Easter Reverb

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

Good morning. Easter is not just a holiday to celebrate or an event that happened in the past. It is the revealing of God a transforming of life and the way that we see the world. In the next few weeks, we're gonna talk about the reverberation of Easter and how it changes our lives and shows up in so many different ways.

Today I want to talk to you about three things. I want to talk to you first about how it changes the way we think about time. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection tells us that there's something more, that there's something new going on in the world. That time as we know it is just a chronological time is not all that there is, but rather there's a fuller reality, a transcendent reality in which it's not just about starting and stopping or birth and death, but there's a fullness of life.

Now what we are accustomed to is following what I would call sort of a standard calendar. There's of course, the winter, spring, summer, fall calendar that we all orient our lives to. Maybe for some of you, you orient your life mostly around the school calendar and back to school starts one rhythm of life for you, and then the summer has another.

There's another calendar that we all live our life by, and I call this calendar the calendar of American consumerism. And of course this begins in January, which is self-help month, where you join a gym and you maybe read a book about how to be a better you. You start eating healthy, you go out and you buy some athleisure wear.

The nice part about athleisure wear is that you can be comfortable in it even after you've given up the exercise. We move from there into February and we celebrate love. And though we all know we can't buy love, we try anyway. Then we head towards Easter and of course, nothing says new life like pastel eggs and Easter bunnies.

I will say that I always look forward to the Reccess peanut butter eggs because those are delicious. But I've gone astray. After Easter, we enter into the season of what I call “Let's Celebrate America,” and this is home improvement time where you get out and you make your yard look nice and you do some summer projects.

We enter into barbecue firework parade season, and maybe we close with some sort of vacation with the. Then arrives back to school because we are about performance and growing and being new people, and in order to do that, we have to have the right outfits and the right markers and pencils and iPads and laptops, and so we sort of ramp up for that.

Then finally, we enter into the season called Fall Y'all, in which you are marketed everything that has pumpkin something in it. Pumpkin spiced this and pumpkin flavored that. Now I know many of you look forward to that. I'll be honest. I don't understand it. And pumpkin flavored things are disgusting. We finally reached Thanksgiving, which is go spend some money, eat, drink, and be merry.

And then we close with the crescendo of American consumerism, which is you have to buy all the right things so that Christmas can be wonderful and that the people who you care about know that you love them because you bought them good gifts. So that's one way that we as Americans sort of enter into a new rhythm of life each year.

And the truth is that it orders a lot of us. You can see it every time you show up at Target or Wegmans or wherever else you go. But because of the resurrection, the church developed a new kind of calendar. A calendar that arranges our life in a different way. And so the church calendar begins with Advent and then moves into Epiphany and then to lent and then to Easter, and then Pentecost and then after Pentecost. And each of those seasons has a wonder and a beauty to them. Advent help the church remember that they are people who are awaiting the arrival of God. Christmas and epiphany are the actual arrival of God in the story, the arrival of Christ.

And in that time we too tune into the world around us and maybe see how God is arriving in the different places. We see God in new ways. Lent allows us to enter into a season of repentance because what we accept is that we are not a people who are perfect, but rather we are people who are broken and we often choose to try to find life in things that bring us death and so we need a savior.

And then finally we enter into Easter where we rejoice in the hope of the resurrection that the good of this world is worth saving. That death is not all that there is, but that God will bring new life to us and to the beauty of creation and the wonderful world that we live in, and the universe that we live in and restore all things.

And then Pentecost and after Pentecost is a season for the church to follow. That because of the resurrection, a new calendar is needed, a new way of living is needed, and so this whole season comes out by following Jesus.

Now, I'll be honest, there was a time in my life where I didn't fully understand the church calendar. I didn't really connect with it, but now I see that it's a way to reorient myself to live differently in the midst of time. And I recognize that the world always invites me to live time a little bit differently, either just sort of chronologically by each day and each month, or as we talked about with this consumer mindset.

But what would it look like for each of us if we tried to tune in a little bit more, tune in to the new way of living, the new way of inhabiting time that is revealed in the resu. That there's a fullness of time that God will bring about and we can connect to it by entering into these rhythms and habits.

And one of the next parts of the reverberation of Easter that I want to talk to you about is being both creatures and actors. After Jesus reveals himself to the disciples and he is resurrected, and he comes and he visits them. He shows them the holes in his hands and the side, and Thomas, doubting Thomas says, Hey, I missed it, but unless I can see it, I can't believe it.

Because resurrection is incredibly unbelievable. And yet the movement and the eyewitnesses give us a sense that, oh no, this radical thing really. But the message that Christ offers in the resurrection to his disciples, and really the message that's offered to us throughout the scriptures is one in which we are both creatures and actors.

We are both people who are very dependent upon others and God for life, and yet we are both. We are also independent in that we have volition and we have action, and what we do in the world matters. And so this is something that we have to live simultaneously because to be human is to be dependent and independent.

Simultaneously, we are dependent in that. You and I did not create ourselves. You and I did not have any control over who we were born to or where we were born, or what time in history we were born. That just happened to. And yet it's also true that the way we love our life matters. We can choose to love someone or not love someone.

We can pursue reconciliation or not. And these, this way of living is sort of this dual moment in which Jesus says he arrives to the disciples in John twenties, says, peace be with you. And he sends them out. And so we are sent out to be people who are simultaneously dependent upon God and one another.

And independent in that we recognize that God has placed us in our family, in our neighborhood, in our workplace, in our school, to be a person that reflects God's grace and goodness and reflects the hope of the resurrection. So how are you doing that? You know, one of the ways we do it here at Grace Community is by partnering with different local partners.

Next weekend we're gonna hear from Sleep and Heavenly Peace, one of our partners that we work with, and they build beds for kids who don't have 'em. And we have folks who help build. Deliver. That's a way, but it also can be as simple as showing up at work and being the person who's known as a listener, showing up at school and being the person who know, who's known for being kind, even when others are not.

And so each of us can be this person who is a creature and an actor, fully dependent, recognizing that life comes from God and one another, and independent taking responsibility for our actions and being faithful to the world around. The last idea about Easter reverb that I want to talk to you about is this idea that we become reflectors, we become agents of grace.

So in John 20, Jesus shows up to the disciples and they see him and they understand who he is, and he sends them out, and he sends them out to continue his ministry. What is the ministry of God? The ministry of God, of Jesus is to reveal God to the. And so that's what he sends you and I out to do to be a people that se that go out into the world and say, Hey, there's hope.

This world, it's goodness and it's love, and it's beauty is something worth saving and that God has shown up in the person of Christ to save it. And that his life, death, and resurrection offers hope. That death is not the final word, that destruction is not im. Jesus says, peace be with you, and we are to be a people who go out into the world offering peace to others, providing hope, grace, and love.

Hey, I hope that in the next few weeks you're able to hang around and hear about Easter. Reverb the way Easter, not just a holiday to celebrate or an event that happened, but a reorientation of the way we see time, the way I see it ourselves and who we are called to be as human beings. That gives us a sense of purpose and unity, and hope in the grace and goodness of God.

Thanks for listening. It was good to be with you. Have a great week. Take care.