COVID-19, Monday, April 13

Dear Church Family,

It’s a quiet, rainy, Monday morning.  Yes, we know that Jesus is risen, and yet somehow, it all feels a little too quiet, doesn’t it.  As I mentioned yesterday, I really missed hearing the trumpet on Easter Sunday, and all those triumphant Easter hymns.

There was a pastor, a number of years ago, who did an Easter Sunday children’s sermon.   At one point the pastor asked the children what they thought were Jesus’ first words to his followers after the resurrection.  One little boy sprang to his feet, spread his arms out wide and said, “Ta-Da!”

“Humor aside, the fact is that a celebrative “Ta-Da!” is not at all what we actually find in any of the four Gospels.”  Scott Hoeze, from the Center for Excellence in Preaching in Grand Rapids, MI, says this:  “The Easter stories are filled with some darkness, some weeping, some uncertainty, some doubt.  In almost every instance Jesus does not bang down anyone’s front door gleefully and triumphantly to declare “I’m BAAACCK!” but rather Jesus creeps up from behind.  He comes up behind a weeping woman and a deeply disappointed couple on the road.  He doesn’t stick around Jerusalem for long but directs everyone 80 miles north to Galilee.  In one of the precious few post-Easter/pre-Ascension stories we get in the Bible (John 21), Jesus is depicted as sitting on a log on a beach tending a little fire on which he’s cooking up some fish and biscuits.  How ordinary a setting can you get?!

In other words: the resurrection emerges from the real world of sorrow and uncertainty with a message for that same world…. We too can still encounter the living Jesus in our present darkness, in our uncertainty and fears.” 

“On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors lock for fear of the Jewish Leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’” (John 20:19).

Sounds a bit like us, doesn’t it – together with your family, locked doors, fear. This post-resurrection Monday might feel very much like that first one. And to us too, our risen Lord says, “Peace be with you.”

Pastor Rita