The Big Idea for The Easter Season

The Easter season is just around the corner, which begins with Ash Wednesday (February 17th this year), hits the apex with Easter (April 4th this year), and concludes with Pentecost (May 23rd this year). As this graphic helpfully illustrates…

The first half of the Easter season is called Lent, and that’s when we’ll focus on lament.

The second half of the Easter season is called Eastertide, and that’s when we’ll focus on celebration. {1}

But why?

Why would we spend time doing this at Spring Church, and why would the Church continue to hand this tradition down from one generation to the next over so many years?

Think of a skill that you’ve acquired through practice.

It could be anything from using your phone to selling widgets to driving a car to making pancakes. All of us have learned how to do something through practicing that particular something, so pause for a moment and think of an example of something you’ve learned how to do by practicing at it.

Now that you’re thinking about your own example, ask yourself: What did it feel like the first time you tried it? The first time driving a car is scary, the first time playing a musical instrument is unpleasant, and the first time cooking a new dish is risky. Learning new skills requires a bit of courage, and a sense of humor because it often doesn’t go the way we want it to go. This is all very normal.

Let’s hold the sense of awkwardness we feel at the first few times we practiced an acquired skill as we lean into The Big Idea for Spring Church for the Easter season:

Jesus uses lament and celebration to reveal his kingdom to us.

Spring Church will have four worship services during Lent, and four worship services during Eastertide. The four Lent services will join the ancient practice of focusing on lament, and the four Eastertide services will join the ancient practice of focusing on celebration. Because our lives contain both sorrow and joy, each lament service will be paired with a corresponding celebration service. The graphic below shows the themes for these eight services and how they relate to one another.

Spend 60 seconds noticing the pattern and rhythm of our next 8 worship services in the graphic below.

We chose a beach image for this graphic because the ancient Hebrew people didn’t like water and associated the sea with chaos and death. In the Old Testament you read about the Israelite army, but you never heard a thing about an Israelite navy, did you? So, for us in this graphic, when we’re in the chaos of the water, we will be in a posture of lament together, and when we’re in the stability of the land, we’ll be in a posture of celebration together.

Now that we’ve been introduced to The Big Idea and the themes for the eight services during the Easter season, let’s return to the awkwardness of learning a new skill. Learning how to lament together as a church is going to require courage and a sense of humor because it’s not something we’ve done much at Spring Church. But, hey, the Western Protestant Church (of which Spring Church is a part) has largely forgotten how to lament, so lament is an acquired skill we don’t know how to practice. Soong-Chan Rah helpfully points out that “shalom requires lament” {2} and goes on to illustrate the problem further:

“The American Church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in the loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.”{3}

I started this blog by asking why we would do this, and here’s the answer:

If we need to lament in order to walk in the direction Jesus is walking, in order to walk towards shalom, in order to remember who we are and whose we are, then we need help. We need help because Spring Church is a community of practice, and we don’t know how to practice lament together. Sure, we’ve prayed things that I’ve written, and we’ve been lead by others who have modeled lament, but what I'm imagining here is different: What if we wrote and prayed a lament together as a part of a worship service? At the webinar with Soong-Chan Rah a few weeks ago, the way forward he gave the church was to lament. What if we tried that?

Well, first, a definition (what else?)

What is lament?

The definition I’d like to use for the next few months comes from Drs. Grace Ji-sun Kim and Graham Hill, authors of Healing Our Broken Humanity, and creators of the video series for our multi-church community of practice that we’ve been hosting, provide this definition:

“Lament is a demonstrative, strong, and corporate expression of deep grief, pain, sorrow, and regret.” {4}

And as we continue to use Healing Our Broken Humanity as our guide, we’ll follow their example in chapter 2 on how to lament as a church together. Since this will be new and somewhat awkward for us, I’m grateful to lean on the example of how others have written and prayed laments.

The goal of all of this is, quite simply, The Big Idea: Jesus uses lament and celebration to reveal his kingdom to us. We don’t lament simply for the sake of feeling bad, and we don’t celebrate simply for the sake of feeling better.

We lament and celebrate as a way to participate in the Kingdom of God, as a way to walk in the direction Jesus is walking in, as we enter into this world as we find it.

On Ash Wednesday we lament the reality of death in our midst, with a view towards Easter when we celebrate the reality of resurrection and new life. This world contains both death and life, and so we will look towards Jesus to reveal his kingdom as we engage with both.

Now our culture might tell us that, when we’re experiencing great sadness, we should be alone, or only with people who are very similar to us. But Uncommon Friendship and Common Discipleship invites us to pop the demographic bubbles that separate us, and we’ll get to learn how to lament together, as a church. Jesus invites us follow his lead into this ancient practice, and not listen to the fear and shame that separates us.

Will it require courage and a sense of humor to try this new-to-us skill? For sure!

Am I excited about the opportunity to try this with you? Of course!

Will Jesus reveal his kingdom to us as we lament and celebrate together? Absolutely!

Footnotes

1 - Etymology.com helpfully points out that the words we use to describe these church seasons have nothing to do with what those seasons actually mean for us as a church. “Lent” is connected to a Latin word meaning “lengthening,” referring to spring time and the lengthening of days. “Easter” comes from a Proto-Germanic way of saying “dawn” and is connected to a goddess of fertility and springtime, and “Eastertide” is an old English way of saying “the time of/after Easter.” While I wish that the names we use for these seasons had a strong connection to the meaning and significance of the Christian Story, well, nobody asked me and I don’t think I want to dedicate my career to the futility of renaming them.

2 - Rah, Soong-Chan. Prophetic Lament. InterVarsity Press. Downers Grove, IL, 2015. 21.

3 - Rah, 22.

4 - Kim, Grace Ji-Sun and Hill, Graham. Healing Our Broken Humanity. InterVarsity Press. Downers Grove, IL, 2018. 43.

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