It's Easter!

I've had this picture in my office for years and years. I look at it when I need hope. Maybe it will help you too.

  

Propped up on pillows, she asked, “Whatcha going to preach on Easter Sunday? She had been in the hospital for days. She had an IV in one arm and her hair was coming out from the assault of chemotherapy. “Wish I could be there…” and she left the wistful sentence hanging. What was I going to preach on? “You’ve asked a good question.” I said. “ Easter is the hardest time for the preacher to preach. Easter is just too big to capture. There is no way you can put Easter into words. I guess that is why we use Easter lilies and a lot of music.” I kept thinking: what was I going to say on Easter Sunday? I responded to my sick friend like this: “What am I going to preach on? I’m not sure what I’ll talk about. Maybe I will begin reminding everyone that Easter began in the dark, in the cemetery with a cluster of weeping women. That’s quite a stretch from Easter bonnets and Peter Cottontail. But Easter came at a hard time. They couldn’t get over the execution of their Lord—the injustice of it all. Their grief was heavy and more than they could take in.” She said, “I never thought about it that way.” “Yeah, it’s a part of Easter we usually miss. Easter comes to the hard places in life. To the things we don’t understand. To grief and unfairness and dead-end streets. I think Easter means that this special day is for anybody who faces the darkness and the unfairness of life.”

“You got me to thinking, Sally. Maybe I’ll move on to talk about Mary Magdalene and how she stood at the Empty tomb weeping. Christ’s body was gone and she assumed someone had stolen it. She stood there talking to someone she thought was the gardener—she finally came to see that she was talking to Jesus. If you read the accounts of Jesus’ appearance to others, we get the feeling that Easter was hard to see. Hasn’t it always been that way? With our fifteen-year-war and wounded vets and Washington scandals. All those kids who hid under desks and feared for their lives who marched last week. We worry about a multitude of things. What’s true and what’s false. All the lies.

Easter is hard for most of us to see. It must be hard for you lying in that bed, worrying about the future. Don’t you wonder about what Easter has to say to all these other people in these hospital rooms?” She said, “I’ve thought about that a lot. I never wondered too much about if Easter was real or not until I got sick. Now I think about it all the time.” “Easter has always been hard to see for most of us,” I told her. “ No wonder so many find it hard to believe.”

“Christ called Mary’s name that morning in the cemetery. So Sunday, “I told her, “I might say that Easter is a very personal word. Everybody’s name is called. We are all included. So much of religion today deals with who’s in and who’s out. Easter is not some yardstick of judgment. ‘He is risen’ spread like wildfire because it was best news that ever was. Easter touched their needs. The woman with a sordid past. The old mother overwhelmed in the loss of her son. The doubter who could not believe what he could not see. Easter walks into every hospital room and knows the names of those in every bed. Easter is not qualified by status or health or gender or race or sexual orientation. Some want to pare Easter down to the size of our prejudices but Easter cannot be boxed in--everyone’s name is called.”

            Easter is more than azaleas and dogwoods blooming and the lushness of the first greens of springtime. But maybe the budding flowers and trees are a sign that the life force really is stronger than the death force. None of us need despair. My friend in that hospital room. The woman who stamped my ticket at the parking lot when I left. Even the man that blew his horn and waved an angry finger at me on my way home. The worst things that happen to any of us need not be the last word. 

As I had left my friend’s room she had said to me. “Sounds like a pretty good Easter sermon. Lying here, I need an Easter real bad.”  We all need an Easter. Maybe that’s why it keeps coming around year after year, decade after decade. In the middle of all those signs the kids held up in Washington last week one girl held up a sign that simply said: Hope. Maybe underneath it all hope is what Easter is all about.

photo by John Sonderman / flickr

(This article appeared Easter week-end in the Anderson-Independent (SC) and the Greenville News (SC)


--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com