This Sunday is one of those marvelous pivots of the church year. We’ve come almost to the end of Lent proper, and we start to look towards the momentous events of Holy Week.  In about a week’s time, we will sing Hosanna and hear the passion of our Lord being read. To riff a little on T.S. Eliot’s words in The Waste Land, we are in that space:

Before the torch-light red on sweaty faces
Before the frosty silence in the gardens
Before the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

Great things, terrible things, world changing things, are about to happen.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that don't want to look at death. It's hard to face the reality of the cross in our religious lives. I know that I would much rather stay on the mountain peaks, in any place where I am not pierced to the core by horror and sorrow, where I am not faced with the reality of the human condition - quite especially my own. And yet here we are.

Here we are, standing at the pivot between the sign of the Easter to come that we hear on Sunday in the story of Lazarus, and the darkness of Holy Week that we walk through first. Christ is the one who in that darkness is raised up as the hope of the world.  He is the rejected one, the one who will travel down into the shadows of the dead, the one who will walk in the company of the dead and the lost and yet will not be destroyed.  He is the one who takes death within himself, the one who offers new life and hope.  

“I am about to do a new thing,” he says.

Just wait.

P.S., Consider this also my yearly reminder to make attending Holy Week services a priority. The liturgies of the great three days — Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil — are the very best of our tradition, and the story these services tell is life-changing and life-giving. Find the Complete Schedule Here.

P.P.S., on a more personal note, I recently recorded a podcast on Karl Barth and you can listen to it on my publisher Wipf & Stock’s website at the link here: The Barth Booth with Kara Slade.

Holy Communion Rite I at 8am
Common Grounds Café at ≈ 8:30am
Adult Forum at 9:30am
Holy Communion Rite II at 10:30am
Special Choral Evensong
with the Choirs of Trinity Church
and Nassau Presbyterian Church at 5pm

Sunday morning’s preacher is the Rev. Paul Jeanes III, Rector
Sunday’s lectionary readings for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

Sunday, March 26, 2023 at 9:30am
in Pierce-Bishop Hall or on Zoom
with the Rev. Paul Jeanes III, Rector & Chris Knerr

Join us as we continue in our Call to Conversation, identifying and deepening our understanding of ourselves as the people of Trinity Church, so that we might better live into our values and practice the good news of Jesus Christ in the world.

Maundy Thursday, April 6, 2023
from 8pm to 7am in the Lady Chapel

One of our special Holy Week traditions at Trinity Church is the overnight vigil in the Lady Chapel from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday. If you would like to spend an hour in contemplation and prayer, click this link to sign up for a time.

Two weeks ago, I reported that we were making some big changes to the way that news and events were shared to our website with a new, dedicated calendar featuring service schedules and events, all of which are optimized to be shareable through social media.

Since then, we — myself, Trinity’s clergy and staff, the vestry, and especially the Communication Vestry Sub-Committee chaired by Tom Scott — have been working on strategic planning to improve our communication, streamline workflows, and reduce the budget wherever it makes sense to do so.

To that end, I identified our email marketing software Mailchimp as a source of delays, inefficiencies, and declining reliability since its acquisition by software company Intuit. Coupled with its higher than average annual cost, it only made sense to find better performing and less expensive tools.

Since we have been increasing the number of things we share directly to our website — making them permalinked, searchable, and shareable — we have decided to use our website software Squarespace’s built-in email marketing tools. This will allow us to produce the emails more quickly with fewer steps, less duplication of effort, and fewer opportunities for error, thereby getting them into your inbox earlier.

You may notice, however, that they don’t look quite the way that they did. In email marketing, unless deploying fully custom templating, different platforms produce different styles and behaviors in emails. If you know what to look for, you can tell what platform a company or organization is using just by the way their emails are structured.

Please be patient while we figure out the best ways to make this platform work for us and if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to email me with them at bonda@trinityprinceton.org.

Saturday, April 1, 2023
from 10am–12:30pm
at Mill One in Hamilton

Saturday, March 25 at 11pm
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
(33 Throckmorton St, Freehold, NJ)

Join us for a moving service of reflections representing the racial history in our diocese, organized by the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey Reparations Commission.