Holy Week and Easter serviceS
For a more detailed description of each service, see a note from the Rector below the graphic.
Worship Bulletins
From the weekly Enews, 4/10/2025
Dear Friends in Christ,
It's probably expected that any priest of the church would say to you, "You ought to come to the Holy Week worship services."
I can at least fulfill that expectation locally, by inviting you with true joy and desire to "come to the Holy Week worship services." But let me be a little more particular.
If you already know God through the richness of these services, be all means, come to all. Or if you are in a spirit of jumping with abandon in a new way into your relationship with God, come to all.
But if your desire, curiosity, or capacity mean that you might just try one or another, let me describe them a little, to help your discernment. While it's not healthy to come to worship with a dominant orientation of "What's in this for me?", it seems right to me that our own spiritual needs are a part of what we hold in spirit as we imagine our time together.
Maundy Thursday, 7pm: Named for the new commandment ("maundatum") that Jesus gave us "to love one another as I have loved you", this worship is emphatically about how we use our own two hands to "do love", and about the fundamental power God has given to each of us to transform the world.
Good Friday, 7pm: In this meditative, spacious style of the Taize Monastery in France, this worship helps us accompany Christ in his crucifixion, and likewise to experience God's accompaniment in our own suffering. Prepare to be surprised, but in a way that you can engage to the depth you are comfortable.
The Great Vigil of Easter, 8:16pm: ...8:16?? The timing itself, linked to the setting of the sun, is a clue to the nature of this worship. Lent ends at the moment when we light the New Fire in the Memorial Garden. This light expands to each of us and the candles we hold, and then, moving inside, we tell by candlelight the foundational stories of God's saving acts in history, culminating in the first Eucharist of Easter. This is the story of God's long, unstoppable salvation of the world, accomplished in all seasons, and even at the highest cost to God. It is an unabashed celebration of our belovedness and the stature we have before God through baptism.
Is there one of those that you particularly need? Or that a friend of yours needs? Come along.
With Love,
Reed
