Thoughts from Pastor Matt…

Happy Easter, beloveds!  Easter is, of course, the centerpiece of our Christian year, the crowning celebration around which all our life as Christian community revolves.  It has long been said that, in fact, every Sunday is a “little Easter.”  In as much as we get it “right” from week to week, our worship every Sunday should rest in the love and grace of God made known in Jesus Christ, and proclaim the victory over the forces of evil and death that God wrought and proclaimed in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The centrality of Easter to our faith as Christians does not make the Easter message an “easy” one.  Our world still deals in messages that would try to speak contrary to the Easter one, those of death and despair.

And yet, somehow, even in the midst of a world that would try to convince us otherwise, our forebears in the faith have nevertheless found the courage to speak of the victory has having already been accomplished.  Take, for example, a couple of verses from the old Easter hymn “The Strife Is O’er”:

The strife is o’er, the battle done;

the victory of life is won;

the song of triumph has begun.

Alleluia!

The powers of death have done their worst,

but Christ their legions hath dispersed:

let shouts of holy joy outburst.

Alleluia![1]

Note the confidence and conviction with which these ancient words sing:  the battle is done, death has been defeated, God is victorious.

Sometimes we like to think that we, as modern people, are more advanced, more highly-evolved, than our ancestors.  But perhaps they have something yet still to teach us.  What paths toward life might we find when we claim and proclaim with boldness the Easter victory message?  How might we be changed, and how might the world be changed through us, when words like these become not only things we sing in church but the foundation of the way we approach life?  What would it mean for you to say to yourself, despite any evidence to the contrary, that “I know my Redeemer liveth!” and then live your whole life rooted in the confidence of that testimony?  What fears—yours or others’—might you cast aside?  What courage might you find?  What would you imagine yourself doing, if you knew you could not fail?

Yours in the journey,

Matt

[1] Verses 1 and 2 of “The Strife Is O’er,” (Latin hymn, c. 1695; trans. Francis Pott, 1861) as it appears in Glory to God: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs, ©2013 Westminster John Knox Press, #236.