“It’s early,” he said, as I unlocked the door of the church.
“I know,” I said. “Whose idea was this?”
He laughed and headed down to the kitchen to get started on breakfast.
Out in the playground, where the service would be, it was as dark as midnight, with the moon still hanging in the southern sky. The swings were still and the cross in the corner stood in silent shadows. The birds, though, knew it was morning and were already singing the good news.
Ed arrived to set up the microphones, and Dan carried out the communion table. It felt like we were setting up for a secret late-night party. But then the Steadmans arrived with flowers for the cross, and Jody and the choir, and Jeff with his guitar, and a couple of sleepy-eyed but excited toddlers, and ever-so-gradually, our front yard lightened up with sunlight and life.
We sang, and we shouted “Alleluia!” and we shared the bread of life and the cup of hope, and we placed our flowers on the cross. And right on cue, just beyond the houses to the east, the sun peeked out above the trees.
Breakfast was ready, then, but we lingered there in the no-longer-dark morning, the world coming to life around us. We could breathe easier, somehow, now that the good news was out there for all the world to see.
Walter Bruggemann, one of my favorite contemporary theologian-poets, uses the word Easter as a verb. “Easter us,” he prays. “Easter us in honesty; Easter us in fear; Easter us in joy, and let us be Eastered.”
I think we got Eastered this week. From those first bird-sung alleluias to the soaring refrain of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!” in the sanctuary at 11:00, and everything in between, I think God was Eastering us. God was bringing us back to life, inspiring us with hope, triumphing again over death.
Good news, people of God: Christ is risen.
Christ is risen, indeed.