In the name of the One whose love is making all things well – Jesus Christ. Amen.
Holy Saturday is quite likely the most neglected of all liturgies in the Church Year. It’s only half a page in the Prayer Book, so people can be forgiven for not even noticing it’s there. And on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, most clergy and altar guilds are thinking about flowers and trumpets more than they are squeezing in another liturgy into an already very full week. But that’s not actually the reason why I think Holy Saturday is neglected. No, it’s not ignorance, laziness, or busyness, but the discomfort of waiting that leads so many to skip over Holy Saturday.
The Biblical witness is rather silent on what happens on this day. Pilate dispatches a guard of soldiers to the tomb and Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, often thought to the wife of Cleopas, go to the tomb to keep vigil. That is all we know directly from the gospels – watchful guards and faithful women. Based on the passage we heard from First Peter, we also know that that “the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead.” And though we confidently and rightly say in the Creed that “he descended to the dead,” the entire doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell comes from that one verse, and it’s a challenge to build a robust theology on such limited references.
Given how much emphasis is placed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and that, by comparison, so little happens on Holy Saturday, it’s perhaps not surprising that so many find the day to be uncomfortable. It’s a day not of action, but waiting. And we are not very good at waiting.
Over the past few days, the sermons have been a conversation with that well-known passage from First Corinthians: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” On Holy Saturday, we sit and wait with the love that hopes all things.
Biblically speaking, hope is what we might call “active waiting.” Hope is an expectant trust while we are still in the middle of things. One preacher has noted that hope begins when optimism dies. We might say that optimism is thinking things will work out, whereas hope is trusting that they will. Optimism is rooted in our perspective; hope is grounded in God’s. Put another way, optimism might be seeing the glass as being half-full instead of half-empty, and hope is trusting that it will be completely filled. This is what leads one theologian to call hope “anticipated joy.” Hope is founded upon a truth known already to God, whereas optimism is merely wishful thinking on our part.
But, as the late Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, noted, “Hope is hard work.” When we hope, we trust things that we cannot yet grasp onto or fully see. Hope is not something we can prove. We heard in the reading from Lamentations, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’” Despite the darkness and devastation that has surrounded the author of that passage, generally assumed to be the prophet Jeremiah, he has hope in God. Just as we trust that dawn will arrive each morning, the prophet trusts that God’s redemption will come.
Waiting for dawn in what feels like a constant midnight is a challenge. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams compares the art of hope to birdwatching. He writes, “The true disciple is an expectant person, always taking it for granted that there is something about to burst through the ordinary and uncover a new light on the landscape… It is a little bit like the experience of a birdwatcher. The experienced birdwatcher, who is sitting still, poised, alert, not tense or fussy, knows that this is the kind of place where something extraordinary suddenly bursts into view.”
I’ve never gone birdwatching, but even from having a hummingbird feeder outside, I know it can take a tremendous amount of patience, stillness, and attentiveness to see one. Our lives move so fast and we do so much multi-tasking that to sit and wait on just one thing with our full attention can be laborious and tedious, and yet this is what Holy Saturday teaches us about hoping.
If you’re an early riser or sleep with the windows open, you’ve noticed something interesting about the dawn and birds. Birds are a great example of hope, because even before sunrise begins, their songs do. They have learned to anticipate and rejoice in the rising sun, even when its rays are not yet visible. It takes a lot of hope to sing about that which you cannot yet see.
Most of us might not be able to quote the prophet Malachi from memory, but, actually, we can, thanks to the Christmas hymn “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” – Malachi 4 proclaims, “Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.” Biblically speaking, Jesus is that morning bird ushing in the dawn. But in order to hear that song of grace, we have a to be something like a birder – still, attentive, and expectant.
The poet Emily Dickinson wrote,
Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without words –
And never stops – at all –
Friends, I don’t know what things you are waiting for, how long you’ve been waiting, or how much longer you will have to wait, but I pray that it won’t be much longer. I know from my own personal experiences that waiting, especially for something or someone you care deeply about, is hard. Five minutes waiting in an emergency room lobby can feel as long as a week of vacation. And, the hard truth of the matter is that, sometimes, we don’t see dawn in our lifetimes. The hope we have on Holy Saturday is that even if we can’t see the dawn, we’ll have the song of Jesus’ love which echoes throughout eternity.
Fifty-eight years ago today, on April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. With a sense of vision and wisdom that only a true prophet can have, the night before he was killed, he said in a speech in Memphis, “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
That’s the love that hopes all things.
