Letter From Bishop vonRosenberg

When you receive this letter, Holy Week and Easter will be at hand - or, depending on the mail delivery time, perhaps just past. Much of the great drama of our Church Year centers on this time - and that drama provides us with a lens to perceive the drama of our lives. I commend to you Christ's walk in Holy Week and Easter as anticipating our own walks through life and descriptive of those walks.

Jesus' loneliness, alienation, and frustration, coupled with the uncertain and unreliable support of his friends, describe some of the experience that is our own. His passion calls to mind the "highs" and "lows" of our lives. His suffering and ultimate triumph remind us of our calling and of our hope.

If the goal of our Christian lives is union with Christ - and I believe that it should be - then Holy Week and Easter provide us with a profound opportunity to live into that calling. My prayer for us all is that we may walk with Jesus during Holy Week and Easter so that we may know ourselves drawing ever closer into union with him.

"Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his" (Romans 6:3-5).

May your Holy Week and Easter be blessed indeed so that your lives thereafter will reflect the blessings of union with our Lord!