At 5 o’clock this morning I was in a pew on the right side of the large and beautiful sanctuary at Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Corn Hill.
It was the third day of the church’s Holy Week celebration, an early morning worship service for those who wanted to start the day right.
I was there to see what it was like.
But I was also there to worship. To see if I might find among these people fuel for the fire of my faith in Christ in these days leading up to Easter.
I felt awkward and self-conscious.
When I arrived, I was the only white person there, and being dressed for work right after the service, I was among the most casually dressed. I was in a place new to me, unsure of how things would proceed, and I felt like I stuck out.
But I also felt like I was among a loving and caring people. The ushers and the people in the pews around me all smiled and greeted me and coming through the front door a man I know gave me a big hug and words of welcome.
Before the service began the choir was singing and swaying and I reflected on how different my own faith’s habits of worship are. I am a Mormon. Not a very good one. I am better at believing than at doing. But I go every week and I find peace there.
But we are dull. Mormons prefer to call it reverent, but it is, objectively, pretty quiet and sedate. Mormons believe in a “restoration of all things,” a return to New Testament Christian practice. I sometimes joke that the arrangements in our hymn book are a restoration of Gregorian chants. The musical annotations promise tempo, but none is delivered.
And so the charismatic and rhythmic singing of the choir at Mount Olivet was very different.
And very beautiful.
You could hear the joy and devotion in the voices of the choir, and see it in their faces.
At my church, we sit down and be quiet. At Mount Olivet, they stand up and make noise. I tried to follow along as best I could and do what others were doing.
Each morning during Holy Week there is a different guest preacher. Today it was Dr. Haywood Robinson from a church near Washington, D.C. He, like the other pastors, was impeccably dressed and groomed. He took the pulpit with dignity and gravity.
And he asked people to open their Bibles, to the twelfth chapter of John, twenty-seventh verse.
It is Jesus speaking about the fact that he must die. That he must meet his hour of destiny. That he must atone for the sins of mankind and bring victory over death and hell – over sin and the grave.
“Now my soul is troubled,” John quotes Jesus as saying. “And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour?
“But for this cause came I unto this hour.”
The preacher said that Jesus could not ask to be relieved of the responsibilities of the hour for which he was born – and that neither could we. And that just as Jesus stood tall in his hour of duty and love, so must we. Satan sought to crush and defeat Jesus, and failed. And he will likewise fail when he seeks to crush and defeat us – if we hold to our faith in what Jesus did for us in his holy hour.
Our hour of discipleship honors and is empowered by Jesus’s hour of sacrifice, the preacher taught.
“This hour” became a phrase repeated, sometimes in loud shouts, through the sermon and the balance of the service.
The sermon went on through the middle section of John 12, culminating in Jesus’s charge: “While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.”
It was so different from my church.
The preacher shouted and chanted and waved his arms and shook his body, whereas in my church the custom is to stand still and speak in hushed tones with no fanfare.
And yet the spirit was the same. It was content, not form; substance, not style. While listening and contemplating the pastor’s words, I came to a new understanding of these verses which had never occurred to me before. I felt the Spirit of God opening them to my understanding in a way useful to me and my faith right now. I also felt that same Spirit testify again to my heart, with this pastor’s words ringing in my ears, that Jesus is in fact the Christ and Savior of mankind.
I found what I came to find. I received the spiritual boost I sought.
And I saw a precious thing.
At the end of the service, they took up a collection, by asking all to come forward and lay a donation upon the altar. When all had passed, the Mount Olivet pastor, Dr. Rickey Harvey, stood above the table with the pile of money and mentioned that he had seen people walk past and leave nothing, but tap the table instead. He said he knew what that meant, that these people had no money to give, but tapped the table in sign that they would if they could. He said he honored such people.
And then he asked if there were any others who wanted to come forward and tap the table.
From across the sanctuary, maybe four or five did.
Among them was a woman of middle age who humbly walked up and returned to her seat.
Before offering a prayer over the donations, an assistant pastor called out to that woman and reached toward her with a folded bill in his fingers.
As that folded bill was carried to her, some of the clergymen on the stand rose from their seats and reached into their pockets and walked toward her, with others, maybe dozens, across the congregation doing the same. All walking to this humble woman, now sobbing with her head in her chest, as the saints of God pressed folded money into her hands.
At the pulpit the pastor pulled out his phone and looked at something.
It was the Facebook Messenger app. He scrolled through it and walked to the woman and showed it to her and asked if it was her.
It was a message she had sent yesterday, promising the pastor that she would come to Holy Week on Wednesday morning. She had been sick, and had no money, but she needed to worship. There were fumes in the car and she was coming to church on fumes because she knew she had to be there.
And this morning we learned why.
So that the rest of us could see that the gospel of love is not just about receiving, it is about giving.
It ended with communion. A wafer and some grape juice, hearkening back to the last supper and a new sacrament of fellowship with Jesus and with brother and sister.
I took communion with the people of Mount Olivet because I felt communion with the people of Mount Olivet.
And then I went out in the dark to drive to work.
Fortified and reminded of what this week means and who we are supposed to be.