Alhamisi Kuu

This year, for Holy Week, we attended Bungo Cathedral—the flagship church of the Morogoro Diocese in downtown Morogoro. Throughout our time here in Tanzania we have mostly moved from church to church each Sunday, trying to worship in many different places in order to meet different people and get a feel for the various regions within the diocese. For this Holiest Week of the year, however, we decided to attend all the services offered at one location—to see and feel the entire worship experience that a person has during a Tanzanian Holy Week. We attended Maundy Thursday (Alhamisi Kuu), Good Friday (Ijumaa Kuu), Easter Sunday (Jumapili ya Pasaka) and Easter Monday (Jumatatu ya Pasaka).
Alhamisi Kuu was a very festive, three hour communion service which began at 5:00 PM, and of course commemorated the “Last Supper” which Jesus spent with his disciples the day before his crucifixion and death. It was for this service that I was invited to preach my very first full-length sermon in the Swahili language. This will be quite a special memory for me personally, considering the work put into language learning since September. Although I still can’t understand everything that people say in Swahili, I believe the sermon went quite well, that people could understand what I was saying and that they found the message useful. I thought it was thematically appropriate to have an visiting/foreigner as preacher on the day when we celebrate communion (unity in the community of Christ).