Easter at Last

The first Easter midweek post for 2026

I am writing this well in advance. Next week’s is in the hopper ready to go, but I meet my professor that day, and we are getting ready to go to a training course in British Columbia soon too. Time to load them up and have them ready. So this is not done with the newspaper in hand. This is about the timeless cycle that does not depend on current events. The world stumbles and staggers through wars and collapses, recessions and depressions, bank collapses and falling empires. And among the toppling towers, the church soldiers along, even though the steeples may be among the toppled.

“The church is not a building. The church is not a steeple. The church is something living. The church… IS THE PEOPLE.”

Variations of this show up all the time but that does not diminish the truth. Underground movements have often been where the teachings of Jesus go on when the world goes crazy and violent. Sometimes the above ground church joins in the evil and the violence as we have seen recently. Cheering on the slaughter of Palestinians, and Iranians is not in any way in line with the teaching, the character, or the message of Jesus of Nazareth. Such actions are undeniable evidence that a church has lost its way and abandoned the Galilean vision of the Crucified One.

But the message of Easter is clear, is powerful and is challenging. The church that follows Jesus, follows him to a cross. It follows him to its death. It rejects the role of the Centurion and takes up the cross of the crucified.

All through history the church has had times when it completely lost the plot. It happened during the crusades. It marched on “the infidels” and forced “conversions” at the point of a sword. It stormed cities and murdered civilians and waged wars of aggression in the name of the one who commanded “Put up your sword.”

Perhaps most famously the German Lutherans, members of my own Lutheran church in Nazi Germany, cheered for Hitler. They allowed the Swastika to fly in the sanctuary. They proclaimed racist and anti-Semitic sewage from the pulpits they defiled. They abandoned Jesus for Hitler. The Lutheran churches have had to reckon with this immense and horrific failure for over eighty years. How could our teachings and our well thought out doctrines be so warped, so twisted, so used by a fascist murderous regime?

But we can learn.

As churches we can learn from our mistakes. We MUST learn or be doomed to fall right back into them. I have been warmed by the good work of the people in Minnesota, the most Lutheran state in all of the USA. Many of my ancestors came through there on the way to Saskatchewan Canada so that is part of my ancestral heritage. We have, it seems, learned. And we must keep learning and being alert.

We have this reminder every year as we pass through the wasteland of Lent into the joyful celebration of the Easter season. The pathway to faithful following of Jesus does not lead through the gun shop and the ammunition dump. It does not put us in multi million dollar machines of death and conquest. It takes us to a lonely and bloody hill of execution outside an oppressed and terrorized city, and to the cold and silent horror of a tomb. That is where the path of Jesus’ non-violent resistance ended.

But that is not where the story ended. It ended in utter defeat and in death for the body of Jesus, but it also led to a resurrection in the bodies of those left behind. He rose in them. They did not do what Rome expected. They did not disperse and melt back into the precarious existence of their exploited nation. They clung together. They remembered. They ate and drank together. They told the stories. Some of them wrote those stories down. They whispered and murmured. They lived out the message. They loved out the message. The words of Jesus did not die. They lived on. They rose again in the many bodies of those who remembered.

And something very strange began to happen. That message began to spread. In whispers and scraps of paper, in street-corner messages and philosophical arguments. At speaker’s corners in Greek towns, and in the synagogues of Jewish settlements, the words of Jesus were spoken. His voice came from the bodies of his friends. Not his servants, but his friends.

Like seeds scattered on the land, like they had been tossed there by judicious hands of sowers, managing a valuable seed, the word spread. And most of it did what seeds do, it died empty. Birds ate it up, thorns choked it out, poor soil failed to give it root. Hardened ears of the greedy were closed. Suspicious forces of tradition oppressed and chased away the messengers. Some heard, but really didn’t understand how challenging this way of life would be.

But in certain places… In some towns… Among those ready to listen and really hear, those words, That Word, took root in fertile hearts. And they picked up their own bag of seed, scattering it by kindness and generosity and love. And an exponential growth began to happen.

AND: it can happen again. Among the cruel thorns of white christian nationalism, and the lust for power, the seeds fall. Upon the rock hard hearts of greedy billionaires, the seeds fall. Into the dry and shallow world of market capitalism, the seeds fall.

BUT: outside the structures of power and violence.

Away from the halls of power.

Far from the golden palaces of dictators.

Seeds fall.

Unnoticed.

In side banks and ditches,

In back yards and in wilderness,

In abandoned fields where the workers have been hauled away and harvest fails,

Seeds fall.

Beside dying trees in untended parks,

In unmaintained sidewalks and massive potholes,

Even in small cracks in the massive runways for terrifying nuclear armed bombers,

Seeds fall.

And seeds sprout.

And plants grow.

And roots expand ever so slowly and gently it may appear,

But the sidewalks crack. And the runways split. And the potholes become refuges.

And there is a harvest. Those plants set seed and those seeds are spread and the message DOES NOT DIE.

The seed dies. It dries in the husk and it is gathered. But then the story is not over, though it may appear to be.

It rises again! Even after dying and being buried in the ground.

The message of love and reconciliation, of hope and new life, the message of Jesus:

It is not a message of success by power and force.

It is Death.

And RESURRECTION!

and despite all appearances, THAT is real power. And it will always keep happening.

HE IS RISEN!

HE IS RISEN INDEED! HALLELUJAH!