Bits for Sunday, April 12, 2009

Happy Easter!

Today has been a very full day in Bekahland – and also in Bekah’s tummy! Our family has the wonderful tendency to have far too much food for holidays. I love it so. And since the dress did zip for church today – I was free to enjoy once church had ended. For those of you who were praying for my (extreme) anxiety over reading in church – and more specifically reading that one sentence in Aramaic – I’d like to report it went well. I have no idea what I may have actually said in Aramaic, but I said something.

My day began with a sunrise service. I wanted to mention that since evil DST has moved our sunrise to such a late hour, a sunrise service SHOULD now start at 8 in the morning. But apparently the traditional 6 still stands. So at 5, my alarm began its blaring and my cats began their glaring.

The service was an Easter Pageant service. I think many of you know that for most of my life, I was in the Marion Easter Pageant. A few years ago, they stopped having the Pageant, mostly because the building was in such bad shape. Easter has never quite seemed the same without the weeks of rehearsal leading up to Easter – and then the performances during Easter week. This year a group of people organized a service to show the taping of the Pageant done the year before it ended. I figured watching it at six in the morning was as close to being in it at six in the morning as I was going to get, so I went.

Every time I watch it, I see something new. And what I saw today really struck me – which is especially amazing, considering the pre-dawn hour.

One of the groups in the Pageant was called the Wealthy Family. In many ways, they had the best part of the entire Pageant. They always had the best costumes (trend setters of the tunic world) and entered with great fanfare. Literally. (Men carrying HUGE fans walked before and behind them.) They pranced through with their treasure boxes and huge fruit platter (fake fruit, but I heard once that they hid snacks inside it to eat during the performance) and even a real dog. They paraded from the entrance to a large alcove at the edge of the stage where they got to lounge on padded seats. Once they made their entrance, they were basically done until they left – so they could just sit and watch the entire Pageant from their better than front row seat.

The part I played required me to exit the stage prior to the end of the performance, so I never saw the very end until the taping was released. And it was in those final moments of the Pageant that I saw something new today.

The Pageant ends with the women discovering the empty tomb and running to tell the disciples – and everyone else – that Jesus is alive! For pageantry purposes, all the people who comprised the inhabitants of Jerusalem were to “wake up” from their sleeping positions on the floor (and let me tell you – at six a.m., I wasn’t always pretending with that sleep business) and walk past the empty tomb to promptly exit stage left (or right).

I was always so nervous about making sure I pushed through the masses and past the tomb in the allotted time frame – which was not long – that I never paid much attention to anything else that happened.

This morning I watched as the masses (myself included) pushed forward and squeezed into the tiny backstage areas – and from the middle of the masses, I watched the Wealthy Family emerge. They packed up their treasure chests and fruit tray and dog and walked right back out the way they came in – leaving behind the people pausing to peek inside the empty tomb.

I don’t know if that was purposeful scripting or simply a way to get the lavish props offstage without smooshing them, but this morning it was powerful to me. The Wealthy Family had it all. They had the costumes we all wished for as we fussed and tugged at our hand-me-downs with holes. While we scrambled to get to our next location on cue, they reclined against pillows and ate hidden treats from underneath the piles of fake fruit. As we stood on tiptoe to see over the tall men in front during some of the scenes, they just shifted a bit and watched with ease.

And when the tomb was empty – the tomb that sat just feet from their perch – they packed up their stuff and left the way they came. They gathered their finery about them and walked away from the greatest miracle.