You are the God who remains with us during our Saturdays of waiting and wondering, marked by the memory of Friday and the hope of Sunday. Forbid us too-easy exits out of the darkness. May we wait until we are at last interrupted by your life-giving grace. Amen. (Walter Brueggemann)
We are a people
shaped by the Paschal Mystery: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ
will come again. Those familiar words flow easily off our tongues. The
challenge is for them to become not only what we profess with our lips, but how
we live our lives, in our vocation to become an Easter people.
For many years now, I’ve
been fascinated by Holy Saturday. As a parish priest, there are so many
liturgies to plan for that by Easter morning, when we proclaim that Christ is
risen, often the clergy need a nap. Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and
the Easter Vigil are all complicated liturgies. And often more than one each
day. And then Easter morning and then the next forty- nine days as well, since
Easter is a season and not just one morning.
But tucked in the Prayerbook between Good Friday and the Easter Vigil is a little one-page liturgy that I used to use with the altar guild and those who would be participating in the Easter Vigil later on this day. I’d plan to take a few minutes for us all to catch our breaths and then the altar guild would decorate and we’d do a run-through of the Vigil on Saturday morning. You can find the liturgy on page 283 of The Book of Common Prayer. Check it out if you don’t already know it.
It is small, but mighty. It’s totally unpretentious. In fact it’s surely the most humble little liturgy in the entire BCP: the "little engine that could" service. The rubric at the top of the page reminds us that there is no celebration of the Eucharist on this day between the observance of the crucifixion and the Vigil.
Holy Saturday is about waiting. A simple collect asks God that “we may await with him the coming of the third day and rise with him to newness of life.” Readings, a brief homily, and then “in place of the Prayers of the People, the Anthem, “In the midst of life.” Then the Lord’s Prayer and the Grace. That’s it. The Anthem comes from the Burial Office – you’ve got to turn the page to 492 to get there:
In
the midst of life we are in death;
from
whom can we seek help?
From
you alone, O Lord…
Saturday waiting. On the Sabbath
day. We know about death. We see too much of it in our lives. Yet we live in
hope for new life, for the promise of the empty tomb. We are shaped by the good
news of Easter and called to live toward that love that never fails.
But so much of our lives is in-between. Waiting for the school bus. Waiting to hear the results of a lab test. Waiting.
Waiting can raise our anxiety and make us fearful. Yet we can also wait in hope. In the midst of life, we are in death. But we know where to look for help. And so we wait for the coming of the third day, so that we might rise with him to newness of life. We can practice waiting toward Easter. We can practice waiting in ways that open our hearts to the new thing God is calling us toward, rather than the old thing which allows us to return to “normal.”
Holy Saturday waiting.
We are not God. That job is taken. We are not masters of even our own lives. We preachers have some sense of what to say in our congregations on Good Friday. And we have some sense of what to say on Easter morning. But right now we are living in-between. We are waiting.
May that short, simple liturgy point us toward waiting in hope, and with courage, and with love, trusting that all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Just not usually on our timetable.
