Stepping out the door into early morning cold, streetlights shimmered beams of light cutting through the dark somber haze. The sun had begun its ascent, but remained masked behind the towers. Gloveless hands tingled, reminding me that Spring had not yet sprung. As I walked down the driveway, I met up with Dave, my neighbour and closest friend. Slowly, intentionally, we packed our music and guitars into the back of the Civic before joining the throng of commuters on their way downtown. Dufferin; Ossington; Bathurst; We weaved North and East towards the U of T campus.
It was Tuesday. Our congregations had marked Easter two days before, but this morning we would gather the “Wine Before Breakfast” campus ministry community to celebrate. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but some days, some years, the sting of death and of grief takes time to wear off.
Over the course of that school year, Dave and I had led music in the community. Meeting in his living room over coffee, we’d read the scriptures, mapping our musical selections against the liturgical year, picking old hymns and new. Each week, as a way of pulling the many threads of the service together, we’d offer a musical reflection at the end of the service, a piece we discerned might resonate with the state of the world, the gathered community, and the liturgical moment.
That morning’s Easter service was opened by Edward Mote’s nineteenth century English hymn, “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less.” The African American Spiritual, “O Mary Don’t You Weep” followed. Being a couple of white kids from the suburbs, our version took on a decidedly Springsteen edge. As Bishop Andrew Asbil (then rector of Toronto’s Church of the Redeemer) blessed the body and blood, we sang Stuart Townend’s 1995 hymn, “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us.”
On a Tuesday morning at 7:22am, our group of bleary-eyed students and front-line shelter workers, academics, pastors, and Bay Street types gathered in a college chapel as an act of longing and hope. This was a community that was deeply interconnected with one another and with the life of the city–especially the plight of the city’s most vulnerable.
In some ways, that campus community was a refuge.
It was not, however, a refuge from the pain and suffering of the world. To be an Easter people is to embrace the world’s pain and suffering, carrying it together, knowing that none of us can carry the burden alone. And so, week after week, year after year, we cultivated a refuge, a community, where we could bring our joys and sorrows, all that we knew, and all that we longed for. Week after week, year after year, conversation after conversation, this place had become a place of shared vulnerability, shared grace, shared mercy. It was a community that knew how to party, absolutely. And also, a community that took seriously God’s invitation to join Jesus in his costly, healing work.
In prayer and in song, in reflection on the scriptures, and in coffee-soaked conversations over breakfast, this community practiced the art of carrying each others’ burdens. Of holding each others’ pain. Of speaking the reality of the beauty and brokenness of everyday life, rather than pretending that everything was fine. Looking back these many years later, this was one of the most honest, loving communities I’ve ever been part of.
That Tuesday morning as we celebrated Christ’s resurrection, Dave and I knew that we couldn’t jump so easily to Hallelujah. The late evangelist Tony Campolo is often quoted as saying “It’s Good Friday, but Easter’s coming.” And I like that sentiment. Yet sometimes we also need to say “It’s Easter, but Good Friday is still with us.” Many in our community were still exhausted, disoriented, and grieving. Which is why we turned to “The Pearl” by Emmylou Harris to bring us home:
Oh the dragons are going to fly tonight
They’re circling low and inside tonight
It’s another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight
That morning we sang of the reality of the world into which Christ is being born, the reality of the world in which Christ is being murdered, the reality from which Christ will rise again.
We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there’s no heaven, what is this hunger for?
As we sang verse upon verse, we lifted our voices to declare the world as it is, not as it ought to be. Taking a hard look at reality, undergoing such great pressure, we acknowledged the toll taken upon us, at the same time struggling, thirsting, hoping against hope, that there is something more.
Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God
Of God. Of God.
That morning we sang of the seeming silence of our civic leaders and churches in the face of poverty and injustice so rampant in our city. We sang of the silence, and wondered why God, why God’s people appeared to be silent. Echoing the Psalmist whose words we had sung all the way back in September, we demanded to know, “How long, O Lord? How long?” Why, with all these Christians around, are the labourers so few? Hungry and parched, the reality of life never far from us, we moved as with desperation into the chorus:
And we cry Alleluia! Alleluia!
We cry Alleluia!
Forty voices joined together in that college chapel to cry “Alleluia!” Forty voices all-too-familiar with the scars of Good Friday and the disorientation of Holy Saturday reached desperately for hope. We cried out like the Psalmist; cried out like rocks on the side of the road; cried out with Emmylou Harris’ prophetic words
And we cry Alleluia! Alleluia!
We cry Alleluia!
There wasn’t a dry eye in the chapel that morning. We sang through tears for all that our tears represented. Sitting behind my bass guitar, locking down the groove, I felt as though I was hanging on for dear life. Friends, I was a sobbing disgusting mess. Overwhelmed at the confluence of grief and hope, I found myself looking around the congregation in wonder, thinking, “Isn’t that exactly the place that Jesus comes to meet us?”
It’s not in our denial of reality. It’s not in our impulse to push away the pain. It’s not in our nostalgia for the way things used to be. Where does Jesus come to meet us? Right here. Right now. And this, I think, is how I understand wholehearted worship.
Wholehearted worship is how we live, and how we show up before God and with one another. Wholehearted worship has space for, invites, perhaps even demands honesty, vulnerability, and hope. Wholehearted worship takes place when we live our lives in ways that profess God’s worth-ship. That God alone is worthy of glory and honour and praise. In joy and in sorrow, God is worthy. And so, this Easter, whatever we are carrying, may we turn our hearts, and may we renew our vows to God and to the world God loves as we cry “Alleluia!”
