It IS the most wonderful time of the year! Holy Week! I have done my usual “begging” email, challenging our parishioners to come and dance every dance. I’ve preached about how transformative that can be, I have reflected on when I first “did” Holy Week and my eyes were opened, my faith deepened, my soul reminded of Jesus’ passion and resurrection in such powerful ways.

In seminary I was named “Holy Week Chair” as a way for our liturgics professor and my classmates to punish me for some horrible sins (which I can’t recall). Why else? Holy Week at seminary is A REALLY BIG DEAL! Each service / event has a chairperson – Maundy Thursday, Agape Meal, Good Friday, The Great Vigil, the brunch after the Vigil. Every seminarian was assigned to one of those teams. And I was tasked with coordinating all of it.

It was so fun! Well….and stressful. Standing at the Kinko’s counter at 3am Good Friday morning, trying to get the Vigil bulletins to print right, was not really my idea of a good time. But my captains pulled it all together and Holy Week was an amazing experience all three years of seminary.

Then I find out upon graduation and ordination, as shocking as it seems, that not ALL priests loved ALL of Holy Week (especially the Easter Vigil)! How can this be? What do  you mean people won’t come to a service that begins before sunrise on Easter Day, or even one that begins after sundown on Saturday? I had to learn to compromise – as a Curate my Rector allowed me to plan and offer an Easter Vigil, but we had to start it at like 5pm or people wouldn’t come (especially baptism families with their infants). So there we were on the steps of the church in the really hot Mississippi Delta blazing sun (it was of course after Daylight Savings Time), lighting the “new fire” in broad daylight and lighting candles whose flames you could not even see before processing into the “darkened” church.

Not quite the effect I wanted.

At St. Patrick’s in Long Beach they had a long standing tradition of doing an Easter Vigil. I arrived two weeks before Holy Week and they had things well in hand – we even did SIX baptisms by candlelight that night. It was awesome! And even though Katrina destroyed our church the next year, we still DID HOLY WEEK in the gymnasium we called home, along with a couple of hundred disaster relief volunteers, every year for four years before moving into our new church building. The worst, though, was probably when Bishop Marble, retired of Mississippi, came to preach and help with our Good Friday service in the Camp Coast Care building. We always setup church in the dining area for the volunteers, which presented some challenges. This Good Friday, as we were saying the Solemn Collects, a group of volunteers who were in their sleeping quarters (basically separated from us by a curtain) got into a….um….high volume discussion. And while they did use the word “holy” a lot, most of the rest of it was way beyond PG 13. I suspect similar language was used by the thieves on the cross.

But none of that is the point of this blog post (for those still reading). I do love Holy Week – every aspect of it. I grow weary of priests talking about how weary they are from it all – SO MANY SERMONS – so many bulletins, so much planning. Friends – nobody feels sorry for you! We get to do this thing, this amazing thing, help guide people on this journey, help prepare meaningful liturgies and preach wonderful sermons and I wish it lasted more than a week!

In fact, I miss doing most of the preaching for Holy Week. At St. Patrick’s, my beloved Deacon, the Rev. Lynne Hough (see my previous post) would help with the early in the week homilies, but I would preach at least one of those and all the rest – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, the Vigil, Easter Day. It was fun to try to weave them together, link these amazing services with the incredible story we were trying our best to connect people to. Challenging, of course. But really so FUN!

Did I mention I love Holy Week?

Now that I have served much larger churches as an Interim Rector for my last 4 (including this year) Holy Weeks, my experience is a lot different. Of course there are many more people who attend, but having other clergy to divide up the preaching and celebrating is quite different than the experience of solo priests. I think it’s great, don’t get me wrong. People need to hear these other voices, be inspired by their sermons and led by their sacerdotal presence. I don’t begrudge that at all. I just kind of miss the intense sermon prep as deadlines approach and all manner of things have to be handled (and again, at St. Patrick’s I had so many great people helping, my deacon, my vergers, choir masters, acolytes, readers, story tellers for the vigil, the works!) and when the time comes you get to lead day after day and night after night of what is the most awesome week of the year.

So….Easter Day sermon is done. And Palm Sunday brief homily mostly done. And I can’t wait to hear Christie (Maundy Thursday) and Jessica (Good Friday) inspire and move and remind me by their words as they preach – but goodness I miss preaching on those days.

Christ Church – I love Holy Week! We will be doing some new things (nothing earth shattering, don’t worry) this year, a “fresh take on Holy Week that honors your traditions” is what I like to call it. I hope you will be there. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!