Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today marks the beginning of Holy Week. It seems a challenging time to worship. It seems like we need to be together now more than ever. It is hard to think about not having all of the services and meals and connection that make this week such a touchstone in our lives. This is not the first time that Christians have felt this way.

When you think of some of the scenes of community in the long scope of Christian history you begin to realize that the circumstances have often cried out for worship when the community could not be together.

In the earliest days of the Church we furtively gathered in catacombs. We tearfully prayed before being forced into the Coliseum. We fervently and feverishly said prayers before our young ones went off to war. We took Communion at a bedside, late in the night, as our old ones slipped away. We prayed before battles and after on far-flung fields knowing we would never see home, or church, or familiar roads again. We broke Bread as storms tossed our ships, as our food ran out, and as we heard enemies at the gates.

In times of plague and famine we broke Bread. In times of persecution and at times when we were the persecutors we dared to take and eat. With chapped lips, dirty hands, broken hearts, and straining voices we took, ate, and said Amen. Under a watchful moon we prayed as we fled along an underground railroad. We sang Amazing Grace when we had fallen down. We sang What Wondrous Love as days grew short. We sang Alleluia when nothing seemed right at all with the world.

The Church has always gathered as a broken people. It is why Christ came into the world - to break and pray with us in our brokenness. Yet each and every act of prayer was greeted with a dawn. Each and every song found its hope in the sure and certain fact that the sun rises. Each and every Christian finds their hope, no matter where they are or what circumstance has befallen them, in the rising of life.

In the victory of Christ we find the boldness to sing in the midst of turmoil. We find the courage to hope in the dead of night. We find the strength to pray and to lend one another the strength to believe.

This period of physical distance from one another is not a new thing. The Church has found its way, from generation to generation, from one Easter to another. Between those celebrations come deserts and wildernesses and falling down and broken hearts and soul-battering turns. But all those turns, all those paths, all those misdeeds and mistakes and more, all of it leads us back to where we started - back to the empty tomb.

It is no new thing for Christians to find the way to Easter, to prayer, to being together marked by challenges great and small. But if one lesson may be ours this Easter it is this. We always find our way back to Christ for Christ always finds a way to us.

My this Holy Week be your chance to find your hope renewed as we journey the winding road to Easter.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert