April 9, 2023 – The First Sunday of Easter

We’re here in this uncertain time and place, searching for signs of hope, as people of hope, together. Alleluia!

Easter isn’t just a day. It is a whole season. It is 50 days of practicing hope. But often our lives and communities and world don’t reflect the same Easter joy. We can relate more to the rejection of Maundy Thursday when Jesus is betrayed by his friend. Or maybe you relate to the grief of Jesus’ gruesome death on Good Friday with your own tear-soaked pillow. Or maybe you relate to the utter despair of Holy Saturday as you wait in unhope for a life that never seems to get any better. It is against these realities of our humanity we walk into Easter season yet again.

But instead of putting on a smiling face (or those itchy Easter outfits our parents always insisted on us wearing), perhaps we can come into this Easter with a little more honesty. Over the last six or so weeks of Lent, we have been speaking honestly about the ways that God meets us in our humanity. But doesn’t just meet us… God blesses us. In our fragility, God blesses our very dust. In our imperfection, God calls us good. In our curiosity, God surprises us. In our suffering, God teaches us how to hope. In our loneliness, God seeks us and finds us and welcomes us home. In our mourning, God weeps with us and comforts us. In our rejection, God welcomes us.

Because we aren’t just blessed when we have it all together. Blessing, instead, is a way of speaking spiritually about how God sees us and how we might imagine the world made right again. So if you are feeling the disconnect from the realities of your actual life and all this eastering happening around us today, you aren’t alone. 

“On the first day of the week, while it was still dark” (Jn 20:1), Mary Magdalene, a dear friend and disciple of Jesus, makes her way to Christ’s tomb. Due to the Sabbath restrictions, she wasn’t able to complete the burial rituals, so while it was still dark, she enters the garden. Little does she know, that like the seeds in the cold, hard ground, something new is being reborn. Mary doesn’t enter into Easter with joy and celebration, certain that everything will work out. She arrives in her unhope with still swollen red-eyes from crying more tears than she has ever shed. She goes while it was still dark in the midst of her uncertainty and unknowing. And that’s when she sees him. With dirt under his fingernails, she mistakes him as a gardener (John 20:15). The one she was looking for arrives in his resurrected glory.

Sometimes we get lucky and everything makes sense. We get the answers we need or the treatment works or the finances add up or the prodigal returns home or the marriage is restored or the pregnancy test is exactly what we hoped. And, most of the time, nothing makes sense. Our hearts are broken beyond repair. We toss and turn in our unsolvable grief. The people we love are lost. The rug is yanked from under our feet. It is there, we can take a note from Mary Magdalene and search for signs of Jesus—for signs of hope—while it was yet dark.

We live in the already and the-not-yet. Because of what Jesus did in his life, death, and resurrection, we know the fullness of God’s justice and love and redemption will be accomplished… but it’s not yet our reality. So here we are in the already-not-yet. Here we are in the mess and the mayhem on the look-out for magic.

Thankfully, we aren’t here alone. We’re here in this uncertain time and place, searching for signs of hope, as people of hope, together. Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed!] Thanks be to God.