EMILY RUTLEDGE, YOUTH MINISTER
Our youth leadership team has a group text message that, I have to admit, I often skim over because it is full of high school student’s commentary on things not pertaining to their leadership and instead focused on which smoothie is best when you have your wisdom teeth taken out and one particular student just giving positive praise to everyone daily. It’s sweet but I’m often changing diapers or sleeping when they are texting. Also—I’m not a teenager. Last night as I was deep in the battle of the toddler bath my phone began to chirp incessantly.
The instigating message was “Proposal: me wearing my Xmas tree onesie to thirst tomorrow so I can celebrate Jesus’s life while we prepare to celebrate his resurrection. All those in favor say aye.”
The slew of responses following were full of ayes and support. Tonight is a night of service in our youth community. It’s not part of our Holy Week liturgy. It doesn’t show up on the website with a service time yet it has become as Holy and Spirit-filled as a Eucharist or Stations of the Cross. Tonight we prepare. We fill bags for Easter morning to give the children after their egg hunt, each lovingly assembled and prayed over. We fold bulletins that the hands of people we know and those we will never meet will touch, read, and experience the resurrection through. We walk through our children’s Good Friday service, working through details to be sure it is not too graphic and not too light but honors the heaviness of the day and the innocence of their hearts. Tonight—we serve our parish because we love the God who died for us.
And these students… they don’t do it out of guilt or with heavy hearts. They don’t approach Holy Week with dread, they approach it with joy and thanksgiving for the resurrected Christ. They can connect the expectation of the long awaited Jesus of Christmas to the joy of His resurrection at Easter. They can wear Christmas PJ’s during Holy Week and totally get the connection. They are not separate seasons created so we can decorate our homes differently as the months change… they are CONNECTED, one, just as God is. To enter into a life in Christ means to live it all simultaneously: birth and death. Christmas PJ’s while stuffing Easter Eggs. Advent and Holy Week. Mary in the stable and Mary at the Cross. We are each always in both of these places in our lives. Straddling the circular nature of God that is birth, death, and life again: watching children grow as we witness others die. Taking something on as we let something else go. Allowing new hope to grow inside of us as we acknowledge the disappointments and failures that are inevitable in life.
This Holy Week may you wear your Christmas PJ’s.
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