I always worried as a child that it wouldn’t be warm enough to wear socks to church on Easter Sunday and that my mum would make me wear my woolly tights again and that if I was wearing my tights, it wouldn’t feel like Easter at all. Those socks seemed so important.
This Easter Sunday, it was definitely a socks kind of day.
The weather turned just in time, there were buds on the trees, the sanctuary was filled with daffodils and everything was golden. Just as I’d hoped.
On Sunday, I was wearing my storytelling hat during our Family Service, pleased as punch to be able to share the best bit of the gospel. Mary Magdalene’s Rabbouni moment in the garden is the beauty of Easter. I just love being able to share it.
That said, I find that Easter Sunday can be a tricky one from a storytelling perspective because many of the congregation – and particularly the children – haven’t been to Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services. You need to bring all of Holy Week into Easter Sunday, but timing is important because you don’t want to linger too long in Good Friday on Easter Sunday. You need context, but you also need joy most of all. Bright, golden garden joy. So on Sunday, I used my post from last week to give context to Mary’s resurrection moment. And I used a prop from the Sunday School.
Last week for Palm Sunday, I brought in air-dry clay for the Sunday School and we made beads. The clay was made of white glue, cornstarch and mineral oil and so it had a lovely clean white sheen. As we made our beads, we spoke about all the bright white hopes that the disciples had. The kind of hope that you gather together and roll into a ball to hold on to, hope that you’d like to wear, bright white and shining, right over your heart. Because our Sunday School is only half an hour and because air-dry clay takes longer to set than that, I asked the kids to leave their beads with me. I took them home, and the Spouse and I painted them with gorgeous, shiny liquid gold leaf. They looked amazing.
I made more and painted those ones, too, so that they were be enough for the extra kids who might come along to church on Easter Sunday.
When each of the children came into church on Sunday morning, I looped a string of golden beads around their necks.
And then I told the story.
I told them that Mary’s heart was full of bright white hopes on Palm Sunday and that she carried those hopes with her as she walked through the market early in the week. I imagined the market place filled with feast foods and with faces from many places. In each face, Mary could see the light that Christ had showed her in her own heart. The same light, shining. She carried her hopes, that light, and Christ’s own love in her heart as she walked through the days of Holy Week. It was his love that brought them all to Jerusalem. And it was those hopes that shattered in the darkness of Good Friday.
Then Sunday came. Mary walked to the garden tomb on that first day of the week and, through her tears, she saw the empty tomb and the figure of the gardener. She cried out for answers and then, in an instant, he spoke her name and all Mary’s shattered hopes turned to gold.
I hope that the children keep their golden beads. I imagine the bright string hanging from a bedroom doorknob, where the beads will rattle each time the door is closed. Maybe they’ll make their way to a bookshelf where they will catch the light. At some stage, they’ll get put into a shoebox with other treasures. A reading prize certificate. A note written in red pen. An acorn. Three green marbles. The purple string will get tangled, perhaps, or it might fade over time. The box will get put up on a high shelf, pushed to the back, forgotten. But there will be a day when it is found again and rummaged through. I wonder how the painted clay will age. And maybe the children, too.
I hope that when they find those beads, they will also find something of Sunday’s sunshine. Something of the shining story. Something of that hope we might wear, white and dazzling gold.
