Holy Week Ahead

I’ve never done much Lent blogging, though I tend to get a bit more seasonally contemplative in the week leading up to Easter. I should be blogging Lent more thematically, but for a variety of reasons, this was not the year to start that tradition — although quite a number of folks asked me about it after my Advent project. Perhaps next year. In the meantime, I’ve decided to give you the preview collection of what I’ve composed for the week, which I tend to review every year.

First, for the kids. A few years ago we began to develop a set of mnemonics for the kids to tell the easter story through all of Holy Week beginning from the anointing at Bethany through to the resurrection. It consists of a number of little trinkets, figures, and objects which I wrote about a couple years ago, and posted a photo of the objects. If you’ve got younger kids, I would encourage you to take up a tradition along the lines of this one. Not only do the kids really get into it, but one year with our home church on Maundy Thursday, the adults shared a meal together and I spread out all the objects and went through the story as everyone fidgeted with the objects. I find them surprisingly helpful for myself.

As for “An Orderly Account of the Events of Holy Week,” A decade ago (yes, really) I preached a sermon at my CLB which was basically just a telling of events with images on a screen… which made for a surprisingly powerful telling. I’ve since split it up into a post per day from the day before Palm Sunday right through to Easter, and last year I added a piece for the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, which had always been missing; I think the reflection turned out as a fairly poignant piece. Reading a post per day would mean starting tomorrow (Saturday), but in any event, here’s the whole series for use at your own pace.