Easter is so central to our faith. It is sobering to think that there were no identifiable Christians until after that first Easter. We are a Resurrection people. If those folks had not experienced their encounters with the risen Christ that day, there would be no church today.

So, actually, we celebrate Easter each year as a birthday. The birth of a new day. The birthday of life itself – no longer confined to temporal physics – life that transcends the boundaries of space and time and even death itself.

We Christians affirm that that life is ours now.

So, like the lily, the mustard seed and the pomegranate, which must die before they live, we can expect the sprouting of new life when our time comes. The message of Easter is not simply a message of the continuing life of one Jesus of Nazareth, it is a message of us, as well.

We are an Easter people.

We gather each week to celebrate Easter – and its message for us. Once a year we focus on tending the ears of our ears and the eyes of our eyes to become more awake and more open to observing and celebrating the presence of Christ in our world, in our lives, today.

To arise each morning thanking God for this most amazing day, is a mantra of thankfulness and awareness of our place in the universe.

Easter lifts us from the no of all nothing, from the mire of mundane existence, from the muck of life’s details, and places us into the realm of the eternal.

May Easter so inform your life this year that you will know with surety, that you are a child of God – no less than anyone who has ever gone before – beloved of the Center of the Universe and the Creator of life itself.

See you in church,