It's Good Friday. It's Holy Week and nearing the end of Lent. I used to always do my best worship planning during Lent and Easter. That seems strange now, being that Lent is about emptiness and all. But I loved coming up with visual and participatory worship settings that drove home the messages of Lent.
There was always a service that I wanted to do on Good Friday. I wanted to make a HUGE (read "life sized, big enough to actually crucify a person on") cross. Maybe out of old barn beams. Rough. Full of splinters. Unrefined. I wanted to lay it out in the altar space where every time anyone moved around the worship area you had to step over it. I wanted it to be in the way. You know. . .like Jesus is supposed to be in the way in our lives as we move around making our day to day decisions.
On Good Friday I wanted to do a first person telling of the crucifixion story from Jesus' perspective. Not in Bible English. But in a creative writing, everybody writing and feeling the story together kind of way. I wanted to end the service with a time of contemplation about what it was that actually nailed Jesus to those splintery boards. What kind of brokenness and sin did it take for Jesus to willing stretch out his arms and say, "It's all gonna be OK. Just give it to me."
In the quiet contemplation I wanted all of us to take small pieces of paper and write down the brokenness in our own lives that Jesus needed to heal. And then, one by one, we would have brought those things to the cross, and each of us – alone – would have nailed those things there. Hammer blows ringing out as the service ended.
That was my idea anyway.
Sometimes we just need to hear the piercing sound of a hammer on metal and feel the splinters slicing through our skin. We also need to know, in an intimate and personal way, that somehow it's all gonna be OK.
Happy Easter.
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