Our town’s Ministerial Association has shrunk. Many of the churches in it have shrunk. So the crowds at our Friday-night Lenten worship services have shrunk too. People usually show up to their own church when hosting, but otherwise I can pretty much predict who will be there: the small huddle ofNazarenes, the little crowd of Methodists, rarely anyone (a little embarrassingly) from my own church. I can’t quite figure that out. We may have doctrinal differences with the Catholics, for instance, but they’re the loveliest of people. Oh well.

Speaking of the Catholics, the final service before Holy Week is always at their place, and it’s always the Stations of the Cross. For the last several years, it’s been Deacon Doug leading us. Every year I overcome my Protestant uncertainty–do I really have to kneel?–and follow along. On this Friday before Good Friday, it’s become my entry into Holy Week.

The Catholic Daughters handed out the prayer guides this year, while the bell ringers warmed up. They played “Near the Cross.” I whispered along.

“In the cross, in the cross; Be my glory ever. Till my raptured soul shall find, Rest beyond the river.”

I changed the lyrics in my head, though. (I am the person who sang, “Later on, we’ll perspire as we dream by the fire,” in the second verse of “Winter Wonderland” for years.)

So, “To the cross,” I whispered Friday night, “to the cross. Be my glory ever. Till my restless soul shall find, Rest beyond the river.”

We’re headed to the cross, after all. And my soul often feels restless. Someday I’ll be raptured, but not yet. First I’ve got a class to teach and three sermons to write, so the rapturing can wait for now. Restless fits me better.

We’re headed to the cross, and there I was headed to it with my Baptist and Nazarene and Methodist and Pentecostal brothers and sisters, as it should be.

I was reminded, sitting there, of reading I’d done recently in postliberal theology (big words, sorry) and a theologian by the name of George Lindbeck in particular, who believed that our best response to Christianity’s waning hold on the ethics and imagination of society is to dig into our unique identity.We’ve got to speak our language. We’ve got to love our rituals.

But it’s not enough to do this living and speaking and loving as Presbyterians apart from Baptists apart from Catholics apart from Pentecostals. We’ve got to speak as one, just as much as we can, or our witness to and in this society gets even weaker.* In other words, occasions like a small town Lenten soup supper is a chance to say well and proudly that we’re all in this together. All of us.

And that could not be more important than this week as we’re heading into when we tell the strangest of stories about a man who was God who gave up his human life and rose again to remain God-with-us forever. 

“Because by Your cross, you have redeemed the world,” we repeated fourteen times, once at each Station. 

Those are special words for a special week, and we’re not speaking them alone.

At the end of the service, we concluded with the 15th Station of the Cross: the resurrection. Deacon Doug acknowledged it was unusual but appropriate since the 15th Station includes the reciting of the Apostles Creed, or “the creed we all share,” as he put it. He’s right. Sure, I mumbled “small case ‘c’” to myself when I affirmed my faith in the holy catholic church, but the faith that unites us–minus that difference in capitalization–is far greater than anything that divides us.

The prayer books that my husband and I received on Friday night were photocopies of the printed prayer books that some others held. The problem with our photocopied prayerbooks was that the copy machine cut off about an inch of text on every right hand page.

But the great thing was–Catholics and Protestants alike–we all did a pretty good job filling in the blanks. We know Jesus, and we know His story. The words came easy. I think George Lindbeck would have been proud. And maybe Jesus too.

To the cross, friends, to the cross, with our restless souls. Let us go.

*”George Lindbeck: Theology and the Eclessial People of Witness,” in The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006], 57-100.