When It Comes to Resurrection, I'm a Bit out of Practice
Photo via Unsplash by Bruno van der Kraan
One really early morning, I couldn’t go back to sleep.
It happens sometimes: I awaken at 2 or 3 am and lie in bed wide awake for an hour, my mind too alert. I work over the day’s high points or low points. Sometimes I find myself anxious, sometimes just keyed up. Eventually I go back to sleep. But sometimes I do some significant reflecting or praying.
This is what happened during a recent time of restive wakefulness. On this particular morning I found myself thinking about Easter.
And not just thinking, but puzzling.
Easter Sunday had come with a flourish but seemed like it left in a rush. The day after—Monday—dawned like another ordinary day.
Church the next Sunday was sparsely attended. And I began to wonder, Why don’t I make more of this season that is so full of joy and promise and talk of resurrection?
Easter is a not just a day, after all. It’s a season.
Just as there are forty days in Lent there are fifty days of Easter—sometimes called the Great Fifty Days. Still, it began to strike me as curious that I and the wider church routinely seem more aware of Lent than we are of Easter. More into the penitential disciplines and the heaviness of Lent than the celebration of Easter and its joy.
Many of us adopt Lenten disciplines—forgoing caffeine or candy, or fasting once a week, or adding a weekly act of volunteer service.
But Easter comes and, well, when’s the last time you heard someone say, I am resolving to be more trusting and calm and at peace now because it’s Easter?
When do we say, here’s something I’m going to do to mark Easter, to live with courage and confidence and joy? While people talk about Lenten disciplines, why not Easter disciplines, Easter celebrations?
***
Other ages have lived more vividly in this reality, it seems. If I greeted this day with a mild case of the blahs, with little expectation for a God unleashed in Jesus able to do extravagant things, I sense something even more deeply vital to where I am.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” wrote the early New Testament writer Peter. “By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Sometimes I repeat to myself.
Not a sluggish hope. A living hope! That implies activity and movement.
The early church’s further apostolic witness, Paul, also wrote of the power that raised Jesus from death as a reality for the moment. I’d like to see what this looks like in action! I’m praying for more of that reality to be, well, real. Paul called what’s possible “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19-20).
The power that made Jesus alive and risen works in and “toward” us? No wonder one morning I found myself too excited to go right back to sleep in the early hours of day. So my pre-dawn wrestling lately has me asking myself, sometimes smack in the middle of what someone called “life’s grubby particulars,” What does it mean for my life that Jesus was raised from the dead? In what ways do (and can I) follow what a poem of Wendell Berry urged: “Practice resurrection”? And how can I do this for fifty days? (Berry’s phrase suggests that it might indeed take “practice.”)
What could it look like now that I know that the risen Lord resides in our world? What might be done to make that remarkable reality more present when another blasé morning comes? I’m a bit out of practice.
And for you, what are some Easter practices you could adopt? I’m thinking especially of how to stay aware of Easter during the sometimes ordinary, even drab moments of any life, this side of Easter or not.
How can God’s power at work not just occupy our minds during the formal season but also when we worry or wonder?
Pastor and author Kara Root wrote this moving meditation that helps me see all this anew:
I need the resurrection because my sister is sick
and can’t afford insurance,
because I’ve told a weeping Haitian mom,
“No, I can’t take your son home with me.”
because I’ve been rushed off a Jerusalem street
so a robot [detonator] could blow up a bag that could’ve blown up us.
because I’ve exploded
in rage
and watched their tiny faces cloud with hurt,
because evil is pervasive
and I participate.
I need the Resurrection
because it promises that in the end all wrongs are made right.
Death loses.
Hope triumphs.
And Life and Love
Prevail.
———
Adapted from a meditation I delivered at a special dinner in celebration of Easter held at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where I served as Dean of the Cathedral.
***
I was excited to be interviewed for Ami McConnell’s WriterFestNashville’s podcast! Link here.
In the interview we have, as Ami puts it, “a captivating conversation. … [as] Tim takes us behind the scenes of his work on Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times, a book he skillfully compiled and edited, featuring the wisdom of the late Henri Nouwen.”