Getting ready for Good Friday...

In what has become an important annual event - our Good Friday mix of prayer, contemporary secular music and the various spiritual themes of the season - we are getting ready. This year Good Friday feels even more paradoxical than others: what good will emerge from the current economic chaos? what signs of hope will grow stronger amidst our fears? what radically new insights can we glean that we might never have considered?

I feel a need for more gentle beauty this year - people are tender and confused - so an invitation is needed more than a challenge, yes?

Four key songs stand out in this year's liturgy: U2's "Dirty Day," Joni Mitchell's "Passion Play" the Eels' "The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight" and the Wailin' Jennys' "One Voice." (We're also working on "Pride," "40" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" as well as some gospel and Taize.)

As I have written before, "Dirty Day" is a beautifully tragic jumble of competing truths about family, faith, fate and all the rest... a perfect way to open the liturgy after reading the world weary words of Ecclesiastes 3: "to everything there is a season..."

Joni Mitchell's "Passion Play" is equally ambiguous as she sings about celebration and tragedy, fear and apathy all within the context of being moved into a new way of living by Jesus. At the same time, she creates a critical tension given her lament about the church: "who you gonna get to do your dirty work now that the slaves are free?" (This version is not nearly as moving as her conversational jazz groove, but it is the only one available.)

The music of the Eels always startles me with the simplicity of the sound and the depth of the message: brilliant. Mark Everett evokes what it must have felt like for both Jesus and the disciples to face his death without ever being explicit or sentimental. (There isn't a clip of this available - sorry.)

Which brings me to the closer for worship - "One Voice" - the heart of my theology of our current band: it blends real life into the sacred fabric of worship. It is experiential, honest, beautiful and participatory in ways that embody the change we all ache for. It helps me BE the change I long to SEE.

One of the texts we will use is Peterson's reworking of Romans 12 and the challenge to be counter-cultural: So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I hope you will join us if you are in town...