Happy Easter! Many thanks to everyone who made a strange Holy Week strangely holy!
Happy Easter, People of St. James’!
As you can see, I have emerged from long-observed tradition of the post-Holy Week clergy coma. We shut down our “Office” on Monday and Tuesday of this week to give our staff a well-deserved and much-needed rest. But now we are back at it, and after the Lentiest Lent ever in my lifetime, it is awesome to get to embark on what I hope will be a surprisingly Eastery Easter as we learn again, in this new time, how to proclaim the good news, that the Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
I want to thank all of the many, many people who contributed to make a very strange Holy Week strangely holy.
- Thanks to our Liturgy Committee, who held emergency meetings to figure out how to invite people into and online and home-based experience of the journey of Holy Week.
- Thanks to all of you who sent in pictures from past Palm Sundays or Easters for video montages, who shared pictures of the sacred spaces you set up in your homes in order to encourage others.
- Thanks to all of you, adults and youth alike, from all of our different Sunday services who lent your voices to readings and prayers and song.
- Thanks to the Powell, Poon, Monts, and Casanova crews for creating videos to introduce us to new spiritual practices that help us to walk in the way of love.
- Thanks to all who offered their artistry for the Good Friday Project or music for the services or setting the scene for backdrops for recordings.
- Thanks to Christy Nisbett and Kathy Kweicinski and Linda Fields who recruited and organized readers.
- Thanks to Anna Blake for being there for us when we weren’t quite sure how to best set all of this up on the website.
- And many thanks to our small but mighty St. James’ staff,
our staff musicians: Sharon Coleman, Martha Pulkingham, Shawn Ellison, Francisco Chavez, and Helen Miers; our clergy: Jim Harrington, Robby Vickery, Al Rodriguez, and Kyra Kerr-Fitzgerald; our incredible office staff: Aimee Estep and Diana Espinosa; director of Family Ministries and coordinator of the Good Friday Project, Simone Barnes; and especially to John Somers-Morales, our sound technician and video editor, without whom we would not have been able to gather the many voices and faces of St. James’ in this strange new online world.
Thanks be to God for you all!
It’s Easter! Alleluia! And Easter is not just a day – it’s a season!
As I look to the season ahead, I see a long and difficult stretch when it is unlikely that we will be able to gather as the people of St. James’ in the flesh. But perhaps we can take a note from the letter to the Colossians, where the author writes, “though I am absent from you in the flesh, yet I am with you in the Spirit” and I delight to see the resoluteness of your faith in your life (paraphrased).
Let us make arrangements in this season to be seen and heard by each other (not by breaking any of the rules for safety) but by using the technologies and the times available to us. If you are feeling out of the loop or you are struggling with Zoom or the website, Stjamesaustin.org, please reach out by calling the office at 512-926-6339 or emailing office@stjamesaustin.org. We want to help you get connected, because some of the changes are for a long time and not a short time.
If you are not yet part of some sort of small group that meets regularly, try out an Online Connections group. Our goal is to get 100 people from across our St. James’ community connected through Online Connections groups – so register through the website by next Wednesday, April 22, or call up the office.
May God who promises to pour out a uniting and life-giving Spirit, inspire you through that Spirit to do the work of connection and welcome that brings about belonging and knowledge of the other. Thanks be to God for you! Happy Easter!
