Holy Week begins this Sunday. I sure hope you can join us! And come early for pancakes our youth are cooking to help fund youth missions. If you can’t come before our 10 a.m. service, pancakes will resume following worship. The full schedule for Holy Week opportunities is on our homepage. Just click here to go there.
Anticipating Palm Sunday and Holy Week, I wonder if you might be interested in reflecting a bit. As Jesus goes to Jerusalem on Sunday, two pronouncements from the crowd stand in stark contrast to each other. The first is “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of God!” (Luke 19:38). A little later in the week, they shout, “Crucify him!” (Luke 23:21). Says a lot about human nature, doesn’t it? And yet, as Steve Garnaas-Holmes helps us see in the poem just below, Jesus chooses to go anyway. He chooses to go through it all anyway. Such is the love of God.
So, maybe find a moment today or tomorrow or sometime in the next few days, allow yourself to take a deep breath, and then let Holmes’ poem help you take in some of the grace and goodness of God.
He knows.
And chooses so anyway.
He knows how fickle our love,
how fleeting our kindness.
We reject what we most deeply desire,
condemn what we most deeply need.
Our glory and our ruin both clamor.
Into that very wound he rides,
into the deepest divide of our souls.
On the Scorned Way—
into the scorn itself—he rides.
Into the choice between love and the way of the world,
and into our failure to choose well, he rides,
having chosen.
To prevail in the battle between good and evil,
between love and fear,
one must embrace them both
and enter the cleft
and still choose.
Worship the One
who embraces our beauty and our woundedness,
who forgives the failure of our worship.
Come with him on the Foolish Way,
the Way of Love,
…and fail… and be forgiven… and come again.
Looking forward to seeing you on Sunday.
Much love to you, my friends,
Pastor Gregg
