April 9, Palm Sunday

Outreach Committee   Sunday:  April 9,  9:00 a.m.

Outreach Committee Meeting This Sunday, April 9th Between the Services at 9:00 am!!!  Everyone is invited.  We want to Hear From YOU!!!

 All Parishioners are invited to celebrate this Holy Season by donating a gently used or new hardcover book to be processed and sent to the newly emerging Suubi School Library.

This month we are focusing on Classics.  For ideas, here is our Amazon wish list: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/37DBLM6B9ECT8/ref=nav_wishlist_lists_3

If you have other books, please talk to Tracy Gaestel who is coordinating this project.

Please help if you are able!

Holy Week and Easter:  2017

 Church Decorations for Easter

We can still use Easter Lilies for the Church:  Sign up on Sunday at the Poster on the Table outside Church.   Lilies are $10.00 each.   Please write your memorial or thank offering on the chart so we can acknowledge it in the bulletins

Reflective Dinners in Holy Week

We can host many more people.  If you’ve never attended the Reflective Dinners before, please consider doing so.   You will really enjoy it.

Reflective Dinner Meal Needs:

All Three Nights,  Appetizers & Wine

Wednesday:  Appetizer and Desert

Presentations at the Reflective Dinners

This year our presentations are being shared by two people. 

 Monday and Wednesday

Our presenter will be Kelly Brandt who will read selections from the writings of

St. Francis of Assisi

 Tuesday

Our presenter will be Jim Stanley who will reflect on Music and Faith, with commentary and then music to illustrate the insight. 

Holy Saturday:  Saturday April 15

This would normally be the day when we all must Render unto Caesar, but the IRS has given everyone until Tuesday April 18 to send in their tax return.

 Wow! What Amazing Grace!  Everyone is freed up to help get everything ready for our Easter celebration! 

 There are three things that need doing:

 Prepare the Church for the Easter Services. 

Everyone is welcome to join in with the Altar Guild to clean and set up the Church.  Flowers need to be set out, candles trimmed, the altar prepared, the baptism set up, and lots more.  Please join in.

 Prepare the Parish Hall for the Easter Breakfast.

We need at least 5 people to help set up all the tables and chairs for the Easter Breakfast.  Many hands make light work, plus that we have the sturdy but lightweight tables.   Please help.   Chris Askew is coordinating the Easter Breakfast.  Please speak to him about helping.

 Prepare the Easter Eggs for the Easter Egg hunt. 

Shanna Tellez is organizing this.  This is a nice activity for children as well as adults. 

 We’ll start the Holy Saturday Preparations at 9:00 a.m.

The Great Vigil of Easter

 The climax of the Paschal Triduum, or the Three Great Days, is the Great Vigil of Easter.  In this liturgy we begin from where we left off on Good Friday with the darkness and desolation of Christ’s death.  Then out of nowhere comes the New Fire, then an ancient chant going back to earliest days of the Church, then a recapitulation of the entire story of salvation, to the cry Christ is Risen!  We share in that Risen life through the Sacrament of Baptism and the First Eucharist of Easter.  It is a challenge to begin in the darkness before dawn.  One can really understand the sentiment, “Wake me when it’s over.”  That’s in a sense what happens when after the Good Friday Liturgy we come to the Eucharist on Easter Day at 10:15.  What happens in the Easter Vigil is that we move through the Paschal Mystery to it’s triumph.  We participate in the actual journey from darkness to light, from death to Risen Life.  That is what makes the liturgy so wonderful and so powerful.

 The Great Vigil of Easter was restored to the Book of Common Prayer in 1979.  It had fallen out of use in most of the Western Church.  The Eastern Church never lost it.  The Great Vigil of Easter is the center of the Christian Year.  Everything leads to it and flows from it.  It is the most complete telling of the Christian story. 

 At Church of the Angles, we have done the Vigil in such a way that it is the center rather than just one more service in Holy Week.  We are blessed to have a building that lends itself to the profound drama the Liturgy enacts.  We are blessed to usually have good weather for Easter. 

 We will begin the Liturgy at 5:30 a.m. Easter Morning.  People will gather and find their places in the Church under conditions of very low light.  When everyone is in place the remaining light will go out and we will sit together in pitch darkness.  That is after all the state of being bereft of God.  I will give the collect and proclaim the Passover of the Lord, whereby hearing his word and celebrating his Sacraments we share in his victory over death.

 A young person will come with me and begin the arduous task of lighting the fire.  They use a flint and steel, the sparks flying and trying to land and catch.  It raises the question for us, will the light come?  Or is darkness all there will be?  It rests on the shoulders of the youngest one.  For you in the congregation you see the sparks come out of nowhere.  Easter is new creation.  We witness the ignition of a new Big Bang.  Then the fire comes. 

 A hymn called The Exultet, is chanted.  This is one of the most ancient hymns of the Church and it sings the praise of the light as the sign of the Risen Christ.  “This is the night when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and Man is reconciled to God.” 

 Once the Exsultet is sung we begin a long period of readings from the Old Testament.  There are nine readings in all and between them there are either choir anthems or congregational hymns.  It is in the Easter Vigil that we all learn how to read the Scripture.  The Bible is about what God does for humankind in Christ.  We see everything that leads to that.  We “hear the record of God’s might acts in history, how he saved his people in ages past and we pray that he will bring all of us to the fullness of redemption.”

 As we go through this long section of the Vigil, the window over the altar begins to be visible as daylight increases.  You might say that it is dawning on us that the Resurrection which theme of the window is real.  Scripture tells us that it took a long time for it to dawn on the disciples that Jesus was not dead. 

 If we are really lucky and the weather is good, by the time of the Great Alleluia, the sun will have come over the hill behind the Church and its light will flood in through the back windows. 

 Once again we will have baptisms.  We’ve never been without one at the Easter Vigil.  It fulfills what we will have heard in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.  “Do you not know that those of you where baptized were baptized into his death?”  We were buried with him in baptism so that as Jesus was raised from the dead by the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will be united with him in a Resurrection like his. 

 Finally we celebrate the first Eucharist of Easter.  At the end we place the Sacrament in the Tabernacle and once again light the Sanctuary lamp which tells us that he is always here with us. 

 We come out to the Easter Egg hunt for all the children and have our wonderful Easter Breakfast on the patio behind the Parish Hall.  How long is the service?  Some people say, “it’s two and a half hours!”  No, it’s only two hours and twenty five minutes.  It is time well spent.  

Easter Day

 The stained glass window in the Sanctuary says it all.  “He is not here.  He is Risen.”  Our window depicts the women at the tomb on Easter morning having come to finish what was left undone at Jesus’ burial.  They wonder who will move the heavy stone that covers the entrance so they can enter the tomb and anoint Jesus’ body following the customs of that time for a proper internment.  But the tomb is empty and he is not there.  It will take a while to understand what “He is Risen” really means both for him and for them, and finally for all of us. 

 In a real sense Easter is not the end of the story but only the beginning.  Easter Day itself commences the long period of time when the Risen Jesus appears to the disciples in various times and places, then the ending of the resurrection appearances in the event we call the Ascension, and finally the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost which the disciples then and now are empowered with gifts to tell the whole world, what the window says to us each time we enter the church:  “He is Risen.” 

 Easter Day is in a sense after the fact.  No one sees the Resurrection take place.  That’s true of the Easter Vigil as well.  We go through that liturgy, but at what point the Resurrection actually happens the liturgy does not say. 

So Easter Day sets the clock running on the great 50 days.  In the Bible the number 40 means “a long time.”  So the time it takes for us to grasped and transformed by the Christ’s resurrection is a long time, and even longer.