Notes Wed Mar 31 2021
1. I invited those of you at our Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday worship gathering this past Sunday to engage the passion and crucifixion stories of Jesus as texts through which you lament the violence that causes and reinforces marginalizations with which many live.
2. There is little doubt (based on my awareness of my own privilege) that this is a disturbing engagement for any one of us. Privilege and marginalization are experiences and realities of most of our lives. Extended marginalization or privilege is only sustained through violence, as the cross of Jesus shows.
3. Violence in any form brings trauma, and one of the realities we sit with in lamentation at the violence of the crucifixion of Jesus is the trauma of the violence upon our own bodies that comes with inequality, exclusiveness and monocultural frames of social reference.
4. This is hard work.
5. This is Holy Week work.
6. Jesus verbalizes this work in the passion stories with his prayer to God in Gethsemane, “Not my will, but your will be done.”
7. During this holy week, I invite you to accompany Jesus in enacting this prayer as far as you can in your lament over his passion and crucifixion. For on the other side is…
8. Reach out to me or trusted others. We are not alone.
9. We will share an agape meal Maundy Thursday – bring some snacks and beverage of your choice to our virtual worship gathering at 7 pm. Depending on numbers we will break out into smaller rooms to enable conversations to take place. After we have settled in we will join together for a service of shadows (Tenebrae) in our zoom worship gathering room. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/782292511
10. A brief worship gathering will take place on Good Friday at 10:30 am in the New Vision virtual worship room. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/782292511
11. Good Friday is not part of Lent – Lent ends on the Thursday of Holy Week, Maundy Thursday.
12. In some countries hot cross buns are baked and eaten on Good Friday to break the Lenten fast and begin the Easter celebration. They are a soft, sweet bread roll made with a vanilla icing cross on the top. Something to bake on Good Friday during a pandemic? Enough to have some around still on Easter Day? Here is a recipe – not a recommendation of this particular one, but an invitation –
13. Looking ahead: Our Rockville partners in bringing the Al Zahar family from Syria to Canada as refugees will be joining us for our virtual worship gathering on Sunday, Apr 18 at the usual time of 10:30 am.
14. Hamilton is back into the Province of Ontario’s “grey zone”. I am sad to say this means that New Vision folks without access to Zoom will have to wait for a while more to participate in person at 24 Main W in our Zoom worship gathering on Sundays. I know those gathering on Zoom keenly miss those who have been gathering in person. I am looking forward to the day we can meet again in person, and I am sad that this is the second Easter we will not be able to gather in person as a Christian faith community.
15. New Vision Virtual Worship is experiential, participatory, image-rich and collective, just like worship in person at New Vision! Join us on Sunday mornings 10:30 am week to week during the Covid-19 emergency by clicking here. If you want to put the link someplace easy to find each week, here it is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/782292511. Please share it with others and invite them to a “different” kind of time on Zoom from the usual.
16. You can also call in to the gathering on the telephone toll free. Call 1 855 703 8985, then, when prompted, input the Meeting ID 782 292 511 followed by the # sign. Ignore the prompts for Participant ID and Password. You are in when the recorded voice says, “You are in the meeting.” If you can only connect by video on your computer with no audio, you can use the phone connection for audio and the computer connection for visual.
Hope to see you in the days ahead, and at Easter – again, or for the first time ~
Rev Ian