If You Really Think About It

We are in the middle of Holy Week, the absolute busiest time of year for pastors. Don't get me wrong, Christmas is really busy, but Holy Week is worse because it's a marathon. Holy Week starts with Palm/Passion Sunday, then plods on through the relentless stretch of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday/Easter Vigil, Easter Sunrise, and Easter. With all of the sermons to write and worship to plan and bulletins to put together, we pastors are harried and stressed. And I don't know for sure about my peers, but I risk losing sight of the meaning behind all the work.

I was particularly stressed getting ready for our Palm/Passion worship this year. We got really creative with the service, designing a sort of lessons-and-carols format of reading the passion story from Matthew interspersed with music and accompanied by different lay people bringing symbols of the story forward and placing them on the altar. The service required a lot of extra work and coordinating lining up the text and music, gathering the items, and organizing our lay folks, and by the time Sunday morning arrived, I was really on edge.

But after the 8:30 service, one of our choir members came up to me and said, "That was really powerful. I almost cried a couple of times because, if you really think about it, how can you not? I had to keep telling myself, don't think about it right now, not while you're singing." The comment, which was really positive feedback about the worship, left me feeling convicted. With all of the havoc of planning and leading the service, I hadn't really been thinking about the incredible power of the Scriptures we were reading, the beauty and sadness of the passion story.

At the 11:00 service I worked to focus, to really think about what I was reading and the meaning behind it. I allowed myself to be moved by the sorrow in the anthems, to let the weight of the cross sink into my soul. I was so lost in the experience that at one point I almost skipped one of the Scripture readings.

As a pastor, I live in the strange tension between fully engaging myself in worship and needing to maintain enough separation to be able to hold myself together. I can't be so moved by a Scripture or anthem or funeral that I become a blubbering mess in the chancel. On the other hand, I never want to be so disengaged as to miss the significance and power of the act of worship. The stress of high holy days tends to push me toward the latter of those two options, and I'm working to combat that. I think it starts, as all worship does, with really thinking about who God is and what God is doing. So that is where I'll strive to begin each service of this Holy Week. I'll let you know how it goes.

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