Dear Friends in Christ,

Easter is the fundamental, essential proclamation of Christianity!  Jesus’ rising from the dead initiates a new reality.  Our relationships with each other, with our world, and with our universe are given new possibilities and new hope!

We have become somewhat inured to the bold proclamation Easter.  Most of us have grown up with it.  We have Jesus’ rising from the dead all tied up in our minds with wonderful annual joys like spring flowers and Easter baskets.

Easter is our life and our hope.  As merely an annual remembrance, Easter is robbed of its unique power.   Easter for us is a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of being in the world.

The Church celebrates and proclaims Easter throughout the year.  Our Easter “season” continues until Pentecost Sunday, May 31^st.  But every Sunday is really an Easter celebration.

Our Sabbath day is Sunday because it is the day of resurrection.  It is the first day of the week, the day of new beginnings.  It is also the “eighth” day of the week, the day of yet unimagined possibilities.

Even during our Lenten time of penance and fasting, Sunday is still an Easter celebration.  We remember 40 days of Lent commemorating Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness.  But to count 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter you have to omit Sundays.  Sundays are always an Easter feast.

Moreover, every funeral is an Easter celebration.  For Christians death is the gate to the kingdom of heaven.  We mourn the loved one we will miss but we also joyfully commend them on their way to meet God in person.  We proclaim the resurrection of the dead.  We even use the same hangings for funerals that we do at Easter. 

Our story is this: In rising, Jesus Christ has opened our graves and given us eternal life with God.  When we are baptized we die to our old life and are buried with Jesus.  We are then raised with Jesus to a new life as God’s own children.

You and I are a new creation in the risen Christ.  We are not better or worse than anyone else but we have been given a special gift.  God has given us new vision of ourselves and our reality.

We know ourselves to be God’s children through Christ.  Whatever failings, hang-ups, hurts, addictions, or sins we may have; God has looked past that to love us anyway.  We have the option of each day forgiving ourselves as God has forgiven us.  We have the possibility of basking in God’s love and growing into our given identity as the people of God.

In our reality death is conquered.  Life reigns!  The death and brutality of the world are strong but they have been completely subdued by Jesus’ resurrection.

To the extent that Christians take this new reality seriously, we are emboldened to live without fear.  All the things that hurt us have lost their power over us.  We still live with a sour economy, with violence and uncertainty, with aging and with cultural changes but our perspective has shifted.

Through Jesus’ resurrection we know that God reigns.  In our history we have renewed and grown through persecution.  By the mere strength of our courageous witness we have converted those who would kill us.  We have gone repeatedly to the “untouchable” of the world knowing that we are called to be God’s love to the world.

In this Easter season I invite each of us to consider what the sure and certain hope of the resurrection means to our lives.  How has this hope changed us in ways that we might take for granted?  How might it change and empower us more deeply if we dared to really believe in it?  How shall we be children of the resurrection in this world?

                                                                        Your brother in Christ,

                                                                        Wilson +