NO, what saves is not Easter as a doctrine, or an evasion, or a sentimental dream. What saves us is
Easter as human beings renewed by Jesus Christ and his victory over sin, death, and the devil. Easter is not a magic trick.
Easter is not a supernatural event out of sync with everything else we experience in life. Easter is the love of God, which
is the ultimate truth about life, entering into all our human pain--all our cruelty, all our fearfulness, all our loneliness
and hurt, all our sinfulness--and overcoming it.
Easter is the spirituality of the Christian life. It permeates everything we do. It seeps into our
bones: it effects our marriages, our parenting, our work, our play, our politics, our friendships. It reorients all of these
toward a faith in the victory of life over the power of death and of darkness.
We live in dark times. As I write this the news is filled to overflowing with death: in Iraq,
in Palestine, in the Sudan, in Spain. The list goes on. No one seems to know how to stem
the tide of violence, hatred, anger, despair and social nihilism flooding our little planet. We live increasingly in a world
of haves versus have-nots. Religion, which is supposed to be about love and peace, has become a huge force for intolerance,
bigotry, exclusion and fanaticism. And not just Islam. The Religious Right in Christianity and Judaism wants to fight the
intolerance of extremist Islam with an intolerance and extremism all its own. And no one, to my astonishment, sees the irony!
What the world needs now is an Easter Christianity that really believes that God is love and that
love covers a multitude of sins, throws light into the darkness of this world and overcomes the power of death. Luther believed
that if Adam and Eve had not sinned and disobeyed at that tree in Eden,
they still would have died eventually. But it would have been, he says, mere biological death—completely natural, the
ending of a life cycle. What Adam and Eve's refusal of God added to the equation, fatally, was spiritual death, our separation
from the love of God. The love was still there, but we could no longer see it or feel it. All we felt was wrath and a cosmic
loneliness. Jesus came to reverse this situation, not only by preaching the love of God, but by being the love of God in our midst, living and dying for us so that we could rise again. Easter is not about one
man coming back from the dead; Easter is about the end of the reign of death.
Open the Post on any day and you will see that Death has not given up. It contests the truth of our
Easter celebrations. The cynicism of our own political and economic life is part of Death's strategy. So much religion today
is playing with Death. On Ascension Day, as the disciples stand gaping into heaven, Gabriel appears to them and says: "Why
are you looking up to heaven? Get to work!" The work is to carry Easter into the heart of everyday life--into our marriages,
our parenting, our work, our play, our politics, our friendships. People of every faith who believe that God is love, who
believe in justice and peace, are our co-workers. We join hands this Eastertide, in the midst of so much death, to proclaim
the only real alternative. We proclaim that God is love and that in his love the whole world rises up from the tomb and greets
a new day.
Yours in Christ,
— Pastor Bastien
Taken from Footnotes, May 2004
