From Palm Sunday until the day before Easter we had in Glencraig 13 services (which, I’m ashamed to admit, included a Wedding on Maundy Thursday – not the done thing in Holy Week! But these young couples book their weddings 2 or 3 years in advance, and they have no idea that it might interfere with what is the holiest week of the year for Christians. So, you can see where they’re coming from, but I would draw the line on a Good Friday! In fact, you used not to have Weddings on any Friday, at all, because of all the connotations.)

Anyway, that’s just an aside and it’s not what I mean to talk about. I just wanted to mention that Holy Week this year, I thought, was really quite exceptional. We always wax lyrical about our speakers from year to year, and rightly so because they deserve it, and we were truly blessed and enriched by Will Murphy this Holy Week. For those who were there, who will ever forget, “How’s life?” or crunchy scrambled eggs? A man of great humour and of great spirituality, as I said in our last Parish News, an important combination to survive as a Clergyman; and what an array of experiences and varied ministries he has indeed had to survive.

Along side thought-provoking and challenging words, we have had a real journey of liturgy throughout the week, not least helped by our own Ray Rennix. Indeed, so many people have put so much into it all:

The commitment and singing of our choir has been exemplary, and Ian our organist has played to his usual high standard and has been here all week, even with all his work commitments and even the three services we had on Good Friday – just except for Thursday night when Maureen Semple gallantly stepped up to the mark and played the piano for us. Our Sacristans have had to work overtime. And now the church is arrayed with the most beautiful flowers and arrangements because of all the hard work put in yesterday morning. Even last night, after our first Easter Vigil, there was our faithful gang clearing candle wax from Church pews and Church carpet!!

Thank you, to all of you. What a week it has been!

I have felt, in the best way that I can, however inadequately, that I have tried to walk in the steps of Christ, through all of this Holy Week, and now I have arrived at this glorious Easter Day. I feel a bit wrecked, but it’s been incredibly rewarding; I feel that because we have attempted to walk the way of the cross, that I now truly appreciate the joy and wonder of this day! That’s what it’s about! But it wasn’t done alone; the journey of Holy Week and Easter Day was achieved because we walked it together, and thank you for helping me.

For some reason, I kept an article from the C. of I. Gazette which suddenly (almost miraculously) reappeared on my desk at home; I say that because it’s dated last September and it’s about the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Particularly, it was about St. Paul’s Chapel which still stands on the north-east corner of Ground Zero. My niece, Christine’s sister’s daughter has travelled the world, but recently she was in New York and she wanted to see Ground Zero.

If she had the chance, I told her to go and see St. Paul’s – it’s a chapel-of-ease to the larger Trinity Church, five blocks south on the famous financial hub of Wall Street. I was privileged to be there in February of 2002, when a gang of us visited Albany Diocese in New York State

It is a beautiful little chapel, built in 1766 and it is the oldest public building in continuous use in Manhattan, now almost lost in a sea of modern skyscrapers. George Washington worshipped there after his inauguration as the first President of the United States and it now contains a ‘Washington Pew’. Somehow, the church survived the attacks of September 11; although pummelled with shards of glass, smoke and debris, not a single window was broken. For nine months after the attacks, St. Paul’s was transformed into a support centre for all the volunteers and rescue workers. The wooden pews are scarred with the marks of the firemen’s belts and equipment and rugged boots where they lay down for rest. A ground swell of support came in once they had started a barbecue in the Church porch; often gourmet food was donated by the city’s best restaurants. It provided a place of rest and solace and a place where workers used the church to express their own faith, Christian, Jewish, even Islam.

Three days after the attack, President Bush called on places of worship to ring their bells in memory of those killed on September 11^th and the sound echoed powerfully through the hollow of Ground Zero below. Later, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Matthews recalled the event by saying, “The rescue workers stood in silence as if to say, the Lord God reigns, even in this hell. Sometimes in the midst of the most horrible tragedies, we see with eyes with which we haven’t seen before”.

Church members believe that the only thing that saved their little church was a huge sycamore tree that was knocked over in the corner of the graveyard.

I don’t always understand why it seems to have to be this way round, but it (often) takes tragedy and devastation to see life ‘with eyes with which we haven’t seen before’.

To have tried to walk the way of the cross through this Holy Week and Easter has helped us to see what it’s all about. It can’t be done alone; we need to do it together, and we need each other’s support and love.

When St. Paul’s chapel was saved by a Sycamore tree on September 11, it became the focus of a rebuilding of lives shattered by such devastation. It’s a symbol of the kind of experience we need to know and understand in Holy Week, so we can truly know the joy and wonder of Easter Day.

I want to end with this. I will comment on Archbishop Tutu’s letter, and the circumstances around it, perhaps later in the next Parish News, but for now I want to draw your attention to the verse which is at the bottom of his letter – “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God – if there is love among you, then all will know that you are my disciples.”

Holy Week and Easter are about love for God and for each other in the most extreme circumstances. It’s about a journey which we cannot travel alone, we’re not supposed to travel it alone, we must travel it together in constant love and support for each other, for love is of God.