Let Us Be People of Easter

A devotion I wrote and gave to MOPS this week:

 

Friends it’s a joy to proclaim to you this morning that He is Risen!  I know it’s easy to think Easter is over--Target quickly put away the plastic eggs, obnoxious Easter grass that gets all over everything and doesn’t vacuum up easily, and marked down all the leftover peeps, but in the life of the Christian church we’re still smack in the middle of the Easter season.  I used to teach a class for children ages 4-6, and it was a program called Godly Play, where we taught children how to worship, how to participate in the life and liturgy of a congregation and we used to help them recognize and celebrate the various seasons of the church year.  We would explain to them when they saw the purple banners and cloths show up in the church it meant we were in the season of Lent, the 6 weeks before Easter, and that purple meant we were waiting for something huge to happen--Easter was so important it took us 6 weeks to get ready for it!  But what many people don’t realize is that the 7 weeks after Easter are called the Easter season--we’d tell the kids that easter was SO huge, was SO important to our faith that one sunday wasn’t nearly enough to celebrate it fully, the church needed 7 sundays where we would proclaim “he is risen! he is risen indeed!” to one another every week.  Many congregations have lost that practice, using those words, “he is risen” only one week a year, but i wish that was something we could reclaim.  Because those words matter.  They’re game changing, life changing words, history changing words.  And many of us only hear them once a year.  But i want to tell you again today that He is Risen.  Or as my 3 year old likes to run around saying “he is risen and fabulous!”  We have absolutely no idea where those words came from, but I love them.  Jesus is risen and fabulous.  

Jesus is risen.  But that doesn’t mean everything is perfect, it doesn’t mean life is without hard times.  We heard three incredible stories two weeks ago from our friends who freely shared about very difficult times in their lives.  Life is messy.  Life is downright painful at times.  There is a constant mixture of the beautiful and the bitter, and Jesus’ resurrection does not promise to take away the bitter as much as we wish it would.  At least not here, not now, not yet.  Shauna Niequist calls this life bittersweet, the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful--a sliver of lightness on even the darkest night, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak.  That if everything in life was sweetness, it would rot our teeth and our souls.  The bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands.  Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, full of depth and complexity, it’s courageous, gutsy and earthy.  It’s the bitter parts of our stories that allow us to sit with one another, to reach out when we see others suffering a similar pain we’ve endured.  It is after having walked through those bitter moments and seasons in life that we are able to utter what I’ve come to believe are two of the most powerful words in a friendship.  The words “me too.”  Me too.  I’ve been there too.  You’re not the only one who has been so sleep deprived you’ve considered walking away from your kids.  Me too.  You’re not the only one who has been so fed up with a spouse that you’ve found yourself entertaining the question “do I want to do this for the next 50 years?”  Me too.  You’re not the only one who has worried over the health of a loved one, or grieved in the emergency room over the loss of someone dear to you.  Jesus is risen, but life is still messy, and walking through those messy times gives us the privilege of proclaiming to one another “you are not alone in your messy and bitter moments.”  

But friends, here is what the resurrection of Jesus does promise us.  It promises us that our messy, sometimes painful and bittersweet life won’t be that way forever.  The book of Revelation promises us, in what might be one of the most hope-filled passages in all of scripture that one day all suffering will end.  I believe that one day we will stand before the throne of God and never again will we hunger.  Never again will we know the scorching heat of the sun.  Never again will we shed a tear, in fact I believe it with all of my heart that one day God will wipe away every tear we have ever shed from our eyes.  Because Jesus is alive we have this hope.  I believe that the same Jesus who was put to death on a cross 2000 years ago is alive again today, and because he is risen we have hope.  One day there won’t be any more depression, there won’t be any more cancer, there won’t be any more drunk driving accidents, one day there will be a cease-fire forever in war torn parts of this planet.  Life is still messy friends, sometimes life is downright painful but I believe with all my heart that Jesus is alive and because he is alive we can live with hope.  

My favorite song-writer, poet, prophet, is the late Rich Mullins, who died tragically way too young.  But he left behind a treasure-trove of words that over and over again point me to Jesus, and to the hope we have in him.  One of my favorite songs of his is called If I Stand, and the chorus says

 

So if I stand let me stand on the promise

That You will pull me through

And if I can't then let me fall on the grace

That first brought me to You

If I sing let me sing for the joy

That has born in me these songs

But if I weep let it be as a man

Who is longing for his home

Friends because Jesus is risen we have the promise of another home someday. The resurrection does not mean we will never grieve here on earth.  It does not mean everything in our lives will be springtime and sunshine and roses.  But because of the resurrection we can say “i know this isn’t the end.  I know in my head, even if I don’t always feel it in my heart, that someday I won’t cry anymore, someday my loved ones won’t suffer.  As i look at the world around me I HAVE to believe that, I have to believe the pain in this world isn’t how God intended life to be.  Even in the midst of dark times, may we be people of Easter.  People who can help proclaim to one another that Jesus is risen, and because of those 3 words, everything in our lives will be made new someday.  We can grieve, cry, laugh, dance, fight, make up, parent our kids, care for our loved ones, and walk through the ordinary everday moments with great hope.  Jesus is risen friends, he is risen indeed.