Jesus’ disciples stood before him as the afternoon wore on. They wanted to send all the hungry people away into the surrounding villages to buy, beg or borrow food. Jesus just looked at them, “You give them something to eat.”

The risen Jesus, who eschews the just path of revenge-seeking and turns himself and his followers instead to lives of transformed and transformative relationship. In this reality, victory is an experience that no longer requires winners and losers, the dominators and the destroyed.

Stir us from our shyness. Save us from respectability. Reveal us as your people–friends and followers of the risen Christ, signs of your unfailing love, evidence of your mending work in this world.

God’s naked joy is holy. God's shedding and sharing of honor and power is holy. God’s bare and deep desire that we be whole and at home in this beautiful and God-blessed world is holy.

Today’s devotion is an extended quotation from Rachel Held Evans’ beautiful and brave 2015 memoir Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. May her good gifts of insight find and feed you today as you work beside and wrestle within and rest from the ongoing labors of grace in a world that loves the quick fix and the fancy wrapping. 

If Christmas is the great vertical feast of God’s descent among us in flesh and blood, Easter is the season in which the width and breadth of God’s incarnate reach is revealed. The risen Christ creates and forms a redeemed reality that extends and exists beyond our hopes and certainties as well as our fears and failings.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence becomes an act of rebellion.

-Albert Camus

We belong to the way of Jesus. It’s a way he taught and a way he lived. I believe Easter was and continues to be God’s vindication of Jesus’ way–what my friend Dan Erlander calls Yahweh’s unambiguous and surprising YES! to everything Jesus did and was and is. Easter is the vindication of Jesus’ way of redeeming the universe from its despairing distance from God.

Though it came to be known for its global ecumenism and a gentle style of contemplative prayer and worship that continues to resonate with young people around the world, the monastic community of Taizé has its origins in a wartime refugee crisis and one young man’s desire to serve those in need.

Acts is the story of what happens because of Christ’s resurrection. And at least one of the things that happens is a new kind of life. Acts tells the astounding stories of a new Way, a new community, and a new kind of people that rise in the wake of everything Jesus said and did and was and is.