Between Sundays for Week of April 14, 2025
Jesus has walked with us throughout Lent and the wilderness of our lives. We gather during Holy Week to celebrate Jesus’ love that cannot be defeated by betrayal, by abandonment, or even death itself. God’s love for us in Jesus never ends!
Holy Week begins with waving our palms, sharing in the crowd’s excitement for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Then we hear the rest of the story. It did not turn out as the crowds had initially hoped. It did not turn out as we had hoped. God sent Jesus to be love incarnate, and Love ended up dying on the cross. (You can watch the story as it unfolded in Bethlehem’s Sunday worship service.)
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As we remember this week in worship, before making their way to the cross of Good Friday or the empty tomb of Easter Sunday, Jesus calls his followers together for a meal. A meal where he loves, cares, forgives and commands them to follow him in the same work of loving, caring, and forgiving. At the heart of our faith lies the image of Jesus calling us into community and calling us to serve one another and our neighbors everywhere.
On Maundy Thursday, we have an opportunity to more deeply experience the community Christ calls us into. Through a shared meal at tables, we will come together to connect with one another, to hear the story of Christ and his disciples, to share in food that we all prepare, to feed one another with the bread and wine of the last supper that Christ instituted, and to ponder together what it means to follow the one who serves.
Share in worship this Holy Week on Thursday with Holy Communion at Noon in the Sanctuary (livestreamed); or at 6 pm starting with a meal in the Fellowship Hall (you can sign up to bring a dish to share) and Friday we gather at 7 pm to reflect upon the Seven Last Words of Christ (livestreamed).
Celebrate Christ who walks with us in every wilderness!
P.S. In the meantime, you can view our festive Palm Sunday worship service via YouTube or watch the most recent Sunday worship service on our website. From there find links to previous worship videos available on Facebook and YouTube.
Faith Connection at Home
This week you may be home with your children, since school is off. Here is a wonderful Holy Week activity focusing on the Stations of the Cross. It was written during the pandemic by the Rev. Mia Kano, who serves as the Assistant Rector for Youth and Families at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, MA. This guide provides children a way to discover that the story of Good Friday and the cross is written into the natural world about them if they only know where to look. “Stations” are very common natural occurrences and not hard to spot – such as a flower or fallen log. The guide allows the experience of the stations to be self-directed and done at one’s own pace. Each station has a summary of the story of the station, a sentence from scripture, a simple prayer, a wondering question, and a simple activity for an embodied response. You can click here to find the PDF. Find a local park, walk in your neighborhood or travel to another “wilderness” place to try it out.
Patty Chaffee
Family Faith Formation Coordinator
Ponderings
Journey with Jesus includes a wealth of poetry, including a selection for Lent and Easter and this one called Palm Sunday.
Malcolm Guite
Palm Sunday
Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,
The seething holy city of my heart,
The saviour comes. But will I welcome him?
Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;
They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,
And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find
The challenge, the reversal he is bringing
Changes their tune. I know what lies behind
The surface flourish that so quickly fades;
Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,
The hardness of the heart, its barricades,
And at the core, the dreadful emptiness
Of a perverted temple. Jesus come
Break my resistance and make me your home.