Easter Awakening
I am moving toward Easter this year (not just the Sunday, rather the whole season) with a particular measure of gratitude. As most of you know, I’ve been away recovering from surgery treating my prostate cancer. While there were some days that were unpleasant regarding the surgery and my recovery, the arc of the experience bends toward love.
The movement of the story we live by reenacting the plot of the sacred narrative which begins with Palm Sunday’s glorious but misunderstood entry into Jerusalem, reaches its nadir at Good Friday, and turns upward again with resurrection on Sunday morning is such a powerful and unexpected story of God’s love for creation that most just don’t believe it. Not me. I believe it all. Every detail. I believe I possess the capacity to enthusiastically misunderstand God like the crowd on Palm Sunday. I know I have the dark capacity to join the lynch mob on Good Friday who shouts, “crucify him, crucify him.” (Ugghhh. Dark.) I most certainly experience an openness toward God that allows me both surprise and astonishment in Jesus’ rebirth and resurrection from a garden tomb at dawn on a Sunday morning in the springtime.
And, because I believe it, I can live it, too. I can live the full range of God-made human experience that swings from great joy to sorrow and back to great joy, again. I can be bereft at loss and awe-filled, too, at the experience of God’s loving provision.
I believe with all my heart, with all the hairs on my head, with all the cells of my body, with all the atoms that make up the hunk of matter that you see as me, I believe that you can live it, too. I believe Easter is the most beautiful reminder that there is so much more than meets the eye and that more is made just for you, personally, but not privately. I believe that my story and your story are subplots of God’s story in which the arc of the narrative always bends toward love.
So, for the next 50 days or the next 50 months or the next 50 years (who knows,) we build playgrounds on top of an empty tomb because from places and predicaments that appear hopeless, hope returns and love abides. He is risen. And so am I. And so are you.
Love,
Jimmy
