Hope Is The Currency Of Easter People

Friends, I want to say thank you for all those who have been following along this Lenten journey blog. It is always such a rich time together, and I have been deeply encouraged by the community of people who have offered thoughts, reflections, comments or personal communication. I also want to thank all of the guest bloggers who have contributed to and enriched this conversation. I am indebted to your wisdom and insight. My hope is that these reflections offered you tools, insights and practices for the spiritual journey, and I look forward to a continued connection with you throughout the year. Blessings on the journey!

For those who are not familiar, Easter Monday is still celebrated as a holiday in many places around the world, and we, too, will mark the holiday! I mean, how can we not celebrate this incredible Easter-tide?!

I love that Easter Monday falls on April Fools Day this year, in part, because what we celebrate as Easter people seems to be folly in terms of worldly values.

In a world that values success and achievement, we honor Jesus who died alone and a seeming failure.

In a world that values domination and might, we celebrate a nonviolent God who forgave enemies and worked to heal those who hurt him.

In a world that sees death as final, we celebrate death as a doorway to new life.

In a world that saw the cross as a symbol of shame and humiliation, we celebrate as a symbol of hope and promise.

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he states it very clearly, “we are fools for Christ’s sake.”

As Rev. Celie said in her beautiful Easter message, Jesus is “on the loose” in the world, and as we affirmed in yesterday’s reflection, this changes everything. The resurrection event invites us not only to believe that whatever we witness in front of us is not the final word but to ACT as if it is not the final word.

Hope is the currency of Easter people.

Hope, however, is not always what we think it is. Rebecca Solnit says that “is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine…[and it’s] not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative.” She says that it is “an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable…It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”

Solnit goes on to say that “One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change.” The Easter story, however, invites us to remember that there is always more than we can see, more than we can calculate.

The great theologian, Walter Bruggemann, says that hope, by many accounts, is really an absurdity because it does not take what we have been told are the “facts” and base our decisions on them. Hope instead relies upon memory – personal and collective – and affirms that our God is tenacious and persistent in overcoming the powers of death and separation – whether we are able to notice it or not.

And this is a faith that we cling to as Easter people. It is a faith that no matter what is happening in our personal story at the moment, we are participating in a much bigger Story where God is active and ever-moving. What is more, in this Story, God can use anything that is offered towards a future that we might only be able to see partially (and sometimes not at all).

As many have said and testified, hope is a practice, a discipline and a choice. Every day, we are offered a chance to embody this Easter hope through a radical offering of whatever is going on for us – even if it does not seem like much or anything of value – and imagine that it can be used by God for some greater purpose.

To the world, we may seem like April Fools, and yet our collective memory and experience tell us that this is both our path and our promise.