Easter People
There is always something pulling us toward feeling as though we are caught in a death spiral -
another wreck,
another shooting,
another person violated,
another system taking advantage of others,
another leader caught,
another church closing,
another member leaving,
and the list goes on.
It is overwhelming.
All of this mess can dominate our minds and lead us to forget that we are called to be Easter people even in the presence of death, dying, and dis-ease. Easter people are not people who possess a Pollyanna faith where the world is just right especially when you close your eyes and imagine it to be so. We are not called to live in a world that doesn't exist with a sanitized faith full of hollow promises and unrealistic expectations.
Rather, we are called to live into a world of pain and suffering and disconnect as Easter people -
people who know that death and death-dealing ways do not have the last word;
people who believe with their hands and feet that the resurrection is not something that simply impacts our future in the by-and-by;
people who stand strong and birth life into a world that so often resembles the opposite;
people who are co-conspirators in the business of the kingdom of God;
people who by their very nature are about the life-giving ways of the divine.
Being Easter people is not easy. But it is the way toward which we are called to live, to move, to believe.
Perhaps N.T. Wright said it best,
“...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second." (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
Let us be Easter people together.
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