Dear U Park Family,
In our men’s group, we’re reading Mike McHargue’s book Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found it Again Through Science. In the beginning chapters, McHargue tells the story of being raised in a theologically conservative church and finding that the explanations and doctrines he was taught didn’t stand up to tragedies in his life or to his increasing scientific curiosity. In the group, we’ve discussed McHargue’s experience and our own, and many of the questions he raises come down to our evidence for religious faith. Why do we believe what we believe? When we doubt or question, how do we work out the truth for ourselves?
This Sunday, I’ll continue our “In the Flesh” sermon series, looking at how we can deepen our relationship with God in this distracting, material world that often falls short of our hopes and dreams. We hear a story from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus heals a man who was born blind. The healing is the shortest episode in what becomes quite a long story, because the religious authorities are unwilling to believe what just happened. The man who’s had his sight restored spends the rest of the story trying to convince people that he is the man who used to be blind, and that Jesus is the one who healed him. The authorities will not believe the evidence of their senses, because they think they already know the truth. I hope you’ll join us for worship, either in person at 9:00 or 11:00, or online. We’ll livestream our 11:00 service on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/UParkumcdenver/) and post a recording later in the day on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@UniversityParkUMCDenver).
Holy Week is approaching fast, and with it the series of worship services that are at the heart of our faith. We’ll start Holy Week with our Palm Sunday worship on April 13. Also that Sunday, we’ll make pretzels during the 10:00 Sunday School hour. Bethany Hader Crabbs, our Children’s Ministry director, has organized a Sunday school time for all ages that day, with intergenerational games and lessons.
Unlike in past years, our choir will not present its Easter Cantata on Palm Sunday. This year’s cantata is entitled “The Weeping Tree,” and it will be the centerpiece of our Good Friday worship, held at 7:00 P.M. Friday, April 18 in our Sanctuary. The cantata is a beautiful series of musical meditations on the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death on the cross. I hope you’ll come out to hear it on Good Friday.
Holy Week worship will be rounded out by a worship service at 7:00 P.M. on Holy Thursday and our Easter Vigil on Saturday. On Thursday, we recall Jesus’ final words to his followers from the Gospel of John. Jesus teaches them about the kind of community they are called to form, one that provides a life-giving alternative to the cutthroat world of status and constant pressure around them.
The Saturday vigil is one of my two favorite worship services all year (with the other being 11:00 Christmas Eve). Traditionally, the Easter Vigil is the first service of the Easter season, recognizing that the resurrection itself took place in the dark hours between sunset on Saturday and sunrise Easter morning. In the early church, new Christians were baptized into the faith on the Easter vigil, and those who had fallen away from church and stopped participating were joyfully welcomed back into the community. The vigil is a remembrance of the Biblical story of God’s saving work, from first light in Genesis to Easter morning in the Gospels. The Holy Week Triduum puts us in the story in a beautiful and compelling way, and I hope you can join us for those services (or for any one of them).
You can help the church prepare for Holy Week and Easter, in several ways. This year’s Easter Egg Hunt will be on Easter Sunday morning at 10:30, and Bethany has a wish list of needed items (especially candy). That list is available at church as well as in our weekly newsletter. Also, we’ll host a church cleaning day on April 5 from 9 – 12. If you’d like to help, we’ll set this up just as we have in the past: you can drop in any time during those three hours. We’ll have a list of jobs and the supplies needed to do them; just initial one of the jobs you’d like to do, grab the supplies, and go. We’ll have refreshments there and it’s always a fun day to share with church community.
I hope you’re looking forward to Easter as much as I am. In this busy and distracting world, celebration of resurrection can be a focal point to remind us that God is at work and there is always hope.
Grace and Peace,
Andy