looks like and was described thusly: 

From afar, the graphic on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times looks like a blur of gray, a cloudy gradient that slowly descends into a block of solid ink. Up close, it shows something much darker: close to 500,000 individual dots, each representing a single life lost in the United States to the coronavirus, signifying a staggering milestone that the nation is reaching in just under 12 months.(1)

Thus, we come to Good Friday, when COVID-19 cases are alarmingly rising in Vermont, the positivity rate is going up, despite Vermont having the nation’s highest rate of vaccinations. We are not out of the woods yet; we still have a long way to go. Death still surrounds us at very close proximity.

We have so much to grieve… the loss of our former lives, the uncertainty of the current moment, those people lost to COVID-19 and everyone else who has died, whose deaths perhaps have not received the same amount of attention and this grief is all wrapped up in the yearly existential grief of Jesus’ death on the cross, something that, if not understood intellectually, we grasp in the depths of our hearts and being.

This year, more than ever, I am purposely conflating Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ death with the Day of the Dead (2 November). Ultimately, Jesus’ death leads to the promise of the resurrection, which we will celebrate in two days on Easter. We cannot have Easter without today. So, I wrap together the deaths we know with the death of Jesus.

+

In prior years, for the portion of the Good Friday liturgy, the Veneration of the Cross, I offered an expression that is more in line with the Orthodox  liturgy and, perhaps, more accessible to people’s experiences. Instead of walking up and touching or kissing a cross, I invite people to approach a cross lying on a bier, take a rose from the vase in front of it, and place it on the cross, the way one might cast flowers into a grave, such that they land on the casket or urn. The cross I have used is a Salvadoran painted cross. Jesus’ halo is red and yellow and the sun rises above it. Over the years, I have been moved to see how people have chosen to place their roses. Some years, they leave his face uncovered; other years, they completely cover it. Regardless, I believe that in the veneration of the cross, they leave their collectives griefs and losses with Jesus.

Maybe this gentle gesture is something you can do today to remember those whom you have loved and see no more, and be still with Jesus, whose death on the cross is part of the great mystery of our faith. You can take a cross, place it on a clear table, perhaps on top of some material, light some candles and then place flowers on it. Then be still in the silence and depth of the moment.

 

(Above: after people have prayed at the cross; Below: roses in the vase form a heart.)

+

The final collect of the Good Friday Office says it all:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living; pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

NOTE
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/insider/covid-500k-front-page.html

Maundy Thursday 2021

 Maundy Thursday • 1 April 2021

Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Exodus 12.1-14a; Psalm 78.14-20, 23-25; 1 Corinthians 11.23-32; John 13.1-15; Luke 22.14-20

+

Maundy Thursday solidifies the turning-point that we noted yesterday. There is no looking back, only going forward deeper and deeper into the journey to the cross and Easter Resurrection. We move from the betrayal of Jesus by Judas into the further confusion of the disciples, who are frantically trying to understand what is happening to them.

he readings and collect for this liturgy complicate matters because they focus on both foundational actions that become part of the church’s story: foot-washing with the new commandment to love one another (John) and the institution of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians and Luke). The collect, when added to the reading from 1 Corinthians, would make the listener think the major focus of Maundy Thursday is the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. But then there is the gospel from John, that relates how Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, gives them the example of the teacher humbling himself before his disciples, prior to Judas’ betrayal, and teaches them the Great Commandment to love. The person preaching and the person preparing the liturgy always have to decide which reading to choose—the norm is the reading from John with the footwashing.

No wonder the Maundy Thursday liturgy itself has gotten so complicated over time. Which narrative do we emphasise? How do we enter into the three most holy days of the year, the Triduum, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday? How do we convey that once we start the liturgy on Maundy Thursday, it does not end until Easter? There are no blessings, the liturgies flow one to the next until, finally, we gather after sunset Saturday night or before dawn Easter morning for the Great Vigil and the first Eucharist of Easter.

+

For most of us, today is the second year in a row where we are unable physically to gather and do all the rituals associated with this night. Accordingly, we have had to do a lot of rethinking about the physicality of the actions commemorated this evening, particularly the Holy Eucharist.

Last year, we had barely entered the pandemic with all its restrictions. In my neck of the woods, the bishop had already ordered the buildings closed, even to the clergy, so we did not have access to the usual symbols and spaces associated with Holy Week. Where I was serving, we did not even try for Communion on Easter; we just read Morning Prayer, the way it used to be back in the 1960s, before Communion became the norm for Sundays.
This year, we find ourselves still in a time of pandemic, Coronatide 54 and, in Vermont at least, is still worshipping remotely. All those actions of this night—foot washing, celebrating Holy Eucharist for the last time until Easter (only three days off but an eternity spiritually), reserving blessed bread and wine, Christ’s Body and Blood, that are lovingly placed in a separate space for an overnight vigil, in preparation for Good Friday; reading Psalm 22 while the congregation removes everything from the altar area, strips the altar and washes the altar with crosses of wine on the corners and in the middle and then cleans it with water—all these familiar actions once again won’t happen and all we are left with are words.

People are champing at the bit to get back into the buildings, back to having weekly communion, but it still is not safe to do so. Others have tied themselves up in theological knots over the expectation that on Good Friday, whatever bread and wine still remain, must be consumed so that there is no Jesus anywhere until the first Eucharist of Easter. Yet yesterday I picked up two tiny little plastic containers that hold wine and a minute piece of bread, which were blessed on Palm Sunday. I have placed them in a secure place and they shall wait for us to consume on Easter along with a remote congregation. There will be Jesus in my house tomorrow and Saturday morning and it will be OK. We adapt as we go along.

Weekly communion, which used to be the breath of my life, my being, now seems like a distant memory. Since last March, I have had communion just once, on Christmas Eve, in the same fashion. The next time I will be able to receive will be on Pentecost, off in May. Even though I could celebrate at home, I do not, as part of my vow to obey my bishop and remain in solidarity with my sister and brother priests who, likewise, have abstained from celebrating at home or privately. We fast. We wait. And we sometimes whine.

Nor can we wash each other’s feet this year. That, too, remains an impossibility, given the restrictions of the pandemic.

+

So, again, we are back to the memories and the words. Like the people of Israel in exile, we remain in exile in this Holy Week. Maybe next year, we can return to some of these familiar actions, though I imagine after two years of virtual Holy Week, we may reimagine much of what we do. Some of our rituals may become sweet memories, no longer necessary for our worship.

On this Maundy Thursday, while still in exile, while still unable to celebrate the Lord’s Supper and wash people’s feet, while not yet able to imagine a future with physical worship, my heart turns to Psalm 126:

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
then were we like those who dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Then they said among the nations,
‘The LORD has done great things for them.’
The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are glad indeed.

Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like the water courses of the Negev.
Those who sowed with tears
will reap with songs of joy.

Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed,

will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

Whether we gather together physically or remotely, God is with us. And where God is, there is love. And where love is, there is God. That fundamentally is the message of tonight. Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est. May you carry this hope in your heart through the next three days.