Holy Week 2023!!!
Prepare your heart, invite your friends, and parking
By Father Jeff Locke
Dear Eucharist Church,
Holy Week is here! The highest point of the Christian calendar and Gospel story is happening this coming week, beginning Palm Sunday and culminating on Easter morning. Over the 8 days of Holy Week, we will have 6 services at Eucharist, and I want you to take full advantage of all that you can!
PREPARE YOUR HEART
This is not merely a time to remember the great events of past redemptive history. As we participate in worship this week alongside Christians throughout the world, the angels, and the saints in glory, we become more fully incorporated into Christ as members of His Body, the Church. We enter into the eternal drama of the unconquerable love of God for us, the defeat of death, and the way to Heaven being opened once and for all by King Jesus. These things are our everlasting inheritance by grace through faith, things into which even the angels long look (1 Pet. 1:12).
INVITE YOUR FRIENDS
With that in mind, I want to encourage all of us to be an invitation to our friends, family, neighbors and coworkers this week to taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps. 34:8). There is no better time in the Christian year to welcome newcomers, fellow believers, the spiritually curious, and the disaffected to receive a firsthand picture of what life in Christ is all about. Prayerfully consider whom the Spirit would have you welcome among us this week (and if you have to pick just one event, pick Great Easter Vigil on Saturday night!).
PARKING
As we prayerfully anticipate many more people than we would normally welcome on a Sunday, I would like to ask us as a community to show Christ's hospitality to one another and any newcomers in our parking lot. Please reserve our parking lot for families with young children, anyone with mobility challenges, and any guests who will visit. This is a practice we will ask our church community to observe both during Holy Week and going forward. If you don't fit these categories, please do your best to find street parking to make room for those with greater need. We also will have some additional parking available on the right side of the parking lot that we don’t usually have access to so keep an eye out for open spots!
Please prayerfully approach this Holy Week. If you would like to learn more about what this week is all about, I recommend this overview of Holy Week (with lots of links for more information). You may wish to take a day like Good Friday off work to fully engage in that holy day. However you choose to approach it, do so with hands open to heaven, expecting the Lord to fill you with good things (Luke 1:53).
Below is a beautiful poem by poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert. Enjoy!
Much love,
Jeff+
The Agony, by George Herbert
Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and Love.
Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
