Friday, April 3, 2009

Easter’s Priorities
  Religion piece by Grant Swank

Candle wax had melted onto the platform carpet in the sanctuary, matting itself deeply into the rug. It had set into hard, stubborn cakes.

That was not the tidiest sight!

“We’ll want to have that cleaned by Easter,“ inserted one of our members.

Fastidious laypersons had a right to be concerned.

“Don’t bother,“ I said. “All that carpet will come up. I expect that we’ll have brand-new carpet throughout the entire sanctuary by Easter.“

Hope springs eternal, for certain.

Earlier that year our church had flooded when water pipes froze, then burst.

Having lived through all of that, I scanned the rest of the building, anxious for God’s House to be cleaned up. What a mess!

Loose ends of the carpet stuck up here and there.

Heating ducts were still exposed.

Downstairs, missing ceiling tiles opened to gaping holes and ugly blotches.

Floor tile was ruined.

Room partitions were warped.

How many calamities this small congregation has endured!

Besides, another flood had occurred some time earlier. An oil truck had burst, setting loose a thousand gallons of oil spilling onto our newly landscaped lawn in front of the parsonage.

But after the landscaping was redone, a bit-tipsy fellow drove his pickup into the center of the yard instead of into the parking lot.

Then there was the fire in the electric dishwasher in the parsonage kitchen, plus the puffback in the furnace which left the entire house grimed by soot.

So this flood was simply one more trial. Yet could it also eventuate as another opportunity for us to trust more simply in God?

Each Sunday I had tried to point out eternal lessons we believers could learn from this litany of unpleasant events.

But now Easter was coming—a day when many visitors attended our worship—yet the church building itself seemed to be turned upside down.

One delay tumbled in after another. Nothing was done about the repairs.

Workmen were on hold; there was this-and-that interruption.

Two weeks before Easter I was to be gone for a week. We had been promised that while I was away, workers would start the repairs.

However, when I returned the day after Palm Sunday, I discovered that nothing had been done.

Further delays and more run-arounds!

At this point we all realized that there was absolutely no way work crews could have everything done by Easter Sunday.

Our Maundy Thursday service was approaching. Though I had been a pastor for more than a quarter of a century, I had never seen a House of God in such disarray.

So it was that the time came to begin our candlelight worship.

We had gathered to pray, to center on the cross, to approach His table, to ask God for His Spirit.

Then as I looked out over the congregation to ponder the faces of those who had meant so much to me over the years, slowly my attitude began to change for the better.

There sat Mary Lou who had served the Lord by assisting those at the hospital where she worked. Charlie had spent his retirement years cheering up neighbors close to his apartment. Jim had reached out with his understanding to side-lined minorities. Marian had fed homesick-for-home college age youth at her dining room table. Elsie had brightened up all of our lives with her sincerest of smiles.

In the peace of candlelight, we quietly meditated on the bare cross at the front of the church, praying for the message of Golgotha once more to penetrate our hurried days.

As we sang a closing hymn, I felt God mysteriously continuing to bond lovingly our spirits together.

It was then that I truly realized that this was indeed a very, very special Holy Week. What I had expected to be awkward and incomplete had become instead warm and wonderful.

As the stillness of God’s Spirit came upon us with heaven’s renewed strength, I realized afresh that the reason for the cross, the purpose of Christ’s death and resurrection, is to take the mess of our sins, the confusion of our earthly pilgrimages, and turn them into his glory.

An impressive beautiful appearance of a room is not what matters. Rather, lives and hearts yielded to the Lord are what actually count for eternity.

J. Grant Swank, Jr.

Posted by Grant Swank on 4/3/09

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