No it isn't a hand made version of the Swiss national flag. Much more mundane than that. This might require a more imaginative hermeneutic. It's masking tape on a carpet. It was stuck there for a reason. Not to measure, not to tack down trailing cables. It was to tell people where to stand.
When our children and young people are helping us with our worship service, it's a mixture of careful preparation and winging it. The mix depends on who has been learning their lines, practising the music, or remembers the words of the song, or who just turned up on the day, and who had time for breakfast; usually the speed of thought in improvisation by the stressed out Sunday School staff is also essential to pull it off.
On the platform are the props, pieces of costume, musical instruments, and space for the performance. And at strategic places, white marker crosses that let each performer know where to stand. And yes, being someone who notices such things, this one was obvious.
Advent, Easter and Harvest are definite calendar dates for these risk filled liturgical interludes. But time and again our worship rises in praise, gladness and deepened love for God because our children and young adults got out of bed, learned enough to make it work, cared enough to stand in front of all the rest of us, and gave us their gift.
Nobody is there as a performance critic; at least not if they have come to speak with God and hear God speak. In the mix of well rehearsed or forgotten lines, the Gospel is proclaimed. In songs that need a bit of work still, and through Bible stories and readings that could be delivered better, we nevertheless hear the good news. And so by amateur dramatics in the idiom of those who are still learning, and who can teach the rest of us a thing or two, we are drawn into the Story that interprets our story.
It was an Easter morning that I took the picture of the white tape on the red carpet. The dramatised story from John's Gospel was all about running to empty tombs, arguing about what really happened (advanced hermeneutics this was not), men thinking they knew everything and women knowing, that whatever else men knew, men never knew when to shut up, and those meetings with Jesus when Mary Magdalene, Thomas and Peter came out the other side of sorrow.
So on Easter morning, our young storytellers and minstrels and dramatists, standing in the place marked by a cross, told us the Story that is our story, and sent us away to live into the story of a world reconciled to God by a love from all eternity.
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