What's Happening at St. C's This Week?

Dear St. Christopher’s Family, 
 

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been telling the story to our preschool students of Palm Sunday and the Last Supper. Mention of a donkey tied to a post, the waving palm branches, and the strange way Jesus talks about his dinner parties (my body? my blood?) stirs up a lot of imagination when you’re 3, 4, or 5 years old. We had interjected stories of how one of our friends had seen a cow once. We heard about big fancy family dinners we’d been to that had been scary and the food was weird. We also talked about how these stories reminded us of stories we’d already heard: like the big festival where Jesus got lost, or that time when God made Moses walk through the water.
We also talked about being afraid: about the Israelites, and why they might have been afraid on that night: even though it was the night of their freedom, they’d never see their house or their neighborhood again. We talked about Jesus and his disciples and how they might have been afraid to walk out of the Upper Room and into the garden. It was dark. And it was lonely. And all of a sudden, Jesus wasn’t with us anymore.
I’m sure any of you could have done at least a good a job from memory, much less with the help of an illustrated Bible. The memories and connections we make are powerful. But memory has its limits. In scholars’ circles we like to talk about “prefiguring,” that is, things that happen in the Old Testament that make the New Testament make sense.  In other words, our memories of one story give us the building blocks to make sense of a new story, one that we haven’t really heard before, but one that echoes off of other things we know and understand about ourselves and God.
Those stories are tricky though. It’s easy to turn them into reruns that we skip past because we already know the resolution to the plotlines, or we already know how the false-alarm dilemmas will sort themselves out. That makes them entertainment, because we can watch somebody else’s story.
But that first Easter Day, a new story starts. It’s not a national story; it’s not a church story. It’s kind of a family story, but still that falls short. Listen closely this Sunday. Mary feels far away from Jesus. Even that Sunday morning in the garden, she doesn’t recognize Jesus until she hears him call her own name. That makes it her story. Jesus is calling you by your name. That makes it your story. 
Some of us haven’t seen Jesus in a while. Many of us know someone who feels like they can’t find Jesus right now. Bring them, and come be a part of our story, those of us who are looking for Jesus this Sunday.