This Is the Weekend. Get Excited.

This is the weekend.  Get excited.

Apple’s new IPad hits the stores tomorrow.  Technology-addicted patrons await the Coming.

It’s also the culmination of March Madness.  By Monday a new basketball victor will be crowned with many crowns.

Oh, and it’s also Easter weekend.

Lest this preface sound like the brassy critique of a clergy who feels squeezed and made irrelevant by the surrounding culture, let me quickly add, in the ancient words, “as always before, so now, and evermore.”  Few, very few, were tuned in back then to note the event we claim changed the entire paradigm of creation.  So it’s to be expected that other stories draw the headlines.

Through the centuries culture created a holiday of the event, surrounding it with rituals and celebrations.  It drew a crowd, especially in the pre-technology days with few entertainment options.  More so in the required-attendance medieval centuries and beyond.  I myself, though not medieval, lived in some few-entertainment-options years, not to mention some years of required attendance.

Today, we’ve got options. And no required attendance.

How is an old Story expected to compete?

And yet it not only competes, it trumps.  Holy Week and Easter reboot the software of humanity, setting us on a path identified by faith, hope, love.  They redefine and reframe.  They raise from the dead the possibility of harmony, healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace on earth and in our hearts.   

And yet Holy Week and Easter do their miracle in ways the world never knows.  They are the real Men in Black, the movie about a squad of clandestine detectives who protect the world from forces we don’t even know threaten us. Holy Week and Easter go largely unnoticed.  They don’t draw the hype of the IPad or a national championship game.  After all, it’s an old story that, sadly, has been greatly reduced.

But for those with eyes opened by Grace, who are conscious and awake, who not only show up but witness the miraculous power of Love-- this is the weekend.