It is harder than it looks to know how to take Easter. On the one hand it feels like an easy home run, a touchdown, a triumphal entry. But those were the kinds of thing we were celebrating last week. How then is this week different? For one thing it amazes how few people to whom Jesus appeared after the resurrection. One would think he would be taking out billboards all over town that said, “I told you so!” but he doesn’t. The first to see Jesus would be the last we would expect. It was not the disciples, not even his family, but one of the…
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Manic Maundy: How you can prevent waging a personal war-on-Easter.
It is springtime and it seems the hectic demands I usually have around Christmas are beginning to over take Holy Week as well. Besides my normal work obligations I have time sensitive art projects, volunteer work, some important events with my friends and of course, church services. I feel like I am waging my own personal war on Easter trying to figure out what the most Christian choices I can make are. I suspect that I am not at all alone in this. I find myself asking familiar questions about what Christianity is all, “about,”
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Actually, Yeah. Mary Did Know.
I love the songs that capture what horror it must have felt like to be a teenage girl who God had chosen for, well, anything. I feel both a sense of honor and terror every time I think that there is good on earth God would have me do. So songs like “Breath of Heaven,” by Amy Grant and “Mary Did You Know,” by Mark Lowry tap into our sense of how overwhelming we would have been and how overwhelmed we are right now. Through our eyes we can only imagine such a call to be suffocating, full of fear. This, however, is not at all like the song…