No surprise.  More Americans plan on hunting Easter eggs this coming week than on going to church.  Barely a third of us consider the religious aspect of the day most important. Only 42% of us identify Easter with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  That’s what the surveys say, anyway.  Candyindustry.com predicts we will spend $2.5 billion on candy this Easter season. Chocolate is three times as popular jelly beans.  All in all, though, Easter makes it only to number five on the favorite holiday list. You can google it yourself.

Easter week – all eight days of it – begins Sunday.  Palm Sunday and then Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and finally Resurrection Day.  Most American don’t care about all that so much as they care about getting chocolate instead of jelly beans.

I don’t tell you all this to make you mad. I will leave anger to the purveyors of rage as we have seen in our recent “Across the Great Divide” adult class. I tell you all this to encourage you – especially parents and grandparents of younger children – to tell the Easter story, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  I tell you all this to encourage you to make worship way more important than chocolate this coming week.

Worship at LPC this week allows invites us to remember the story.  Palms on Palm Sunday.  Climbing the step to the Upper Room on Thursday, there to share the cup and the loaf. Carrying the cross through the borough on Friday and a powerful message in the worship that follows (Tyler is preaching).  Resurrection Day begins at sunrise (Core Creek Park, 6:00 a.m.) and then with joyous worship at all three services at LPC – the Hallelujah Chorus closes the 9:45 service.

Not much new. But why should there be much new when we have an old story to tell?  Old and the best ever.

See you at church this week.