Holy Week Reflections              Rocky Mountain Synod, ELCA 

     April 23, 2011 

 Holy Saturday         

The Word comes screaming, shattering silence, sparking new fire


I am counted among those who go down to the pit;

I have become like one who has no strength;

lost among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave,

whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.

Psalm 88 

 

What words can be spoken,

on this day when the Word lies deathly still and silent?

To speak at all, to break the silence in any way,

seems a desecration.

Light itself seems a sacrilege, even noonday a mockery,

when the Light has been extinguished.

 

But the darkness will not overcome.

Imagine. Imagine the creative and creating Word

piercing, laser-like, into the Lazarus death blackness.

Into the light and life absent tomb, the Word comes

screaming, shattering silence, sparking new fire

against the cold stone, igniting ears to hear,

eyes to see, heart to beat.....to beat.

 

Stone be rolled away!  Come out!  Unbind him!

And in his unbinding we are all unbound,

set free to breathe at last.

 

--Bishop Allan Bjornberg

 

 

I'm sometimes up, and sometimes down,

Coming for to carry me home,

But still my soul feels heavenly bound,

Coming for to carry me home.

                                    African-American Spiritual