Community of Christ's Holy Week

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I am not great at observing the different seasons of the liturgical year. A good friend of mine once responded to this complaint with “Welcome to living a liturgical year life,” so I gather that to a certain extent, this is how everyone feels about it. It always feels a little frustrating to me, though, because I love the idea of the liturgical year.

I attended a spiritual retreat sponsored by my congregation last Saturday, and one of the activities we did was to string together some painted wooden beads representing the different liturgical seasons as we read about what each of those different seasons represents. I love the sense of “waiting for something great to happen” of Advent. I love the bursting forth of the spirit associated with Pentecost. I even appreciate the invitation of Ordinary Time to make the everyday sacred in its own way. I’m just bad at making those areas of focus when those seasons roll around (maybe the prayer beads I have up in my office now will help).

As I was biking into work yesterday, I started thinking about how the ongoing Holy Week can be useful in that symbolic way, whether or not I do a great job of being present for the symbols of every day as they come. In particular, I spent some time thinking about everything that happens in between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. The week starts off great, it pretty quickly starts to get worse, Good Friday is devastating, but the next Sunday is better than before.

As I’ve written before, I don’t know that I believe in a literal resurrection, but I find so much value in Easter’s promise of better things ahead. I figure there’s that kind of value in all of Holy Week—and especially this year, in my denomination. Community of Christ’s transferring historic properties like the Kirtland Temple to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been devastating for many of us, and some kind of painful for most of us. Since yesterday, I’ve been thinking about where my denomination stands in the Holy Week journey.

I’m not a historian, so I’m open to pushback, but I’d place our Triumphal Entry during W. Grant McMurray’s presidency, between 1996 and 2004. In many ways, McMurray represented who Community of Christ is today. He was the first non-Smith to lead the church, he represented the culmination of decades of wrestling with Restoration history, and he helped us commit to becoming a peace and justice church. Maybe choosing a new name for our denomination in 2001 was our specific triumphal entry moment—it was a new way of entering the religious landscape, proclaiming who we are now as a church and as a people. I like that entry! It’s exciting, it feels victorious, and it drew me (and many others) into the denomination.

As deeply as I appreciate McMurray’s ministry, though, and as much as Community of Christ’s Triumphal Entry has been meaningful for me, it’s clear that some of the enthusiasm and optimism of that time period didn’t pan out. McMurray’s Transformation 2000 initiatives, to revitalize the church before we hit the demographic challenges on the horizon, have been tremendously successful in some ways but (as I understand the history) never quite realized the hope that we’d somehow dodge the predicament that we’re currently in. The sale of the Kirtland Temple this year emphasizes that—as does the World Church’s warning that our financial worries aren’t over yet.

I joined Community of Christ from a church that literally has hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. Community of Christ is the church that I want to be in, but I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t sometimes miss being in a church where I didn’t have to worry about the financial future of the denomination. Over the past several months, I’ve thought about this in terms of one of the darker moments of Holy Week: Jesus’s arrest in the garden. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enough money in the bank to purchase the services of legions of angels, and boy howdy, is that ever tempting! We in Community of Christ, though, may only have one option ahead of us: To put away our swords (which wouldn’t be fitting for a peace and justice church anyway) and to follow Christ to the cross.

In terms of our Holy Week, I do think that Community of Christ is on the path to the cross. That’s really uncomfortable, even when I choose to understand all of this in Holy Week terms where the path to the cross is clearly the right choice to make. I believe that there are difficult days ahead—I don’t know what our Good Friday looks like, but I can’t imagine it will be easy. Yet, because I believe in the message of our Triumphal Entry 20 years ago, I also believe that there is an Easter waiting for us on the other side of our Good Friday. I don’t know what that Easter is going to look like, but I am excited to walk with my co-religionists toward that future.

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