Were You There?

Just moments ago, I returned to my office after our Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Service at Fourth Church. It was a powerful service of communion, scripture reading, singing, and the extinguishing of candles as the sanctuary grew progressively darker.

I've been to many tenebrae services before, but this was my first at Fourth. Sitting on the chancel, looking back on this magnificent building created for the purpose of worshiping a God of awe and wonder, I was moved by the presence of the Spirit.

I'm often humbled when I lead worship at Fourth. It's such an amazing worship space with such an incredible history.

But tonight I felt something a little different. As the sanctuary grew dark, with every light extinguished, I realized that the darkness that we experienced tonight is the same darkness that envelops every place of worship during this Holy Week. Darkness doesn't discriminate. From the smallest chapel to the largest cathedral, we find ourselves in utter darkness. The passion of Christ reminds us with startling immediacy of the darkness in our world, a darkness that the love of God in Christ comes to vanquish. But we must all live in the darkness, at least for a little while.

In the darkness tonight, as the city moved with life outside the walls of our sanctuary, everyone inside was perfectly still and quiet, except for a single voice singing the powerful words of the old spiritual, "Were You There?"

Were you there? I wonder if the African American slaves that first sang this song knew the profundity of this theology? Whether they could have put into words or not, I suspect that they did. They felt it in there deepest beings.

Were you there? Throughout the evening we heard the story of Christ's passion read. The voices were those of my colleagues, my friends.

Were you there? When our pastor, John Buchanan, introduced the Lord's Supper, he retold the story of Jesus' final meal with his friends with an intensity and gravitas that I have rarely felt before.

I was there.

This story is my story. It's our story. And we relive it every year at this time.

Truth be told, we relive it every day of our lives.

I am a student of the Bible. I spend my life dissecting and interpreting this story. I read it over and over. I teach it. I explain it. I preach it. I believe it. I doubt it.

Tonight I lived it.

Were you there?

I was, and I'll never be the same.