Information for reservation for the re-enactment of a Seder meal
6 p.m. Palm Sunday evening, April 1st

For those who want to deepen their understanding of Holy Week and the Last Supper:  Reservations are required.  Please use the sign up sheet on the bulletin board in the parish house hallway or phone in your reservation to the parish office by Wednesday, March 28th

It has been a custom of St. John's to offer on Palm Sunday evening, the beginning of Holy Week, a re-enactment of a traditional Seder meal, as Jesus would have eaten.  This meal is part of the Passover celebration of God's deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery.  The last supper Jesus had with his disciples on Maundy Thursday was probably this special meal of Passover.  We do know that Jesus made his final journey to Jerusalem during Passover and wanted to celebrate Passover with his closest disciples.  (A pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover in the Holy City was always a desirable priority for the faithful.)  Our Eucharist has the Passover meal as its foundation and all the Gospels assume the knowledge of the original connection.  We invite all who wish to partake, young and old.  We try to be sensitive to the spirit of the Passover as well as acknowledge that the actual holiday is very sacred to our Jewish neighbors, and is not part of our present tradition like it was to earliest Christians who also considered themselves Jews.  Our time together is an educational experience and devotional occasion as well as a full meal with roast lamb and special vegetables.  There is no charge, but we will not refuse donations. 

HOLY WEEK SCHEDULE

Palm Sunday
8 a.m. & 10:30 a.m.—Blessing of the Palms and Holy Eucharist
6 p.m.—Seder meal re-enactment

Monday in Holy week — 5:30 p.m. Holy Eucharist
Tuesday In Holy Week—12:10 and 5:30 p.m. Holy Eucharist
Wednesday in Holy Week— Eucharist at 5:30 p.m.

Maundy Thursday
6:00 p.m.—Simple soup supper
7:30 p.m. —Liturgy & Vigil
Good Friday
7:30 p.m.—Good Friday Liturgy & Stations of the Cross

Easter Sunday
5:30 a.m.—A Vigil before Easter
8:00 a.m.—The Holy Eucharist with choir
10:30 a.m.—Festal Eucharist with choirs

ADULT ED CONTINUES IN SPRING AND FALL

St. John’s Adult Education series on “The American Church in Times of National Crisis,” which featured presentations by Gary Anderson in January and Father Snyder in February, continues on March 26th at 7:15 PM with a talk by Chaplain Clark West of the Episcopal Church at Cornell. He will describe how, while conventional Christianity slumbered in the mid-eighteenth century, the Transcendentalists embraced the cause of Abolition. His talk is entitle, “Thoreau and Transcendentalism.” After an Easter break in April, the series will recommence with a talk by Ed Baptist on Monday, May 14th, Ed will bring the story of how American churches responded (or did not) to the needs of their day into the mid-nineteenth century by focusing on “Slavery and the Emergence of Black Christianity."

Then, following summer vacations, Ed Kokkelenberg will get the series underway again in September with an examination of the role of American churches during the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

OUTREACH OPPORTUNITIES

The needs of the victims of the Gulf Coast Hurricanes and the Southern Tier Floods continue.  The organization, Love Knows No Bounds, is dedicated to supporting the people of both of these areas who have on-going needs.  Love Knows No Bounds (LKNB) is an organization, founded locally, whose mission is to provide ongoing support to individuals and communities who have been victims of natural disasters.  Success has been achieved in rebuilding homes, providing furnishings and sponsoring respite to victims.  These activities are directed at the underserved persons of the affected areas, specifically after the immediate relief efforts of the major help providers, i.e., FEMA, Red Cross, et al. have gone.  LKNB works in New Orleans through its relationship with St. John’s #5 Faith Church and in Owego through the Tioga Area Recovery Program. 

• A trip to New Orleans is planned for the period April 7–14. Volunteers may join the group. This trip will focus on a new rebuild project in the 7th Ward. Donations are welcome. Funds will be used to purchase building materials and to defray travel expenses.

The following types of household furnishings, food items and tools and supplies are needed for the Owego efforts:

• household appliances in good working order
  
• gently used furniture, especially couches, chairs tables and dressers
  
• entertainment centers
  
• bookshelves
  
• non-perishable food items
  
• toiletries and non-medical health and beauty care items
  
• storage containers
  
• clothing and shoes
  
• linens
  
• tools in good working order
  
• dishes and kitchenware
  
• cleaning supplies

Such items listed may be provided as available. LKNB will schedule pick up as necessary. Trucks are scheduled weekly or monthly depending upon material collected. Following is the contact information: If you have high-quality furniture and appliances to donate, please contact LKNB’s donation coordinator, Rebecca, at:rribeiro@ithaca.edu.

If you want to volunteer on LKNB’s delivery crew, please contact the volunteer coordinator, Katie, at: katiecrumm@gmail.com.

For trip (April) information call 607-379-9964.

For monetary donations visit www.loveknowsnobounds.org home page.

Interested persons may also contact Scott Russell, 607-257-2831 or srussell11@twcny.rr.com.

Musical Notes

The changing season brings new opportunities for music - at St. John's and throughout the community.  Here is some of what's coming up this spring:

Saturday, March 31st, at 7 pm, at the Masonic Lodge in Interlaken, I will perform a live accompaniment to Buster Keaton's classic The Navigator. This is a tale of love, ingenuity, and danger on the high seas. Admission is free, but donations will be accepted. Light refreshments will be sold, and all proceeds will benefit Masonic programs for the community. Everyone is welcome.

Sunday, April 1st is Palm Sunday.  The children, youth, and adult choirs will present special music within the service.  The adults will sing on Maundy Thursday, April 5th, too. We will have vocal solos and the bell choir for the evening Stations of the Cross service on Good Friday, April 6th.  The adults will sing at both the 8 and 10:30 services on Easter, April 8th, and the bells will ring at the later service.

The children's choir is working very hard on The Tale of the Three Trees, which we plan to present during the 10:30 service on April 22nd, with Roy Ives as our narrator. This is a wonderful cantata that tells of three trees, and how God fulfills their dreams.

The children, youth, adults, and bells will all participate in the 10:30 service on the 29th of April as we celebrate Father Snyder's ministry at St. John's. I won't give details, but it promises to be a special day.

There are a couple of events still being organized for May.  On the afternoon of May 6th, Andy McCullough and I plan to present the concert we performed at Steinway Hall in New York City in February.  The program includes Christopher Berg's settings of Frank O'Hara's poems on New York City.  It is wonderful music - brilliant, beautiful, complicated to perform, but very accessible to the listener. Watch for more details on this in the coming weeks.

Finally, we are organizing a talent show for the afternoon of Sunday, May 20th. This fundraiser will help fund restoration of our choir room piano, and everyone is invited. If you have a talent you'd like to share, please let me know. Perhaps you sing or play an instrument. Maybe you dance or recite poetry. I will put together the program on a "first come, first chosen" basis. Or, perhaps you just enjoy supporting our musicians through attendance.  That's important, too. We already have some great, diverse offerings, and it promises to be fun for all. More details will be published in the coming weeks. 

Nancy Radloff, Director of Music

An Easter Greeting from our Seminarian at General Theological Seminary in the City of New York:

Dear People of St. John's:

I am writing to you on the fourth Sunday of Lent and, though Jesus hasn't yet even arrived in Jerusalem, I find myself thinking of resurrection.  Perhaps it's the flowers already emerging from the earth or the buds on the tree outside my window that belie the Lenten desert. Or, perhaps it's the fact of it being Sunday, that every Sunday is Easter, that on Sunday we step outside of whatever liturgical season we are observing to celebrate the Risen Christ.

Today it is Christ's Risen-ness that I am pondering.  Last semester I had the privilege of taking a course, Approaches to the Resurrection, taught by former Archbishop of Perth Peter Carnley.  Archbishop Carnley, a systematic theologian specializing in the Resurrection, built the course around an array of theologies that attempt to interpret the Resurrection.  We had two questions we sought to answer as we progressed through the term: What was the Resurrection? What does it mean to the Church today? At first glance, the two questions may seem to be asking the same thing. But look more closely. One deals with substance and the other with meaning, and it is the latter that proves most fertile for me as I prepare for the approaching Easter season. 

prefigures the sharing after he has risen.  Williams sees the pre-Calvary sharing as an act of self-giving that creates a context for the post-Easter appearances.  “We are invited to grasp,” he says, “the truth that to eat at Jesus' table is to benefit from his total self-offering—in historical terms, from his death on the cross.” Because it is after Calvary that these events of self-sharing reveal their greatest importance, it is only appropriate that we understand the community's meal with Jesus, and hence our celebration of the Eucharist, as an Easter event. 

Archbishop Williams further develops this idea of the Eucharist as an act of self-sharing and looks into how receiving food from Jesus is receiving the gift of His self.  It is with this idea of gift that Williams proclaims the transformative power of understanding not only the food we receive from Jesus as gift but to understand the world as gift.  He describes the process as us “relinquishing what is ours” so that it can be given back to us and received by us as gift.  We do this symbolically every time we celebrate the Eucharist, and it is through an awareness of the significance of this event that we are called to transform the world, to see the world not as something to be possessed by us but, rather, a gift given to us by God. 

Archbishop Williams explains that through such reasoning we come to understand that all of material reality is thus grounded in Jesus' life.  He is careful to point out, however, that this ordering of the world is to be discovered by us, not invented by us.  “Jesus,” he says, “is the embodiment of creation's hidden truth: he is the logos, the meaning of all things made flesh.”

And so, it is with the Archbishop's call to understand the world as gift echoing in my head that I prepare to receive the Eucharistic today.  Indeed, it is with this awareness of
Christ's revelation that I go into the world to see it transformed, to awaken to a world transfigured by God's love.

May God's peace be with you.

Notes on Holy Week & Easter:

Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday - There are two distinct and ancient customs for this Sunday: The blessing and procession of palms, and the reading of the Passion. Our present prayer book formally added a blessing for the palms (even though most parishes had done it for years), and incorporated the two themes with the title Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday. The blessing of the palms and the commemoration of Jesus' procession into Jerusalem combine joy with irony. Hence the service today begins with a parade atmosphere of greeting, hope and expectation of God's new commonwealth. After the procession is over, the atmosphere becomes somber as we recall what lies ahead.

The greeting "Hosanna, blessings to those who come in the name of the Lord," was a greeting used by pilgrims to each other as they went up to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. The Seder meal is a main part of the Passover celebration and it was probably a Passover Seder that Jesus had with his disciples at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday. (Details on our re-enactment of a Seder meal on Palm Sunday evening are printed elsewhere in this issue of the Eagle.)

He has loved us.) The festive nature of the occasion is cut short, as Jesus goes to pray and later is arrested. The stripping of the altar parallels Jesus' loss of dignity and freedom.

The long night vigil in the choir stalls following the service remembers Jesus' praying and the disciples' anxious waiting before Good Friday morning. (A sign-up list for the vigil will be on the bulletin board.)

Good Friday: We will offer the Good Friday Liturgy and Stations of the Cross at 7:30, Friday Evening. This has become a popular service over the past few years, especially with the larger community. The readings and meditations will be read from various places in the church. We will begin in the church, but we end with a very poignant conclusion in the parish house. 

For Christians, Easter became the fulfillment of the Feast of Passover.  In almost every language except English where the word is possibly a derivative from the name of the Anglo-Saxon spring goddess, the word for Easter and Passover is the same. The deliverance from slavery in Egypt, crossing over the Red Sea, and entrance into the promised land became associated with Jesus as the victorious Passover lamb. Baptism into a redeemed community, and entrance into a new type of life became associated together. Hence the symbols of the blood of the lamb and the water of new life in baptism became important early Christian symbols.