The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the
USA, The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, believes in getting her
Easter message out early.
Last week the following was released.
The Resurrection must be understood in significantly different images
and metaphors in the southern hemisphere, when Easter always arrives in
the transition from summer to winter.
Even as a hard, hard winter
lingers on in northern climes, with unaccustomed April snow in many
places, we yearn for the new life we know is waiting around the corner.
As Christians, we’re meant to have the same hunger for the new creation
emerging all around us.
We can see the broken places of our world either as complete and
utter disaster, or as seedbeds — graves, even — in which God is doing a
new thing.
The situation in Haiti is dire, yet day by day and person by
person hope lightens and leavens.
Plans are emerging for civic
reconstruction in Port-au-Prince that would bless the nation with pride
in its heritage and more effective government.
The Episcopal Church is a
partner in those possibilities, as the vision for a rebuilt cathedral
takes form.
The graves are becoming gardens, at Cathédrale
Sainte-Trinité and Collège St. Pierre.
New and more life-giving
relationships are emerging between development ministries and the lives
of the people.
Resurrection is happening in many places, even if one
must search for it, like looking for the first buds on the trees as ice
and snow give way to the warmth of spring.
The aftermath of earthquake and tsunami in Japan continues to look a
great deal like winter, and the trials and failures at Daiichi Fukushima
currently resonate more with apocalypse than Easter.
Yet across
northeastern Japan the work of the faithful is feeding senior citizens,
ministering to displaced persons in shelters, and prompting challenging
questions about social priorities, energy use, and consumerist
lifestyles.
The gift of Easter insists that human beings are capable of divine
relationship, for as Athanasius put it, “God became human that human
beings might become divine.”
The life, death, passion, and resurrection
of Jesus are the cosmic insistence that nothing can separate us from
the divine passion for humanity.
Easter people are imprinted with the
assurance that God is always working some new grace of creation out of
death and destruction.
For most of us the dying is not cosmic.
It may start with a small
willingness to set aside self, or a new opportunity for grafting onto a
greater whole.
Or it may involve lowering the barriers between self and
other to become more readily aware of our fundamental oneness, our
common heritage as offspring of the Holy One.
If we are to be followers
of Jesus, we share the work he did on our behalf.
We give thanks for
the Resurrection, and we become part of Jesus’ ongoing work, as we
become aware of its power in our own lives.
May your Eastertide be filled with the grace of new life.
Go, discover, and BE resurrection for the world around you.