Easter Sunday 2012...

Ok we're taking a break from the blessings of worship and community starting... NOW!  After a truly sweet week of worship and reflection - service and renewed commitment - we're into our jammies and a time of feasting and rest. (I just place the Indian take-out order!)  Then, tomorrow we'll drop the dog off and head to Brattleboro for some quiet time to rest and reconnect.  (I'll sneak back into town for a necessary meeting but then won't do anything work related until next Sunday.)  We have a fun jazz gig on Thursday night for the parents of local jazz students that should be a gas, too.

What a festival of hope and commitment we experienced in worship today:  a perfect culmination to Holy Week.  Excellent music - jazz trumpeter, Rob Fisch, joined us for some mellow reflections as well as a smokin' riff on our gospel anthem - and Carlton was tender and powerful on organ and piano as the music and mood dictated.  As one old timer who has been around the block said:  we've come a LONG way in five years!  And we have: Christ is risen - He is risen, indeed!

"Well, it's the most profound holiday in the Christian tradition," Lamott says. "And I think two things really come to mind. One is something that the great writer Barbara Johnson said, which is that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. And I think that every year the world seems more of a Good Friday world. And it's excruciating, whether... it's Japan, or Libya, or whether its your own best friends and their children who are sick, which is something that makes no sense when you think about a loving God. But it's a time when we get to remember that all the stuff that we think makes us of such value, all the time we spend burnishing our surfaces, is really not what God sees. God, he or she, loves us absolutely unconditionally, as is. It's a come as you are party."