Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-04-07
Wednesday, April 7th, 2021
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
Friends,
Tonight, join us for our Wednesday Vespers. Let’s pray together. It’s an Easter thing to do. Here’s the link:
Email zoom@firstpres.church for the link.
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Tomorrow, join us for ESL Café. Come join us for conversation. Listen in. Join the chat. Our friends learning to speak English need conversation partners; that’s you. See you tomorrow. Here’s the link:
Email esl@firstpres.church for the link.
If you have any questions, please email the ESL Director, Jeanette Pyne, at jeanette@firstpres.church.
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Part of what makes Easter shine so bright is the troubles of Holy Week. I share this reflection about Holy Saturday. Because we don’t do Saturday mailers, I didn’t send it then. I hope it sharpens the meaning of Easter.
Thoughts from Holy Saturday
The Saturday before Easter
Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16
Holy Saturday. A long, mournful day. A wandering day for the church, for on that day there really is no church at all, not between crucifixion and resurrection, not yet. Jesus lies in that tomb all alone. From the clay we have come, to the clay we return. No church soup kitchens, no church pews peopled with folk eager to hear the gospel. No church building. No church people. No church bells. No church steeple. Ash Wednesday ashes streak endlessly across a leaden sky, from that molten eruption of violence the day before. The world had gone raving mad, and we tried, weakly, to put on the brakes, but it was too late, and though the madness convulsed to a stop and the brakes finally held, it was too late. The smell of metal against metal, and heat, and loss. Too little, too late. And what on earth could we have done?
Airless, still, and hot. Holy Saturday. We are sad, and a little afraid that they can still get us, can still kill us in a second just for knowing him, for loving him. Except it didn’t take Jesus only one second to die. It seemed to take forever.
Hoarse, nothing left to cry. We pace, we pace.
Old rock-and-rollers know the feeling after the concert is ended and the people have gone home. Jackson Browne’s “The Load Out” (Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty,” 1977) describes such a late night, and becomes metaphor for this limbo space between Good Friday and Easter.
Now the seats are all empty
Let the roadies take the stage
Pack it up and tear it down
They’re the first to come and last to leave
Working for that minimum wage
They’ll set it up in another town
Tonight the people were so fine
They waited there in line
And when they got up on their feet they made the show
And that was sweet–
But I can hear the sound
Of slamming doors and folding chairs
And that’s a sound they’ll never know
The women, of course, are the roadies. They’ll do the heavy lifting tomorrow when they make their way to the tomb with the burial spices, laden with their incomprehensible grief. And the fans at the concert, as the crowds at the cross, know little of how much humanity and hope went into what happened the night before. They might have been moved. They clapped their hands or jeered. The show lifted them to new heights, maybe. They were enthused or repulsed, but all are sleeping this early morning at home in soft beds. And they can’t know how broken our hearts are, how tired, how barely they beat now after pounding all night long. They don’t know how much we paid to be here.
Tomorrow the women will trudge to the tomb, before the stench begins to rise. And the rest of us will wait for the trucks to be loaded, wait to get back on the road to our regular lives. Life without Jesus. We’ll drop Mary back home, as small as a fist, defiant, unbelieving, dazed by it all, stoned from insults that cut us all to the quick. We’ll kiss her lightly goodbye and drive through the dust.
Tomorrow we’ll load up, as if any of this stuff is worth packing in the first place. Empty Hopes. The heft of Big Ideas. The Books Never to be Written of what he said to us, what he taught. And the Memories. Life back in the real world. The notion of love is better left for poets than tired fisherman and hangers-on like us.
Now roll them cases out and lift them amps
Haul them trusses down and get ‘em up them ramps
cause when it comes to moving me
You know you guys are the champs
But when that last guitar’s been packed away
You know that I still want to play
So just make sure you got it all set to go
Before you come for my piano
The piano is The Dream. It’s the last thing we allow to die. It’s the last thing we can bear to see go. And, for awhile, it sounded so in tune with what the psalmists had said, and the ranting of the prophets, and God’s age-old promise for the future. Take the piano last. Please.
Holy Saturday. Today we’ll rest. Then, tomorrow, we’re out of here. Scattered. Long gone.
* * *
At the end, when he was on the cross, Jesus quoted the fifth verse of Psalm 31: “Into your hand I commit my spirit.” It was a final and complete affirmation of the trust he had in a God who would not let him, ultimately, be put to shame. Jesus knew that his future, as uncertain as it may have seemed to him and as utterly bleak as it was to his disciples, could be trusted wholly to God’s merciful care.
“My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love” (vv. 15-16). Jesus trusted God with his life.
On Holy Saturday, we keep vigil. We lament because we are part of the sharp-edged chaos that wounds the world. We lament that shame, idolatry, wayward egos, and a host of other sins cripple our best efforts. We have every reason to be worn out and to bury our lined faces deep into our hands. But we have ample reason to be glad, too. We have hope because we trust a God unfettered by mockery and grave clothes.
“Jesus’ words from the cross are not simply an interpretation of how Jesus died but also an interpretation of how Jesus lived his whole life—trusting God, proclaiming and embodying the reign of God in word and deed” (McCann, The New Interpreter’s Bible, IV, p. 802.).
Our calling is to live free from the hopelessness of Holy Saturday. Our consolation is that after the long vigil, he rose again sometime in the wee hours. We do not toast a dead hero. We serve a living Lord.
And other stages await.
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Much love to you all.
Matt Matthews
matt@firstpres.church
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Jackson Browne sings it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
