On Easter Day, we remember and celebrate and say once again, that in Christ, God showed how perfect love can defeat any other power: the power of darkness, death, evil, corruption, and fear – all have been defeated by God through Jesus Christ, who broke death into pieces once and for all. This truth is completely out of step with our culture, our world’s expectations of human behavior, our own expectations of ourselves and our future probably. This is utterly non-intuitive and frankly, very strange.

Years ago, our now-Presiding Bishop Michael Curry preached a sermon called “Crazy Christians.” Bishop Curry said, over and over, “We need some crazy Christians!”  To work for love, to believe in the power of love, to find love in the smallest of interactions and to look for love in the aftermath of atrocities. Let’s be crazy Christians and celebrate the power of God who made a full tomb to be empty, who took his son, dead from the cross, and watch him be buried deep in a cave, and then, through a mystery which none of us understand but all of us want to know about, resurrected him to new life – he still had the marks of the nails in his hands when he appeared to his frightened disciples later in the afternoon after it was discovered that the un-moveable stone had been moved away from his grave – he was no ghost, he was the Son of God, born to bring God’s promise of new life, of grace, of the defeat of death into our world forever.

After a long Lent, in the midst of a world that is struggling with such brokenness, such anxiety and worry, we crazy Christians declare that Christ walks with us, through our baptisms is with us, in us, between us and beside us, and we are called for the rest of our lives to do the resurrection work of faith and love begun in Jesus. To know and to declare that death is not the final word, resurrection life is there for everyone! To live with compassion and mercy, to forgive, and to declare to everyone we know, “Alleluia, Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!”

A blessed Easter to you all.

Beth+