APRIL 6, 2021
Happy Eastertide, church family and friends!
Ya know, for my entire life I have always said that fall is my favorite season. Probably I will say it again in a few months, knowing me. And I do love it, as the world kind of starts winding down for winter sleep, and the colors change, and the weather gets cooler. I love all the sounds and smells and meaning of it. But I gotta tell ya, now that I have – in an extremely amateur, faltering way – taken up gardening, spring is giving fall a run for its money.
Seeing my 3 year old dwarf peach tree absolutely COVERED with pink blossoms makes me ridiculously happy. Hoping my first attempt at compost works out, and excited to learn how to do it well. Looking forward to planting new kinds of things, and being careful not to do my spring cleanup too early lest all the good pollinators lose their winter sleeping habitat. Seeing the earth start to wake up at church and at home, with little bits of green popping up all over the place promising fresh flowers. It’s all just so sweet and good.
I find a lot of deep spiritual meaning in the fall season, as human beings probably have from the beginning of time. While we as a species look toward winter and depend on the fall harvest to get us through, there is tremendous gratitude and hope and trust in God that infuses the season. In the spring, it’s much more like awe. Happy surprises everywhere. The fulfilment of the hopes we have held onto through the winter. Evidence of new life around every corner, like answers to prayer. It makes lines from the Song of Solomon echo in my mind, about the rains being over and the flowers appearing, and all the God-loving hope expressed in that…and that passage from Lamentations 3:22 about God’s mercies being constantly renewed.
One of my favorite songs to sing at an Easter sunrise service is “Morning Has Broken.” Though Cat Stevens made it popular 50 years ago or so, it was actually written as a Christian children’s hymn in 1931 by famed children’s author Eleanor Farjeon as “a song to give thanks for each day.” It is set to a beautiful Scottish tune first published some 50 years before that.
Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from Heaven
Like the first dewfall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day.
This is all just about flowers and rain and bees, and how sweet and good and even awe-inspiring all of that is. But 2000 years ago, a small group of women and men were just waking up to the impossible fact that Jesus had been raised from the dead. It changed absolutely everything. Everyday miracles of new life are astounding if we are paying attention, but this was – this IS – something else entirely.
It means everything God has been trying to tell us is true. Not just metaphorically true, religious-scholar-debate true…but literally, physically, right-here-in-real-life true.
For God so loved the world that He gave the Son, so that whoever believes him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it.
What if we lived like we believed it?
Christ is risen, beloved. He is risen indeed!
Pastor Dawn
Worship Any and Everywhere!
Living the Resurrection
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