When It’s Saturday

Here’s a word for your toolbox that might be unfamiliar for some: Liminal. I’ll explain it in just a bit.

Last weekend, Claudia and I joined so many others walking the familiar paths from Good Friday through Easter Sunday.

Friday night, Foundry Church held a contemplative service with readings and songs and communion, recalling the notable movements of Holy Week, ending at the filled cave-tomb of Jesus. We were all dismissed and left quietly with plenty to ponder.

Sunday morning we joined all the Jesus-followers around the world celebrating an empty tomb and a risen Savior. Joyous songs of amazement that the dead Jesus had returned, just as he said he would. This changes everything.

But we don’t talk much about Saturday. The hymn writer says, “Low in the grave he lay…” but the hours are cloaked in mystery God has not chosen to explain in detail for us. Between “Were you there when they crucified my Lord” and “Up from the grave he arose!”, Saturday stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets.

It’s liminal time. Watching the clock move at a glacial pace. On a threshold but what lies ahead not quite in sight. A place where hope hangs on for dear life. Waiting Rooms and empty mailboxes.

Jesus’ apprentices, not forgetting the words of promise from their Leader but slapped in the face by what they just witnessed, cluster scared and hidden away behind a locked door and shuttered windows. Imagine their conversations that matched the gloom of the place, whispering so as not to be discovered and shoved off by rough hands to who knew what. Liminal time.

You’ve been there and so have I.

Those places where dreams have been executed and hopes wrapped up and buried in an apparently final resting place. Liminal spaces.

That is the place where mourning is a right response. Just like the women who waited in sadness for the Sabbath to end so they could finish tending to Jesus’ body, so we wait in sadness over our losses. The absence of a loved one, the disease that will not be healed, and the plan unraveling before your eyes are three of countless tombs carved out of rock where hope is hard to come by.

But “liminal” also talks of a threshold, a transition, a movement forward to something new and different from what came before. That’s Saturday.

Carla Harding writes of Saturday this way:

Easter Saturday is a day marked by grief and fear. A day of waiting and questioning. A day when the broken body of hope lies in a cold tomb. I wish I could skip straight from the horror of Good Friday to the hope of Easter Sunday, but as I settle into this silent Saturday, I find surprising solace. I have lived through many days of suffering and mourning, of doubt and anxiety, and on this Easter Saturday, I take hope that, even when it seems like God is not speaking, like maybe God is absent, God is preparing something very good just out of sight, something miraculous just beyond my mortal imagination.

Don’t conflate this with either triumphalism or simple wishful thinking. No, this idea that God is at work in and through each part of life is woven into every corner of the fabric of faith we use as a warm wrap on cold nights. Even when he is silent, he is not absent.

So, as believers in Jesus, we lean into our Saturdays, mourning our losses. But we follow a Savior who lived suffering and rose to new life, and who invites us to join him in our next new thing. Liminal times are threshold times where God is at work in you and through your circumstances where he says, “Follow me.”

It may not be you living out a Saturday, but you probably have a friend who is. Pray for them to find courage and endurance and for them to know God’s comfort as they wait. Share with them these words of love from God, who stands close by them. Sit with them in their grief, not hurrying the hours of their Saturday.

And if this is you today, I pray that you will not lose hope, but will use your liminal times and spaces to know more of God and yourself, then step, however cautiously, across the threshold to your next chapter with Jesus.

Saturday ended.

Sunday arrived.

Everything changed.

A week of music from gifted women…

Alison leads it off

Maria Callas and Puccini

Where are you?

Megan Woods remembers

The Lady and Kirk

And a couple of bad jokes…

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Paddy was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking place.

Looking up to heaven he said, "Lord take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to Mass every Sunday for the rest of me life and give up me Irish Whiskey".

Miraculously, a parking place appeared. Paddy looked up again and said, "Never mind, I found one."