In my office, I have a US Forest Service
sign and poster that reads, “Who passed this way?” showing an assortment of native
and pioneer faces. Underneath, in a somewhat smaller font, it reads: “Please
Don’t Erase The Traces of America’s Past.” I have that sign hidden back behind
the desk in my study, because I’m half-expecting that the Forest Service will
be knocking on my door and arresting me for having it tomorrow.
How this sign came to me (legally,
cough cough) is maybe interesting but not so important, but as I think about
Easter, and especially the report of Easter from the women at the tomb, I am
intrigued by the way we consider Easter both an historical event and a game-changer
that turns our lives upside-down, even two-thousand years later. Today, we celebrate
the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but we don’t celebrate it like we do Memorial
Day or even Thanksgiving, whose significance is tied to memory. The resurrection
is more than that Forest Service sign; it does more than beg us to remember the
past. Easter does not live in a museum. It is not some fossilized reminder of a
thing that happened once, which we must excavate each year. Easter colors everything.
I want to talk today about why.
Like many of you, my eyes were drawn
to Notre Dame last week as that famed cathedral caught fire. The majesty of
that church and the history held within capture our imaginations in a multitude
of ways, but the cathedral itself is only an incredibly impressive antiquity.
People discover God there—no doubt!—but as I listened to the coverage, I heard
the value of that building equated time and again with its age. I get it (I
do!). Magnificent, old churches have character and a patina where the very air
you breathe feels ancient, pregnant with the weight of the divine. And, yet, the
worship of relics for relics’ sake is another way of treating Easter as just
another historical event. God is more than a god of history; God is the God of
right now.
The resurrection of Jesus is the
life-blood of the Christian faith; it is the thing that moves us, and we
remember the resurrection not just by study and devotion but also by practicing
resurrection daily. Practice resurrection!
This is the concluding line of a poem by Wendell Berry (in his Manifesto: The
Mad Farmer Liberation Front) that might be the most important call to attention
for Christians in this 21st century, because it takes something that
we assume to be passive—God will raise us; we are the object of the God’s
action—and it transforms resurrection into something we participate in. Of
course we can’t resurrect ourselves, but we can live out of the grace of God
that this Easter morning instills in our souls.