It always feels strange to write about Easter during Holy Week, especially today, Good Friday, as we gather to kneel before the naked altar and the old rugged cross, as we allow the Passion to wash over us and allow our response to be – simply – silence. But Holy Week and Easter go hand-in-hand. It is a composite story – a cohesive magnus opus that unfolds, moves up and down and sideways, discordant then harmonious, revealing truths along the way to anyone paying attention. By the time we arrive at Easter, we will have been on a journey together – having moved from one place to another, from dark to light, from fear to joy, from hurt to healing. The experience moves us from one consciousness to another, each and every year.
What strikes me is that this epic story, with its two pieces, is all about change. Absolutely no one person and no one thing is the same person or thing by the end of the story – by the time Jesus’ resurrection is discovered, proclaimed, and spreads across the land. Everything has changed: relationships, reality, truth, awareness, power dynamics, perceptions, and futures.
Theologian and poet Pádraig Ó Tuama reminds us, for example, that the women who discover the empty tomb were not believed at first by the disciples. “In the resurrection story,” Ó Tuama writes, “the disciples were invited into an eternal truth that required them to fundamentally change the way they saw temporal power: women’s testimony was considered an idle tale. And they were products of their time and place, so they operated within the imaginative strictures of this era. In order to pay attention to the invitation of the Gospel, they must amend their associations of power and their practices of disempowering in the here-and-now.” The truth of Easter is revealed first to the women – and in order to live into that truth themselves, the disciples have to radically shift their worldview, a way of being and relating that asks them to reorder everything they’ve known before.
Easter changes everything.
It strikes me that the Easter story invites all of us to consider our relationship to change – and we’ve been swimming in it amongst our community at St. David’s: sickness and death, diagnoses, parishioners moving, changing jobs, the birth of babies, new parishioners, shifting leadership and staff, weddings, and funerals, both grief and celebration of our beloved Frank’s retirement, a rector search process, and emerging paths for our common future. The only thing that’s constant is change itself – and not just any change but consistent, rapid, epic change. We are decisively in “liminal space” – the era between the “now” and the “not yet” – between “order” and “reorder.” But we are a resurrection people – and we know that with change comes transformation, renewal, and regeneration. As a resurrection people we know that we emerge from every liminal time as changed people, whether we know it or not, and in many circumstances our surroundings are unrecognizable.
One of the first things my then-soon-to-be-father-in-law ever said to me was during a visit to the storied family cabin on Gull Lake in northern Minnesota. We were standing outside the house, gazing out at the lake, and he said, “the very best thing about Gull Lake is that it never changes.” I thought, at the time, it was a curious thing to say, because if living on a huge lake teaches you anything you know that it is changing all the time. Storms come up out of nowhere, blow down trees, and crush out-buildings. Lake ice buckles stairs leading down to it. Winds take out docks. So too the family that populates that place is always changing – babies are born, people find spouses and marry, we age and die, neighbors sell their little family cabins and McMansions go up in their place. I always wondered if he was referring to things: the cabin’s furniture perhaps, or the decoupage mounted on bedroom walls – original to the building and always in the same place; the night-time air-flow regimen of windows and fan placement; or the white Kitchen-Aid mixer that sat on the counter for over 50 years, and now sits on my counter. Maybe the value was about having a few things that we can control and keep the same when everything around us is shifting, and the world is becoming less and less understandable. Maybe it was about affording some comfort in the swirl of change.
Every year we are confronted with Jesus’ resurrection and the Easter story. Every year we hear anew about that early morning when God rose Jesus from the dead and changed everything as we know it. As Ó Tuama puts it: “in the economy of Easter Sunday, it is both the form and the content of resurrection that is shocking [change]:
The content: that love might be as big as this.
The form: that love might be as challenging as this.”
In resurrection our relationship with God is changed forever – a definitive promise that love always has the last word. In God, all is healed and made new. We are each worthy, loved, and saved, come what may. We know that this great love is most emphatically made known to us in the midst of life’s greatest pain and heartbreak. Living into the “form and content” of Easter, as resurrection people, changes everything. If we allow it, it can anchor our whole lives in its promise.
Every morning, I pray the Daily Office and read the scripture assigned for that day and a while ago Paul reminded the people of Corinth: “…for God is not a God of confusion, but of peace.” (1Corinthians 14:39). This declaration is an Easter message. Change is always with us – both renewing life-giving change, as well as unwelcome, even terrifying, change. If we root and re-root our lives in God’s Easter promise, relying on God’s gift of worthiness, unconditional love, and our continuous renewal, that rootedness affords us the gift of peace – the ability to live with change and even accept change with a kind of holy confidence, resolve, and evenness.
Author, theologian, and civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, is known to have told his chapel students at Howard University to “…look at the world with quiet eyes…” “Quiet eyes” necessitates a groundedness in the Gospel, a stubborn hopefulness, an uncompromising focus on God’s promise embodied in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Each Easter we are gifted with the memory of Jesus’ coming to life again. With the power of this incalculable love, it opens our hearts and lives, so we may live fully, peacefully, and joyously in the midst of whatever the world serves up. This is our story; this is our song. Alleluia!
The Rev. Devon Anderson
Interim Rector
Published: March 28, 2024