Jeremiah 31: 1-6 (links validated 4/3/25a)

Have you ever experienced a moment when time stood still? Maybe you were afraid to breathe for fear of breaking the magic of the moment. It’s the stuff of hospital bedsides – the passing on of death and the passing into life of birth. It’s the good news of a proposal, the announcement of a grandchild to be born. It’s the stillness of the doctor’s phone call and the world closing in. Your senses, like nerve endings, crackle with life. You hold onto the strangest details and can’t recall the most ordinary things that must have happened. The moment you will spend the rest of your life saying, “I remember exactly where I was when it happened.” Good Friday is an easy place to see the dynamic on display. The moment of silence when the Christ candle is carried out, when the last note of the hymn fades to stillness. The weight of the sadness of the world is a place where time stands still. But it can—and often does—stand still in joyful moments too. Celebrating a reversal of fortunes no one saw coming. Soaring on top of the alleluias, as it were. These are what theologian N.T. Wright calls the “thin places,” the moments in time when the curtain between heaven and earth grows sheer for a fleeting glance. A thin place, like a sacrament, where we hold the story of the past and the hope of the future while living deeply in the present.