Monday, July 27, 2015

Thoughts from Easter

What's that you say? Easter was almost four months ago? Well, I've been busy, okay? Here's what I meant to write back at the beginning of April.

In the week leading up to Easter 2015, death seemed pervasive. Among my circle of church friends alone, one young man my age lost his mother, one woman a little closer to my parents' age lost her ailing father. At my evening church I prayed with a young couple for the safe return of their missing friend, Jennifer, a UofM student; driving to work one or two days later MPR's news ticker told me she'd drowned. I struggled wondering how any of these people could possibly find hope, which is what Easter's about, in the midst of utter grief. I resolved the answer must relate to my own answer to Theodicy (God and suffering), which is: it's not about the person who is suffering, but about our communal response to that person. Because (drawing yet again from Beggars in Spain) Community *must* be the assumption, not an exception.

And so, Easter morning on Facebook, I wrote the following:

The tomb is empty. We may yet live in a broken world, a world filled with war, hatred, death, sadness, but the empty tomb brings the promise that *this world we live in is not the end*. There is something beyond the corporeal reality we know. There is Hope. And it is alive today. Happy Easter.

Easter morning I ran sound at Jacob's Well, and for weeks leading up to it I'd been assembling a special Easter pre- and post-service playlist to play while people were congregating and leaving. All were songs that, for me, summed up the Hope that lives in Easter. In case it's of interest to anyone else, here's the list:

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