Holy Saturday, 2020
Dear beloved Trinity friends:
Outside a south window, branches, bare only weeks ago, proclaim spring with a constellation of white blossoms. Our neighbor squirrels scamper, dig and eat all over the grass, sharply green and bursting out of the soil. Down the street, a mallard couple face upstream on the brook, dipping their heads in the water to catch motes of food coming their way. Elizabeth and I wonder if a nest is near, with ducklings on the way.
With Easter coming tomorrow, as of this writing, the life of Earth's new season sings a choral introit, with blue jays, geese, sparrows and more joining the breezes with their music.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
These stirrings of spring provide a counterpoint to the drumbeat of bad pandemic news. They remind us of healthier times and serve up a promise that these hard days will pass.
While we live in a pandemic-driven Good Friday world, the risen Christ calls us to be an Easter people.
Against the spirit of this coming Resurrection season, this year our voices of praise, thanksgiving and joy will not be raised together under the soaring vault of our sacred building on Sigourney Street. Instead, through Zoom and YouTube, Trinity's faithful and those called to join our online services from far and near will be invited to raise your voices at home. Jackson Merrill will bring us music from our magnificent organ or from a keyboard in his apartment. We will share Easter singing from year's past. We will still sing together though, from our different homes, raising our voices from every direction as the birds are singing now from every tree.
Many have noted that the intimate settings where we will gather for Easter echo the experiences of the first Christians. The risen Christ came to the disciples in a single room in Jerusalem. He met them over breakfast in the early morning by the Sea of Galilee.
Great cathedrals all over the world will greet Easter morning with mighty music reverberating through empty naves. Our celebration will be full of the presence of Christ right where we sleep, eat, work and rest.
During this difficult time, the Gospel of Matthew's closing words of Jesus, "I am with you always, even to the end of the age," proclaim a truth we need to hear. Christ' is with us, right now, just where we live.
May your Easter season be blessed and healthy.
In the name of the Risen Christ,
Norman
