We do not currently have much access to email, but Carl has access from time to time on his iphone. I encourage you to check our team blog at: www.vabrazil2011.blogspot.com as different team members update and write stories. We have an amazing photographer on our team, and there are a few photos.

Love from Brazil!

Kristin

But for us who know the ending to the story, to those of us who read the gospel backwards, knowing about the resurrection before the crucifixion, and even before the birth of Jesus, it’s hard to say that we experience Holy Saturday as a day of despair. My experience is rather that Holy Saturday is a day of waiting.

Waiting is a really hard thing for upper middle class persons of the United States. We are all about convenience, efficiency, and getting things done. Let’s get there, do it, and move on to the next thing. I think perhaps that this is one of the things that separates the classes, that separates the poor from the well-off (or upper middle well-off): the reality and inevitability of waiting.

I have spent a good deal of time in Cuba over the years, and my friends there have always said that the two things you do most often in Cuba are: hacer una cola (make a line) and esperar (wait). The Cuban reality includes waiting, waiting for public transportation, waiting for offices to open, waiting for ice cream at Coppelia, the best ice cream in town. (I have waited in a line for Coppelia for almost two hours.) It is part of life.

I recently participated in a poverty simulation here in Virginia. Each participant was given an identity within a family, with all of the details of normal family life i.e. how many people in the household worked, how much they made, what their bills were, etc. We had to live the “normal” life, paying bills, buying groceries and school supplies, and getting around. It was much harder than most of us realized to navigate within the circumstances we were given. My role was that I lived with my daughter, her husband, and their daughter. I was injured, unable to work, and receiving disability. One of the things I did was go to Social Services, which was pretty frustrating. I spent three days waiting at Social Services, before finding out that we didn’t qualify for any help at all. Three days waiting.

Holy Saturday is a day of waiting, and it drives many of us crazy. We want to move on to Easter Sunday. In fact, yesterday, on Good Friday, I spoke on the phone with a friend who said, “Happy Easter!” to which I responded, “NOT YET!” We don’t like to sit with the “meantime,” the waiting. We don’t like the call to “watch and pray.” We would rather move on to the celebration, move on to the good news.

I hope you will spend some time waiting today, sitting in reflection, in silence, in contemplation. For those of us who are used to instant gratification, waiting is a good discipline. It confronts us with the reality in which many live. It reminds us that we are not in control, and we don’t call the shots. It reminds us that our lives, present and future, lay in the hands of God.

In Spanish, the word esperar means both “to wait” and “to hope.” On this Holy Saturday, we wait and we hope, that God will move, that God will act, that God will triumph. We wait…

In my home church, our Good Friday ritual was a service called Tenebrae. Tenebrae is a Latin word that means shadows or darkness. This word is tinieblas in Spanish, which is delicious to say. In our version of the tenebrae service, 12 persons read through the passion narrative in sections, beginning with the anointing of Jesus all the way up until his body was laid in a tomb. After each reading, the person extinguished a candle from the 13 candles that were lit in the front. What this means is that as the night continued, and Jesus got closer and closer to the cross, the sanctuary got darker and darker. No matter how many times we did this, it was always amazing to me that there is one moment when you realize all of a sudden how dark it has gotten. You don’t notice at first; it’s gradual. But all at once, you are struck with the realization that the darkness is surrounding you.

I was part of this service every year for many years, and this was the basis of my understanding the significance of Good Friday. It is a day set apart by the extreme drama and sacrifice of its events. Jesus is betrayed by his own disciple, deserted by all of the others, put on trial, accused, sentenced, flogged, mocked, and finally, crucified.

Ever since Tenebrae, I have tried to be in a place where the entire scripture account is read, which is what will happen in our worship service tonight at Central. There is something essential about reading the entire narrative, even though it’s long, even though it takes awhile. We are a people of short sound bites, and we even use short sound bites in our worship experiences. But TONIGHT, we will hear the entire narrative. Every time I hear it, I am struck by something different; I enter the story in a different way every year. I wonder where I will be cut to the heart this evening? Where will you be?

I hope that you are attending worship somewhere on this day; please find a community to join where the word will be proclaimed! If you absolutely cannot, I encourage you to read the entire passion narrative, which in Matthew is 26:30-27:66.

Today is a good case in point. It would probably be most natural to focus today on the anointing of Jesus at Bethany (Matthew 26:6-13). My devotional book that I read did this. But instead, I’m still stuck on the chapters of Jesus teaching in the temple. That takes a good FOUR and a half chapters of a book that is only 28 chapters total. There must be something significant about this.

Today I am reflecting on the parables of chapter 25: the Ten Bridesmaids, the Talents, and the Judgment of the Nations. The first parable is about being prepared and staying awake, for we never know when our Lord will return. The second parable is about what we DO in the meantime, while we wait for him to return, and we learn that we are to work and produce fruit with whatever we have been given.

The third parable is where I am stuck, and this is perhaps the most familiar: when the Son of Man comes back, he will separate people one from the other, the way a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Some of these will go away into eternal life and others into eternal punishment. What are the criteria they are judged on? What are the dashboard dials? Here they are: did you give food to the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, and visit the incarcerated? If you did this for one of the least of Jesus’ family, you did it to Jesus. If you did not do it for them, then you did not do it for Jesus. (Wow, this is another Godspell reference…just in case you are wondering, I was a goat in the production I played in.)

I often wonder if we are so busy “doing” church that we completely miss Jesus in our midst, dressed as the least among us. As I was working on my sermon for Easter Sunday, one of the commentaries spoke about the way that Jesus is so often in front of us and yet we fail to recognize him because he doesn’t look the way that we expect. I suspect that we are also just too busy for him. We are busy with our meetings, our plans, and our maintenance and so we run out of time to welcome the stranger and provide for the physical needs of others. “Missions” becomes an extra bonus instead of the main thing. We can just write a check and be done with it.

But something about the way Jesus says this in Matthew reads like I am physically present with the person. There is a relational aspect of this passage; some kind of relationship is established between the person caring and the one being cared for. It is not the same to give money as it is to look in the eyes of a person and give him a bowl of soup, especially when he is hungry. It is not the same to give money as it is to go out of your way to welcome a stranger and help her get acclimated to her new surroundings, especially when she is treated harshly by others.

When was the last time that you or I gave food to a hungry person, drink to a thirsty person, welcome to a stranger, visit to a prisoner, or care for a sick person?

I took my first trip to the Holy Land back in January, and one of my favorite places that we visited was the site of the temple steps in Jerusalem. You can tell in the photo that the first few rows of stairs are original, carved out of the bedrock, while the higher, more polished stairs have been added. One of the great things about bedrock is that you can be about as sure as is possible that the bedrock layer is original; therefore, while most of the holy sites that we saw are questionable as to their authenticity, it is fairly certain that these are the temple steps where Jesus taught.

As I sat on those bedrock steps, I thought about the crowds listening to Jesus teach in those days. I thought about the religious officials, who questioned him: By whose authority are you doing these things? Have you passed the Board of Ordained Ministry yet? These officials tried their best to trick him into getting himself in trouble, in both political and religious traps. Jesus responded with wise answers, parables that exposed their treachery, and then a scathing discourse on their hypocrisy. If you are a Godspell fan, you will recognize this passage (Matthew 23) in the song, “Alas, alas for you lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites that you be!”

I encourage you today to read through Matthew 21:23-26:5 and get a sense of the Jesus’ teaching during this last week. He did not take it easy, on the people or the officials. The words were strong, the parables were shocking, and in the end they were ready to put him to death. Teaching is a dangerous job you know, especially when you say things that people don’t want to hear.