The Atlantic

What Easter Can Teach Us About Suffering

The most important holiday on the Christian calendar feels foreign and unfamiliar this year.
Source: CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP via Getty

Jimmy Dorrell is the kind of Texas pastor who slips into preaching mode within the first five minutes of conversation, who has to tell two stories before finishing the first. His jokes can skip right past you if you’re not paying attention. On Palm Sunday, the fast-talking 70-year-old stood in the middle of Waco’s Webster Avenue, near Baylor University, wearing a light-blue face mask and a black hoodie, surrounded at six-foot intervals by homeless men and women waving palm fronds. Beside the street’s double yellow lines, a tattooed Jesus washed the feet of one of the men, while volunteers in masks and gloves waited on the sidewalk to put food from a slow cooker onto Styrofoam trays.

This is what church looks like during a pandemic: distanced,

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