What can we say March 31? Easter Sunday

    I can never decide if preaching Easter is one fabulous moment, or a vaguely monotonous drudgery. I mean, it’s Easter. No greater day could be to preach. And yet, they come  - in droves! – yet inoculated against the radical truth of the day, thinking it’s that All Dogs Go To Heaven, that it’s all about flowers and pretty dresses, the flowers blooming in Spring. We’re fortunate – maybe – this year in that Easter is early enough that all may not yet be in bloom.

   I can only point you to two earlier posts on prior Easter Sundays, this one focused on Kavin Rowe’s Christianity’s Surprise – and then this one, that attends to the fact that Easter was “after the Sabbath.”

   Friends, preach well – which is only fitting – on Easter. But don’t be exasperated if, afterwards, the response is a bit tepid. So it was for the first proclaimers of the astonishingly good news.

   I would add, to what I link you to above, this. St. Augustine tantalizingly wrote, "The more you love to be, the more you will desire eternal life." We love to be - even the unhappy, or those bearing chronic pain. We know we are made for eternity - for God would not have made us with this love for be-ing for any other reason.

    How do we appeal to that to draw people toward eternity? And why then does our living matter? I just saw the best movie I've seen in years: One Life - the story of Nicky Winton (played masterfully by the aged Anthony Hopkins!), a businessman in Prague who figured out how to save not just a few, but 669 Jewish children on the brink of the Holocaust. No spoiler alerts - but oh my gosh, how moving, one life, courageously and creatively saving life. At the climax, the credits say 6,000 people owed their lives to Winton. How many owe our lives to Christ? What do we then do?

   We can ask why God bothered to get involved in our dying... In Kristin Hannah's lovely new novel, The Women, she repeatedly pictures combat nurses in Vietnam sitting with soldiers dying far from home. They hold his hand, and soothingly say "You're not alone." So crucial - and so Jesus-like. The Gospel is less Oh, you get to go straight to heaven! and more You are not alone.

   Recently I attended the funeral of my friend, Jean Ford, Billy Graham's little sister. Her grandchildren sang "Heaven came down..." which was sung and quoted at her brother's funeral. Notice it's not We go to heaven - but heaven came down, to us, and claimed us, assumed us, collected us. Review this song - an oldie I'd not pondered for many years. Isn't Easter Heaven coming down to us?