Watching the Friday morning chapel service from Hunting Park Christian Academy in Philadelphia has become a helpful habit during this year of the pandemic.

Raising a child in the Hunting Park neighborhood of North Philadelphia can be difficult. For more than twenty years, HPCA has offered “an affordable, quality, Christian education that celebrates a diverse community and leads children to know and serve the Lord” to the Hunting Park community. Getting to know HPCA and its work and some of its people was a great joy for Becky and me during our time in the Philadelphia area.

Pre-covid, I might make it to an HPCA chapel service once or twice a year. I would leave thinking I ought to go more often, and then I never did.

HPCA quickly and amazingly adopted a virtual education strategy last spring at the beginning of the pandemic and has been using a creative hybrid model for its classes throughout this academic year.  Only half the students are in the building on any given day, so chapel has remained a virtual event which is particularly good for people who live 600 miles away.

This past Friday’s chapel, the last before Easter break, included an Easter Program presented by the middle school students along with the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes.  The kindergarteners and pre-Ks were as sweet as might be expected. The middle school presentation, a video collage depicting the events of Holy Week, spoke to me in ways unexpected.

Part One of the middle school production offers scenes from the ministry of Jesus, one of the students playing the part of Jesus and others playing disciples and those touched by Jesus.  Part Two takes us to the Upper Room and then to Jesus as he bears the cross to Golgotha and is hung upon it.  As Jesus carries the cross along the way of suffering, the iniquities of the people are placed upon him in the form of strips of paper stuck to his robe, each strip with a sin printed on it, among them rage, hate, fighting, murder, vandalism, arson, malice, fraud, pride, slander, addictions, classism, greed, and more.

I wonder if the students came up with their lists of sins on their own. They seem to be very real to the lives they live.

As Jesus carries the cross and then as the cross bears Jesus, we hear the words of the old spiritual “Were You There?”

It was all very effective. But as I watched, it went from being effective to preaching.  It was a sermon I needed to hear.  As the middle school Jesus hangs on the cross, the sins of the people still cling to him. That’s when I saw it. That sin. Oh, not one of the glamorous sins. Not one of the top seven. Not even my sin. That sin. That sin committed, really committed, by someone I know. A sin that surely has hurt others much more than it has hurt me, but which has been gnawing at me for way too long.  It is a sin the sinner seems to have gotten away with. A sin we decided to let slide.  A sin about which we are supposed to keep quiet.

I’m not sure how or even if I am supposed to forgive this sinner at the edge of my life. I know I have quit loving this sinner. But there it was. This sinner’s sin stuck to the middle school Jesus hanging on the cross.

Jesus bore the sin of that sinner on the cross. Sometimes it causes me to wonder.

The question of how or even if I must forgive this sinner remains, and the answer is not obvious.  That Jesus loves this sinner and is willing and able to forgive this sinner, however, is without doubt. Sometimes it causes me to wonder.

A sinner at the edge of my life whose sin still gnaws at me. Jesus bore that sin to Golgotha and it clung to him as he hung on the cross. Jesus loves that sinner whether that sinner knows it or not.  It will take a while for the forgiveness issues to work themselves out for me.  But that I must love this sinner is not a question at all.

Among the sins the middle schoolers at HPCA listed are some of mine.  Jesus bore those sins on the cross because he loves me. We love because he first loved us.

Sometimes it causes me to wonder.