{"id":4320,"date":"2023-04-19T11:27:46","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T16:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/?p=4320"},"modified":"2023-04-19T11:27:46","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T16:27:46","slug":"saturday-april-8th-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/?p=4320","title":{"rendered":"Saturday, April 8th, 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table is-style-regular\"><table><tbody><tr><td><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"264\" src=\"https:\/\/files.constantcontact.com\/cfd132e6001\/cb799b49-c101-44dd-a517-2113d86f549a.jpg\" alt=\"\"><br><br><strong>St Alban&#8217;s Episcopal Church<\/strong><br><strong>Bolivar, Missouri<\/strong><br><br><strong>Saturday, April 8, 2023<\/strong><br><br><strong>Holy Saturday The day it seems that nothing happens.<\/strong><br><br><strong>Holy Saturday<\/strong><br>For many Christians Saturday is a sort of meaningless pause between Good Friday and Easter day. But that wasn&#8217;t true for the first thousand years of Christian history.<br>For them the words we say without thinking about them much really mattered: &#8220;He descended to the dead.&#8221;<br>If Christ&#8217;s victory is really as great as we say it is, then it not only moves forward in history, but also backward. The idea of permanent punishment in a &#8220;hell&#8221; was not a Jewish one. But the dead either simply were dead &#8211; gone &#8211; erased, as the Sadducees thought, or they were dead as Lazarus was, awaiting resurrection in some future time, as the Pharisees taught.<br>Medieval Christians loved the idea of Jesus&#8217; death and resurrection being such a magnificent and final victory over all sin, all death. And so they believed that even while he was in the tomb, before his resurrection, Jesus went to the dead &#8211; where he called out\u00a0<em>every<\/em>\u00a0person from Adam and Eve forward into life.<br>This is an image of Christ pulling a sinner from death&#8217;s realm &#8211; portrayed on the baptismal font of St Mary Magdalene Church, Eardisley, Herfordshire, England<br><br><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"230\" src=\"https:\/\/files.constantcontact.com\/cfd132e6001\/728c7712-d6e4-4d90-8990-6101fe955b4c.jpg\" alt=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"20\" height=\"20\" src=\"https:\/\/imgssl.constantcontact.com\/letters\/images\/1101116784221\/S.gif\" alt=\"\"><br><br><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"184\" src=\"https:\/\/files.constantcontact.com\/cfd132e6001\/025d8fb5-dfdd-4423-a580-1ade4c0c3e74.jpg\" alt=\"\"><br>What the lonely and disheartened disciples saw &#8211; or didn&#8217;t see, wasn&#8217;t all they got! But you can imagine how difficult this day must have been for his friends. We know days like this, too &#8211; when it seems as if God has really not only gone silent, but perhaps gone absent as well.<br>The images of Christ &#8220;harrowing&#8221; hell, turning it over as a farmer turns the soil every spring, is something that came only in retrospect. At the time, there couldn&#8217;t have been any way to interpret what had happened on that long day after their Teacher and Lord had been crucified and buried.                                                      <br>                      <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"200\" src=\"https:\/\/files.constantcontact.com\/cfd132e6001\/bb484a60-c789-4138-860c-f98d5c026f9c.jpg\" alt=\"\">                     <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"155\" src=\"https:\/\/files.constantcontact.com\/cfd132e6001\/5d56c390-f2f1-482b-81e4-cfdc218ceb59.jpg\" alt=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"20\" height=\"20\" src=\"https:\/\/imgssl.constantcontact.com\/letters\/images\/1101116784221\/S.gif\" alt=\"\"><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>St Alban&#8217;s Episcopal ChurchBolivar, Missouri Saturday, April 8, 2023 Holy Saturday The day it seems that nothing happens. Holy SaturdayFor many Christians Saturday is a sort of meaningless pause between Good Friday and Easter day. But that wasn&#8217;t true for the first thousand years of Christian history.For them the words we say without thinking about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4326,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4320\/revisions\/4326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stalbansbolivar.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}