What has occupied me? I began the semester with 15 hours of teaching a week, not counting the Friday night classes at Mid-City for ordination for Pastors Moise and Manoah and several friends from the French-speaking congregation. Of those classes, two have been new preparations. I gave two papers at the Wesleyan Theological Society/Wesleyan Philosophical Society meetings; preached a wonderful weekend with the Pasadena Armenian Youth Group (they give me hope!); participated in a multicongregational conference at PLNU; participated in the ordination interviews for the So Cal district of the Church of the Nazarene; and have attempted to keep up with my regular responsibilities at the church. I have much to give thanks for in all these activities.

I'll try to get you caught up on reading, thoughts, and events at Mid-City. Three events during Holy Week stood out. First, during our Palm Sunday multicongregational procession, as we turned into the building to go to our different places of worship, three police stood five feet away, putting a young man into handcuffs. The incongruence in the scene, the profound ambiguity, still weighs heavy on me. Perhaps the best response I've heard of was that of a little boy who was walking with his parents. As he turned into the church and saw the arrest going on, he smiled and waved at those persons involved in the arrest -- and received a 'wave' back -- obviously not from the person in handcuffs.

Second, during our Maunday Thursday service we heard sirens. Friday morning I picked up the San Diego Union-Tribune and read that there had been a drive-by shooting about 7-8 blocks from the church -- not exactly our immediate neighborhood, but close. The "word from the streets" was that a man had just gotten out of prison and was visiting his girl friend. He walked out of the house drunk. Apparently some one was waiting, and shot and killed him; also wounding a 17 year old at the house as well. Again, I don't know if I have processed the incongruence (or is it congruence?) in this event.

Third, our Easter multicongregational service. I'm sure it stretched the English-speaking congregation because it lasted well over 2 hours. I had the honor of baptizing 9 persons. Perhaps because the water was cold and I was in it for a long period, the deep relationship between the foot washing on Maunday Thursday became apparent to me, not as an abstract idea, but as a concrete reality of our lives. During the service Rev. Simon Pierre, the Nazarene District superintendent from the Northeast Rwanda district, brought us greetings -- he told of his experience of the genocide, and how it happened because "the church was silent" and told us "not to be silent." Pastor Anthony Duclois of our French-Speaking congregation preached, incorporating slides of his trip to the tragedy/beauty of his trip to Haiti. To share Easter with Revs. Pierre and Duclois, the joy of the resurrection of Jesus amid those who have lived through two of the most tragic places in the world is a third experience that remains to be processed. It is all very humbling.

I'm not sure if Eastertide has a "message" or a "meaning" -- but through the week, perhaps I experienced a little how the celebration of Easter works in the witness of those around me. They endured. Amid the tragedy of arrest, human slaughter, disaster, I witnessed how faith in God and confession that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised him from the dead "works". Easter is not about some withdraw from the tragedy of sin and human life, even the physical life of the world; it is not about our ability to fix the world in its sin through "social justice" or organizing that can bring in some utopian existence for human life within the play of immanence. The resurrection of Jesus "works" on us to allow us to endure -- to keep going, to not be silent in the face of the sinful tragedies of the world, to call us into the sufferings of the world through works of mercy, not to fix it, but to remind the world that the play of immanence is not all there is -- that ultimately, God already has taken the sin and the tragedy into God's own self through the crucified body of Jesus, and raised, transformed, and perfected it in this same body, now resurrected into life everlasting. We are freed, not to change the world, but to participate in the world because God has already changed it in Jesus Christ. We keep going, persevere, endure, not because it's up to us, not because we're going to rid the world of its tragedies, but because the joy of live everlasting is ours, seen in the resurrection of our Lord -- and in its witnesses like the little boy who waved and Pastors Simon and Anthony.

Perhaps I can keep going as well. . . .