The ongoing and unfolding consequences of a Jesus whom death could not hold continue to startle the jaded, surprise the cynical, and work wonders within the weary. May it do so wherever you are today.

Hope is patience with the lamp lit.

-Tertullian

As you walk through this day and night, may the prayers of the faithful and the playful and the wayward and the wise in every time and place bear you up and shelter your sweet soul.

The risen Jesus meets our doubts in the same way as he meets our boldest confessions of faith: with his body broken and his blood shed. There is space enough in this resurrection body to hold all of our questions and each of our hopes.

Joy’s connection to gratitude makes sense. Both activities are tangled up in our response to God’s daily invitation to pay attention to the world around us and to the lives of our neighbors. Both invite us to experience ourselves connected to others. Both open us to the abundance of God’s love outpoured.

Freedom is less about having every option and more about being liberated from a power too great to escape or defeat on one’s own. Freedom is the life that comes when the captivity to compulsion is ended. It’s the day you realize you don’t need to numb or deny or damage yourself in order to avoid feeling your feelings. In Easter terms, freedom is what happens when you’ve been raised from the dead.

For Jesus, peace involves not absence but presence. Jesus’ resurrection gift of peace, of shalom’s fat fullness, is one that arrives into our lives as they are right now, not as we would like them to be or think they must be.

It was an open grave that met the women on Easter morning - the earth’s own surprised O-shaped empty mouth. And the news that poured forth from that opening was both simple and alarming: He is not here. He has been raised. Something has been opened in the universe that was once closed. We live, now, under the circumstances of resurrection.

It is early in Easter, my friends. Recall how slow of heart some of the first witnesses were, and how it took them time to realize and recognize the news the women shared. Not everybody’s good at this stuff yet. That’s okay. Start small. It takes as long as it takes.

Now we live in a different world with different rules. Now we stand up. No longer bound by the limited laws dictated by death, we can live according to the terms of resurrection.