Pastor's Corner: Easter with the Armenians

Holy Week is drawing nearer and nearer! From the excitement of waving palm branches on Palm Sunday to the sorrowful somberness of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to the bright joy of Easter morning, I have always loved Holy Week. Last year, when the first wave of the pandemic crashed over us and forced all of Holy Week online, we felt how jarring it was to wake up on Easter Sunday without a tangible community around us to celebrate our Savior's resurrection. This year, we're two weeks away from Holy Week, and I'm already excited. It will be so thrilling to let our Alleluias ring out from behind masks rather than from behind a camera!

There's been another Easter in my life with particularly thrilling Alleluias. When I studied abroad in Turkey during college, I spent my spring break in Egypt, and Easter fell on the first full day of the trip. One of my fellow travelers from the U.S. was an Armenian Orthodox Christian, and he knew the exact time and place to celebrate Easter, Armenian Orthodox style, in Cairo. He graciously allowed me and another friend to join him, even though much of the service would be foreign to us. I figured we wouldn't be able to participate in much of the service, but how many chances does a person have of celebrating Easter in Egypt in an Armenian Orthodox Church? Of course we were going!

As our trio of Americans walked up the stone steps of the warm, creamy church, one usher made a beeline for us. In pretty good English, he enthusiastically invited us in and gave us charmingly old postcards of the church. Our Armenian American friend explained a bit of who we were, and then the usher leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially to us two non-Armenians, "Please, take communion with us. You are welcome! You are welcome!"

This man knew that we were not Armenian Orthodox. He knew that we were not baptized members of one of the sister churches of the Armenian Orthodox Church. He knew that officially, we should not take communion. And yet, here in a place where we were clearly the outsider, we were being welcomed in, welcomed joyfully, even gleefully!

I don't believe I took communion that day, since I wanted to respect the tradition of the place where I was worshiping. But how well I remember the warmth and welcome of that man's invitation to worship fully with his church. How well I remember the invitation that he extended to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Holy Week usually pulls many people to church, for many reasons. Whether you're an old-timer or a newcomer, we all have the same role as that gentle and gleeful Egyptian Christian usher: to welcome each other to God's table of love. We welcome everyone because we know the good news that Christ has died and has risen to save both the folks we know and the folks we don't know. I hope that the welcome we extend to others this upcoming Holy Week - and every week - can be as gracious as Christ's invitation to us into the new life of the resurrection. I hope our welcome, be it in words or actions, gestures or smiles, can be as joyful and sincere as the welcome I found in Cairo that blessed Easter morning.

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Pastor Megan Hoewisch

First Lutheran Church