For me it is resurrection and salvation. It is names known and hope restored. It is springtime and greening. It is conversation and forgiveness. It is Christ’s peace within us. It is Christ the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last who pledged a new creation where pain and sorrow are banished, and God’s kingdom of light and love is revealed.
It is all these things and more. It is love and joy and song.
For those of you who were baptized or confirmed during Eastertide, I offer my congratulations and prayers as you embrace this new beginning in all its fullness. To all of us who renewed our baptismal promises, remember that we are forever marked as an Easter people who carry the song of the Spirit in our hearts and whose watchword is hope. We are the ones Jesus calls blessed because we have not seen him in the flesh but still we believe in the truth of the resurrection and the difference this means for our lives.
Easter is not one day in a year, but a whole season of gazing into the mouth of an empty tomb believing against all odds, and even in our fear, that the rolled-away stone opens a door of promise to a broken world.
In these challenging times, when the hits keep coming, it’s easy to throw up our hands and give in to despair.
We didn’t do that five years ago when a worldwide pandemic shut us out of our churches and threatened our very existence. Instead, we quickly found ways to connect for worship and fellowship. Loving our neighbours took on a whole new meaning as we supported the most vulnerable and isolated in our communities.
While we cannot change what’s happening around us in this moment in history, we can choose how we act, how we speak and where we offer our support. We need the gift of patient endurance and are called to embody bold hope. Let us not cower in the corner but follow the Risen Lord by teaching and healing and preaching the kingdom of God through kindness and acts of loving service; by being merciful, offering the hand of grace and forgiveness; and by remaining steadfast to the end.
What if in this Eastertide we think of this challenging time as containing the birth pangs of something new? What if we are seeing, in the words of theologian Tom Long, but “the old creation groaning for the new; sighing for a mercy deeper than its own anguish, a redemption more hopeful than its sad despair”?
And can we trust that the God who knows the exact number of hairs we have on our heads, who sorrows over the fall of a single sparrow, who has called us by name, commands his providential care over you, over me, over our whole world? If we can, then we have nothing to fear.
