“Easter won’t be the same this year,” said one pastor. Another pastor told me how their church is making plans to celebrate Easter when the lockdown is lifted. “When everyone gets back, we are going to blow off the doors!”
I get it.
Three years ago, the Easter Celebration at our church was one of the most powerful worship services I’ve attended in recent years. Soul-stirring songs, well planned creative elements, a moving testimony and a timely message were infused with the dynamic power of the Holy Spirit. God showed up! Add lots of people into the mix, and you have the kind of service that fuels a pastor’s ministry for the next six months.
This year will be different We will be sitting in front of a phone, computer or TV, watching Easter online. It’s not what we would have chosen.
During its long history the church has faced crises far more serious than our current pandemic. Severe persecution, horrible wars, and devastating plagues, have forced Christ followers to remember the resurrection of Jesus while isolated in prison, hunkering down in foxholes, or living in a refugee camps. While they wished their circumstances would have been different, it was the truth of Easter that offered them hope.
If the experts are right, Easter Sunday will come about the time the pandemic is at its worst in our country. Fear, anxiety, hopelessness, grief fill many hearts. The truth of Jesus resurrection—and only the truth of Jesus’s resurrection--speaks to all of these in a lasting way.
This Easter may not be the biggest Sunday of the year, but in our recent history, there has not been a more important Sunday. The glorious truth of Easter has not changed. It makes possible an eternal, new normal, which no virus can touch.
People will be watching from their phone, their computer, their laptop. They need to hear the bigger-than-our-every circumstance, life-changing words: He is risen!
The resurrection of Jesus is for such a time as this.
Thanks Doug! He is risen indeed. ✝️
ReplyDelete