“Don’t Believe Easter…Live It” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/)
Easter invites us to imagine a world without fear. It invites us to imagine what our world would look like if violence and retribution were indeed signs of weakness rather than strength and might makes right. It invites us to imagine that violence and death and the Powers that Be do not have the last word. It invites us to imagine the transformative, mountain-moving power of nonviolence and grace, of faith, hope and love.
In fact, Easter proclaims that this is true. Easter proclaims this is the reality of the world God has created, and that this had indeed always been the reality in which we live. God has always been calling to us, through prophets and sages of the past, to live as if love, not hate and violence, were the forces that matter most in the world. Easter isn’t true because Jesus was resurrected. Easter is true because it has always been true that God loves us, because it has always been true that God hasn’t been interested in controlling the world with war, violence and oppression like the Powers that Be, but in transforming it with love and the giving away of power.
Easter invites us to remove to veil and see the world as it is intended, to behold the reality that exists behind the curtain of oppression and the fog of war. It invites us to open our eyes and see brothers and sisters where we had once seen enemies, to see hope where we had once seen despair, to see life in a world flooded by death.
And Easter asks us how we will then live our resurrected lives.
Easter invites us to remove the grave clothes that bind us, to walk out of the tomb in which we live, and begin to move into the world in new and profound ways — the way of resurrection in which we walk through doors that had previously been locked and barred through fear and despair.
Easter invites us to start living, and living fully, and living fully for others rather than living for ourselves, for security, for our small portion of domination of others in the midst of our own oppression.
Easter asks us not to perform penance, but to practice hope.
Easter asks us not to sit patiently for God to arrive, but to see that we have overlooked God already among us, in the strangers on the road, on the beach, in our midst, and in broken, life-giving things like bread.
Easter asks us not to believe the resurrection, but to imagine it, to practice it.
What would it look like if we imagined a world in which Easter is true, a world in which way of death, violence and oppression had been broken and robbed of their power?
Can we begin to imagine it?
We have 50 days to begin to imagine a world transformed. No, that’s not quite right.
During Eastertide, we have 50 days to celebrate that the world has indeed been transformed already. We have 50 days to imagine how we will live in the world in which Christ is risen, in which Easter didn’t just happen once, but happens always, in which Easter has become the way of the world.
So what will be your Eastertide practice, your practice that joins the tide that turned the world upside down?
How will we imagine resurrection?
How will we practice Easter?